Adventures in F,O, X, & 0

The experience of setting up dozens and dozens of VPS servers individually by hand (for the first "test run" course) was "interesting", and only served to encourage me to move in a direction which I'd always looked to do eventually - the cloud. Frankly the manual process works OK it's just that it's Not Fun and it doesn't scale very well. For my course case it's already clear that several hundred small servers will be needed, so automation is a must. In theory it's probably possible to automate the purchase and provisioning of traditional VPSs, but it's not an option with VolumeDrive.com, and of course there may be underlying physical limitation to just how much they can quickly setup. My feeling is that I'll retain the current class set of server at VolumeDrive, but work to be able to add in further sets via (probably) Amazon's AWS. If provisioning is done right they should all work much the same, with some simple scripts us...

Well, t he Course is being launched today - with the first lessons going out on Monday the 5th of November. Exciting stuff. If you've been following along you'll know that it's been a long gestation, with the final product being very pared back - an MVP in the jargon - but I'm pleased with the result and very happy with the tools I've chosen and used now: Blogger , Google Apps , and Squarespace . The payment side uses Paypal - which I've found easy to make work, but this would be the one thing that I may change in the future. So, now off to setup more servers for the first participants!

This month I'm looking to revive my Linux sysadmin trainging course project. First off I spent some time polishing the training material, but now I'm concentrating on getting the others bits into place, especially: website mailing list my planning wiki I'd originally though in terms of building/hosting these myself, but now want to largely, or exclusively, use services such as Mail Chimp, Google Apps etc. Many are free for the initial size/period that matter to me, and while they're somewhat restrictive they also save time - which is a big deal. So, the month is almost half gone - looks like I need to put in some more hours! 

Just doing this a few times today: VMware Tools into Ubuntu From the VMware menu in VCentre, choose VM->Install VMware Tools. This makes the tools installed appear as a CDROM drive, but this now needs to be mounted, and the installer run. On Ubuntu it's also necessary to compile the tools from source - and so we need to first install compilers etc that are not normally needed. The script below does all of this. Open an editor ( nano or vim ), to create a file called vm-tools , paste the contents in, save and then run the chmod command to make the script executable:     cd      (changes to your home directory)     nano vm-tools (paste and save)     chmod +x vm-tools and now run the script:     ./vm-tools You'll be asked for your password initially - and can safely use the defaults for all prompts. This is the script: # ## vmti - VMware Tools Installer # echo -e "\...

Hmm, a Big Important Server was restarted by a client overnight - and never came back up. Opps! These days of course, everything's virtual, so from the console I could see the problem - a "panic". Downloading a SystemRescueCd ISO and booting from that went smoothly, but sorting it fully out got me back into "chroot" - which I find fun. Less fun was the complexity of GRUB2 - seems I haven't played with grub for a while because this is a different beast than I remember. Oh, and the main disk is LVM, which caused me some headache too. Cause? Unclear, but lots of old kernels clogging up /boot was a BIG factor! Now re-thinking my automated-upgrades strategy)