expansion

/PERSONAL
I'm a little late posting this entry, but I've actually been quite busy recently and when Monday evening came around all I wanted to do was relax. Even now, two days later I'm tired and kinda want to go back to bed. But today is a special day and I decided that I needed to get stuff done, this being one of those things on my list. Now on to the tech talk that I normally spout.

/TECH
After some deliberation about where my best hardware should be I finally decided to put my better hardware in Doppelganger. So as part of my Independence Day festivities I took down Doppelganger and Phoenix and swapped their hardware. I made backups of Pegasus (my current TeamSpeak server) and Balrog storing them on my external HDD. At first I thought I'd just swap the HDDs between the cases, but then I remembered a critical detail: my video card, the only part not going in Doppelganger, doesn't fit in one of my cases. Motherboard switch it was! Later I realized another small detail that the Sabertooth 990FX motherboard doesn't have on-board video. Low-powered NVidia video card to the rescue once again! I always knew it was good to keep that.

Now Doppelganger has a beautiful rich-featured motherboard, a quad-core AMD FX processor, and 16 glorious GB of DDR3 RAM. I'm especially happy about the RAM. Eventually I'll get another server named Raven setup where it will automatically boot with Doppelganger and launch TeamSpeak Server, Ventrilo Server, and Murmur Server giving me and my friends a full range of voice-over-IP choices. Balrog is happily running along with several scripts I wrote to help me manage it more easily including a pretty sweet update script that downloads the given update, replaces the server jar, updates the message of the day in the server settings, and automatically restarts the server. But between the two VMs I'm hardly utilizing Doppelganger. There must be more. More! MOAR I SEZ! …ahem… Sorry, I devolved for a second there.

After a recent gaming session in EYE: Divine Cybermancy with friends, I decided I needed to setup another dedicated server for the game. It's pretty awesome and it's a Source engine game. Since Source engine games can be run using the same dedicated server application I realized that I could get it running using a Linux server. Since the Source engine is made by Valve and published to the Steam platform, I decided that my Source engine dedicated server would be named Golem. Sadly, I have not spent the time getting it running yet and really need to experiment with the Source dedicated server before I jump into running it on Linux.

My real next task is to setup two VMs for experimentation. One will be a Linux playground and the other a Windows playground. With so many distros of Linux, I'm not sure which flavor I'll use, but I'm thinking just a standard one, like Debian. Windows I have fewer choices, but it tends to be more of a hog and so I'm not sure which version I'll install. Anyway, once those are installed I'll make snapshot backups of each and then I can experiment on the system and mess it up as much as I like. And if I can't fix them, I can just restore from the snapshots.

Besides the Source dedicated server, I've thought about playing with include a private Internet radio server, DNS server, file server, web server, and a SQL server. I'm also hoping that I can buy some large capacity HDDs within the next year to put into Doppelganger and expand the storage to ridiculous sizes. If you have any ideas of what I should experiment with let me know in the comments and I'll see what I can manage.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

doppelganger

/TECH
Doppelganger lives. It is quite gratifying actually, to finally have a server that I can run a combination of production systems as well as test systems on. Proxmox is a sweet system. The Linux based hosting environment is quite powerful and comes with my favorite price tag of free. Currently Doppelganger is running two other systems constantly: Pegasus and Balrog.

Pegasus is my current system for hosting TeamSpeak, but I'm trying to get it moved to another system called Raven. The reasoning behind this is that Pegasus is currently setup as a VM whereas Raven is setup as a container. The difference between the two is that a container is more isolated thus increasing security plus they are way easier to manage. Eventually I'll figure out my hang ups on Raven as I'm also trying to set it up to auto start TeamSpeak. I also hope to install both Murmur (Mumble server) and Ventrilo server applications on Raven so that I can have a more complete voice conferencing solution.

I thought Balrog was an appropriate Minecraft server name. Yes, I play Minecraft and I've dedicated a ridiculous amount of effort to maintaining the dedicated server for it. One of the things I've distinctly learned about Minecraft is that it likes RAM. It likes a lot of RAM. I've caught it using 1.5GB of RAM on my computer several times. It also likes a decent CPU speed, fast upload speed, and fast download speed. As it stands, I can only have about 5 people logged into my server simultaneously. But it's loads of fun and often worth the effort.

My first week with Doppelganger has been good, but I've discovered that the hardware I'm running it on is a bit… lacking. As a result I've been looking for ways to upgrade it without spending additional money. Solution: swap my hardware from Phoenix, my personal computer, to Doppelganger. This would then net me a much more powerful machine for the server but set Phoenix back a little. All in all, I think it will be worth the effort to swap the hardware to result in a more stable virtual environment.

It's good timing to do this transition right now too. Phoenix is having issues lately and Windows needs to be re-installed. Yeah, when your computer can't find Google.com, you know there's a problem with either your service, your router, or your computer, and since all other devices were connecting to the Internet just fine, it's the computer. So Phoenix will once again die and be reborn. Phoenix will take a step back in performance, but ultimately it will be better. Once I settle on hardware, I'll post the specifications.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

quirks

/TECH
As most design and development is apt to have, SharePoint 2010 and its associated software has quirks. These quirks can be documented or undocumented, but they eventually come up as someone out there is trying to use SharePoint in some specific way. I use Infopath and SharePoint Designer a lot as I design and develop custom forms. One of those quirks has become apparent to me as I was struggling for several hours one day to get a workflow functioning correctly. This workflow was trying to compare a username to a person field returning the login name as a string. SharePoint 2010 is new to me and the string builder features are much improved over 2007. One of those features however broke a workflow. It turns out that the new string builder treats the '\' just like most programming languages: it's an escape character. Thus when I had it trying to concatenate a '\' in a string, the lookup following it kept failing as it was no longer being a lookup but a string literal. Again, as with programming using 2 '\' actually inserts the character into the string.

/EXISTENCE
Speaking of escapes, currently I've gone through another bout of gaming remorse, this time from Diablo 3. I spent an unhealthy amount of time on the game over the last weekend, thus not getting useful things done, like working on my projects this blog is supposedly helping me follow through with, finishing my re-organization project, getting a haircut, doing laundry, or going grocery shopping. Was it worth it? The frustration and self-defeating said "No, and you're a loser for wasting all that time".

But I know I'm not a loser. It takes me a little bit of time to get over the initial depression that sets in, but then it turns into a priority defining moment for me. It was because of those thoughts and the realization that I can actually do something about those problems that in the time between writing the previous paragraph and this one, I went and got my hair cut and grocery shopping. It's amazing at how much better I felt after something as simple as getting my hair cut.

The same thing goes for work. Last week by Friday I was burned out. I was just wasting the University's money by sitting there while I did nothing but stare blankly at my screen. So I left early. Today I went to work and before I knew it, it was time to leave. In fact I stayed a little longer today because I needed to finish something before I left. Perhaps there's hope for me yet on accomplishing 40 hours per week.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.