[HLUG] Virtulisation and file systems

[Mark Broadbent]

Hi Paul,

Paul wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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.

There are plenty of backup programs, but most tend to be command line 
based (i.e. set-up once and it just works).  Amanda is one of the more 
famous ones from memory.  I'm not about GUI based though - I think KDE 
have one called kdar??

Try here:
http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Administration/Backup.html

> 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)?

Surely that's just a single rsync command!  However there are GUI 
front-ends for it.  Try:

http://www.opbyte.it/grsync/ or
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/rsyncweb.htm

> 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!

Nope, just backup, format, restore.

> 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 believe user-space NTFS using the FUSE file-system is stable for 
writes.  Look for ntfs-3g I think.

> 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.

Most VM environments will allow access to external peripherals, either 
through direct mapped hardware or some sort of emulation.  I know VMWare 
can do this and so can Xen.

Hope that helps.

Mark

-- 
Mark Broadbent <markb at wetlettuce.com>
Herefordshire LUG Master

Web: www.wetlettuce.com
LUG: www.herefordshire.lug.org.uk