Showing posts with label Virtualization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virtualization. Show all posts

Friday, May 6, 2011

Nagios




In our new VMware View and vCenter infrastructure, we're humming along, although in a matter of three weeks, we're nearly at capacity with our current hardware infrastructure (mostly in memory and disk space usage). As a result of our heavily loaded infrastructure, we've realized the criticality of setting up a monitoring system to monitor our servers and infrastructure components.

My previous experience has been limited to using Microsoft SCOM and I was not very impressed; granted I did not have the opportunity to really learn its ins and outs, I just know that we constantly had rogue alerts, false positives, and SCOM server problems (although these issues could very well be attributed to how it was set up, not the product itself).

Furthermore, our infrastructure is primarily Linux-based (RHEL Oracle server and ESX hosts), so why pay for a Microsoft tool designed to really monitor primarily Windows servers when we have the world of open-source available to us? Enter the picture Nagios, a free, open-source IT infrastructure monitor. Like many open source projects (think Red Hat, SLES, etc) the "core" is available for free and there is a pay-for commercial version. With our limited budget and no need for elaborate performance metrics and reports, we opted for Nagios Core. While it requires a decent amount of time to set up the service and host definitions, install the correct plugins, and configure the client monitors, we've been very pleased with it as a monitoring solution. It's pretty straightforward to set up and tweak, we can customize and adjust alert levels for individual hosts. And thanks to the engineers over at op5 (a monitor based heavily on Nagios core), we can monitor our VMware virtual datacenter with Nagios. While we're still waiting for our SMTP relay to be configured (the client wants ownership), so I can't opine on the email alert functionality, thus far we've been very pleased.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Citrix VDI

Haven't had much time to post lately as we're deep in our Citrix VDI build at work. Our lead VDI engineer left the firm about the same time our hardware arrived, which means I am not the full time engineer on the project, which I'm sincerely enjoying as it affords me the opportunity to learn and really familiarize myself with our XenDesktop 4, PVS 5.6 SP1, XenApp 6 environment. The downside is I definitely am caught spinning my wheels sometimes simply because I'm not that familiar with the technology. As a result, below is a list of a few things that I've learned thus far that is not documented on Citrix's site that may be useful for others experiencing similar issues:

  1. When installing UPM on Windows XP VDIs, change the default installation location to C:\Citrix\ProfMgr. Supposedly, it can handle 8.3 filenames (filenames like C:\Prog~\Citrix\Prof), however we never got it working in our environment, even though 8.3 filenames are enabled.
  2. When working on the GoldenImage or vdisk in private mode, make sure you delete all domain user profiles before XenConverting or putting the vdisk in standard mode. Otherwise UPM will complain of log file issues as it can't write to the log file because the log file is read-only, imprinted in the user profile on the vdisk, which is read-only
  3. XenDesktop 4 does not like MS SQL 2008 SP2. While SQL 2008 is not officially supported, we've had no issues using it until SP2 was applied. Once SP2 was applied, XenDesktop continued to work, but could not reliably determine the power state of the VDIs and the XenDesktop Setup Wizard would always fail on the PVS with an error of "Invalid Host ID" when trying to create the desktop gropu
  4. Make sure to check the "Manage Machine Account Password" on the VDisk File properties! Otherwise you'll have a nightmare of AD issues and the VDIs won't register using the Desktop Agent to the DDC
  5. In a somewhat unique environment, we are required to stream to two separate VLANs. To accomplish this, we teamed two of our physical NICs on our PVS servers and trunked the teamed connection to each VLAN. This alone will not accomplish streaming to both VLANs as both the TFTP service and Provisioning Server Two Stage Boot Process only listen on one NIC by default. If you try opening the tftp.cpl control panel, it only allows you to check one adapter for the service. As for the PVS two-stage boot process control panel (.cpl), we couldn't even get it to open on our 2008 R2 Server. To allow the services to listen on all adapters, go into the registry HKLM\System\Controlset001\services\\parameters, clear the value of the "Adapter" reg key. If you run a netstat -a you'll see the service is listening on 0.0.0.0 *.*
  6. Due to a client security requirement, TFTP is disallowed in the environment. As a result, we use boot ISOs to boot to our VDisks. Through trial and error, we discovered that to boot to an empy vdisk for the first time, you must use PXE boot (and subsequently, TFTP). You cannot use a boot iso when first creating a vdisk.
Off the top of my head, that's all I can think of right now. As we continue through our build phase, I will continue to supplement this list.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Creating ISO images from a Directory

Recently at work, we had a need to transfer Citrix XenDesktop installation files into our VSphere 4 lab environment, however our ESX servers did not support USB, as the hypervisor did not have usb-storage.ko, uhci-hcd.ko, or ehci-hcd.ko modules compiled and we didn't have time to compile and load them into the kernel.

From our VSphere console, we can only mount ISOs and we can't drag and drop files into the VM, like in VMWare workstation, so the easiest way to get our files into our VMs was to burn an ISO. Fortunately this is pretty easy to do in Linux:

mkisofs -o files.iso -J ./folder


Credit where credit is due, this blog post was extremely helpful.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Flip the switch from 'Broken' to 'Fixed'

The key to using KVM: ENABLE VIRTUALIZATION IN THE BIOS

In the words of the famous Homer Simpson- "Doh!"
After doing a bit more research and piecing together why I could boot into Windows, but then everything would come to grinding halt, it occured to me to check the BIOS to ensure that virtualization is enabled, as I was continuously getting an error when starting a VM: "Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support".

Seeing as my intel processor supports virtualization (egrep vmx --color=always /proc/cpuinfo), why wouldn't KVM start correctly? Furthermore, modprobe kvm-intel wouldn't load correctly.

After a couple of audible, "huh."s it occured to me to check the BIOS on the HP laptop to ensure CPU virtualization was enabled. SURPRISE! It wasn't. After enabling it in the BIOS and booting, and with a little more confidence, I ran into the same problem, "Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support." After a bit of Googling, I found that for whatever reason, a full shutdown and cold boot were necessary for the BIOS setting to take effect. Sure enough, after a reboot and starting my VM:


And with the -CDROM option pointing to my Windows 7 ISO, I made it past the infinite "setup is starting" page, and was able to install Windows 7:



As is usually the case, the issues experienced with KVM were due to user error rather than shoddy development.


So some tasks to complete to ensure that my work laptop will actually facilitate work:
  • Ensure I can share files between my RHEL host and KVM guests
  • Ensure that USB devices can be used on KVM guests
  • Provide my work Windows 7 guest with enough disk space to accomodate all of my work documents
After a bit of consideration, I think my best approach will be to keep my guest OS on a different virtual disk image than my documents. That way I can keep a separate non-OS partition with all of my documents on it and boot my virtual disks with the -hdb option, thus allowing me to easily switch from Windows 7 to Windows XP guests.

Some links I found useful or potentially useful:
How to resize a libvirt image
QEMU Monitor Commands
QEMU USB Handling

Thursday, July 8, 2010

RHEL 5 and KVM for Enterprise Notebook

So after finally successfully downloading and burning RHEL 5 Client x86_64 and obtaining a new hard drive for my notebook, I'm ready to install RHEL and test KVM.

The RHEL install was relatively painless, as Anaconda is an amazingly simple installation utility. Unfortunately, the first road bump I ran into was that the RHEL Client installation disk does not come with any virtualization package options (Xen, KVM, etc). No worries though, I was sure I could simply find the packages on the RedHat Network and push them down that way.

Small problem: RHEL didn't recognize my wireless card. After a quick lspci and some grepping:

lspci | grep wireless

I found my card and a nice step-by-step guide to install the necessary firmware to get it working.

After getting wireless up and running, I found that after registering my RH system, it did not appear in my RedHat systems on RHN, therefore I couldn't target packages to be automatically pushed to my laptop. After a bit of research on the RedHat Knowledgebase, I determined that this was because of the way my enterprise evaluation account was set up- my systems would be assigned to the Organization Administrator. Being the impatient person I am, I decided to just pull down the necessary packages manually instead of waiting for a response from my company's RHEL partner contact.

It was a bit of a tedious process, as I had to not only pull down the necessary RPMs, but also their dependencies. Anyone who's had experience working with RedHat, SuSE, or any other RPM-based distro before yum became available knows how frustrating it can be. I actually documented each package I had to pull down and listed them in the original version of this post, however Blogger didn't do a good job of saving the post, so that list has been lost in the series of tubes.

After pulling down all the packages I needed (apparently RHEL only officially supports up to version 83 of KVM) and checking the Guest Support Status, it looked as though I'd be good to go with virtualizing Windows Vista or 7 on KVM.

The first thing I tried was to convert the VMWare VMDK virtual image of my Windows Vista laptop into qemu's qcow2 format, as outlined in a link from my previous post. I quickly discovered, however, that RHEL does not natively support reading/writing to NTFS filesystems. What!? What is this, 1998? After a bit of Googling, I found this NTFS support in RHEL 5 blog post outlining the basic packages needed. One thing to note is that the dev package (kmdl) is not necessary and will generate a compile-time error if your kernel is not 2.6.18. I went ahead and just skipped installing it and was able to mount ntfs file systems fine. I figured I'd try configuring the automounter later, after I got my converted Vista image converted:

qemu-img convert Vista.vmdk -O qcow2 /home//virtual_machines/Vista.qcow2

The conversion appeared to complete successfully, however it did take a good bit of time (roughly 30 minutes).

kvm -hda Ubuntu-copy.qcow2 -net nic -net user -m 512

Upon attempting to boot this image, I received a blank screen with no indication of the guestOS trying to boot. After a couple more attempts, I did get the "Windows failed to start properly" menu and tried booting into safe mode, however this too failed. No sweat, there's a chance that my virtual image didn't convert well in the P2V, and I haven't yet tested it on VMWare, so I figured why not start from scratch with a brand new Windows 7 image?
qemu-kvm -hda win7.img -cdrom win27.iso -m 1024 -boot d
Success! (at least initially...) The Win7 ISO booted up beautifully and actually relatively quickly. I was able to run through the initial steps to install Windows 7- selecting time zone settings, user settings, etc. That was until I got to the "Setup is Starting" screen and where I was left in indefinite purgatory. I did a bit of googling and found this bugzilla report outlining the same issue I was experiencing, but with no resolution. Tracing duplicate bugs led to no where, and thus again I was stymied.

Alright, well I don't really need Windows 7, why not just use XP Professional? Being an older OS, perhaps it would install more cleanly on KVM. As before, the ISO booted great, I ran through all the OS options, and it actually started to install... only to later hang just as its younger brother did before. After a few repeated attempts (one allowed to run overnight), it was obvious that there was little I could do to get a Windows OS up and running on this version of KVM.

Alright, well maybe the version packages I chose to install KVM were incomplete or still unstable. Afterall, the kvm-qemu package was listed as in Beta. So I decided to scrap my RHEL client idea and go for the real deal: RHEL 5 Server, whose installation media actually contains virtualization packages. Despite this more by-the-book (and probably more officially supported) attempt, I ran into identical problems as noted above

So the conclusion: KVM has potential as an alternative to a baremetal hypervisor, perhaps just not version 83. RedHat is striving to make RHEV (RedHat's implementation of KVM) a market contender for a low-cost virtualization solution, however it seems this may be a bit premature. Maybe they should give their internal developers a bit more time to design and test before selling that horse.

While the battle may be lost, the war is far from over- next attempt: the more tried and true Xen!

Packages: kvm-qemu-img

Links:
HowTos/KVM - CentOS
RHEL Virtualization Guide
(dev package not required- complains if kernel is different)

P2V of Vista machine failed

Thursday, June 3, 2010

P2V for KVM

Some resources I plan on using when trying to P2V a Windows Vista laptop to use on either RHEL or CentOS KVM.


Right now, the best solution looks to be to convert the physical box to a VM using VMWare vCenter Converter

I haven't ruled out using Xen, but my initial research indicates this may be easier to do on KVM then Xen. KVM appears to be more similar to Solaris Containers, whereas Xen uses paravirtualization. I've had limited experience with Xen, and no experience with KVM, so this should be a good learning exercise. Here's some more resources for reference:

Managing Windows Bitlocker Drive Encryption (BDE)

A quick and easy way to manage Windows Bitlocker Drive Encryption (BDE).


C:\Users\user>manage-bde.wsf -help

Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.7
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

manage-bde[.wsf] -parameter [arguments]

Description:
Configures BitLocker Drive Encryption on disk volumes.

Parameter List:
-status Provides information about BitLocker-capable volumes.
-on Encrypts the volume and turns BitLocker protection on.
-off Decrypts the volume and turns BitLocker protection off.
-pause Pauses encryption or decryption.
-resume Resumes encryption or decryption.
-lock Prevents access to BitLocker-encrypted data.
-unlock Allows access to BitLocker-encrypted data.
-autounlock Manages automatic unlocking of data volumes.
-protectors Manages protection methods for the encryption key.
-tpm Configures the computer's Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
-ForceRecovery or -fr
Forces a BitLocker-protected OS to recover on restarts.
-ComputerName or -cn
Runs on another computer. Examples: "ComputerX", "127.0.0.1"
-? or /? Displays brief help. Example: "-ParameterSet -?"
-Help or -h Displays complete help. Example: "-ParameterSet -h"

Examples:
manage-bde -status
manage-bde -on C: -RecoveryPassword -RecoveryKey F:\
manage-bde -unlock E: -RecoveryKey F:\84E151C1...7A62067A512.bek



Making it much easier to image and P2V a machine. This will come in handy when I P2V Windows to run on virtualized hardware, so I can finally make the switch to all open source OS (read: Linux)!

Friday, February 12, 2010

Fast Forward 8 Months

So again, I have criminally lapsed in my posts on this blog. Since that September post, I left my previous job at the University of Georgia, had a nice 2-week backpacking trip through Europe away from computers and familiar faces, and returned in mid October to begin work for the man a large technology consulting firm, based out of the Atlanta office.

I'm currently on a 6-month 10-month project for a federal government client, spending 4-5 days of the week in the greater DC area, working as, to my dismay, a "Windows Desktop Engineer." I've been able to grab a few server tasks on the side, and the role has afforded me some valuable experience with Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory, however I find myself a good distance away from where my true interests lie: Linux servers and virtualization technologies.

At work, I've learned a good bit about GPO authoring, Active Directory 2008 configuration and management, Ghost Suite 2.5, Windows Server 2008 implementation of DHCP and DNS, enterprise-level IT, and the nature of consulting.

In what little time I have at home every few weekends (I tend to spend weekends in different cities or staying in DC), I've been playing around with Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory architecture in a virtual environment. Since leaving UGA, I had to forfeit my VMWare Workstation license, and thus have been learning to use Sun's VirtualBox. Aside from the networking, I've found that many of the standard features are comparable to VMWare Workstation.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have the opportunity to play around with Xen virtualization and KVM in Linux. More on that later!

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

VMWare NAT on Windows 7

While I would never dream of switching my home workstation to a new version of Windows within its first few months on the market, particularly when it is still only in RTM, at work is a different story.

I could probably still get by using XP Pro on my workstation, and put Windows 7 in a VM, I find self-immersion to be the best method to fully learn a new OS, as it forces me to get it set up completely, otherwise I can't do work.

While I've run into a few annoyances thus far (no Daemon Tools or PowerISO, urg), nothing yet has been a show stopper... until I tried accessing the internet in my XP Active Directory administration virtual machine in VMWare using NAT.

Apparently Windows 7's new compartmentalized network security breaks VMWare's NATing ability. Note in the below screen shot how the VMWare Network adapter is identified by Windows as being on a public network, thereby disabling its connection.


I was able to still use Bridged networking within VMWare, but this was not practical at work since we have to specific each connected machine's MAC address in our DHCP tables to assign it an IP- a bit overkill for an only occasionally non-critical VM.

So after some digging and a bit of troubleshooting, I found a workable solution thanks, in part to this article, using Win7's Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). One important caveat to note is that Win7's networking has changed in a few minor ways that require a bit of deviation from the article. Below is a summary of steps:

1. Run the Virtual Network Editor as Admin
2. Go to Host Virtual Adapters tab, remove all VMNet instances (default are VMNet1 and VMNet8)
3. Click Apply
4. Click Add, select VMnet1
5. Click Apply
6. Go to the Host Virtual Networking tab
7. Click the > next to VMnet1 and change the address and subnet to use the Win7 ICS network (192.168.137.0 / 255.255.255.0) <- note how this deviates from the article
8. Click Apply
9. Go the NAT tab and select VMNet1
10. Click Edit and change the Gateway to the ICS gateway IP (192.168.137.1)
11. Click Apply and restart the NAT service
12. Go to the DHCP tab
13. Add VMNet1 and remove all others
14. Click Apply
15. Select Properties of VMNet1 in DHCP Tab
16. Enter a Start and End Address for DHCP (I used 192.168.137.50 to 192.168.137.75)
17. Click OK then Apply

19. Go to Network Connections in the Windows 7 Control Panel
20. Right Click on your Local Area Connection > Properties
21. Go to Share Tab and check both boxes (Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection and Allow other network users to control or disable the shared Internet Connection [optional])
22. Click OK

23. On each VM, go to Network settings and select Host Only Networking for every VM that needs to NAT out to the network

Done! Seemed to do the trick on my XP SP3 VMs, and now I can administer our AD tree and group policy!

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

IT Humor, RAIDing USB Drives, Windows 7 Deployment

No posts for a while, been keeping busy at work, haven't been motivated to come home and spend more time tinkering on my computers after spending 8 hours on my workstation... I guess sometimes even a geek needs a break. In lieu of actually working on my computers, I've been watching a lot of the British sitcom IT Crowd on Netflix, combining British humor with a little esoteric IT humor thrown in.



As I spend more time in my full time position here in our IT Office, not only am I gaining a lot of enterprise-level IT technical experience, I'm also learning a lot of the ins and outs of dealing with our clientele. Its been an eye opening experience to say the least, dealing with all different sorts of characters with different technical competencies. I hope to post more on this subject later, as it has sometimes provided good humor here in the office, as well as some definite frustrations.

I've recently stumbled across a potential need to RAID USB drives for mirroring (RAID 1). My roommate uses an external USB harddrive to store photos taken for her work. Unfortunately, it seems that only after using the drive for a month, it has already bitten the dust (although I still have yet to take a look at it). It occurred to me that a USB RAID array could be very useful, particularly in this situation, but according to Jason Khors of Big Bruin, this can't be done using Windows. Not surprisingly it can be done using Linux, using the LVM (oh what can't you do, Linux?).

But there still may be hope, seeing as my roommate uses OS X (which I've grown to dislike more and more since working with it in an LDAP enterprise environment). Apparently OSX can use external drives for RAID arrays, at least according to this article. Assuming my roommate doesn't mind me hacking away at her MacBook, maybe I can set this up for her, and learn something in the process.

On an unrelated note, here in the office we've gotten our copies of Windows 7 RTM, so we're mired in documents and manuals dealing with Windows 7 deployment tools- WAIK tools, Sysprep, WinPE, imageX, and SCCM just to name a few. While SCCM is a beast in-of-itself, a good resource for general 7 deployment can be found here. We're hoping to start using Windows 7's VHD capabilities for deployment as well.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

X is Dead

Just a quick update:

After being away from my systems for a week because I'm in the process of moving, I set up my workstations in the new house, along with two new toys. I had the opportunity to throw Windows 7 up on a VM, but haven't had much time to play with it. So far, I'm more impressed with Win7 than I was with Vista, in terms of usability, notification handling, and its more enterprise-friendly configuration options.

For the past week I've been working on getting my system back up and running- since upgrading to kernel 2.6.29 and a newer intel driver, X no longer starts correctly- basically everything I've experienced is documented in this gentoo bug report. I now have an intimate understanding on configuring Xorg-server, using masked packages, and installing X11-drivers on gentoo. I'm still struggling to get X to work properly, but so far am still having issues with it starting then freezing. As of right now, I have recompiled x11-drivers as well as followed the steps in this Gentoo how-to.

At work, I've finally been granted some Active Directory privileges, so I'm trying to take a crash course in AD group policy. I have learned basic AD administration, such as user and computer creation, managing organizational units, and user privileges. Right now, I'm working on creating group policy to implement auto logoff and something along the lines of Windows SteadyState. I'm also in the process of configuring Mac OSX to authenticate users using the University's LDAP tree. I've also had the opportunity to toy a bit with SmartDeploy, but have yet to actually start deploying workstations with it.

That's it for now, hopefully I'll be able to post a bit more frequently now that my move is almost complete.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

FreeBSD

Got bored waiting for the Gentoo box to emerge and compile all the new packages, so...





Now I just need to familiarize myself with the different file structure, and get Gnome running faster. Install was comparatively painless, it did most of the hard part for me. First adjustment: no /etc/init.d, this is true blue Unix, so I'm looking at /etc/rc.d and /usr/local/etc/rc.d

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

SAMBA

So after completing my iptables exercise, I proceeded to work on configuring SAMBA, only to find that it was already configured how I wanted. I had forgotten that shortly after I finished installing Gentoo, I went ahead and used this Gentoo wiki article as well as this quick Gentoo how-to . I really only need a simple share between my Vista machine and my Gentoo box, as I don't have any printers installed on the gentoo machine, and I don't need granular permissions for the share as it within my LAN.

One thing I did not do was learn how to effectively use CIFS and smbclient, so I'll have to familiarize myself with both and figure out how to mount and search samba shares.

On another note, I spoke with our web designer at work, and he shared with me that I should check out Inkscape, a free/open source vector graphics editor, similar to Adobe Illustrator. I really do need to familiarize myself with software such as this, as when it comes to web design, I am lacking most in creating and manipulating images.

He also pointed me to click2try.com, a pretty cool site with a bunch of hosted VMs, allowing users to try open source software for free, without having to install anything on the user's machine.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Up to Speed

So over a year after my last post, I figured it may be time to reinvigorate this blog. For whatever poor soul happens to stumble across this blog, I apologize in advance for its discontinuity, potential esoteric jargon perhaps only discernible to myself (I tend to occasionally make up words), and its unscientific approach. Honestly, I am using this blog more for my own personal benefit than anything else, as any other intended use seems fruitless and narcissistic.

That being said, this past year I've been keeping busy finishing up school, work, and side projects. As hinted by the title, I've been monkeying around with a bunch of different projects since the end of that MIST directed study in Adobe Air. Some of the projects I've undertaken, finished, or abandoned in the past year are as follow:
  • Built a new Desktop at home after my crappy video card crapped out (who'da thunk)
    • AMD Athlon 64 X2 Brisbane Dual Core 2.7GHz
    • Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2HP AM2+/AM2 780G HDMI Micro ATX Motherboard
    • 4GB DDR2 800 (PC6400) Dual Channel RAM
    • RAIDMAX Hybrid 2 RX-530SS Power Supply CrossFire ready
    • WD 500GB SATA II HD 7200RPM
    • WD 320GB SATA II HD 7200RPM
    • NEC 16x DVD-RW
    • ROSEWILL CD-RW/DVD-R
    • ATI TV WONDER ELITE
    • Windows Vista Professional Yeah, yeah, I know...

  • Installed Gentoo Linux Kernel 2.6.24 on Dell Optiplex GX270
    • Apache 2.2.1 compiled from source
    • MySQL 8.42 compiled from source
    • PostgreSQL 8.3.3 compiled from source
    • PHP 5.2.6 compiled from source
    • Gnome 2.20.3
  • Reengineered SMIS web site
  • Reengineering Atlantatrains web site
  • Learned well-formed DOM manipulation with AJAX (no more innerHTML!)
  • Update of UGA Franklin College OIT Project Log Tool
  • Using pdftk to generate and fill PDFs
  • Using AutoSuggest for AJAX autocompleting forms
  • Projects completed for CSCI 4300 Web Programming Course:
    • XSL style formatting
    • XML Schema and DTD
    • Created a simple ticketing system in Ruby on Rails
    • Created a simple bulletin board using Java servlets and MVC
    • Basic ANT build file syntax and usage
  • Scriptaculous sortable
  • Prototype AJAX handling
  • Set up and experimented with Subversion and TortoiseSVN on RHEL5
  • iDeneb OSX dual boot abandoned

Future projects that I hope to document using this blog include (but are not limited to):
  • Setting up OSX within VMWare Workstation (I hear its a doozy)
  • Playing with netBSD, freeBSD, and freeBSD jail within Vmware
  • Installing Oracle Express within a VM
  • Monkeying around with Sun's VirtualBox
  • Potential Projects Courtesy of Microsoft DreamSpark:
    • MS SQL Server 2008
    • MS Virtual PC
    • MS Windows Server 2008
  • Java servlets and Struts
  • Apache Modrewrite
  • Continue learning Regex!
Only time will tell how disciplined I'll be in documenting these projects, but hopefully I will be!