saintcolumbus

I now have 4 virtual machines setup in production, but only two being used. The two not being used are a FreeBSD 7.1 install not setup yet and backup web hosting appliance OS.

I have a CentOS 5 install for my friend, but I don't think he is using much. But I also have converted a production Windows 2003 IIS server that does nothing but web site hosting. Converted on the existing physical server with VMware Converter software writing the images straight to the VMware server via Samba. Imported the server over the weekend and doing great today live for several customers. This is our main test for the moment....

I have installed CentOS 5.2 host in the data center and now have up a FreeBSD and a CentOS 5.2/BlueOnyx Linux guest on the dual processor Xeon 2.4GHz with 6GB memory server. So far so good with memory allocated at 2GB and 1GB, respectively. I am adding a second vanilla CentOS guest for my man Lucas. Once things roll well, I may consider adding a Windows 2003 web server...

If that is accomplished, it will probably be all this host will handle.

Well, I loaded vmware on a second host that I am installing for a customer today, but not the same results. This machine is almost identical to the one I have testing for myself. On my test box, I was clearly impressed with the processing power even though it is on one IDE drive with merely 2GB. Slow, of course, but responsive, even with 3 vguests including 1 win2k3.

But this machine is crawling with one win2k3-r2 guest. The problem is clearly processor related, but this machine has actually a bit more in that department. This one is 3.0GHz where my test box is 2.8GHz, go figure...let's see, I'll take an image of this to try later on my host. I won't use vmware on this customer box, just not stable. Unless I can figure out the issue, I can change over later.

I have finished testing various virtualization hosts. I loaded CentOS 5.2 on my machine at the house and it gave me the option of Virtualization on install. It setup a Xen kernel and I gave it a quick try.

I have three basic systems that need to be supported as guests, maybe just two if the load is too much for running mail filtering against a remote database as a guest system. The other two are the already existing CentOS Linux web appliance that serves web site hosting and mailboxes (IMAP/POP) and customer SMTP. The third is my lone Windows server that does only web site hosting.

I moved on quickly to VMWare after Xen failed to load my BlueOnyx web appliance system giving an error regarding writes to a /tmp fs. I tried also on Xen for Ubuntu Linux. VMWare was loaded, no special kernel needed, I believe it is working as a kern module. This is some sick shit - I loaded FreeBSD Unix, which is used for the mail filtering explained earlier, the web appliance and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, all no problem at all. I can load a system from CD or iso image, add hardware, install, did all the OS updates, ran all three systems on my meager P4 with 2GB of memory and one IDE drive. I even converted my Win 2K3 Ent server that I have running development web sites and db web applications, Quickbooks accounting, etc...lots of stuff on 2GB by itself. Took the converted system as images to the new vhost, imported the Virtual Machine (VM), made minor adjustments to memory settings down within limits of new vhost system. Works great. I believe I will deploy VMWare at home as well to save on hardware.

Now for production testing, we'll install at the local data center this Friday, I hope....maybe we'll have something major to celebrate along with heritage this coming St. Paddy's Day!!!

Have completed the downloads, did I say that I love fiber, and will take to data center later today I hope....

OK, I thought I removed the feed of this technical blog into fb, but found on my notes there this morning :-/
I'm new to the fb notes application, please excuse my chatter :)

I'll leave the tech stuff here at Live Journal blog

Talked with my Linux bud today, Lucas, and in order to get his VPS business, I need to get my own VPS supported. We will work on this together, I'll load up CentOS5 on this server where I am having the Perl upgrade issue instead and then load FreeBSD into a VPS on the server. I hope this works out for all the packages I need to support on the FreeBSD level, but Lucas seems to think they will...I will go with CentOS as the host since Lucas loves it as much as he loves Fedora Core (never could get him to go BSD) and I already use CentOS for all my commercial web hosting and mailboxes and love that Linux distribution as well.

I am excited and have been wanting to get into the virtualization game for a while now. Another IT friend is using Ubuntu Linux virtualize all his Microsoft server installs. If this works for me, I'll be able to bring up necessary backups as need on a number of virtual hosts ready to go, giving me a lot more units per U in the data center. Perhaps I'll be able to avoid the full cabinet upgrade that will be necessary soon in Tampa if I continue to grow that rack.

I may need this doc for the upgrade of the server in Lexington since it is 6.1...

I decide to get the 7.0 backup machine completely up to date before starting the 6.x upgrades because all was delayed due to a trip out of town and visitors. Actually started this last night, updating my Journal now to remind myself next time what I need to do.

I stopped all my important services, most important the database for the Maia Mailguard package. I started this system upgrade with 'portupgrade -a' and was quickly notified of the need to upgrade Perl, so, of course, I decide to handle that all by itself before continuing with the rest of the system.

The Perl upgrade went perfectly, no issues or errors. Then I run a nice little script FreeBSD has to realign Perl modules for me

#perl-after-upgrade -f

...then I continued on with making sure all Perl modules were upgraded, maybe I should have checked to see if they were first, not sure what went wrong....

#portupgrade "p5-*"

As I said, this server is used as backup, which is a backup to our mail filtering system that primarily runs postfix+maia+SpamAssassin+clamav. After all the upgrade steps, amavisd-maia would not run with the following issue...I run "amavisd-maia debug" and get...

Feb 21 15:48:22 esmtp.webtent.net /usr/local/sbin/amavisd-maia[10219]: Creating db in /var/amavisd/db/; BerkeleyDB 0.36, libdb 4.1

Feb 21 15:48:22 esmtp.webtent.net /usr/local/sbin/amavisd-maia[10219]: SpamControl: initializing Mail::SpamAssassin

Segmentation fault

I also notice Nagios does not work with the same fault, but other packages that use Perl are fine, like MRTG.

Have this doc and planning to do the upgrade of the Lexington server following the procedure from 6.1-RELEASE to 7.1-RELEASE -- to be continued...

Just got signed up at LiveJournal which is supported by the Blog Poster application in Ubuntu, my OS of choice...

Why the name 'saintcolumbus' you asked? No, I don't think I'm a saint, far from it I'm sure. Columbus is a nickname from my college days and I was born on All Saints Day, and the name is available on most sites.