What Price Performance?

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I was chatting to a young Apple store engineer and he said I could upgrade my one-legged dog, late 2012 iMac with an SSD. Apparently you can even recover MacOS over the internet with these models. Well I began to get interested to the extent of thinking about forking out £320 for the SSD.

However, on further investigation it turns out that only some of the 2.7Ghz i5 late 2012 iMacs can accomodate SSDs. How do you tell? And, even if you could it takes 60 steps, according to iFixit to install one. Don’t fancy that at all.

Leave well alone I think and let it run like a dog. I’ll stick to Centos.

I’m lovin’ it

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No, not McDonalds, Centos7 of course. I now have this machine running with email, Windows 7 and Windows 8 VMs under KVM, sound, video and ICAclient to do remote working. It’s sooo much better than my bloated Mac. Having just got ICAclient working, I need to try and get hotkeys to work though since you can’t switch back to Linux once it has taken over your screen without disconnecting, which is a bit of a pain. Should be fixable with some tweaking though…

KVM Success!

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After a long elapsed period, I finally found a site which gave good instructions on how to move a VMware Windows 7 machine to KVM. That site is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X8TaBP1v_rh8e2QXDGFmkmzoPB13Pvp2V0FQ630VCsU/edit. (Googled for qemu import qcow2).

After converting the image using qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 Windows7-1.vmdk /VMbackups2/Windows7-1.qcow2 the instructions turned out to be very simple.

Result! I now have a Windows 7 desktop running under KVM on Centos 7! Next I will convert Windows 8.

In other news, yesterday I started a new job as a solutions architect for HSBC in London.

Tunes

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I haven’t had a blob of free time big enough to continue moving a VM from VMWare workstation into KVM on Centos 7 yet. It’s half done in that I managed to convert the disks [server crashed here and lost the rest of my post, thanks UK2] using qemu-convert, but not with the virt-v2v tools. I’m left with the problem of converting the machine definition from a vmx file into xml which can be consumed by KVM, which should be the easy bit but seems no easy way to do it with libvirt tools. The tools are geared to connecting to APIs.

I have had enough time to enable iTunes server on a QNAP and successfully copied my media there. The whole area of media servers and streaming has the potential to be complicated and a field of expertise in it’s own right. The QNAP calls itself an iTunes server, but this is a Firefly media server. Then it also has a DNLA media server which is a Twonky Server. And a music player which can be run through a browser. Getting confusing already. Is iTunes on an apple device a server, a client, a protocol or a fat application. Can iTunes metadata be separated from media and how can that be copied between servers?

I took the simple route, thanks, and just found where my mp3 files were located on the iMac and copied them to the QNAP. I can see and play them but selecting the QNAP as a source in iTunes is not the same experience as using the local computer.

Centos 7 diary entry

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As mentioned below, as I go off MacOS, I have been investing more (precious) time getting a Centos 7.0 desktop fully functional. Mail is up and running in the shape of Thunderbird, which I preferred over Evolution. Neither seem particularly customisable (particularly fonts) but Thunderbird seems to have the edge.

My next major requirement is virtualisation. I didn’t have any luck with VMware Player as a first attempt. It loaded some kernel modules and I pointed at my existing vmx files but the VMs didn’t boot and now the player just crashed with a couple of error lines in the USBArb log.

In any case, I wanted to use KVM on Linux and have reached the milestone of building a Centos 7 guest VM using VMM and qemu-kvm (after overcoming the obligatory hurdles, luckily relatively minor). I don’t have much faith in VMware and KVM working together although there’s no reason why they shouldn’t (VMware player is a type 2 hypervisor, or is it?) Things are complicated enough as it is without trying to run two hypervisors on the same machine!

Next experiment is to get my Windows desktops currently running under VMware workstation on Ubuntu into QEMU/KVM.

I’m Almost Done

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With MacOs, that is. My latest frustration is with a bug, or something recently introduced into Yosemite which resulted in Time Machine deleting my entire backup and starting again. Because I sometimes plug in another disk to make another backup. It took me a couple of iterations to work this out and I have had to do two full 600G backups of my Mac to QNAP over the network recently. Because it’s QNAP, it’s not supported of course.

This is the second big blow to MacOS on top of the last howler of not being able to open older versions on Pages and Numbers documents after I upgraded 18 months ago.

Trying to debug these issues is hard. MacOS has become so much bloatware. And slow as a mollusc with lumbago.

Centos 7, on the other hand is clean, fast and functional. Simple too, compared to Macs, it seems to me. This is going to be my next desktop full time next time Apple mess up my data.

Dumb ways to die

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Like accidentally removing a disk from your system while VMware workstation is running a machine from it. Uh-oh, I thought after I had removed the disk and woken the machine up to see that Ubuntu-14.04 had been running. Straight away put the computer back to sleep and put the disk back but the VM wouldn’t shut down or turn off and Workstation wouldn’t quit so in the end I had to kill it.

Having rebooted and tried to start the Ubuntu VM again, I got nasty errors like "reason: failed to lock the file". Next I copied all the files to another disk and re-added the vmx file to workstation (“I moved it”). Same types of error.

On the plus side, I was pretty confident this wasn’t terminal. After all the machine was asleep when the disk was removed, no writes were taking place and modern file formats can cope with that. A look in the folder showed a couple of Ubuntu-14.04-1.vmx.lck files. Simply deleting them allowed the VM to start and all was well. Could have been worse.

The reason I took the disk out in the first place was to put the DVD drive in. The reason I did that was to burn a Centos 7 iso. The reason I did that was to replace my physical install of Centos 6.5. The reason I did that was because I couldn’t get my Bamboo tablet to work on 6.5, despite manually building the kernel module and recompiling the kernel from source. The reason I wanted to use the pen was to do some graphic work in Gimp. The reason I needed Gimp was Photoshop’s lack of Bezier curve drawing. The reason I needed bezier curves was for a piece of artwork for a label for a new product my wife is working on. Finally we get to the business justification!

Happily, and as expected, Centos 7 works out of the box with the Bamboo dock. Also glad that judicious choice of options in the Centos 7 installer didn’t wipe out any of the other partitions with other operating systems and data on my disks. All told, good progress. And lucky.

Spotlight on Sloooooowness

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Hmmmm. I have a new theory about why my Yosemite Mac is so damn slow.

Spotlight.

I turned it off and (without any scientific tests) seemed to get a much better experience. I disabled it by adding the hard drive in the exclusions of Spotlight preferences.

Of course, I immediately started getting complaints from “other users” that they couldn’t find anything so I’ve had to be a bit less harsh on the exclusions.

I also wonder why indexing activity is not visible using iosnoop or iotop. Maybe it is and I’m just not looking at the output correctly or maybe it happens at such a low level that it doesn’t trigger any counters. Or maybe it all happens in memory in kernel interaction with the file buffer cache (unlikely but possible). However, if that were the case I would still expect kernel cpu to be logged.

Certainly worthy of a bit more investigation, i.e. “googling” plus some dtrace perhaps.

UKOUG / LOSUG Jan 2015

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Or, Down the Rabbit Hole.

I checked the archives and the last event I went to was in May 2012. Everything was exactly the same as it was then, although my extended absence just heightened to me how surreal the whole event is.

I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Quite the opposite. Peter Tribble gave an interesting talk entitled “Adventures with illumos”. Myself and the other middle aged geeks were treated with another journey down memory lane where I heard words long absent from my ears like “Sun”, “Solaris” and “CDE”.

The irony is, a lot of the technology is new, and as Peter ably demonstrated is actively being worked on. What made it surreal is how far divorced it all is from the “real” i.e. commercial world, especially if you have been exclusively in that environment for a few years, dealing with big vendors, clients and “The Cloud”.

There’s something very “British”, and heartening about how, hobbyists (can’t think of a better description) dedicate their time to preserve and develop something that is of value because they (we) love the technology: the effort and creativity that is embedded in it and the respect for the people who have worked on it before. People are not doing this to become the next dot com with A,B and C round funding. They’re doing it because they love it.

As time goes by and the rise of the machines continues, this community could form the core of a whole new field. In the compressed timescales of IT, the rate of change and the knowledge that could be lost is a real risk. Britain is very good at preserving heritage; in IT terms, Bletchley Park is the obvious example that springs to mind and you can find sites like http://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/. These however, are mainly concerned with hardware; hardware that can be identified with a specific country.

Code is different. It is global. It is like DNA, literally “code”. It contains lots of redundancy and continually evolves. How do we preserve it? Should we preserve it? Is anyone else writing this story down? Who is carrying on the work of Peter Salus and his history of Unix http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Peter-Salus/dp/0201547775?

Great to have a dose of un-commerciality once in a while.

Converted

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The Starwind converter I tried is great! I used it to convert my Ubuntu instance and it worked first time without any error or fuss. Didn’t even need to read the instructions. That’s the kind of tool we all like.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud and in this case after I was happily using my new VM on Hyper-V my entire Windows 8 second boot disk died a death. A calculated risk as the disks were old, re-cycled SSDs.