Vietnamese fishermen are catching up with the script kiddy fad, and decided that they could do way better than pimple-faced fat western kids or Brazilian bums:

I have some friends and family back there and they've been bitching non-stop about this. They all want the bastard fishermen to get the death penalty. They do take their Internet very seriously. :-P

I was given a tight deadline to move some of our Windows servers (read: server OSes installed on crappy desktops sitting in the corner of the server room) to XenEnterprise. I delegated some to my colleagues to rebuild from scratch on a XenEnterprise server and had one for myself: a box that was such a PITA to build that it would take weeks of my time. There was only one thing I could think of: using a Physical To Virtual conversion tool to convert this bitch into a XenVM.

XenEnterprise comes with no P2V for Windows, only one for Linux (which only supports a handful of OSes: RedHat, CentOS and Suse). The manual refers to a number of Xen partners which offer commercial tools for this. I went with one called Leostream. They have a P2V product which has a free trial limited to 1 server - perfect for my need!

Installation is a two-step process. 1: install the Leostream Host Agent on the XenEnterprise box to receive the original Windows installation and convert it into a XenVM and 2: install the Leostream Client Agent on the original Windows server. Afterwards, just launch the Client Agent and follow a dumb wizard.

There are a few gotchas:

• You're given the choice to muck around with the partitions before the conversion process, but doing so will screw up a lot of applications, so don't do it.
• Write down the partition or drive letters of the original setup before you start, because after conversion, they will be different and you'll need to change them back to what they were originally.
• The Emergency HVM boot is great to diagnose some problems. In my case, it was a faulty installation CD (and ISO) that wouldn't boot.
• Booting from an ISO is possible (so that you don't have to go to the server room to change CD) but only if the ISO is on the server itself (i.e under /opt/xensource/packages/iso). It won't work if the ISO is under a NFS mount (i.e /var/lib/xen/iso_import) although you can select it.

In the end, it was all smooth. The original box was a Dell SC430 Pentium D 2.8Ghz dual core with 512MB of RAM and the XenVM was a single virtual CPU (the server is a dual dual core 1.8GHz Opteron 2210) with 512MB of RAM. The XenVM is just as fast, or at least more than fast enough for our needs, and the server room is a little bit neater now. :-)

My SAGE proposal paper this year has been provisionally accepted! It'll be a full paper plus a 30 min technical presentation. Now it's a small matter of writing the bloody thing before May 4. :-)

Some people at Oracle have been smoking something weird to come up with this WTF. What the hell were they thinking?

Stumbled upon a software called SCIgen, a tool that can generate Computer Science research paper in Latex with graphs, charts, bibliography and well-formatted two-column text. Very authentic looking! Of course once you read it, it's fairly obvious to anyone with some tech knowlege that it's all bollocks, but apparently one generated paper was accepted at a conference and another was rejected but got a nice explanation letter as if it was legit. Here's an example of such generated paper that I got from TheDailyWTF:

LosslessVirtualInformationForE-Business.pdf 111.42 kB

I wish that tool was around when I was doing CompSci at uni! It was written by a bunch of MIT graduates who had way too much time...but did a damn fine job. :-)

A List Apart has a new article on web standards and this time it's about the selling points of web standards, although it's titled "Where our standards went wrong" (don't quite get why the author chose that). The selling points of web standards, especially those you can pitch to the marketing execs, are very important, but at the start of the article, the author also touched on an issue that divides standardistas and web developers: strict compliance or a more pragmatic approach to web standards.

The author suggests that both are right but are different takes. The latter is what I disagree with. If your page doesn't validate, it is invalid. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that you're gonna throw it away because you can't sell it to anyone. It doesn't mean that it will automatically fail in current browsers. However, it is still invalid and should be recognized as such. If your grammar and spelling are not 100%, but people can still understand what you mean, that's considered acceptable, but it doesn't change the fact that your grammar and spelling are not valid. Somehow some people cannot face the fact that their work may not be standard compliant and find ways to redefine standards or muddy the water with "standards don't matter" headline-grabbing blogs.

This blog is a perfect example of the above: "Mike Davidson: March to your own standard". Mike made some good points such as having a valid page doesn't mean that you're a great coder, and that we should not be too hung up about the current standards, but should let ourselves be free to experiment and create new things (which might become standards one day). However, he lost the plot when he tried to vilify validation and came up with that silly idea of the Invalidator Badge. He seemed to focus too much on the cool and fun parts of web design but neglect and disrespect the more boring part such as correctness, syntax, etc. Steven Champeon, a WaSP member, gave him a good whipping in the comment section, and I'm disappointed to see Mike's rather immature reaction to Steven's points. Still, it was a good discussion and I will keep in mind the points made by both sides when talking about web standards.

While I was typing out an email to send to our users about a scheduled maintenance downtime for one of our services, I got bored and checked The DailyWTF which now has a stupid name Worse Than Failures because the founder doesn't want his grandma asking him what the F word stands for...

If you don't believe the IT crowd can scare the poop & pee out of you, think again. We know what you've been doing in all that supposed work time of yours.

Now that I have 2 XenServer hosts, I wanted to experiment with migrating XenVMs from one to another. The open source version had a live migration feature but it was very buggy and I couldn't get it to work. XenServer seems to have removed or disabled it, as it's not listed in the command line manual. I used the Administration Console for this task, but it could be carried out with some command lines and I intend to use it when I write a cron job to take monthly snapshots of XenVMs.

After migrating all VMs off a server that originally had open source Xen installed on software RAID1 + LVM, I set to rebuild this server with XenEnterprise. To my disappointment, XenEnterprise installation CD (which is based on CentOS 4 or RHEL 4) doesn't support software RAID1 setup. I think it's because Xen only uses the textmode installer and doesn't use the graphical installer of this distro which does support software RAID1 and LVM out of the box. Luckily, people on the XenSource forum have encountered this and have come up with a workaround - thanks to Harry de Jong and Felipe Vadal. It's basically:

1. Installing Xen on one drive
2. Create raid partitions (label fd) out of the 2nd drive to match the first
3. Sync content of the first to the second, including moving the LVM's PVs over.
4. Create RAID1 md devices out of the partitions of the 2nd drive, marking the matching ones on the 1st drive as "missing"
5. Physically swap the drives so the 1st drive become the 2nd and vice versa
6. Now mark the partitions on the 2nd drive (the old 1st drive) as fd and rebuild the RAID arrays. Reboot and done.

I had a lot of different plans for this paper but eventually I decided to do it on Xen. Leaving the submission until the last minute as usual, today I wrote and submitted this to SAGE-AU:

Xen Garden: Tales of server management via virtualization from The Marsh

The Marsh: a server room inundated with gray towers and old desktops masquerading as servers surrounding the quality rackmounted ones, which provides the perfect climate for the wild growth of various operating systems and applications with undocumented and often mismanaged configurations.

Xen Garden: a server room with a lot of breathing space and rackmounted servers, which are paravirtualized with Xen technology to best utilize hardware resources and partition servers into more manageable XenVMs (virtual machines), and to bring serenity into the life of a system administrator.

The wilderness of The Marsh is a sight that system administrators have seen too many times in their days and sometimes nightmares. Inheriting The Marsh from my predecessors and having added to its growth myself, I knew I had to stop its expansion and take back the control before it consumes me. This paper explains the problems stemming from The Marsh and why I chose Xen virtualization technology as the solution. It demonstrates the use cases for Xen at my workplace, how a Xen Garden is managed and some future plans with this newfound flexibility.

And this time I have a new presenter biography:

Linh Vu works as the system and web administrator at the Physics Department of the University of Melbourne. He is at the cowboy stage of the SDLC - Sysadmin Development Life Cycle - meaning he loves to explore new cool technologies, preferably with catchy names like web-two-point-oh, and sneakily apply them in production before they pass rigorous enterprise quality testing for mission-critical spaceship launchers. Linh presented at the SAGE-AU 2006 Conference in Canberra on Apache security.

Just a little bit of geeky humour. :-)