LinuxWorld Expo 2007 Day 3

As usual with any show, the last day on the exhibit floor is very light. Both Marc and I were scheduled for the morning and Scott was not scheduled at all Thursday. We didn’t always stick to the schedule though. Marc didn’t get in until after 1pm and Scott was there most of the time anyway. Both Kir and Kostya made their rounds to see other exhibits as well did Scott. Not much swag was left, but it was fun to speak with others. In some cases it turned into just a cold-calling out on the floor. One exhibiter from rPath turned the tables on us (after Kir asked why rPath doesn’t support OpenVZ while several other virtualization products are supported) and wanted to know about OpenVZ instead of telling us about rPath. We ended up back at our booth finishing with a demonstration.

The DVD burning continued and we had no trouble keeping up with the demand… however we did end up burning all of the spool of 50. By the end of the show we only had about 5 left.

Hashing out Samba

I just recently wrestled with my little smb setup here to tighten the grip on who might be accessing my share. My intention is to simply share my own smb share I have running in VmWare with my XP host. My XP host is logged into a domain server not to the local machine. The Linux I have installed in VmWare is FC5 running from USB drive and using the NAT networking setting. My company has blocked DHCP to only those machines authenticated with by the domain server. I originally used the KDE Control Center to setup my smb sharing homes. However I felt a bit uncomfortable with the possibility of people with remote desktop access being able to drop into my share. So I created a new share with access to only part of my /home space. I had great difficulty with the KDE Control Center giving access to this new share. For some reason I was simply not able to authenticate into it.

So I prefer/suggest using swat to configure SAMBA. Starting with a clean slate, I removed the homes share and printers. Prior to all this I added my user via the terminal console: ‘smbpasswd -a johndoe’. This is very similar to adding a new system user. Also I used the same user as my existing system user; not sure why but it doesn’t like non system users being added, go figure.

Some non SAMBA defaults from the stock FC5 samba RPM I am using are depicted in my smb.conf file below:

# Samba config file created using SWAT
# from 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1)
# Date: 2007/03/02 13:56:48

[global]
        workgroup = WD
        netbios name = USB
        server string =
        username map = /etc/samba/smbusers
        log level = 1
        server signing = auto
        preferred master = No
        domain master = No
        ldap ssl = no

[USB2]
        path = /home/warren/software/Xfer
        read only = No

Also I am not using the same workgroup as my windows xp pro domain host is using. In xp, I browse the network neighborhood and into my WD workgroup I find the USB share and browsing to it pops up the authentication window. I choose not to save password. I also don’t map to this share. What I do is create a shortcut to the \\WD\USB\usb2 share and have it on my Desktop or quick links toolbar. In the morning I click it and it asks for authentication and am set for the day. No worries about IP address or XP home or XP pro here at work or at home; it all just works.

First OpenVZ installation

This weekend I finally got around to checking out OpenVZ. With lots of prodding from Scott, not to mention lots of help from Scott, I got this thing installed rather quickly. I pretty much followed Scott’s latest article Intro to OpenVZ: Part II. I started with installing CentOS 4.4 using the custom minimalist install and updated everything. BTW this machine is an old Dell 2Ghz with 512MB RAM and 40GB drive. My plan is to actually use one of the virtual private servers (VPS) as a production backup server. Other VPS’s would be just for fun and possibly exploration of other distributions.

So in short after having my bare bones install here is my quick and dirty easy to follow steps from Scott’s article:

1. cd /etc/yum.repos.d
2. wget http://download.openvz.org/openvz.repo
3. yum install ovzkernel
4. nano -w /etc/sysctl.conf with these changes:

# On Hardware Node we generally need
# packet forwarding enabled and proxy arp disabled
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
net.ipv4.conf.default.proxy_arp = 0
# Enables source route verification
net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 1
# Enables the magic-sysrq key
kernel.sysrq = 1
# TCP Explict Congestion Notification
# net.ipv4.tcp_ecn = 0
# we do not want all our interfaces to send redirects
net.ipv4.conf.default.send_redirects = 1
net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0

5. Set the default kernel in grub to the new one
6. Reboot using the new kernel
7. yum install vzctl vzquota
8. service vz start
9. yum install vzpkg vzyum vzrpm43-python vzrpm44-python
10. yum install vztmpl-centos-4
11. nano -w /vz/template/centos/4/i386/config/default.list appending this:

yum
mc
links
system-config-date
nano

12. vzpkgcache -f centos-4
13. vzctl create 101 –ostemplate centos-4 –config vps.basic
14. vzctl set 101 –ipadd 192.168.0.101 –save
15. vzctl set 101 –hostname vps101 –save
16. vzctl set 101 –nameserver 192.168.0.1 –nameserver 192.168.0.2 –save
17. vzctl set 101 –userpasswd root:areallycoolpassword
18. vzctl set 101 –onboot yes –save
19. vzctl start 101
20. vzctl enter 101

Okay so that is it in a nutshell. Then this is where I start getting into trouble with my wild ideas. I mentioned wanting to make this my backup server and I normally use Dirvish, but this time I want to try out BackupPC. Now I also have a nice 300GB drive I have used for my backups and I planned on just mounting it inside this new VPS. Problem is I couldn’t figure out how to give it enough diskspace quota. The most it would give was from my 40GB drive and that was a 34GB quota. So I called Scott and pretty much just decided to do LVM (logical volume management) and merge the drives together to make it look like one big drive. This however entailed starting from scratch again as I’m pretty lazy when it comes to trying to figure out installing something like this after the fact.

So I find my single CentOS CD and attempt to boot it but my crappy old Dell has an abused CD-R drive. So I borrow the one out of another Dell and off we go. So when I get back to the point I was last, I run this:

vzctl set 101 –diskspace 315621376:315621376 –save

This gives me 301GB disk space to work with in my VPS. Problem is I was told by Scott there is an rpm for BackupPC but currently there are no rpm’s for CentOS. So this brings me to another task… create another VPS with a distribution that includes rpm package management for BackupPC. I found out the hard way that these guys are yet another that uses caps in their package name and caused me a bit of headache searching for it.

I picked FC-5 for the new VPS as it seems to be the latest to carry BackupPC. To do this I needed to build the template similar to building the CentOS template above.

yum install vztmpl-fedora-core-5

The rest was pretty much as stated above. Of course I forgot to edit the default.list and had to later go back and update the cache after already creating the VPS with FC5. So I needed yum installed on this to fill in the blanks and Scott to the rescue again; I could install this from the host with:

vzyum 102 install yum

This is it for now. I have yet to configure BackupPC. I will have to blog about it later.