Showing items from pre-2010

Migrating from GFS to GlusterFS

This week I started the process of migrating from GFS to GlusterFS.  The hardware running my GFS cluster is older and I decided it was better to replace it than continue maintaining it.

Background Information

Back in 2003 I needed to find a storage solution that was fast, reliable, and fault-tolerant.  It also needed to be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously.  After doing much research, I ended up going with an IBM FAStT 600 2GB Fibre Channel (FC) based storage system.  The intent was to replace a single server running a JBOD SCSI disk chassis and RAID-5 card acting as an NFS server.

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Linux Soft Phone Roundup

I’ve been working heavily with VoIP for the last couple of years, and every few months I find myself looking at SIP soft phones again. I haven’t really used them at all under Linux in a long time because none of them quite fit my needs or are as good as the ones available under Windows. Because of this, and the fact that I do 99% of my work under Linux, I’ve got 8 SIP phones, 3 ATA’s and 2 regular phones sitting on my desk right now. This makes for quite a bit of clutter.

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Open Source and other nuggets

The silence for the last few months has been because my life got crazy.  I’ve been spending a lot of time working and what hasn’t been working has been spent in preparation for our new baby.  Yes, thats right, baby.  In 2006 we were told by a fertility doctor that we would likely never have kids.  We didn’t figure it out until less than a week before Jessica entered the second trimester.  So thats been consuming all of my weekends getting the nursery (strange calling it that) and the rest of the house ready for the new baby.

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Remote Desktop on Xubuntu 9.10

So I was planning to work from home on the Friday after thanksgiving so I wanted to be able to access my work desktop from home just in case.  Normally I just ssh and use terminals and such, but for some reason I decided I wanted a full desktop.  I use Xubuntu at home and at the office, and there is no default VNC setup like there is with Ubuntu and Kubuntu.  A couple of quick Google searches and I came across this post:

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Fedora out, Xubuntu in

The number of minor annoyances in Fedora 11 turned into a major annoyance.  Last Saturday I wiped Fedora 11 from my home machine and installed Xubntu, which is the Xfce-centric Ubuntu distribution.  I did the same on my office machine on Wednesday.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with Xubuntu and Ubuntu in general.  For the most part, everything just works.  The Synaptic package manager made the installation of most things pretty painless.  I’ve installed all of my “non-standard” apps without having to first find the right repository, then hope that there aren’t conflicts, and then fight with different versions of things because there were conflicts, etc.  Everything that I use on a normal basis is in one of the repositories that Ubuntu has included.  On Fedora I always had to fight with them.  I didn’t realize just how many extra steps there were in Fedora until I didn’t have to do them.

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Fedora 11 First Impressions

So this week I did something unprecedented for me.  I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially.  After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge.  I’ve now installed it on three machines (in this order):

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