Office Visit

Today I went into the office for only the second time since March 12th.

As with the first post-lockdown visit, my reason for going in was to download large virtual machine templates (OVFs), and then upload them to a different system. I couldn't vMotion them between clusters, because they are on different network security zones and running different version of VMware ESXi.

The other task I had was to setup a new PC that a coworker and I will use for this sort of thing going forward. It's configured to allow Windows Remote Desktop connections and hardwired to the company LAN.

Our local IT guy did a great job of quickly turning around my request for the PC. It's a new Dell OptiPlex with an Intel Core i7-800 at 3.2 GHz, with 16 GB of RAM and a 500 GB disk. I was surprised to see that it came with a DVD drive. The OS is Windows 10 Enterprise. It seems like a decent little corporate desktop machine and is on a network security zone that will allow me to access anything I need to.

I have an old Netgear 8 port Gig-E Ethernet switch on my desk that allowed me to connect both my MacBook Pro and the Dell to my network drop. After setting up the PC I just used Remote Desktop from the Mac all day to do work on the PC. After I got home tonight I confirmed that it's working over our VPN connection.

Going into the office was a nice change of pace but I'm happy working primarily from home. I expect that to continue into next year.

openSUSE 13.1 Linux

As you may remember, my primary computing platform for the past several years has been a Mac. I've also maintained Windows PCs at home -- one in my office and one out in my workshop. The office PC had been setup as a dual boot Windows 7 Professional / Debian Linux box for awhile, but I hardly ever booted into Debian.

A couple weeks ago I replaced Debian with openSUSE 13.1 and have been using it quite a bit after work. The install went smoothly with all of my hardware recognized. This included my Icom 7200 ham radio that is connected via a USB port, as well as the programming cable I use with my Baofeng UV5RA 2M/70cm ham radio.

The default openSUSE desktop environment is KDE, but Gnome is also available from the openSUSE repositories, as are several other desktops. After using KDE for a few days, then LXDE for a day, I settled on the XFCE desktop and have been pleased with it. It's lightweight but is a complete environment.

The primary applications I've been using:

• Chromium for web browsing, including accessing Gmail via the web.
• Firefox when a web page doesn't behave with Chromium.
• Fldigi for digital mode ham radio operation on HF using the Icom 7200.
• CHIRP for programming my Baofeng UV5RA.
• Leafpad for text editing.

For system administration I've primarily been using YaST, openSUSE's GUI admin tool. I ran SUSE Linux as my home desktop for a few years in the early '00s and YaST is still a good tool.

Another program that I installed was VMware Player, so that I can run a Windows 7 virtual machine if I'm working from home. I'd built the VM at work on my VMware vSphere environment and brought it home on disk, and was using it on the Windows side, to keep my own stuff and my work stuff separate. I copied it to the Linux partition and it works just as well there. Now, if I'm working from home I can use the Windows VM to connect to work's VPN, while I my own stuff can access the Internet without going through the VPN.

Note: VMware Player is proprietary but free (as in beer) software, as opposed to VirtualBox, which is open source software and which would also let me run a VM. However, I've found VMware Player to give me better performance than VirtualBox.

Overall I'd say my experience so far with openSUSE 13.1 has been very positive.  I have my old MacBook Pro from work and I'm considering replacing the spinning hard disk with an SSD, then setting it up to dual boot OS X and openSUSE, for use as a portable ham radio laptop.

Strange VMware vSphere 4.1 Issue

I ran into a weird issue over the past couple of days while trying to deploy a couple of CentOS 5.5 virtual machines onto my vSphere 4.1 server.

I created a VM to serve as my template for future VMs, then exported it as an OVF template to my laptop.  (I do not yet have a vCenter management server, so I'm stuck running the vSphere Client inside an XP VM running in VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro).  Probably due to our network, the export took a couple of hours.

I then deployed two VMs from the OVF file.  Import went much more quickly than the export, thankfully.  When I ran the "system-config-network" tool to configure the IP address, subnet mask, gateway, hostname, and DNS settings, I noticed there was a duplicate of eth0.  The dupe wasn't present in my original VM.  If the dupe was not removed, running /sbin/ifconfig displayed that eth0 had all the correct info, but the machine could not reach the network.

Through trial and error, I discovered a workaround.  Upon running system-config-network, if a duplicate eth0 is present, select it.  Then blank out all values, save and quit.  Next, reboot the VM and once again run system-config-network, and configure eth0.  After doing all this networking worked properly and I was able to SSH into the VM from my laptop.

Once we get a vCenter Server I shouldn't have jump through these hoops.  vCenter includes the ability to clone a VM without doing an export and import, so setting up new VMs should be much simpler and faster.

VMware Training and a New PC

Last week I attended a five day course on installing, configuring, and maintaining VMware vSphere 4.1.  My employer purchased an "all you can eat" license earlier this year, and I've been asked to implement it on one of our networks.  Since I have no prior experience with vSphere I asked my boss for training.  It turns out that we had some training credits which expire at the end of 2010, so I was able to register for this couse at no cost to my department.

I am very impressed with vSphere, as well as VMware's vSphere Client management program.  I find it well designed with a very good user interface.  It runs on Windows only, unfortunately.  I wish they had an OS X client.  At work I have a Windows 7 VM inside Paralles Desktop on my MacBook Pro which I can use.  I also recently setup a four year old Dell Precision Workstation 470n which I scrounged.  It's running Windows 7 x64 with 4 GBs of RAM so it runs much more smoothly than the VM on my laptop.

As a side note, the VMs I have running inside of Parallels Desktop have gotten a lot slower recently, especially the Windows 7 VM.  I am thinking of dumping PD and installing VirtualBox.

Because vSphere is basically a means to run other OSes as applications on a host I decided I wanted to have a way to refamiliarize myself with any number of OSes on a system at home.  To that end, yesterday I did something I haven't done in 12 years: I bought a new desktop PC running Windows.

For the past 10 years or so I've built my own machines.  I have two tower cases which are well designed and which have been used in several incarnations of motherboards, CPUs, and operating systems.  However, I just didn't feel like putting together a new PC, especially since I can now buy a very powerful system for under a grand.

So, yesterday I did some searching on Microcenter's website and purchased a PowerSpec B707 mini-tower system for $699 plus tax.  The basic specs are:

1. Intel Core i5 - 655K 3.2 GHz dual core CPU
2. Intel DH55TC motherboard with integrated video (VGA and DVI), sound, Gigabit LAN.
3. Samsung 1 TB hard disk
4. 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi (which I have disabled since I have an Ethernet connection)
5. DVD+/-RW drive
6. Media card reader
7. 300W power supply
8. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
9. 4 GB of DDR3 RAM (expandalbe to 16 GB)

Because I bought the system with the idea of running other OSes inside VMs I wanted to increase the RAM.  I found an OCZ 4 GB kit (2 x 2 GB DIMMs) at Microcenter for $69.99 less a $20 mail-in rebate, so added that to the cart.

Microcenter allows you to place an order on their website and arrange for in-store pickup in 18 minutes, if they have the items in stock at your local store.  I did that and was in and out in about 10 minutes.

The PC came with a cheap Inland USB keyboard which I'm using currently but will probably replace due to the mushy feel.  It also came with an Inland mouse which I left in the packaging, in favor of the Logitech mouse I already had.  The machine didn't come with a monitor which was fine, I'm using an Acer AL2016W 20" widescreen LCD display that I bought last year.  I'm using the DVI port and it looks good.

The PowerSpec box came with no crapware installed which was a pleasant surpise.  It did include a trial version of ESET NOD32 antivirus which I removed in favor of MS Security Essentials, and also an installer for MS Office 2010 Starter Edition (lobotomized versions of Word and Excel supported by ads).

The machine is quite zippy for my uses: web browsing, light office use, as an SSH client, and to run VMs inside VirtualBox.  I haven't really pounded on the box yet but so far the CPU usage is minimal most of the time and I'm only using about half the 8 GB RAM that's installed in the system.

So far I've created VMs running Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP Pro SP3.  I unfortunately need the XP VM to run a VPN client which doesn't work in Windows 7; I hope to lose that particular need in the next few months.  My next VM will probably be Windows 2008 Server R2.

Another use of this box will be for me to evaluate various remote control applications.  I have GoToMyPC, LogMein, and TeamViewer in mind.

Messing with Virtualization

In my ongoing quest to improve the efficiency of how I maintain my lab, I'm looking into virtualization as a way to setup test PCs.  This will probably work OK when testing applications, though it won't work when testing connectivity issues.  E.g., if I need to test tweaks for Windows XP's TCP setting to optimize throughput, I need to be running XP right on the hardware.

This morning I downloaded VMWare Server 2.  It's free-as-in-beer, always a plus when one's budget is limited.  For a host OS I'm using CentOS 5.2, running on one of my 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo boxes.  I figured I'd get better performance using Linux as the host, vs. using a Windows host.  The box has 3 GB of RAM so I should be able to run a couple of VMs concurrently, as long as I'm not doing something requiring significant disk I/O or network access.

For my first guest OS I loaded the Windows 7 Beta.  I'd previously run it directly on an identical PC, and was quite impressed.  Rather than an entirely new OS, it feels to me like Vista SP2 or Vista SE.  In other words, Vista without the suck.  It's a lot lighter than Vista and seems to run about as fast as XP does on this hardware.  Installing W7 into a VM went smoothly.

I'm now building a second VM, this time using Solaris 10 x86 (32 bit) as the guess OS.  Not being conversant with Solaris I'm using the default settings in VMWare and the Solaris install, except that I allocated more RAM than VMware asked for, 1024 MB vs. 540 MB.

VMware Server 2 uses a web interface.  Frankly, I'm not thrilled with this as compared with a non-web interface as it's sluggish.

After I use this setup for awhile I intend to replace VMware with Sun's VirtualBox to see how it compares.