Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

Having a few accounts at slicehost has sold me on the potential of server virtualization. Faced with the need to build a new in-house server on some older hardware, I figured it’d be worth taking a look at setting the new server up as a virtual host. Even though I only need one linux server today, it’d be nice to easily migrate  sets of services on/off it in the future, jump onto new hardware without doing a whole reinstall, etc.

I like ubuntu, so that’s where I started looking at for the host OS. Being on the client end of Xen via slicehost has been smooth, but there are also other virtualization options pushed in the Ubuntu docs, including at least VMware and KVM, so I’ve spent a little time looking into them. I’m a bit of a Free Software snob, so VMware was off the list. KVM requires one of a small set of recent processors to run — the CPU of the server in question is on that list, so KVM remained an option.

Due to previous experience, though, I started looking at Xen first, only to find that Ubuntu isn’t and won’t be supporting Xen from the current release onwards. Wondering why that would be, I came to the following debate, and became thoroughly confused.

After getting this far into the process, I revisited my reasons for looking into virtualization in the first place, and came to the conclusion that my relatively simple needs don’t justify the time to wade through the options.

In a word, no.

However, old-skool readers¹, you can still rejoice: the slagwerks blog homepage has a new feature that will help you answer this question any time you like. In honor of Earth Day 2009, you can now see at the above URL a shiny JPG depicting the latest CO₂ levels recorded by NOAA’s lab at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

To celebrate, here’s the mega version.

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1: old-skool — reading this via a web browser rather than some sort of feed reader

Faced with a big site full of URLs like http://mysite.com/Internal1.asp?id=357 to mirror & archive, I recently tried out a new (to me) tool, HTTrack. I’ve fiddled with wget for this sort of job in the past, but it always takes me ages of man-page reading to get my options right, and even then not everything seems to work out.

This time around, for example, I’d convinced myself that wget -r -N -l inf --no-remove-listing -E -k -p http://mysite.com would do the trick. It mostly did, except for seemingly random pages that didn’t get all of their links converted.

HTTrack, on the other hand, did The Right Thing without any switches or arguments whatsoever. It was a bit more of a pain to get running; even though it’s in macports, right now the port is lagging behind the available versions, so I had to actually type ./configure and ./make myself. Well worth it for a usable mirror.