Tech4Him – Technology with Integrity

A Christian technology chaos wrangler and his thoughts

ESXi 4, Moving VMs to new Storage

Posted by Tom On March - 24 - 2010

As previously discussed, we recently purchased an MD3000i iSCSI SAN from Dell. We are running the “free” VSphere ESXi 4 on 3 hosts. That’s right, no VCenter, no VCB, no VMotion, no SVM. So, how does one best approach moving these VM guests from local storage to our new lovely SAN? Well, we looked into [...]

Dell MD3000i and R710 – Shiny and New

Posted by Tom On March - 18 - 2010

Well, the time finally came. We bit the bullet and purchased a new Dell PowerEdge R710 and an MD3000i SAN for the office. The R710 will be a new VSphere ESXi 4 host that will take on a bulk of the production VM’s while one of the remaining 2950’s will remain a smaller production host [...]

Linode StackScripts and LAMP Servers

Posted by Tom On March - 8 - 2010

On February 8th, 2010 Linode.com announced the availability of StackScripts. The StackScripts are described as:
StackScripts™ provide a flexible way to customize our distribution templates. They’re very easy to use — find a StackScript, answer its questions, and click deploy. When the deployment is first booted, the script is executed and does its [...]

Installing APC on MediaTemple DV 3.5 for Drupal

Posted by Tom On December - 11 - 2009

We have a few sites that exist on a MediaTemple DV 3.5 server. We’ve long been concerned about the lack of performance we are getting on this DV versus sites on a smaller Linode.com DV. We are not here to debate that today.
What we have done is to install APC on the MediaTemple DV in [...]

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Posted by Tom On October - 29 - 2009

We recently began testing the installation profile for Drupal called OpenPublish. The good folks at Phase 2 Technology have opened this installation profile (distribution) up for all to use with some key features for the semantic web. This post is not to go over or compares features with other similar distributions. Instead this is more [...]

ESXi 4, Moving VMs to new Storage

Posted by Tom On March - 24 - 20102 COMMENTS

As previously discussed, we recently purchased an MD3000i iSCSI SAN from Dell. We are running the “free” VSphere ESXi 4 on 3 hosts. That’s right, no VCenter, no VCB, no VMotion, no SVM. So, how does one best approach moving these VM guests from local storage to our new lovely SAN? Well, we looked into the following possibilities: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 29% [?]

Dell MD3000i and R710 – Shiny and New

Posted by Tom On March - 18 - 20103 COMMENTS

MD3000i and Dell Poweredge R710 mounted.Well, the time finally came. We bit the bullet and purchased a new Dell PowerEdge R710 and an MD3000i SAN for the office. The R710 will be a new VSphere ESXi 4 host that will take on a bulk of the production VM’s while one of the remaining 2950’s will remain a smaller production host and the third 2950 will be a test and development box.

So you can see the MD3000i with the faceplate off directly below the new R710. I’m tempted to leave the faceplate off so that the executives and visitors see more lights when they look in. For some reason, non-technical people tend to have a first reaction to hardware such that more lights is mo’ better. :) Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 18% [?]

Why I Love Linode Disk Image Options

Posted by Tom On March - 12 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

This is just a quick post on another feature of Linodes I really adore. Disk image options allow you to do a number tasks with multiple disk images. One thing that is a huge help for me is the ability to resize a disk image. Now to do this, your linode needs to be powered off.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Today was spent working on creating a Drupal 6 version of a custom Drupal 5 module as part of a Drupal upgrade project. This module is similar to the image_attach module that is a contrib module package with the Image module. The difference is that the module allows you to designate categories for images by content_type and allows for the upload, selection, removal and ordering of images in each “image category”. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Linode StackScripts and LAMP Servers

Posted by Tom On March - 8 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

On February 8th, 2010 Linode.com announced the availability of StackScripts. The StackScripts are described as:

StackScripts™ provide a flexible way to customize our distribution templates. They’re very easy to use — find a StackScript, answer its questions, and click deploy. When the deployment is first booted, the script is executed and does its thing. You can even watch its progress by viewing the console.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

OpenPublish Demo at ADUG

Posted by Tom On February - 19 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

This video is from Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) member Kent Lester, and his presentation on Open Publish – the Drupal distribution created by Phase2 Technology.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6% [?]

MySQLCheck For Quick Repair

Posted by Tom On February - 15 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

Thanks to this tip on the Taragana blog, I was introduced to the mysqlcheck command. In a pinch, the following command will check, repair and optimize all tables in all databases on your MySQL server instance.

mysqlcheck -u root -p --auto-repair --check --optimize --all-databases

mysqlcheck is available in MySQL 3.23.38 and later.

The official documentation for mysqlcheck says: “The mysqlcheck client performs table maintenance: It checks, repairs, optimizes, or analyzes tables.” Now, this must be run on a MySQL instance that is currently running, unlike the myisamchk tool. So, you may want to stop all access to your instance. If you are using it for websites, perhaps kill HTTPD for a few minutes some other means.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Internet Explorer iFrame Insanity – Lullabot

Posted by Tom On February - 15 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

Here’s a great little article from the great folks over at Lullabot with a fix for why Internet Explorer insists on an ugly frame for black IFrames.

http://www.lullabot.com/blog/ie-iframe-insanity

To fix it you have to do this:

<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameBorder="0"></iframe>

Popularity: 3% [?]