A Place to get your Geek on!!
Archive for December, 2009
Happy New Year
Dec 31st
Well out with one year and in with another, Happy New Year everyone !!!
Hope you all enjoy the night and its festivities.
We hope the New Year brings much to all and many items that we can post about.
Townsville MRA Toy Run 2009
Dec 14th
Another great Toy Run for MRA and everyone involved, Salvation Army ended up with huge amounts of toys and food. Great site to see so many bikes out there, Good on Australia Post for having their riders in uniform on their postie bikes doing the toy run. From where I was located mid to end of the pack it was brilliant, from Dean St Park to Thuringowa RSL. Good job to everyone involved.
Spirals in the sky, Look out UFO’s again.
Dec 10th
Run for the hills, Aliens are coming… UFO in the sky above Norway.
A spinning worm hole shaped light display in the skies above Norway, apparently visable for over 100 Kilometers,
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/981989/spiralling-sky-light-baffles-experts
Wifi Security
Dec 9th
At present a trip to work reveals well over 500 wireless access points. On average its about 1 in every 5 that I see has no security. People please use at least WPA or WPA2 with a passphrase of well over 20 characters, this slows persons trying to access your network. Somebody with experience can crack wireless networks very easy. You could be even better if you use passphrases of around 50-60 characters that will stop more than the average person from getting in for a while. Also if you notice your wifi connection dropping out then reconnecting and repeating the cycle, you probably really have someone trying to capture a WPA handshake, best advised to turn it off for a while if you dont need it. If you are going away for a while eg xmas than you would far better to turn of your wifi connections.
Putting ESXi servers under some load – Hardware testing
Dec 2nd
After using VMWare ESX and ESXi in production environments for some time now I thought it only fitting to use it testing some server hardware.
I loaded ESXi 3.5 and imported my test machines, these Guest machines were loaded with PrimeNet Software from www.mersenne.org
I wanted to load the servers up with large utilitsation to make sure that the servers could and would handle some serious load.
I setup the machines and importing the clients and then powered on each machine, then started all the PrimeNet clients.
As each machine kicked into gear, so did the memory use and cpu usage.
I made sure that the servers were at full utilisation, if they were not I set up another guest and started PrimeNet.
Considering that these server are not top of the line and have been running else where for a few years I was quite surprised just how much data they could still crunch.
The whole process goes to show that ESXi could utilise older hardware quite easily and could save you big dollars, the ability to import and export guest systems makes it really easy to test each server.
Small business can leverage off this technology by having a constant environment while being able to migrate from server to server.
Cost, Cooling and management savings can easily be factored into buying new servers, thus making ESX very viable for expanding business.
Migrating to different servers only took the time to export and import a guest, If you go for a Virtual Centre licence its even easier to migrate between servers. This also gives you the ability to manage all the systems from one interface.