Earth Computing

Joe McDonagh joseph.e.mcdonagh at gmail.com
Wed Jan 27 19:17:00 UTC 2010


Alvin wrote:
> A lot of questions in the annual user survey concern cloud computing. I 
> administer some small businesses and use Ubuntu in most of them. Maybe my 
> biggest client will one day use a personal cloud, and I applaud the efforts, 
> but I can 't help but notice that other things are left in the cold.
> The survey wants to know how Ubuntu Server is used. I'm curious about the 
> results and really wonder how many Ubuntu clouds there really are, in contrast 
> to file, web, terminal and other servers.
>
> I'd like to give an example of how we are using Ubuntu in one company and 
> where it could be put to use in the future, along with the issues encountered. 
> The reason for this is that I think there is a lot of room for improvement 
> outside the cloud.
>
> We're a prepress company with a mixed network.
> - 3 Solaris Servers with Helios.
>   Why not Ubuntu?
>   - ZFS (does not need much explanation)
>   - Helios, A commercial application to provide file and print sharing for 
> Macintosh.
>   - [bug 462169] "nmbd dies on startup when network interfaces are not up yet"
>   These run Samba and are NFS servers.
>   These machines are an example of what stability should be. No serious bugs.
>
> - 3 Ubuntu Virtual Hosts
>   These run Karmic. They are basic installs with ubuntu-virt-server installed.
>   They do suffer from some problems.
>   - [bug 460914] "root device is sometimes not found"
>   - [bug 446031] "static network interfaces do not come up at boot"
>   - [bug 470776] "NFS shares do not mount at boot"
>   - [bug 491273] "netfs storage pools are not autostarted"
>   - [bug 444563] "udev errors all over the place"
>   Aside from that, IF they want to find the root drive, are set to DHCP, and 
> libvirt-bin is restarted, we can run virtual machines.
>   kvm runs well, but I'm scared of reboots.
>   When Karmic was just released, we used separate /boot on all servers which 
> also rendered them unbootable. [bug 462961, fixed]
>   Due to the above problems, I would love to have some sort of boot log [bug 
> 328881]
>
> - 4 Ubuntu Virtual machines.
>   These run Jaunty because of the above bugs and because of a regression [bug 
> 224138] "No NFS modules in karmic 32-bit"
>   2 of these machines run our most important commercial production software.
>   kubuntu-desktop is installed on them and the users use XMDCP to work on 
> these servers.
>   Users also run rdesktop from here to get to Microsoft Word on a MS Windows 
> Terminal server.
>   They do suffer from some problems.
>   (I'm not mentioning Kubuntu stuff. It's not that bad)
>   - [bug 366728] "LD_LIBRARY_PATH not loads from .profile"
>   - [bug 374907] "libmotif3 crashes"
>   - [bug 251709] "Caps Lock does not work in rdesktop"
>   - [bug 86021 or 234543] "XDMCP does not work without reverse dns, or with 
> the basic /etc/hosts"
>
> - 1 Debian based commercial router/firewall/mailserver
>   Ubuntu could do this, but we're pretty happy with this machine.
>
> - There are also a lot of Windows Servers, virtual and physical. These will 
> probably never be replaced.
>
> - The clients run Kubuntu, Windows and Mac OS 9/X. The Kubuntu machines are 
> XDMCP server and normal workstations.
>
> Sometimes you hear: "it's open source. Don't complain and fix it yourself." 
> That's partly true. I'm not a programmer, but I was able to patch libmotif3 to 
> solve the crashes.
> The kind people in ubuntu-bugs also managed to convince me that I could 
> package the new version of openmotif myself and put it in Debian. Maybe I'll 
> learn how to do that, so that bug can at least be closed. I can understand 
> that there is not a lot of interest in this package, but we need it and will 
> probably need it for some time to come.
> What I can't understand is that there would be no interest in NFS. Is everyone 
> using samba between unix machines these days?
>
> This is a real-life scenario. Is it common? I don't know. It's not free of 
> struggles as you can see. So, this is a plea for quality. Cloud Computing 
> might be very important, but please don't lose sight of the little guys who 
> just want some 'classic' servers.
>
> Links
> -----
> Ubuntu Server user survey:
>   http://ubuntu.com/server
> Bugs, "In order of apprearance":
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/462169
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/460914
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/446031
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/470776
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/491273
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/444563
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/462961
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/328881
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/224138
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/366728
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/374907
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251709
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/86021
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/234543
>
>   
IDK what's with the 'hey brah' subject line, but you probably shouldn't 
be using an LTS-interim release like karmic or jaunty for the business. 
You will run into more show-stopping bugs. I prefer RHEL for business, 
but whatever.

And for the firewall you might want to think about moving to OpenBSD.

-- 
Joe McDonagh
AIM: YoosingYoonickz
IRC: joe-mac on freenode
L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire





More information about the ubuntu-server mailing list