Saturday July 29, 2006

And back again Well The ride back yesterday took longer. 65:15. But then I rode back a very different way. One of my colleagues was riding as well so we went back via his house ~10 miles. Practicing drafting, which makes things much faster and easier. Only trouble was that he lives in Wokingham so I had to get back from there. So I started coming the direct route along Reading road, and quickly got fed up with that, so at Winersh headed in to Woodley and back through Sonning. Though this added a couple of miles it was probably nicer riding. So 19 miles in 65 minutes isn't so bad. Though I felt really tired afterwards, and hungry, and hot.... Well that makes 90 miles this week. Most I've ever managed. I'll have to see if I can do it next week Posted by cwb ( Jul 29 2006, 07:00:00 PM BST ) Permalink

Friday July 28, 2006

57:07 So cycled in today in 57:07. Must have been because I was happier in the traffic rather than riding faster. Posted by cwb ( Jul 28 2006, 11:00:00 AM BST ) Permalink

Wednesday July 26, 2006

And home again So the journey home wasn't too bad either. I measured from the cycle lockers home rather than the entrance to the campus (the speedbumps in the campus are so vicious you cannot get a decent speed up). So it was a bit further. 17.4 miles in 63:37. So averaging 16.36 mph. Could have done better really but The bit between shinfield and the M4 on the A327 was up hill and I felt my legs had no energy. (not surprising really) Posted by cwb ( Jul 26 2006, 07:00:00 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Rode in to work this morning I decided to try cycling to work. It's a 20 mile drive that takes around 45-50 minutes due to the traffic. Going by bike I avoid some of the faster rodes and take the more direct route which is almost exactly 17 miles to the entrance of the campus. So I checked mail from home and set off after that. Did the 17 miles in 59:09. Even taking a shower in to account that's not much slower than driving. Any way - I've just got to do the same on the way home now! Posted by cwb ( Jul 26 2006, 10:10:00 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Sunday July 23, 2006

What am I listening to Last week I was visiting our colleagues in Prague. Talking about Xen, Dtrace, FMA and other cool stuff, but also helping out with some problems they were having. Anyway I did have a nightmare journey back and was thankfull of two things. A good book (Use of Weapons - Iain M Banks: I love the detail he puts in the worlds he creates), and an IPod.

So what did I listen too? Well I found I had subscribed to a podcast that has some excellent music on it. IndustrialRadio. Plenty of interesting music I'd not heard before. Apprarently the detroit industrial scene is pretty active, which is more than can be said for most places.

Any way back in the real world, I rediscovered I like some Handel, Having bought Essential Handel I've remembered learning Violin as a child. May be I should take up some more.

What else. Well in complete contrast there's been Classic Euphoria Which is pretty much audio wall paper but great for getting stuff done too.

My eldest Son did a part in the school production of Oliver a couple of weeks a go. Today there was a local schools show case of the out of school activities that they've been doing. Naturally eldest was the best, but one other that stood out was another schools "Rock School". They have taken "Feel Good Inc" by Gorillaz and re recorded it using the instruments they can play (The group only sang to a backing track which I guess is fair enough given the size of the venue, and the fact they had no switch over time, Oh and hey're only 8-11). I only realised it wasn't to the real track when I heard recorders on it! Pretty impressive.

And this evening while watching the end of The Tour They had a butchered version of One Which made me put on the original which was much better.
Posted by cwb ( Jul 23 2006, 09:23:00 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday July 17, 2006

Xen for dummies - part1
I've been helping out the Xen team to try out the bits they've put on OpenSolaris over the last week or two. I've been impressed with how much they've got working so far, but as an experienced Solaris user who is new to Xen I've found it quite hard to get my head around what Xen does and how it works.

First off install it using the instructions on OpenSolaris and then you need to get some domains set up.

So boot up under Xen. You'll see from the grub menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) some things have changed. Instead of booting a Solaris kernel, you boot xen which then loads a solaris kernel in the module line.

#Solaris on Xen 64bit
title Solaris on Xen 64-bit
kernel /boot/amd64/xen.gz dom0_mem=524288 console=com1 com1=9600,8n1
module /platform/i86xen/kernel/amd64/unix /platform/i86xen/kernel/amd64/unix -k
module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive


Note the option dom0_mem=524288. This assigne 512Mb to your Dom0 at startup.

Another thing to note is that even booting on metal (ie not booting the xen hypervisor first) we no longer use multiboot, but can boot our unix directley.

#---------- ADDED BY BOOTADM - DO NOT EDIT ----------
title Solaris Nevada snv_41 X86
kernel /platform/i86pc/kernel/amd64/unix
module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive
#---------------------END BOOTADM--------------------


Read Joe Bonasera's blog about why this is the case.

OK so you've got Solaris booted on Xen. This is refered to as Dom0 you need to set up some more instances of Solaris (or whatever Xen compatible OS you happen to want) and that is refered to as a DomU.

Each DomU has it's own full OS install so for solaris we set up a flar archive and use the vbdcfg script to help us convert that in to a OS instance Xen can boot as a DomU. This is all described here.

A couple of things to think about. Networking is bridged (ie it appears to be directly connected to the outside world) so you're going to need to give it a real IP address or use DHCP (this can be decided as the DomU boots up). Also you need to give it an ethernet address using the -e flag to vbdcfg. As this is a made up ethernet addess I don't know how you're supposed to create it, Dave Edmondson suggested making the first octet 0xaa and encoding the IP address in the rest of it.

So when you've got your DomU setup using vbdcfg what do you get?

Well in /export/xc/xvm you'll have a directory for your DomU domain

$ ls -l /export/xc/xvm/mydomU
total 10
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 379 Jul 12 09:57 mydomU-64.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 367 Jul 12 09:57 mydomU.py
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 512 Jul 12 09:48 platform
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19 Jul 12 09:48 root.dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Jul 12 09:48 vmnt


the .py files are python scripts used to start the domain, platform is the directory where the kernel to boot is, root.dev contains the name of the root device and vmnt is where the domain can be mounted using

$ vbdcfg mountdomU domU-name


But you don't want to do that now. You want to start up your domain, So this is how you do it

$ xm create mydomU-64.py
(this starts mydomU in 64bit mode)
$ xm console mydomU
(puts you on the console)


or alternatively

$ xm create -c mydomU-64.py


which starts the domU and puts you directly on the console - useful sometimes to find out why your domain isn't coming up

So at that point you on the console of your domain and it's coming up just as if its a fresh install of Solaris.

In future "Xen for Dummies" installments I'll show how to configure the network, add disks, create more cpus in the domU than you have in the real box! and I'm sure I can think of more later.

Xen

Technorati Tags: Solaris OpenSolaris Xen
Posted by cwb ( Jul 17 2006, 10:31:10 AM BST ) Permalink

Friday July 07, 2006

Action Shot The new Pup still doesn't seem to stay still , but we can now take him for walks. As I was working from home today that's what we did at lunch time. He's pretty good at coming when called these days Posted by cwb ( Jul 07 2006, 06:00:00 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday July 06, 2006

Another Dtrace Customer presentation I had another opportunity to talk to a customer (this time a law enforcement agency) about Dtrace last week. This time it was only a 1/2 hour slot and we had already over run by quite a way so the Presentation was a lot shorter You'll notice the similarity with the previous presentation (well there is no point in reinventing the wheel) In this case the customer was very interested in virtualization. They have a large farm of PCs which are only ~15% utilized. They felt something like Xen or vmware might be able to help bring that up. I'm working with the Xen team right now just getting up to speed on the technology. It looks pretty impressive. Go and check out the Xen Opensolaris community it's pretty interesting now and I'm sure it'll have a load more interesting stuff on it soon Technorati Tags: Solaris OpenSolaris dtrace Xen Posted by cwb ( Jul 06 2006, 11:00:00 AM BST ) Permalink