[HLUG] Virtulisation and file systems

[Matthew Macdonald-Wallace]

Quoting Paul Stenning <paul at vintage-radio.com>:

> Hi all,
>
> We are looking to rationalise the number of PCs that are on and running
> 24 hours a day, and doing very little most of the time other than
> wasting electricity and generating heat.  Currently we have:
>
> * Windows 2003 R2 file server
> * Ubuntu 7.10 web development server
> * Windows XP weather station PC (uploads data from weather station to
> internet every 15 mins)
> * General "office" PC (Windows XP, probably upgrading to Vista)
>
> I would like to combine the first three into one machine.  The existing
> file server (which has a proper server motherboard with a 3GHz P4,
> 500GB of RAID1 storage and 2GB RAM) can be rebuilt with Ubuntu 8.04
> (probably server with Gnome added) and used for the file serving and
> web serving.  I would add an extra hard disk for the operating system
> and use the 500GB RAID as /home.  This would get rid of the web dev
> server, which is an old 1.6GHz P4.

I'd recommend Debian Etch over Ubuntu - far more stable.  To  
virtualise, you can use Xen, VMWare or VirtualBox (although qemu is  
also an option).

Out of the above, I've played with VMWare and Xen and I'm impressed  
with both.  They both have nice GUI's that work over the network  
although as I've only ever run them on my laptop, it's probably worth  
talking to someone else about exactly how it works on the servers.

>
> This machine also has a DLT tape backup drive and I am currently using
> Backup Exec.  What tape backup options are available Linux; preferably
> point-and-click rather than command line?  I am not expecting to be
> able to restore old BackupExec backups.

Check out either bacula ( http://www.bacula.org/ ) or Amanda (  
http://www.amanda.org/ ) both will do what you want, we use bacula but  
only because of the Auto-Changer support.

> We also synchronise it daily to two Maxtor 500GB OneTouch drives (only
> one connected at a time) as a secondary backup.  What Linux software is
> available for that (again point-and-click)?

Backuppc ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) can probably do this -  
it's got a web interface.

> Is it possible to convert the 500GB drives (within the server and the
> Maxtor USB ones) from NTFS to some file system that Linux supports
> natively, without having to wipe and reformat?  I'm guessing the answer
> is NO there!

Probably not... :o(

> Also for the USB ones I would like them to be readable on Windows PCs
> too, so I assume they will need to be FAT32?  Or is Linux write support
> for NTFS reliable now?

I'd stick with FAT32 for now, NTFS write is meant to be better these  
days but I wouldn't stake my career on it!

> The weather station software is Windows only, and won't run on Vista
> (so can't go on the office PC when updated).  This has to remain on
> either Windows XP or Windows 2000.  However it's system resource usage
> is light.  This is the problem one.
>
> I would like to run this as a virtual machine on the Ubuntu server, but
> I need to sort out whether it will communicate with the weather station
> OK this way.  The interface is USB.  Does anyone know what the
> situation is with virtualisation environments such as VMware or
> VirtualBox with regard to accessing physical USB ports from the guest
> operating system?  I don't think WINE is viable for this as the weather
> station software is a bit iffy and uses loads of DLLs etc.

VMWare allows you to access the USB ports on the host, shouldn't be an issue.

Hope this is of some help,

Matt.
-- 
Matthew Macdonald-Wallace
matthew at truthisfreedom.org.uk
http://www.truthisfreedom.org.uk/