We’ve been working on the store for a few weeks, and it’s now ready to go. Check it out! The store is powered by Zen Cart, which seems pretty nice.

Buy something for your Significant Other!

http://kiladesigns.com/

I traveled to the Tyler area this week, and worked for a couple of customers out there. One of the primary things we worked on was implementing virtual servers on VMWare Server.

If you don’t know what VMWare is all about, and you are in the IT industry, I urge you to do a serious evaluation of it, or of a competing product.

Here’s a rundown of the (as I see them) key points…

• Host pre-installed “appliances” for single-task servers.
• Convert existing out-of-date or failing physical servers into virtual servers on a brand-new host.
• Export periodic “images” of your running servers for off-site backups and disaster recovery solutions.
• Consolidate servers, and free up server room rack space, and save on electricity and cooling costs.
• Separate different “third-party” software solutions onto their own virtual server, so that said vendor has a more difficult time “pointing fingers” when something goes wrong.
• Install a server OS once, customize it, and then deploy that image again and again for new “servers.”
• Evaluate new or different solutions, such as Linux, in a risk-free environment.
• I’m sure there are other benefits, but that’s about all I can think of right now.

One of this week’s customers hadn’t really heard of virtualization, and now she is running five (5) virtual servers! One was converted from a physical machine, and was her school districts’ existing web server. On that particular machine, their SCSI backplane was failing, and they were down to a single drive, with no redundancy. Now that server’s image runs on a brand-spanking new Dell, with eight (8) “cores” and eight (8) gigabytes of RAM.

The other customer had done some virtualization, and needed far less help using the software, but had some other nagging network problems regarding DNS. We think we’ve got those solved. One of his domain controllers had been off line for a time, and he didn’t realize that it hosted backup DNS, as well as the schema FSMO role. He took it off line originally, because it hadn’t been replicating in some time.

I also stopped off at Mike’s in Austin on the way home. We spent a few hours just chatting about, um, VMWare and stuff. He’s playing with running a certain popular BSD-based OS on his VMWare Workstation. He was showing me that he was able to get it up and running, although it wasn’t optimized to run in a VM, and certainly not on an AMD machine!

I got back home to a ton of postal mail… I guess that’s what happens when you travel near the end of the month!

I had a friend over working on it with me, and he showed me fwcutter, a tool that makes it easy to install proprietary network cards using NDISWrapper. Basically, what NDISWrapper allows you to do is to use actual Windows drivers in an emulation mode in Linux.
Previously I had read directions on using fwcutter, here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185174 and had put off migrating my wife’s laptop, since I didn’t want to leave her with a laptop that had no wireless, until I figured out how to make it work.

Here’s what we did:

• Noticed that wireless networking wasn’t working, but wired worked perfectly, of course.
• Ran fwcutter.
• Clicked the checkbox. It said something like “Get firmware”.
• Waited for it to install.
• Used wireless networking.
• Seriously.

I was completely blown away.

We had to spend a little time configuring audio and the correct video driver, but all in all it wasn’t bad.

Here’s the link on the audio: Trev’s Travels. Ignore the part about the video, it didn’t work on the MX3215, but the audio part did.

Here’s the link on the correct instructions to get video working: OpenChrome.

Now I just need to get DVD video working correctly. The audio works fine, but the picture doesn’t show.

Anyways, I hope all of this helps someone out there who’s trying to configure their MX3215. My wife probably won’t start using it until tomorrow or so, we’ll see how it all goes.