Linux - Uncensored

[#] Mon Apr 30 2012 00:48:38 EDT from Freakdog @ Dog Pound BBS II

I think there's still a Unix room, but I can't see why not...we've survived topic drift for several decades, already. ;-)

[#] Thu May 03 2012 01:18:20 EDT from maraakate @ Uncensored

I've been playing around more with Linux lately. I have debian setup and had to do a few apt-get install's for some essentials (i.e. g++, make, cvs, etc.). The one gripe I really had with it was the wlan configuration. For some reason, my card does work and it does show up but the GUI interface doesn't seem to recognize it.

So, I had to go online and found some awkward tutorial on how to configure it. That wasn't so bad, but the awful part was trying to get it to work with WEP/WPA/etc. For some reason I could just never get it to work properly so I got so frustrated with it that I configured the router to have no passwords and be locked by MAC Address.

I don't understand why the wlan0 would show up in iwconfig totally fine, but not in gnomes configuration utility and why would linux make it overly difficult to setup WEP/WPA from the command line?

[#] Fri May 04 2012 08:18:50 EDT from the_mgt @ Uncensored

First rule of WIFI under Linux: If it doesnt work out of the box, replace your WIFI card.

Second rule: Feck all the desktop specific gizmos and gadgets.

I use plain old wpa_supplicant, that is what is run under the hood probably by all other managers too.

And it actually has a gui and a tui: wpa_gui and wpa_cli.

[#] Fri May 04 2012 09:50:19 EDT from dothebart @ Uncensored

my last fiddlings all have been about the RFKill and friends...

is the device up, is the radio enabled, is the whole card disabled by rfkill, sometimes rfkill even switches bluetooth & wifi with the same pushbutton cycling through them.

and... for shure... are the binary firmware packages installed.

[#] Fri May 04 2012 23:22:40 EDT from the8088er @ Uncensored

Oh, didn't know there was a UNIX room. Heh. Thanks.

[#] Sun May 06 2012 22:12:17 EDT from Sig @ Uncensored

I'm doing 3 months of updates to my Linux Mint Debian Edition netbook using the free hotel wirekless. I've been delaying because we keep getting charged for going over our bandwidth at home.
OK, that was more interesting in my head. Carry on.

[#] Wed May 09 2012 15:26:29 EDT from maraakate @ Uncensored

lol

[#] Sat May 12 2012 21:04:54 EDT from dowdle @ Uncensored

Subject: My experiences with virtualization

Greetings,

I used BBSes from 1982 - 1996 or so on Atari 8-bit and Atari ST. I was on here a few years back but the account had gone away. I listened to the fairly recent Security Now audiocast and decided to get back into Uncensored/Citadel. For my hobby and work email I've been running the OCS version of Zimbra for the last 5.5 years. I wasn't aware of the modernized Citadel when I got into Zimbra. I hope to use my own instance of Citadel at some point in the future. I'm a long time Red Hat (1996) fanboi and prefer RHEL/clone on servers and Fedora on desktops.

For virtualization, I prefer OpenVZ when it is appropriate for the task. Then comes KVM if the machine in question has VT in the CPU. If it is a 32-bit only system with no VT then VirtualBox.

The most OpenVZ containers I've had on a single machine is 1,000 but that was just testing. So far as containers that have actually been used... about 50 or so.

The most KVM VMs I've had on a single machine was about 40... all desktop Linux systems accessed via SPICE. That was for a sysadmin class.

oVirt is basically the upstream project for RHEV. I tried RHEV when it required Windows 2003 Server, IIS, and MS SQL server and Internet Explorer to run and use the management interface. Most of that changed in 3.0 and more is coming in 3.1. The design is too clunky and requires too much fancy hardware for me.

I like Proxmox VE but I'm not a Debian user. It seems kind of strange that PVE is based on Debian because Red Hat is king of KVM and OpenVZ bases their stable kernels on RHEL kernels. The PVE developers aren't familiar with rpm-based distros. Their choice of perl and not using libvirt was also fairly radical too... but I respect them for it.

I only have a few dozen VMs to worry about and don't really need any of the fancy features so vzctl and virt-manager work well enough for me. I'd love to see Proxmox VE made available for rpm-based distributions, based on libvirt, and support the SPICE protocol... but I won't hold my breath.

TYL,

Scott Dowdle, Belgrade, MT

[#] Sat May 12 2012 22:06:56 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Subject: Re: My experiences with virtualization

Hi Scott, welcome aboard and thanks for sharing your thoughts.

From what I've read, SPICE is part of the PVE 2.X roadmap. I seem to recall they wanted it to be part of the 2.0 release but that definitely didn't make it in yet. I doubt we'll see an RPM-based version though; they've pretty much built the thing as a Debian spinoff.

[#] Sun May 13 2012 07:16:39 EDT from the_mgt @ Uncensored

Hi Scott!

Thanks for your insights.

My problem right now is, that things as Proxmox and Opencloud and whatnot are whole distributions for the single purpose of getting many VMs up and running. You'd need to add more infrastructure for other tasks, probably requiring more hardware.

I am often confronted with (very) small businesses, run by really miserly people: architects, dentists, you know those people with a very low income... They need some fileserver, some other comfortable things (Outlook sync, other fine things you get for free on linux) and the odd networked tool running on a windows "server" (XP Home edition...).

So, basically I need a host linux which is long term supported, can run some stuff like apcupsd, openvpn and kvm. Now this is all possible, but in a heterogenous environment where every user runs windows, I need some small graphical frontend for the VMs so that the windows dude can restart a VM. virtmanager for windows is cli only, X11Forwarding via putty and XMing a little tiresome.

And the web based guis are rather huge or inexistant. But after some digging around I found:

http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/

http://karesansui-project.info/ for KVM/Xen (tarballs are oooold, but git seems active with recent commits)

I will test the latter soon, will give feedback then.

[#] Wed May 16 2012 21:49:33 EDT from dowdle @ Uncensored

Subject: How To: Download Kid's Educational Shows from YouTube in a free format

It seems a lot of children's educational shows have been posted to YouTube. It isn't up to me to decide if them being there is a violation of someone's trademarks or copyrights. If they are there, I can use youtube-dl to download them.

Want "Magic School Bus" season 1? Many Linux distros provide a package named youtube-dl. I went to wikipedia and looked up the Magic School Bus episode titles for season 1 and then I searched for those on YouTube. Then I made a text file and put in the URLs like so:

Don't forget to chmod 755 that text file and then you can run it from the commandline. I hope you have some disk space. Each episode is about 130 MB or so. You'll get the webm flavor. Most everything on YouTube is available in several flavors including webm.

I haven't looked for all of the other episodes yet but will soon. You can also find a lot of episodes of PBS' Arthur show. My 6 year old really likes that one.

The quality of these videos is not really that great when played back on a computer monitor with high resolution or an HD TV... but playing them on my Nintendo Wii (with Homebrew's WiiMC application over a samba share) on a standard def. TV, they look just as good as anything else. We do not yet own an HD TV.

youtube-dl is a fantastic program and it can even download complete YouTube channels and/or playlists.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

[#] Wed May 16 2012 22:22:45 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Subject: Re: How To: Download Kid's Educational Shows from YouTube in a free format

Cool. I seem to remember youtube-dl was broken for a while. Glad to see it's back in action.

I'm playing around with it now and it confirms something that I've suspected about YouTube for a while -- they deliberately throttle the download speed to something that can easily keep up with the video, but is obviously not the top speed the network can deliver. It's optimized for streaming, not bulk downloading.

So it's definitely a good idea to batch everything up in a big script like you did. Maybe run them all in parallel.

[#] Tue May 29 2012 20:43:49 EDT from dowdle @ Uncensored

Subject: Fedora 17 released today

Greetings,

Since I'm a Fedora fanboi I thought I'd mention that Fedora 17 was released today. I started using it shortly after the beta came out several weeks back. I have made a remix that includes GNOME, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, and a few others... and lots of desktop apps... and Flash, Google Chrome, and a few other things. I've been remixing it since like Fedora 9 but I haven't really registered it with DistroWatch... because do we really need more distros? Also I haven't really done any true customization... I've just added a few extra repos (rpmforge and google) and pre-installed all of the software I like on my machines. I call it MontanaLinux.

If anyone is interested in it, please let me know and I can share the URL. It is a LiveDVD that is about 1.8GB (dowdle@montanalinux.org)

--
TYL,
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

[#] Tue May 29 2012 22:27:47 EDT from ax25 @ Uncensored

Subject: Re: Fedora 17 released today

I would be interested.

[#] Wed May 30 2012 01:19:25 EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

Installing Slackware 13 on ESXi - bring back a lot of memories. I know a bunch of you like other VM hosts, but I'm kinda interested in playing around with different distros, and I don't have to worry about trashing the base OS. And Slackware because I kind of feel like my Linux mojo is rusty, and this is what I learned it on, and seems like a good place to re-learn.

First task after my install is completed (later) is to move my Citadel installation over.

[#] Wed May 30 2012 09:18:36 EDT from dowdle @ Uncensored

Subject: Re: Fedora 17 released today

You can find it here:

http://img.cs.montana.edu/linux/montanalinux/

I rebuild it and rev the number usually every week or two... as updates come out. Our network sucks sometimes so I recommend using "wget -c [URL]" from the command line to downloadi it... so if it times out you can continue it. Of course that assumes you have Linux already. Building a Fedora spin or remix is actually very easy and the scripts used to build MontanaLinux are included in /root/livecd-creator/MontanaLinux/. KDM/KDE are the default but of course you can pick what you want from the session selector button that is part of the login screen.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

[#] Wed May 30 2012 09:37:27 EDT from dowdle @ Uncensored

Wed May 30 2012 01:19:25 AM EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

I know a bunch of you like other VM hosts, but I'm kinda interested in playing around with different distros, and I don't have to worry about trashing the base OS.

I have no issues with you picking whatever virtualization platform you want... but I did want to clarify what I believe to be a perception you have from your statement. Installing some virtualization products can "trash" your distro... if by trashing you mean they use a third-party module that hooks into the kernel... and that module has to be recompiled (or updated via a binary package) every time you change your kernel. Pretty much all hosted (aka a Type 2 hypervisor) virt products are that way.

ESXi is a bare-metal (aka Type 1 hypervisor) that doesn't trash your distro because it is an operating system unto itself.

KVM is kind of a hybrid. I guess technically it is hosted but I consider it to be Type 1.5... a hybrid between type 1 and type 2. KVM is three stock Linux kernel modules (kvm, kvm_intel or kvm_amd) that have been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.20... so it is a no-brainer... because it can't trash your system... it *IS* your system. Of course you do have to install some additional (almost always packaged/provided by your distro) userland pacakges like libvirt and virt-manager to use it... and KVM requires hardware support for virtualization be present in your CPU (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/FAQ#How_can_I_tell_if_I_have_Intel_VT_or_AMD-V.3F) but other than that it is 100% natural and totally organic. :)

Then again, I don't mind poluting some of my systems with a third-party kernel patch for better quality containers (OpenVZ), but that is another topic.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

[#] Wed May 30 2012 10:44:52 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

I really think that with the advent of hardware-assisted virtualization, there is no practical difference in performance between "type 1" and "type 2" hypervisors.
There's way too much mud in that water at this point. For example, HyperV is billed as a "type 1" hypervisor, but you can't remove Windows 2008 from it, so does it really matter? VMware ESXi is a "type 1" hypervisor but there's still a barebones Linux supervising it, whether they admit it or not.

There really is no such thing as a bare metal hypervisor. You need to have some sort of minimal operating system supervising (hypervising?) it. The goal ought to be to have the ability to strip down the OS to the bare essentials required to run virtual machines, while at the same time allowing the server administrator to activate whatever portions of the operating system are required if he needs to run things like management/monitoring software. VMware ESX did that nicely; ESXi totally blows it.

KVM is nice because it runs on standard Linux and you can run as much or as little of that Linux as you need.

In any case, running major applications by themselves in virtual machines is almost always a design win, imho ... it gives you the modularity and flexibility to manage everything nice and cleanly.

[#] Wed May 30 2012 12:16:05 EDT from roue @ Dog Pound BBS II

+1 for KVM from me. I've tried a bunch of these and while it may not be the fastest, having it part of the mainline kernel overrides all the other advantages (for my admittedly desktop virtualization needs). I miss Xen's xm console, but with VNC it's not too bad. I know you can set up a serial console but I've never managed to get it working.

[#] Wed May 30 2012 15:37:22 EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

Never having used ESX, I don't know what VMWare did to cause ESXi to suck. And so far it's working, so no complaints (OK one - the VSphere console blows). Basically, I didn't want to install a full blown OS, install KVM (or other) on it, then decide I didn't like it.

Unfortunately, I have to have the occasional Windows Server install on it, if just for testing, and KVM's didn't look all that great (mostly looking here: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status#Windows_Family).

Meh, it's a choice. It's doing what I want. It's saving me a bundle on having to replace a bunch of systems at once.