Hiatus

It feels like I’ve been on hiatus for a while. I’ve sorta slacked off my volunteer IT work at Crossroads for the last 4 months. I’m working myself back into some work, though I won’t be getting back to the 15-20hrs per week I was doing before. I’m doing the cooking and spending more time with the kids and that takes time.

Last year I pulled together a team of people to redesign the Crossroads website. That group basically went on hiatus (from web design) when I did. We’ve come back together now and are building on the work we did last year. We hope to release a new site within the first half of this year.

One of our design goals is to use ajax/javascript to make a site that feels like it is one page. Up until now we have been using Joomla as our content management system. It doesn’t look like Joomla has support for such a concept out of the box. I’m on the hunt for a content management system that does this, though I haven’t had much luck yet. The other alternative is to write a Joomla component that would do this.

Any suggestions?

Global Warming

I’m having fun following what’s happening since a “climate expert” at the weather channel declared that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) should revoke AMS certification for any weather men who don’t agree with the global warming hypothesis (she didn’t call it a hypothesis).

The fun parts are not her articles, but the comments at the end. Her first post was completely blasted:

JUNK CONTROVERSY NOT JUNK SCIENCE…

Her second post in response to the blasting from the first was again blasted:

A VERY POLITICAL CLIMATE

Heck, even other meteorologists are getting into the fray:

The Weather Channel Mess

Multi-layer Virtualization

Virtualization at my day job is not my responsibility, but I thought people might find this interesting.

We’re currently moving to a virtualized environment. We’re a Linux shop and there are numerous virtualization mechanisms available for Linux (including an upcoming mechnism built into the 2.6.20 Linux Kernel). My shop has an aversion to any software that is not open source, so VMware was not even considered.

This morning we transitioned our main production Apache server where most of our applications run to a virtual host on a Vserver. I’m not clear on all the details, but Vserver is not a para-virtualization technology. All VMs run under the same kernel and are isolated from each other using standard Linux mechanisms such as chroot, segmented routing, and quotas. VMs are still easily moved from one physical host to another. What Vserver doesn’t have that para-virtualization does is complete provisioning or partitioning of resources including CPU, memory, etc. It also cannot run multiple operating systems. Since we are running Ubuntu Linux, all VMs are Ubuntu. The benefits are that system resources are allocated more efficiently since there is a single kernel.

Underneath all of this we are running Xen. Xen is a para-virtualization mechanism similar to VMware. Xen allows complete partitioning/provisioning of resources on the machine including running different operating systems.

Most of our VMs will be Vserver level VMs, but there will be uses for the Xen level VMs as well, such as testing new OS releases, hosting test environments, and running anything that absolutely has to be isolated from everything else.

The first transition was amazingly smooth. We’ll be moving all of our servers into VMs over the coming months.