Booting grub with the Fedora PXE vmlinuz/initrd images allows you to perform a network installation of Fedora over any existing linux distro, should you not be able to write to or boot from the conventional CD/DVD install media. A PXE netinstall can both be done locally, and with extra care, remotely using VNC. Both methods are explained in this HOWTO.
via Installing Fedora Using PXE Images — Fedora Unity Project.
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.1) on a Debian Sarge (3.1) system.
Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called “virtual machines” or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers’ web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it’s more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.
Via The Perfect Xen 3.0.1 Setup For Debian | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.
This howto works for other distros as well.
I’ve gone this far without ever having to compile a kernel … until now. 🙂 Though the howto is a bit dated, I downloaded the latest xen distro here. (xen 4.1.1)
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They can’t get the passcode into your cloud resources, and they don’t have the ability to generate the passcode. You don’t have to go that far, of course, but the point is that if there’s no local data on the device in normal use, there’s no local data on the device that can be stolen.
via Die, VPN! We’re all “telecommuters” now—and IT must adjust.
Here are a couple of interesting comments covering both sides of this issue:
I work in a large IT org in a large company. THis issue keeps creeping up all the time. I think most end users just really want access to email, ccontacts, calender and IM – this tends to cover at least 80% of the use cases. This can be done with a digital cert and loginid/password – without installing a VPN client. It took a while to convince the security group to do this. Full layer 3 routing access to the network should be for sensitive apps like SAP, etc. Sadly though most IT departments will continue to drive that square peg into that round hole.Hey, IPV6 will solve all our problems. LoL 🙂
SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the rightful owners of the domains visitors are accessing, rather than impostors who have hacked the users’ connections. Countless websites also use SSL to encrypt passwords, emails and other data to thwart anyone who may be monitoring the traffic passing between the two parties.
It’s hard to overstate the reliance that websites operated by Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Bank of America and millions of other companies place in SSL. And yet, the repeated failures suggest that the system in its current state is hopelessly broken.
via How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways • The Register.
“People want to use their own smart phones and tablets for work, but that practice can create major headaches for businesses’ IT departments,” says Chris Hill, part of AT&T’s Advanced Mobility Solutions group. “Toggle helps resolve the issue in a simple, affordable manner.”
via One Smart Phone, Two Personalities – Technology Review.
No doubt someone will get a patent for this — for multiple users on a single device — something that has been going on since the first mainframe.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.
via Dennis Ritchie, 70, Dies, Programming Trailblazer – NYTimes.com.
RIP
Now, what about throughput? The host’s networking resources are shared amongst the virtual desktops it supports and users will suffer from poor performance if there’s insufficient bandwidth available. As such, consider routing virtual machine traffic over an SLB bond so that it’s automatically load balanced across two NICs. Virtual machine traffic is load balanced by MAC address and rebalanced every ten seconds. Failover support is provided for all other traffic types, including management and IP-based storage traffic. The load balancing algorithm associates traffic from each virtual interface to one of two NICs in the bond. It’s important to understand that it doesn’t allow a single virtual interface to utilize both NICs in the bond simultaneously.
via Open Source Rack » XenServer for XenDesktop – How many network cards do I need?.
I can see this getting complicated fast. XenDesktop seems to use a lot of network bandwidth. Someone must have done a study on this. Thin clients have been a marque product for the last couple of decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if our clients didn’t have a hard drive — as if merely eliminating a hard drive would eliminate all IT support for that device.
Todo: Get XenDesktop running and do some tests and estimations.
The head of computer operations for Reed Specialist Recruitment, an employment service with operations on three continents, Whetstone recently upgraded his company’s 6,000 desktop computers. Chief information officers order new Dells or HPs all the time. But the computers Whetstone brought in for his employees aren’t the traditional metal boxes that sit next to desks or under monitors. They are “virtual” computers. Each employee has a keyboard and a screen, but the processors making the calculations and deciding what color goes in each pixel are far away, inside a big computer at Reed’s main data center in London.
via The Death of the PC – Forbes.com.
This is dated (12/28/2009) but interesting nonetheless. Thin clients never quite die either. 🙂