Image by gocyclones via Flickr
I’m currently in Dallas taking RH436 and thought it would be nice to post about my use of Xen during the first day of class.

During class we did some set up to give ourselves 3 cluster nodes. To do this set up it was a simple kickstart to get a fresh install on Dom0. Once I had Dom0 installed I installed the cluster software with “yum groupinstall Clustering” and yum installgroup “Cluster Storage”. Once I had all of the clustering software installed I shutdown the Dom0. Then I shutdown the Dom0 and used another script to clone Dom0 to 3 new nodes. This allows for quick rebuilds of any of the nodes during the class as it just uses an lvm snapshot of Dom0 to create nodes 1-3. Pretty slick! I’ll see if I can post the pertinent parts of the scripts from Red Hat tomorrow.

Image via WikipediaI am trying out a new Firefox plugin that was recommended by Christopher S. Penn, Zemanta. Zemanta will look at what you are typing in your blog post and after you write 300 characters it will start making suggestions for links to related articles, tags to use and related images to use in your blog post.

So let’s say I was writing a blog post about some new Nikon equipment that had just been released like a Nikon D300.  It would look at the text I had typed in my blog post and make suggestions to articles on D300’s or images taken by D300 or of D300’s.  This is great!  It will make for much more interesting blog posts.  I just went past 600 characters and now on the right hand side of my blog post in Word Press I see 9 images.  4 are images taken by a D300, 3 are images of a D300 or it’s components, 1 is a Firefox logo and 1 is a Nikon logo.  The other really cool thing is that as you hover over the image it tells you what the license  of the image.  I’ll post a few of the items suggested now.  How cool is this.

I figured that since I posted yesterday about virtualization podcasts that I listen to I should do the same for photography podcasts that I watch/listen to. There are quite a few more of these out there and a lot of them are really well produced. It’s hard to believe that this content is all FREE!

• Tips From The Top Floor
  • http://www.tipsfromthetopfloor.com
• The Digital Photography Show
  • http://www.thedigitaphotographyshow.com
• The Russell Brown Show
  • http://www.russellbrown.com
• Photoshop User TV
  •  http://www.photoshopusertv.com
• The Nikonians On Location
  • http://podcasts.nikonians.org/on_location.html
• Layers TV
  • http://www.layerstv.com
• PixelPerfect
  • http://revision3.com/pixelperfect
• Photoshop Killer Tips
  • http://www.photoshopkillertips.com
• Nikonians Podcasts
  • http://podcasts.nikonians.org
• Meet The GIMP
  • http://www.meetthegimp.org
• LightSource Studio Photography Podcast
  • http://www.studiolighting.net/
• Focus Ring
  • http://www.photocastnetwork.com/

With Lockergnome getting the front page fixed I’ll be reposting some of my previous posts to get some views.

I tend to be a bit of a podcast junky. I am subscribed to around 100 podcasts in total. Most of the podcasts I listen to are technical in nature, and as of late I’ve subscribed to a few virtualization podcasts. Here is a list of podcasts about virtualization that I’ve found and subscribed to myself:

• DBACC Radio
  • http://www.dabcc.com/podcast.aspx
• InfoWorld Virtualization Report Podcast
  • http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/podcast/
• Virtualization Strategy Magazine
  • http://www.virtual-strategy.com/en/podcasts

If anyone else knows of any other virtualization podcasts I’d love to hear them and give them a listen.

Matt

Lockergnome is undergoing some changes to WP.  The new WicketPixie theme is now live on my site.  Chris is still tweeking this so it will be in flux for a while.  I for one will be glad when the author icon is finally Matt’s head instead of Chris’ head.

So I’ve been having a fun time getting a RHEL5 VM installed in ESX 3.5. I had first started by trying with the latest version of RHEL5 U1 but found out after ESX 3.5 update 1 was released this past week that wasn’t going to work. ESX 3.5 only supported RHEL5 not U1 until U1 of ESX. I know it’s all really confusing. Anyway it turned out that the problem was that the port had not been turned on on the switch. Go figure!

I will be taking a serious at the RHEL Advance Platform options for virtualization and high availability. They are included in the subscription price and you no longer have the issues of waiting on a 3rd party vendor to play catch up with your OS. Sounds like a good idea to me!

More updates coming soon!

Adobe has released a new beta product today. It is called Adobe Photoshop Express and is an online version of Adobe Photoshop. The target market for this product is the MySpace/Facebooker’s that don’t want to pay for the full version of Adobe Photoshop or even the $99 for Adobe Photoshop Elements. The beta is open to anyone and gives a 2GB storage area for photos to be stored online all for…wait for it…wait for it….FREE!

With Adobe Photoshop Express it is possible to resize, tint, distort, sharpen etc.Go and try it out and provide feedback to Adobe on how they can make it better. I sure will be.

http://www.photoshopexpress.com

Sorry no postings lately.  I’ve been quite busy studying for my RHCE exam tomorrow.  I do have plenty to talk about as I’ve been using VMware Server beta 2 and VMware player to do the testing in a CentOS 5.1 server image.

There have been some great Dilberts in the past few days about virtualization. They are so true as always.

Donnie plans his vacation while at work. These things just crack me up!  Also make sure you check out Donnie's work place website.  My favorite quote from it is on that Services page, "PhebCo. Waste is not a four letter word."  Donnie also shows up on the employee page as a "Dumper".  There are plenty of other subtle things in these videos like file and folder names that you've got to watch it over and over to pick them all up.