Dartmouth

Armed with gkrellm and openSUSE 12.3 I have found the perfect use for my 8-core/32GB server - vbox guests. In addition to handling 90% of my web traffic (there is no sound card on the server, so video/sound sites are still handled on my desktop) I now have multiple Windows desktops and various linux distros as well as an OpenBSD bastion.

It wasn't fun, nor easy getting VirtualBox to work. I finally narrowed it down to the server's BIOS where the virtualization bit wasn't flipped (which of course required cracking the case and setting a hardware jumper). After that I couldn't keep vbox running until I lowered the memory configuration down from 16GB. Now all my vms have between 512MB & 8GB depending upon their specific application (and my tendency to run them as standalones or alongside other concurrently running vms.

I have also moved to lubuntu - the LXDE version of ubuntu. Ever since the pig won out over the tight 19-year old I've been a grinning idiot over the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. Ubuntu has been frustrating me solely because of its window manager. Its not just that I hate unity, its simply not designed for the environments in which I wish to use it. So now ubuntu and I are back on speaking terms. After all, SUSE and its derivatives don't have things like DKMS - but they did just add a clusterssh package, which means I no longer have to compile it from scratch.

The only post-Dartmouth issue I am personally experiencing is google-chrome crashing, bring X down with it every. single. time. Thus far I have not found a good workaround. So I'm using Firefox. Like I said, not a good workaround :(

I recently offered someone a login on my vps to tinker with code. But that's a poor idea compared to giving them root on a local vm! In the long run, using VirtualBox is not a sustainable plan of action. I need to rebuild my ESX server. Problem with that is my DL380 is dead, and it could not create 64-bit guests. Now that I'm saying this aloud, I wonder if I should turn my PowerEdge 2950 into an ESX server and use one of my DL360's as a local server? Yes, the wheels, they ever turn...

But this will probably all change by tomorrow :P