Frustration :-(

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Allow me, once again, to vent my frustration on this blog. I am trying to upgrade VMware workstation from version 7.1.6 to 8.0.6 on Ubuntu 12.04. I am doing this so I can run windows 8 VMs.

There is no working upgrade path. You have to uninstall VMware workstation 7 and install VMware workstation 8 on Ubuntu. The command to uninstall is:

/usr/bin/vmware-installer -u vmware-workstation

but this starts a wizard which immediately fails with the message:

The VWMare Installer could not shut down all
running virtual machines. If you have ACE
VMs open, please shut them down or suspend
them now and press 'Retry' to continue.

Needless to say, I have no running VMs after a reboot. So, OK, lets shut down all VMware process and unload all kernel modules using:

/etc/init.d/vmware stop

Oh dear. That gives:

Stopping VMware services:
   VMware USB Arbitrator                     done
/etc/init.d/vmware: line 370: [: 18177068162212705687: integer expression expected
   VM communication interface socket family                           failed
   Virtual machine communication interface                            failed
   Virtual machine monitor                                            failed
   Blocking file system                                               failed
ERROR: Module vmnet is in use by [permanent]

Well, that doesn’t look good! Turning on some debugging leads to the following line in the vmmonUseCount() function:

   count=`/sbin/lsmod | awk 'BEGIN {n = 0} {if ($1 == "'"$driver"'") n = $3} END {print n}'`

which indeed when used with vmmon as $driver returns a silly number.

# count=`/sbin/lsmod | awk 'BEGIN {n = 0} {if ($1 == "'vmmon'") n = $3} END  {print n}'`
# echo $count
18177068162212705687

So, what is going on? Well, it’s not lsmod, because cat’ing /proc/modules gives a similar number, which means that the scripts is making bad assumptions. It thinks there are 18177068162212705687 VMware workstations are running. I think not. In fact, it can’t even know this since the number is so large, it’s bigger than the biggest integer that the shell test expression can handle, hence the error. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2965761/find-maximum-positive-integer-value-in-bourne-shell

My answer here is to comment out the block which begins with the integer -gt expression.

# /etc/init.d/vmware stop
Stopping VMware services:
   VMware USB Arbitrator                                               done
   VM communication interface socket family                           failed
   Virtual machine communication interface                            failed
   Virtual machine monitor                                            failed
   Blocking file system                                               failed
ERROR: Module vmnet is in use by [permanent]

Well, that gets rid of one thing. The rest will have to wait since it’s past my bedtime. Sigh.

 

 

Thinking about data

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A few blogs ago I was musing about how to categorise and talk about applications. This post is about the other side of the coin: data. Throughout the industry, there has been a lot more work on how to organise data than applications and as a result there are plenty of good taxonomies. Everyone who has used a computer has used one of these taxonomies because every computer has a filesystem and a filesystem is an implementaiton of a data taxonomy.

However, there hasn’t really been much progress in filesystem design over the last few decades, at least not from the user’s perspective. There have been great innovations going on under the covers: de-dupe, indexing, encryption, copy on write etc. but in terms of   helping users organise and find their files it’s pretty much hierarchical files and directories for everyone who has a PC, Mac or Linux.

In the context of a personal computer, most people want to be able to find their files quickly, or just fine them, particularly when faced with the prospect of moving data from one system to another. Or even just to back them up—probably the best reason. I recently had this challenge with my laptop; where is all my data? I want to copy it to a new system. In Windows terms you can copy your profile, but is that enough? What about the times you wrote something on C: or D: and what about the data, such as private keys, that the operating system has written on your behalf?

There is great scope for storing and exposing to the user more metadata about their files than just size, dates, type.

I would like to see, as part of the filesystem and operating system, concise information about the owner of the data. Not the file mind, that’s just the container; the file could be owned by the operating system for protection but the data inside may be a users. In this scenario, the OS should always prompt the user about where to store the data, not put it in  some “built in” area of the subsystem. The OS can store it’s own data where it likes but the user should always get to choose where to put their own information. The OS can give  hints but ultimately it should be down to the user.

The filesystem should remember all locations that a user has specified so that it is easy to get all the users data. (In most cases it will all be on a single disk, which is fine if you can copy the disk at a block level but not fine if you just want your data.) A user can run a search which specifies “all my data”, perhaps with other information such as size and date.

To be fair, Windows search has the ability to look for metadata such as author or tag but the problem is that the metadata is application dependant and not built into the save dialog, I don’t get the option to specify author or tags in notepad. this leads us down the route of file formats. The filesystem should take more of the burden here and wouldn’t it be great if you could even specify your own types of metadata.

Just another lifetime needed to write a better filesystem.

Raspberry Pi

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In an attempt to interest and educate my children in the ways of IT, I borrowed a raspberry pi to see what they could do with it. Well it sat around for ages while they played on their iPads so it fell to the uber geek to download and install raspbmc.

Raspbmc is a minimal Debian based linux distro dedicated to supporting XBMC, which is an open source media player i.e. you can plug it into your TV and stream internet based content.

Overall it works very well and it a great (cheap) way to watch streamed media. My biggest gripe (maybe I was unlucky) is that the installer was not very robust and did not detect that the website needed to download raspbmc was down. How often the website is down is a pertinent question.

Once I managed to download to an SD card, the installation was easy, at which point I could get the offspring interested in configuring it to watch some programs. There are improvements that could be made to the UI and it can be slow – forgiveable given the hardware. The HD video output was great and when content worked, the experience was no different to satellite or terrestial. It’s a digital world after all.

Perhaps I can ditch my 13 year old Humax decoder and take down the ugly satellite dish from my house.

There are, of course, other ways to drive a raspberry pi and I look forward to having time to experiment with them too.

Windows 8

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It’s time to bring Windows 8 to the home lab. So far I’ve been running it as a VM on my RedPixie laptop, which has worked very well and I want to do the same at home. With a bit of tweaking I think it will be very good, I’ve generally liked it so far.

My first challenge however is to get VMware Workstation up to scratch as I have version 7 which will not run Windows 8. Given the hassle I had getting the current version of Workstation to run on Ubuntu, I’m not looking forward to it so I will make sure everything is backed up and recoverable first.

Apologies for the outage by the way – forgot to put money in the meter.

Been to Mars!

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Virtually, at least.

If you followed RedPixie’s tweet last week, I went to the e-Infrastructure South business event at the Space Research Centre in Didcot. There, they have a large HD video wall made up of 24 monitors which showed a panorama from Curiosity. Standing in front of that was like being there, almost.

I did feel old by the end of the day, having listened to the talks on GPUs. I started my commercial career in 1988 at AMT, a company that made a parallel processor, the DAP. It was about the size of a desk cabinet. Now, much more power than that is available in an NVidia GPU. Furthermore, no-one had even heard of AMT and the DAP. In many ways my career has come full circle, which is not a bad thing.

Incidentally, I solved my Ctl-Alt-Del problem from the previous post by the simple expedient of changing the hot key combination in VMware Workstation. Simple.

Too Much Virtualisation

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You can have too much of a good thing, VMs included. The scenario is that I am at home using a Windows 7 VM running under VMWare Workstation. From the VM, I am VPN’d into the office where I am connected to my physical laptop, on which I am running vCenter. I have the console of a Windows XP machine open from virtual center but there is no way to log in to it because Ctrl-Alt-Delete just affects the local VM. Ctrl-Alt-Ins the same.

Will post a solution when I find it.

London Solaris SIG February 2013

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Last Thursdays talk, SmartOS in the cloud was interesting, not least because it was the first meeting I’ve been to where the presenter was giving the talk via Webex. It worked well. Perhaps one day Ben Rockwood’s descendant will be able to give a talk via tele-holo-vision, as if he were in the room.

The interest for me also came from looking at cloud technologies at the far end of the spectrum from the major vendors offerings, which is where all the professional services work is. Joyent does have a share of this market but I’m not sure if it is more than a Rizla worth. Perhaps I am doing them a disservice.

We were reminded that Illumos is the Opensource continuation of the OpenSolaris kernel, upon which SmartOS, OmniOS, OpenIndiana and Tribblix distros are built. These all have different uses. SmartOS is purpose built for virtualisation and is certainly not a general purpose operating system. It is lightweight, stateless (think esxi), has zones and KVM and essence of Solaris”. This cool sounding OS runs in RAM and is best booted from PXE.

We went into quite a lot of technical stuff, and Ben could have carried on for hours (another time). What struck me was the amount of open source software in the stack. Some of them I remember are Zabbix, chef, jabber, pingdom, openldap, bart. Of course, if you are a FTSE100 company you like to buy your software from other big companies. Personally I like open source software.

One question which I didn’t get the opportunity to ask was regarding the commercials. If you are selling a cloud service (which Joyent are), on the back of all this free software, are there any legal or licensing issues? Do you have to give you users loads of license files to tick? At one point, some open source software disallowed it’s use for commercial purposes. Perhaps I am out of date, or more likely Joyent themselves pay for it in some way.

Anyway, it looks good and definitely worth bearing in mind, and even labbing if time were no barrier.

 

Solaris for the cloud

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I received the usual invite to the Solaris SIG, an event which I attended regularly but have missed for several months. This talk looks particularly interesting being titled “SmartOS: Solaris re-envisioned for the Cloud” to be given by Ben Rockwood.

Given Solaris’ standing in the server operating system league tables, which has been declining for years, thanks to Linux, this talk will be more for academic interest than any practical application. A niche product on a niche product, sad to say. My own experiences over the past five years have not brought me into contact with Solaris at any clients. The great technology it contains will continue to ensure it does not disappear completely and if it can keep bringing new ideas to the party, so much the better for IT in general.

Ubuntu 12.04 – thumbs down

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After getting back from a business trip, I decided on a whim to upgrade my main Ubuntu machine. Big mistake. I was running Lucid Lynx and I decided to try Precise Pangolin. Yes, I know the risks, don’t fix what isn’t broken etc. but even allowing for that, it’s still not good. I did the upgrade from within 10.04, and yes, it did work and boot afterwords but that’s where any success ended.

First of all, I lost the ability to log in as my original user, or as root from the new greeter screen. The workaround seems to be to add a manual login option to the lightdm config file. After that, vmware workstation no longer worked (not supported on 12.04) but I managed to fix that by upgrading the kernel to 3.4 and applying a patch.

I had the computer set up while I was away so that when my children turned it on, it would automatically log in as root, run vmware workstation and start a VM that they could use. This no longer appears possible, even after solving the vmware workstation problem.

The lightdm config seems to be subservient to the accountsservice package, so changing it’s options has no effect. The accountsservice cannot be removed, it appears core to Ubuntu.

The final straw is that I couldn’t find any documentation on the accountsservice on the Ubuntu website. Other problems I can forgive, but not that.

Overall, I think Ubuntu has evolved to a level where it is just trying to be too “smart”. I can understand making decisions on behalf of users to cater for a wider audience but it has forgotten it’s roots and blocked off customisation options. From this initial (and brief!) experience it no longer seems to meet my needs so it is time to look for a new default distro.

 

IP Expo 2012

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In addition to the keynote, I attended the Oracle talk on Big Data along with a history of Hadoop by Doug Cutting. A very interesting field not least because of all the open source projects involved. To be up-to-date refer to the spanner paper by Google.

Also attended a talk by SolarFlare and gnodal. All very interesting and relevant. Too many seminars to attend and too many stands to visit. One day certainly couldn’t do it justice, and neither could two.

In browsing around, I visited some companies I had not heard of:

TINTRI are a VM optimised storage vendor who make heavy use of SSDs to delivery IOPs. AT a high level they seem to be in the same space as XIO but I have yet to look in detail at their literature. I did find out their founder was Irish and Tintri is Irish (for hot-headed I think). There seemed to be a dozen more storage vendors there but no time to visit them.

I came across a thin client vendor I didn’t know called iGEL (German company I think). The chap started to explain their solution could make use of existing hardware and sweat assets so I assumed it was a type 1 client hypervisor like XenClient but we ended up talking at cross purposes. I think he was refering to their “soft” thin client. Anyway, they make a thin client and some management software but it was not immediately clear what their differentiator was from HP, Wyse, Sun / Oracle, or any other thin client vendor.

Finally I visited a company called Apposite, who make a WAN emulator. I think it could be pretty good but the demo was completely underwhelming and unclear. Personally I would question the need for a rack mount WAN emulator supporting 15 WAN links. For developers, one would be enough, or even better, teach your developers to program for WAN in the first place and use a real WAN for development.

Overall a lively and interesting day and definitely worth a visit.