IncentivesPro make a product I recently used for a Virtual Desktop Thin Client Implementation. That is USB Redirection for Remote Desktop. It uses a proprietary client/server and so I used Windows XP embedded thin clients to redirect specialised USB Thermal Laser Printers to the Vista Virtual Machines. The website looks a bit underwhelming but the product is flawless and it’s priced much better than their competitors. If you have more time than I did, it’s likely you can get the Linux client working with Thinstation

For the other desktops, I used 2x’s Thin Client Server that use PXE (or USB / CDRom) to boot the original desktops over the network, essentially converting the original desktops into diskless thin clients. It’s a shame you can’t build your own images or add your own software to 2x’s desktop as I really didn’t like having to implement the Windows XP embedded thin clients.

As it’s a small environment, we are using VMWare Vsphere 4.0 free version. I was aiming to use Xenserver 5.5 but it doesn’t natively support Tape Drive passthrough to the client and I wanted to easily accomplish this without kernel rebuilds, as it is possible to achieve this with Xen by recompiling the kernel with ISCSI support and making the Tape Drive an ISCSI target.

Some other useful software was SplitView, allowing the accountant to use Dual Monitors. RDP  5.2 only allows to use the mstsc.exe /span option which spans the monitor across two screens. Splitview allows you to manage those windows as individual desktops. The only issue I had was with Adobe Reader 9.2, I had to add it to the exceptions list in Splitview otherwise it would crash.

Technorati Tags: vmware, vdi, virtual desktop, remote desktop, rdp, thin client

After reading the documentation, the file layout and concepts are all quite similar to django, though a downside is that we lose much of the beauty of the Python language and it doesn’t seem to have the Admin interface that makes django so delightful to work with.

Here is a sample of a helloworld, which would exist in a file called “Hello/Views.php”

< ?php
class Hello_Views
{
    public function hello($request, $match)
    {
        return new Pluf_HTTP_Response('Hello World!');
    }
}

as you can see, it is reasonably similar to (though more verbose than) Django’s equivalent “/hello/views.py” which would look like this:

from django.http import HttpResponse
def index(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello world")

Check out the full helloworld tutorial of Pluf

ORM

Pluf has an ORM that applies similar concepts and ideas as Django’s ORM, though as with the helloworld, it is slightly more verbose. The rest of the framework follows the same patterns, urls.php has a more verbose PHP regex patterns than django’s urls.py

Caching

Pluf runs it’s own caching system as well as being able to utilise APC and Memcached

Django vs Pluf

So what exactly does Pluf offer in ways of advantages over Django and why would you choose to use it instead? The obvious reasons are if you are well setup as a PHP developer. You work with tools and ide’s setup specifically for PHP, you have hosting infrastructure setup for PHP and you work with developers who are well versed in PHP. The other advantage of Pluf is that it comes with a migration framework out of the box, whereas django doesn’t and you need to use one of the available database schema migration, the most promising currently looks like South

Of course, Django deployment is becoming much simpler recently by leveraging the tutorials and tools like virtualenv, pip and most recently modrails has begun supporting python wsgi services. I recently performed some benchmarks with modrails vs fastcgi against a django blogging application called byteflow and modrails provided approx 1.8x speedup. More to come on that later.

Technorati Tags: PHP, Pluf, Django, Web Development, Framework, MVC

• No Install to Host/Join meetings
• Easy Share Screens&Webpages
• Audio & Video Conferencing
• Present PowerPoint and PDFs
• Private & Public Chat
• Whiteboard & Annotations
• Record and Playback Meetings
• Open Source and open APIs
• SynchroLive Co-Browsing
• Free Recording & Archiving
• Mac & PC Screen Sharing (no Linux??)
• Multiple Presenters
• Free Teleconferencing Calls
• Secure, Private Meetings
• Faster and Easier than ever
• No Install to Host meetings

It’s available as a vmware virtual appliance or for those of you using Qemu / KVM / Xen, you should be able to convert the image using:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow

Here’s a tiobench of Ubuntu 7.04 running on a Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB SATA drive.

Sequential Reads
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 1 54.81 9.103% 0.070 370.19 0.00000 0.00000 602
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 2 44.26 13.23% 0.175 791.39 0.00000 0.00000 334
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 4 49.33 31.25% 0.306 1187.43 0.00000 0.00000 158
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 8 47.55 59.80% 0.613 1626.75 0.00000 0.00000 79

Random Reads
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 1 0.51 0.771% 7.648 136.11 0.00000 0.00000 66
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 2 0.52 1.272% 15.015 155.48 0.00000 0.00000 41
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 4 0.55 2.649% 27.618 572.07 0.00000 0.00000 21
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 8 0.55 5.843% 53.622 1032.24 0.00000 0.00000 9

Sequential Writes
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 1 32.42 17.40% 0.116 5364.25 0.00109 0.00000 186
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 2 45.88 58.74% 0.158 4584.56 0.00044 0.00000 78
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 4 43.31 105.3% 0.325 4418.34 0.00196 0.00000 41
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 8 41.73 198.6% 0.654 6986.02 0.00763 0.00000 21

Random Writes
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 1 2.00 0.972% 0.257 15.78 0.00000 0.00000 206
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 2 1.92 2.064% 0.503 150.80 0.00000 0.00000 93
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 4 1.59 3.425% 1.691 332.46 0.00000 0.00000 47
2.6.20-16-generic 1792 4096 8 1.78 6.911% 1.178 546.28 0.00000 0.00000 26

Now – Running inside the same physical machine in a Virtual Machine using Vmware Server Version 1.0.3-1 I am running SunOS sun1 5.10 NexentaOS_20070402 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris with all ‘apt-get upgrade’ applied as of today.

The vmdk files live on the same physical hard drive of the above benchmark tests and obviously the benchmarks were not being performed at the same time.

First, the UFS volume, living at /

Sequential Reads
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 69.05 51.46% 0.055 280.48 0.00000 0.00000 134
5.10 512 4096 2 110.90 157.3% 0.065 280.11 0.00000 0.00000 70
5.10 512 4096 4 113.98 318.0% 0.120 390.12 0.00000 0.00000 36
5.10 512 4096 8 127.42 715.1% 0.214 725.61 0.00000 0.00000 18

Random Reads
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 51.53 45.93% 0.073 154.57 0.00000 0.00000 112
5.10 512 4096 2 55.09 82.72% 0.089 97.44 0.00000 0.00000 67
5.10 512 4096 4 102.26 98.82% 0.036 0.90 0.00000 0.00000 103
5.10 512 4096 8 121.49 96.99% 0.029 0.24 0.00000 0.00000 125

Sequential Writes
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 37.51 33.65% 0.097 890.04 0.00000 0.00000 111
5.10 512 4096 2 87.13 113.1% 0.077 510.31 0.00000 0.00000 77
5.10 512 4096 4 77.77 195.4% 0.154 604.28 0.00000 0.00000 40
5.10 512 4096 8 89.91 446.0% 0.283 924.70 0.00000 0.00000 20

Random Writes
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 3.39 25.89% 1.123 180.35 0.00000 0.00000 13
5.10 512 4096 2 12.12 72.10% 0.366 509.51 0.00000 0.00000 17
5.10 512 4096 4 10.33 93.73% 0.786 340.37 0.00000 0.00000 11
5.10 512 4096 8 15.49 299.5% 1.254 428.83 0.00000 0.00000 5

and here’s the home directory, which is running ZFS

Sequential Reads
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 128.28 96.71% 0.030 36.40 0.00000 0.00000 133
5.10 512 4096 2 127.90 188.5% 0.056 200.39 0.00000 0.00000 68
5.10 512 4096 4 130.20 360.9% 0.108 380.10 0.00000 0.00000 36
5.10 512 4096 8 130.67 689.6% 0.211 640.09 0.00000 0.00000 19

Random Reads
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 74.75 71.35% 0.043 17.40 0.00000 0.00000 105
5.10 512 4096 2 112.29 99.28% 0.032 1.29 0.00000 0.00000 113
5.10 512 4096 4 105.33 204.9% 0.074 92.12 0.00000 0.00000 51
5.10 512 4096 8 125.68 98.95% 0.028 0.23 0.00000 0.00000 127

Sequential Writes
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 99.39 67.10% 0.034 569.68 0.00000 0.00000 148
5.10 512 4096 2 86.28 118.8% 0.066 558.60 0.00000 0.00000 73
5.10 512 4096 4 76.45 201.4% 0.121 760.74 0.00000 0.00000 38
5.10 512 4096 8 108.75 558.3% 0.229 570.08 0.00000 0.00000 19

Random Writes
File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU
Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff
—————————- —— —– — —— —— ——— ———– ——– ——– —–
5.10 512 4096 1 13.72 56.60% 0.263 49.72 0.00000 0.00000 24
5.10 512 4096 2 12.34 93.16% 0.558 282.44 0.00000 0.00000 13
5.10 512 4096 4 13.88 183.4% 0.920 350.58 0.00000 0.00000 8
5.10 512 4096 8 16.86 288.1% 1.027 510.47 0.00000 0.00000 6

Now, if I was doing a Masters or Phd, I would run these >5 times and take the average to make sure my results were accurate but I just ain’t got the time and no-ones publishing or referencing these little SATA disks, are they. If I can get the chance to install Nexenta on an ESX server that’s also running Suse 10.1, I’d like to see some vm->vm comparisons to see the performance difference between the two.

Anyway, Nexenta is looking ubercool ie: in it’s most basic form, think of being able to bolt on ZFS, Dtrace, Zones and Containers to Ubuntu and you have.. Nexenta – well, almost. I have been waiting for this ever since I read the announcement that Sun were open sourcing Solaris. A huge kudos to the guys over at Nexenta who give me Z-raided fantasies.

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Technorati Tags: zfs, ufs, filesystem benchmark, vmware, virtual machine

Where do I start? Let’s start with the fact Peru had a large earthquake on the 16th August near the cities of Chincha (The Afroperuvian epicentre), Ica and Pisco. These places are approximately 140kms south of Lima, where my wife is from (and her family are living).

I subscribe to Treehugger RSS feeds and the same day as the Earthquake comes a post with Vinay Gupta, the brainchild of the Hexayurt project, an open source disaster relief shelter, to put it simply. I suggest Treehugger subscribers pitch in some funds to send Vinay to Peru to kick something off and Vinay responded with this post, to which I also responded. When Vinay was discussing the Hexayurt, he mentioned “wood gas fire” as seen in this clip

I happen to work with a guy who is right into his steam engines.. now, I don’t really discuss my “treehugger” leanings with him, as they burn coal in those things but the above wood burner did lead me to think about how a closed system steam engine might possibly be able to fit with the goals of yet another open source project called worldbike, which is a group of bicycle designers who make open source bicycle designs to build or modify an existing bike to be more suited to our brothers and sisters in Africa.

I would like to think that the goals of Open Source Green Vehicle are somewhat similar, in brief – a group of people who come together in like mindedness to share some of their skills for the betterment of humanity. People may not realise just how much Google has it’s hand in all this. Google is almost like the glue of all knowledge. Google has shown us to realise how powerful open business models can be and helps reward people for sharing their knowledge. Staying with the our OSGV project, for the moment. I came across this group of videos on youtube (now owned by google) that discusses in depth two big interests of mine. How to convert an engine to hydrogen and use it for both automotive use and / or when used in housing (whether emergency or not) it can provide a source of electricity, heating and clean water. Now, with the amount of instructional video content on youtube, it’s really a knowledge sharing platform just as powerful (if not more so) than Sourceforge or Wikipedia.

Vinay also linked to this Microcredit system being used in India, another area which I am interested in and I am not bullshitting about this, you can view my Amazon wishlist on this. I am currently on three weeks holiday. The first week (right now) I am in Canberra, the Capital of Australia doing my Vmware Virtual Infrastructure course. The following two weeks, I will be starting to code the beginnings of a Microfinance System that I will be writing in Django. I have been really working hard teaching myself Python (and Spanish) using my own modified version of the “Seinfieldian” system.

Now, it’s also worth mentioning that through Vinay’s posts, I ended up finding “The Open Business Guide” and Open Source Ecology that Vinay offered up to me, which I haven’t yet had time to have a good read of as yet.

I could write a lot longer of the “bizaare” sequence of events but I have some reading to do.

Richard Stallman may yet become the modern day Marx, the way things are going..

The simplest example of open source that I use as an analogy is

“imagine eating in a restaurant where you loved the food and the chef was willing to share the whole recipe with you – you may go home and make it yourself but if he is a good chef, you will no doubt return for ‘his way’ of preparing the dish” – this is the nature of open source, to give something to humanity and yet you lose nothing.

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• To upgrade from ESX 3.0 Starter to Standard or Enterprise, you have to be an ‘Enterprise Partner’
• To become an Enterprise partner, you need to pay US$1000 and ALSO
• You need to have a Vmware Certified Professional as an employee

Did I get that right? They won’t sell me their product unless I get a VMware Certified Employee? That can’t be right.. come to think of it, maybe the licensing team at Ingram Micro who told me this information must think that the client is onselling the license… I will double-check that tomorrow. That half makes sense.

Anyway, to become a VMware certified Professional you can’t just go in and sit the exam after reviewing the some book. You need to do one of their courses @ US$2200, then and only then can you book your exam. It just happens I am booked to do the course next week in Canberra.

Maybe, it would all seem a little less relevant if I had bought some VMware shares when they were released, I read they jumped 75% in 1day while the rest of the market was near-crashing. The problem that occurs when a company goes public is that less importance gets place on the end customer because they now have two customers.. the share holders and the end-users.

Now that VT Processors are in the marketplace, it seems there’s some pretty decent reasons to take XenSource much more seriously. Although, they seem to have jumped into bed with MS of late also.

Technorati Tags: rant, vmware, xensource, xen, virtualization

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I know myself that FROM A USER’S PERSPECTIVE, very high disk i/o can kill a HP DL-585 with 5 x 15K SAS drives, meanwhile the same task running on a lower end HP9000 running HP-UX11a will manage just fine. Go and run bonnie++ or gzip 2 x 4GB archives and also try and USE Linux, you will notice a a severe almost unusable system.

Now, I am one of those people who get caught reading comments of articles. I find some of my nicest little gems there, other suggestions etc. I came across Haiku and Syllable OS, two open source Operating Systems that AREN’T linux. Most people familiar with Linux will be aware that it’s roots are in Unix and so too are the BSD’s but Haiku and Syllable OS do not have Unix roots. Haiku has it’s roots in BeOS and Syllable is a fork of “written-from-scratch” OS called AtheOS.

Now, these aren’t the main two Operating Systems of interest to me. The really interesting ones for me are Nexenta OS and ReactOS. Why these two?

When I was looking to move from PCLinuxOS (and decided upon Ubuntu) I was taking a very strong look at running OpenSolaris for my desktop but I was seeing myself spending too much time trying to build from source or trying to get a decent desktop running as I wanted it. What drew me to Solaris? Three things:

• Zones & Containers
• ZFS File System
• Dtrace

ZFS was the main thing. It provides true snapshotting capabilities, among other things and I really wish something like OpenFiler offered ZFS as it’s main file system rather than LVM on Ext3. I would also like to do some Solaris Certification, so I want to get down and dirty with Solaris – when you work in IT with Financial Services, everything is very conservative – for godsakes, it’s a major problem trying to get approval to get bash and vim installed grrr. anyways..

Anyway, Nexenta OS is essentially Ubuntu on a Solaris kernel, as I understand it.. so I can have my pie and eat it too.. the best of both worlds – I expect it will probably end up replacing Suse 10.2 as my virtual machine fairly soon.

Next on the list, I mentioned ReactOS, why? It’s a windows clone ie: it’s designed to be an open source clone of windows. ie: it’s aim is to be 100% compatible with windows programs, drivers etc. Why is that necessary, why is that powerful? Because it can give to the windows world what we have in the Linux world. ie: distributing mini-virtual machines that are preconfigured with specific sets of services, databases etc. I know of quite a bit of software written for Windows that has no need for 90% of the windows ‘features’. The web hosting industry is a perfect example. Most of those running Windows are only doing so for asp, VB.net and C#.net and MSSQL of course. Now, the dotNet land has been mostly filled by the fruition of Migueld e Izaca’s dreams in mono. Ok, now we can compile and run .Net programs in Linux but there’s many who still need to run win32 applications that haven’t been (and won’t for a while) be compiled in Mono.

Many people dual boot their Linux PC into Windows just to play games – they are still tied to Bill and his crew. That’s where the power of a project like ReactOS shines. It starts to break those ties. It’s an alternative.

I’d still love to take Syllable and Haiku for a test-drive.. but I have too much on my plate at the moment. Maybe one day.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, solaris, haiku, syllable, nexenta, reactos, haiku, open source operating systems

Well, I don’t know if it has always been there but there’s two ways to switch between the remote desktop session and your local session when using NX

You can switch between full-screen and your original desktop by clicking on the ‘Magic Pixel’ on the top-right corner of your screen. Just move to the top right corner of the screen and left-click.

If, for any reason, your remote session is not responding, you can switch by pressing the sequence ctrl+alt+shift+esc.

Hope this helps..

Technorati Tags: freenx, nomachine, remote desktop

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Last week, we had:

1. Mindquarry 1.1 released
2. TinyERP released a web client and a new version
3. OpenBravo 2.30 released

and while it’s not truly open source, NoMachine released V3 of their NX server and finally, they have introduced

Now, if your an admin, it’s a no-brainer to set it up – you can either do it from NX Manager (make sure you have V3 also) or you can edit /usr/NX/etc/server.cnf

You can checkout all the directives from the Admin guide at this link.

And here’s what the Administrator’s Guide says:
The desktop sharing and session shadowing functionalities are enabled in the default configuration of the server. Desktop sharing allows the sharing of any of the native displays on the node, while session shadowing allows the sharing of any of the NX sessions running on the node. By default, it is up to the owner of the native display or of the master session to accept/deny the user’s request to attach to the display/session.

Now, here’s the $20,000 question – how the hell do we mirror a session or grab a console? I have both the Windows Client AND the Linux client and nowhere is there any option to shadow a session or grab a console.

If I try and login to an existing session, it logs off the original user and logs in the one trying to login.. so wtf?

I have read the docs – oh, I had to google for the page that lists all the docs, so here they are.

Additionally, I personally think the US $750 for the Small Business Server is a little too high as an entry point – or at least expand the free server beyond 2 licenses..

Even a 5 user (+ pay-per-incident support) for $300 would likely make NX a more palatable option for young startups or those wanting to offer a SAAS setup.

At the moment, I am just keen to find out how to test the mirroring or grabbing a console… anyone??

OK, I worked this out:

Then, when you start the session, it will display the sessions that are available to connect to – the default setting is to prompt the user to authenticate you. To change this, edit using:

vi /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg

and change on Line 563 from:

EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “1″

to

EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “0″

Save it and exit [esc]x! or [esc]wq! in vim

I restarted the nxserver daemon just in case, which will disconnect your NX session if you are connected already.

/etc/init.d/nxserver restart

BUT – the problem I had is that my remote screen resolution is 1440×900 and my local screen resolution is 1280×1024 – so when I try and connect to my local console, NX fits the width in the 1280px by squashing up the 1440 remote image, which presents a barely readable screen – and it makes the height 900px leaving a gap (which is no big deal). It also seemed much slower than a regular nx session.

I will keep playing around but I will probably stick with my current: pkill <program> setup.

Technorati Tags: nomachine, nx, remote desktop, thin client

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