Tim Groeneveld

Looking at my emails, I just realised that I forgot to pay for Drupal Downunder. -.-”

Imagine if there was an application that you could feed a disk image to, wether it be Microsoft Windows 2008 or Red Hat EL 6 and see a list of applications that are installed – no step back – imagine if there was an application that you could feed a disk image to and just discover what operating system was installed.

Well fear not! There is such an application. I kid you not, if you are anything like me you are going to look and see this as one of the most amazing discoveries. When I found this, I had a “oh my goodness, why didn’t I know about this sooner” moment.

libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. You can use this for viewing and editing files inside guests, scripting changes to VMs, monitoring disk used/free statistics, P2V, V2V, performing partial backups, cloning VMs and much much more.

libguestfs basically allows you to do anything that you have ever dreamed of. Yes. It will even read your Windows Registry “hive” files and spit them out as XML files.

The virt-inspector command examines a virtual machine or disk image and tries to determine the version of the operating system and other information about the virtual machine.

libguestfs is definitely on the TODO list for installing I am love. I could just imagine a nice web application thrown on top of this that would allow you to do funky things like that a WIndows machine offline, run a Windows Update *while the virtual machine is not running* and then start the machine up again. Doesn’t sound awesome yet? Think about it this way: a new Windows update is released. You take an LVM snapshot of the currently running box. You apply any Windows Update to the new LVM snapshot, shutdown the current running box while bringing up the new one (or edit the registry and remove any details of the IP and add a script to run on startup…)… so many ideas

A typical day’s worth of updating my machines usually looks a bit like this:

[tim@myhost tmp]$ sudo pacman -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
warning: gnome-disk-utility: ignoring package upgrade (2.30.1-1 => 2.32.0-2)
warning: gvfs: ignoring package upgrade (1.6.3-1 => 1.6.6-1)
warning: kernel26: ignoring package upgrade (2.6.34.3-1 => 2.6.36.3-1)
warning: kernel26-headers: ignoring package upgrade (2.6.34.3-1 => 2.6.36.3-1)
warning: libbonoboui: ignoring package upgrade (2.24.3-1 => 2.24.4-1)
warning: libgnome: ignoring package upgrade (2.30.0-1 => 2.32.0-3)
warning: nvidia: ignoring package upgrade (256.53-1 => 260.19.29-1)
warning: nvidia-utils: ignoring package upgrade (256.53-1 => 260.19.29-1)
warning: proftpd: local (1.3.3-5) is newer than extra (1.3.3c-1)
warning: rdesktop: local (1.6.0_rc1-1) is newer than extra (1.6.0-5)
warning: udev: ignoring package upgrade (151-3 => 165-1)
warning: udisks: ignoring package upgrade (1.0.0-0.20100223 => 1.0.2-1)
warning: youtube-dl: local (2010.12.09-2) is newer than community (2010.12.09-1)
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...

You know it’s bad when you have so many custom packages, that you may as well have your own distribution .

PHP is one of the most popular web development language in the world, with millions of active developers and tens of millions of PHP-based sites already in deployment.

A new company on the PHP scene has been created to service the hundreds of thousands of application developers who work with PHP on a daily basis.

PHP Fog is the only company offering deployment and infinite scaling of PHP applications in the cloud with little to know effort. The company offers one-click deployments for many popular PHP apps and frameworks including WordPress, Drupal, Kohana, Zend, and SugarCRM.

The company is currently in private beta but expects to launch publicly in the first half of 2011.

The technology around PHP Fog allows you to create a new site in less then one minute of your time. You do not even need to know how to code (although, it really, really is beneficial if you can ).

Deploying changes to your site is as easy as git push, No longer do you need to work with FTP or any other 1990′s technology. PHP Fog has been built to work around the developer – which is a good thing, because it means that your developers are no longer system administrators – especially in smaller shops.

With PHP Fog, all of your servers (cache, web/http, database servers and load balancers) are on separate boxes

It will be interesting to see how this technology evolves. A similar provider for Rails, Heroku, was not too long ago acquired by Salesforce for $212 million in cash. What company will buy PHP Fog and for how much?

Yahoo are big users of PHP, so they could be in line. Facebook seem to have gone their own way with Hiphop. Interesting times ahead! I can’t wait to see what times I can get out of PHP Fog for page loads!

When I faced with a decision of what web server I am going to roll out with, I usually end up picking between two web servers: Apache and Cherokee.

Apache is like your grandfather. He is 80 years old, and He has been around for a while. He is not always the guy you go to when you want something done quickly, but when you want it done reliably, you would not even think of going to anyone else.

Cherokee is like a kid out of Uni. Sure, he is still only a little baby, but he is packed full of the latest knowledge and has been taught how to do the job. Quick. He is also much better then his Granddaddy at doing the easier things, such as giving you the same document over and over and over again.

The way that Apache is written, it does use up a lot of memory, however, there is also the benefit with Apache that if you want to do it, you can. There is literally any type of module you would ever want for Apache. There are more then 400 modules to download, compile, install and try.

Cherokee on the other hand has a much smaller selection of modules you can choose to run with, but don’t let this scare you! If you run pretty much stock standard Apache setups (such as I do for timg.ws and sharesource.org), then Cherokee will be able to come to the table with everything you need and more.

The really cool benefit that you get from using Cherokee is the fact that, it does more out of the box with all its modules.

At the moment, I really like the development that is going into Cherokee.  They do look very hard at security, such as this the new spawning mechanism introduced into Cherokee earlier this year.

But really, there is a lot of hype over the whole “lightweight” httpds in some sense. Sure, lighttpd and Cherokee are really fast to deliver static files, but are they really faster then for anything else? In all honestly, not that much faster.

I hear about people doing a lot of really interesting things when it comes to web servers, like Apache+nginx+fastcgi, and then I wonder, couldn’t you just pick one product and stick with it? It’s not like the extra milliseconds are going to save you $200,000 a year.

I usually choose Cherokee now for new installations, simply because it does everything and I don’t need to actually do that much hunting around to make it ‘just work’. Not only that, but it has a nice web interface for administrating it that would even make my Dad happy (yes, literally).