The World of a Penguin

Here is a story about two weeks of frustration installing a new server. I have never had that much problem installing a computer in my life and I have installed hundreds of them. A few weeks before I left Sweden for a three week trip in southern Africa I noted that I was out of disk on my server. I decided to wait by more disk until I got back home. Therefore I moved some data temporary to my workstation. When I got home a few weeks ago I ordered a new motherboard and hard drive. I decided to go for the brand new Intel mini-ITX atom based motherboard D945GCLF2 with 2GB memory and a Western Digital Green Power 1TB S-ATA drive . This made the new computer cheap and green. Misco delivered the stuff fast. When I had assembled the stuff it did not boot, the screen was black and I couldn't enter the BIOS-setup. I Removed all cables, including the hard drive. The mother board worked fine. Tested with another old S-ATA drive and it worked fine. It was with Western Digitals Green Power t...

Today I took three different computers. Decomposed them into parts and built one computer fitting my need for a new server. I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Fesity Fawn). The /boot-directory is stored on a 128MB compact flash disk. The main disk, configured using LVM, is a 200GB-disk. I will later move a 320GB-disk from the current server to this new on. So I will get ½TB of disk, if I do not buy a new disk before that. Thanks to this solution, I can change to bigger disk without reinstall the system. First, of course, I install the new disk in the computer. Then I tell LVM to include that disk in the Volume Group. After this, I ask LVM to migrate all data from the old disk to the new one. This can be done seamless. Finally, I tell LVM to remove the old disk from the volume group.

Except from having a terrible cold this week I have been at two seminaries. The first one was Red Hat and JBoss Value² Tour. Red Hat clearly show that they have entered into the offices of managers, CEOs, CIOs, VPs etc. They also show that they want to lock you in as any other vendor, but they can defend themself that at least the source is open. From a commercial and organizational perspective I think they do one important thing wrong. They are still not shipping proprietary drivers such as wireless, graphic cards, codecs etc. This means that as a system manager one must still handle these things to give the users a pleasant drive on the desktop. Here is an area where other providers such as Suse and also Ubuntu have done a tremendous job. On the other hand Suse trie to lock us in with Yast, even if it is open source, which makes it harder to manage from central point. Ubuntu on the other hand lack of kerberos/ldap/AD integration in main, which is a demand in many organizations. Red H...

I have a Express Card slot in my laptop. Until today, I have thought it is just another name for PCMCIA/PC Card. Which it isn't. Express Card has a smaller connector an exists in two sizes 34 and 54 mm. What I am looking for is a Compact Flash (CF) reader, since my Nikon D70 uses these. Unfortunately, a express card CF reader costs about $60 and a PC-Card CF-reader costs about $12. That's not funny. I can buy a USB connected CF-reader for about $12, but I want to avoid carry around a lot of loose pieces. I will wait a while too see if the prices goes down and coninu to use my desktop for the purpose a bit longer. On the good side I found that Belkin has a docking station that you connect to the express card slot. The MSI S271 does not have support for traditional docking station, which was a drawback I did know when I bought it. Now is the question if Linux supports Belkins docking station.