Gallatin County had an "IT Surplus Sale" today.  I picked up a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U server for only $50.  It is a complete, functional system except they removed the hard drives... so I'm going to have to buy some.  A new 4TB 2.5" Seagate Constellation ES SAS 7200RPM will set me back about $180.

Stats:
     18 DIMM sockets, 6 populated with 2GB (12GB installed, 288GB max)
     8 2.5" hard drive bays - empty, first two have to be SAS drives, others can be SAS or SATA
     Perc 6 / LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2108 RAID card
     2 quad-core Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (combined BogoMIPS 76803.42)
     6 GBit ethernet ports (4 onboard, 2 on a descreet card)
     2 Riser cards with 2 empty slots
     Dual power supplies

With only 12GB of RAM, maybe I need to buy some more RAM.  Here's how much the various sizes of DDR3 1600 ECC DIMMs cost:
     4GB DIMM - $48, 8GB DIMM - $65,  16GB DIMM - $118

Not too bad for $50, eh?  They even threw in a Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U server for free with it.

A few of us were talking about VDI and KVM in IRC and our buddy kaptk2 told me that nested KVM was working pretty well these days... since Fedora 19 he said.  I had not tried it yet so I thought I'd give it a try.  It worked so well that I thought I'd make a screencast showing it off. The original recording size was 1920x1080 (plus titlebar) and I scaled it down to 1280x734... so full-screen it for a better view beyond the embedded 824x473 video.  Oh, and yes SELinux is enabled and in enforcing mode everywhere.  Umm, and NO, this is NOT an April fools joke!

There is a tiny bit of work to do to get it going but not much.  Add a kernel boot parameter and configure the CPU details for the VM.  For more info, see this:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_enable_nested_virtualization_in_KVM

nested-kvm-on-fedora-23.webm (21 minutes, 21.5 MB)

A user with the IRC nick of CoffeeMan wanted to know how Fedora 23 and Korora 23 (Cinnamon edition) compared for resource usage because he was seeing performance differences between the two.  There shouldn't really be much in the way of differnces other than branding and themes... so I created two KVM VMs and installed them both side-by-side.  While I realize that running two VMs at the same time isn't really that bright when it comes to getting accurate performance metrics, it at least gives one an idea how of they compare... and things like the number of processes, CPU usage, RAM used, disk used, etc... shouldn't really vary that much.

While it is a fairly boring, not-much-action video, at least it is small.  28+ minutes at about 16.4 MB.  It is 200Kbit (variable bit-rate) with no audio with a resolution of 1280x491 at 25FPS.  Not too bad.  I have made the default size in the browser be 824x316 so go full screen for a much better view.

fedora23-vs-korora23-resource-usage.webm (28.5 minutes - 16.4 MB)

The folks over at AmeriDroid (an American retailer of the South Korean ODROID SBC/SoC products) posted a video showing the unboxing of the C.H.I.P. mini-Linux computer.  I wasn't even aware they were shipping yet.  Enjoy!

There is a nice write-up in the Communications of the ACM on, "Lessions Learned from 30 Years of Minix."  Here's an executive summary video:

I'm sure you heard about it already, but here's a nice intro video by the Raspberry Pi Guy.

Or if you prefer, a direct YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Z6b64eh2E

Finally got some free IPs, created some new containers (CentOS 7), and used Software Collections to add newer versions of PHP and Apache. I got Drupal 8 installed and am playing with it. Looking for some good training material, I found a Drupal 8 Beginner Course on YouTube. That's a link to a playlist as the course is spread across 63 videos. I decided to use youtube-dl to download the entire playlist and ffmpeg to join them all together, and then ffmpeg again to re-encode them to webm (vp9/opus) 720x404 at 200Kbit video and 32Kbit audio. Good quality / compression ratio.

Drupal_8_Beginner_Course.webm (4 hours, 10 minutes - 246 MB)

The course creators have quite a range of training videos on their website (OSTraining.com) so check them out if so desired. The problem I have with converting all of the MontanaLinux.org content over (from a Drupal 4 site circa 2004), is that some of it is so old. Embedded video formats and players have changed a lot over the years so I'm going to have to do quite a bit of work converting everything for modern standards. I'm sure a lot of the external stuff I've linked to in older articles, probably doesn't exist anymore or has moved. In any event, it will be a lot of work over the coming months but worth it in the end.

Being a LONG-TIME OpenVZ user, I've been avoiding LXC some. Mainly because it wasn't quite done yet. I thought I'd give it a try on Fedora 23 to see how well it works... and the answer is surprisingly... fairly well. I made two screencast (without sound). I just used the lxc-{whatever} tools rather than virt-manager. Both containers just use the default network config (DHCP handed out via DNSMasq provided by libvirtd) which is NAT'ed private addresses... and were automatically configured and just worked. Here's a list of all of the container OS Templates they offer on x86:

centos 6 amd64 default 20160205_02:16 
centos 6 i386 default 20160205_02:16 
centos 7 amd64 default 20160205_02:16 
debian jessie amd64 default 20160204_22:42 
debian jessie i386 default 20160204_22:42 
debian sid amd64 default 20160207_11:58 
debian sid i386 default 20160204_22:42 
debian squeeze amd64 default 20160204_22:42 
debian squeeze i386 default 20160204_22:42 
debian wheezy amd64 default 20160204_22:42 
debian wheezy i386 default 20160204_22:42 
fedora 21 amd64 default 20160205_01:27 
fedora 21 i386 default 20160205_01:27 
fedora 22 amd64 default 20160205_01:27 
fedora 22 i386 default 20160205_01:27 
gentoo current amd64 default 20160205_14:12 
gentoo current i386 default 20160205_14:12 
opensuse 12.3 amd64 default 20160205_00:53 
opensuse 12.3 i386 default 20160205_00:53 
oracle 6.5 amd64 default 20160205_11:40 
oracle 6.5 i386 default 20160205_11:40 
plamo 5.x amd64 default 20160207_11:59 
plamo 5.x i386 default 20160207_13:13 
ubuntu precise amd64 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu precise i386 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu trusty amd64 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu trusty i386 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu trusty ppc64el default 20160201_03:49 
ubuntu vivid amd64 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu vivid i386 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu wily amd64 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu wily i386 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu xenial amd64 default 20160205_03:49 
ubuntu xenial i386 default 20160205_03:49

The first one shows the basics of LXC installation on Fedora 23 (per their wiki page on the subject) as well as creating a Debian SID container, getting it going, installing a lot of software on it including XFCE and most common desktop software... and accessing it via X2Go... and configuring XFCE the way I like it. This one was made on my home laptop and my network is a bit slow so I cut out a few long portions where packages were downloading and installing but everything else is there... yes including quite a bit of waiting for stuff to happen.

lxc-on-fedora-23-debian-sid-GUI-container.webm (25 MB, ~41.5 minutes)

The second video is very similar to the first but it is a remote ssh session with my work machine (where the network is way faster) and shows making a CentOS 7 container, installing XFCE and the same common desktop software, and then connecting to it via X2Go using an ssh proxy, and configuring XFCE how I like it. It was done in a single, un-edited take and includes a bit of waiting as stuff downloads and installs... so you get the complete thing from start to finish.

lxc-on-fedora-23-centos-7-GUI-container.webm (22.7 MB, ~31 minutes)

I recorded the screencasts with vokoscreen at 25 frames-per-second @ slightly larger than 720p resolution... and then converted them to webm (vp9) with ffmpeg @ 200kbit video. They compressed down amazing well. I recommend playback in full-screen as the quality is great. Enjoy!

I recently encountered an Alpine Linux developer in the #openvz Freenode IRC channel who was working on an Alpine Linux-based LiveCD that uses the OpenVZ Legacy stable kernel and tools. If you aren't familiar with Alpine Linux (and I wasn't prior), it is a very minimal Linux distro that uses BusyBox. The LiveCD shafire (his IRC nick) created is ~ 100MB in size. Since I know OpenVZ very well, shafire asked me to lend a hand with testing.

I recorded a screencast that shows using the LiveCD from start to finish. Being very small, and needing storage space for containers, besides the LiveCD you really need a disk partition for permanent storage. The video shows booting the CD, a few manual steps that are needed to get a proper environment established, creating two containers, starting them, entering them and running some simple commands, shutting them down, and shutting down the host. I did all of the testing using a KVM virtual machine which made it easy for video capture. The video runtime is about 11 minutes and there was no editing of the video... everything is absolutely in real-time with no speedups. It is just THAT fast. :)

The embedded video is in webm/vp9 format and should play fine in contemporary versions of Firefox and Google Chrome. If you are using another browser and can't play the video, feel free to use the link under the video to download it and play with a recent version of the VLC media player. Looks like some video feeds that pick up my blog (planet.openvz.org for example) aren't embedding it properly so in that case, use the link under the video. That should work.

If you prefer to download and play in local media player, here's the direct URL:

alpine-based-openvz-livecd-demo.webm

For those interested in screencast creation and video conversion stuff, I used vokoscreen to capture my screen. It natively output a 175.9 MB .mkv file. I used ffmpeg to convert it to a webm file (vp9 video codec, no audio). The resolution is > 480p and the quality is very good... but amazingly, the filesize for the 11 minute video is only 1.7 MB. I guess ffmpeg / vp9 are awesome at comrpession of this genre of video. I set an upper limit of 200 Kbit for the video bitrate but using a variable bitrate it was able to greatly reduce the bitrate for the bulk of the video.

The topic of the BozemanLUG meeting tonight is the Let's Encrypt project. Today I got an SSL certificate for this site from Let's Encrypt and I would like to encourage everyone to use the https version of this site. Your browser should love the new certificate and automatically accept it.

Ghosts of SSL Certs Past
I have used a free start.com SSL cert but it expired. Since then I've used a self-signed one as everything I do on the site is over https since I want to avoid getting my admin account credentials sniffed out over plain-text... but asking the rest of the world to accept my self-signed SSL cert? That's just too much.

Now that I have a good cert, I might force https at some point but not yet.

Future Developments
This site is ancient. The software running this site is ancient... and the distro it is running on is ancient. I hope to change that sometime after the new year. The limiting factor was a lack of public IP addresses... as I wanted to create a new OpenVZ container with newer stuff on a different IP address. In January we should have 5 additional IP addresses and I can at least get started on a new site while leaving this one running until the new one is ready. I'm not even going to guess when I'll be done enough with the new site so this old one can go away, but hopefully sometime in 2016. :)