Yesterday me & my colleague (KC) been assigned by my Boss another ad-hoc task for Toyota Malaysia production server which is currently running file server using SLES9 + OES2. My job is very simple, do full back-up for the server and he suggested we using Acronis as a back-up tool and to be honest, I never use it before. Since it’s ad-hoc task & I have to finished it within a short period before Novell NTS coming & do OES2 patching on the server, I decided to go with noguix live-cd to be as a destination back-up server.

As per our early plan we should start the the first back-up at 8:00PM unfortunately, everything went wrong from the beginning. SATA Bios, authentication failure, bad media problem delayed us from the first back-up until 11:30PM. At one time I was thinking “could be this another disaster to us”. FYI, two weeks before my junior mistakenly deleted customer /opt (oracle directory) during disaster recovery which cost our company name & reputation. But as professional, I calmed myself, I told KC I went for a dinner (A&W) alone while KC try to solve the problem. He try with Knoppix, SLES10, Netfilter to setup the dhcp, samba, nfs & ftp server as it’s needed by Acronis but failed. While I’m having dinner, my brain still working for the solution. After half an hour, I’m back calmly with my grateful magic hand to safe our name’s.

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After long delay and difficulty I had, I finally managed to consolidate all servers & services within VMware ESX 3.5 running on top of my AMD Athlon64 X2 machine plus noguix linux acting as VMFS Datastore via NFS to keep all virtual machine images inside Celeron 1.7Ghz machine (old server).

Previously, within one physical server & one virtual machine it’s really hit the performance of my server. Everything must to be running inside this two which is too much for the server. But with ESX now, I manage to have total 7x virtual machines which running different services on different servers and different OS. I can separate Squid from Apache machine, Sendmail running on his standalone primary server while scalix waiting to get into this environment too. Same goes to DNS & DHCP services.

So, everything now running happily on my new virtual environment.

At last, I decided to use my new server with VMware ESX 3.5. It’s already a week now I’m playing with ESX 3.5 and I admit it’s really painful just to get everything is up & running. Supported NIC card, already gave me one week delay but I solved it with Intel PRO/100 (RM20). When I’ve done with ESX installation, new problem is coming. ESX seem can’t detect my on-board SATA controller. Sigh!!! Have to order & wait then for supported SATA controller Silicon Chip Sil-3112 from one lelong seller there (RM60). I hope with this card coming very soon, I finally can create VMFS and store noguix virtual machines using SATA. Otherwise, I might choose another option which is openvz, xen, or even worse vmware-server for my new virtual environment.

I had a problem booting noguix linux with Asus  M2A-VM with integrated ATI Radeon X1250 which resulted the system hang after the system try to load noguix boot logo. This may caused by high resolution used for the boot logo or wrong setting on M2A-VM board itself. But I managed to solved the problem by recompiling the kernel plus new boot logo but this time with low resolution.

Hope this will help some of you out there…

ariyossss

athlon_crazy

Since my new AM2 X2 machine already arrived, I will perform another major changes onto my current environment very soon. I’ll do some test on performance first then let see how compatible & stable this AM2 X2 working with noguix linux. If everything going smoothly the next step is to get all current physical machines & services into different virtual machine running on top of noguix with SMP kernel. Of course this will minimize physical machines involvement but it will also give me an opportunity to add more virtual machine into this new environment.

This time with better processor speed, ram & bigger storage, I hope there will some improvement on scalix & SSLVPN services . Only then I’ll decide what to do next with my Streamyx broadband
A month is enough & let see how it works!

ariyossss

athlon_crazy

1. Noguix Cluster Edition (Main Server)
- Master VPN / Tunnel / Web Proxy
- VPN
- Sendmail MTA
- Pop3 & imap
- Apache + Mysql
- Heartbeat (Cluster)
- Samba File Sharing
- Squid

2. VPS SUSE10 (Secondary Server)
- Running on vmware inside noguix
- Scalix Mail Server
- Fetchmail

3. Noguix Cluster Edition (Backup Server)
- Hearbeat (Cluster)
- Apache + Mysql
- AoE

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