January 2010 Archives

There are truly dozens if not hundreds of requirements and limitations that come into place when designing and building a long lasting and durable Linux Workstation for the home office.

The overall goal is to have a system that will be reliable, constantly upgradeable, and high value.    Existing hardware MUST be incorporated where possible.

Here are some of the decisions I made:

• Equipment binges in the 90's and 2000's resulted in an excess of external equipment (low cost home nas, Firewire/USB attached drives, USB Hubs, video cameras, etc).  While the ability to add things externally makes incremental expansion easy, it does so at the cost of complexity, reliability, and overall noise/aesthetics - not to mention power costs which in San Diego are quite high.  So, my rule going forward was to put everything in a large full tower ATX case.
• Supporting multiple operating systems is no longer as important.  In the way, way, way past, I used to dual boot between Linux and Windows.   Later, I experimented with multiple monitors dedicated to each either running in virtual machines or separate boxes (sharing keyboard/mouse).  Then, as hardware got more microsoft dependent, I ran windows as an OS host and had a RedHat Enterprise Linux VM bootup in windowed mode for most day-to-day work.  We are at the point though, where there are only a few applications that can not be fully ported to Linux (Quickbooks + VMware Virtual Center Client + FrameMaker/Acrobat Extended/Visio  + ).    Therefore, the default now is to make Linux the host and access applications via unity mode of vmware workstation software.
  
• I agonized over what Linux Distribution to depend on for the next many years and finally decided that it needed to be Fedora 12.  RedHat Enterprise Linux is by far the predominant OS installed in the datacenters I manage and being able to easily access development versions of new software for RHEL in my off hours is critical.  Ubuntu may be very popular now, but I didn't see it being the right fit here.   Furthermore, RHEL Workstation itself while being more stable than fedora just didn't provide easy access to recent versions of  desktop/home office applications I may need or want.   As a former gentoo developer, I'd have installed Gentoo but honestly I just couldn't afford to deal with managing a constant flood of manual security issues and qa testing that using it would have required.
• All data must be protected by RAID, and regularly backed up in a low noise/maintenance manner w/ the ability to occasionally perform off site backups.
• I want lots of storage, ability to burn blue ray discs, and excellent graphics.

So, I grabbed the best full tower case + motherboard/cpu/ram combination I currently had in the house and then add any other hardware components I could find.  And, only if absolutely necessary, ordering specific hardware from amazon.  The idea was not to build the perfect system right away but to have a base to grow over the next 10 years.

At the moment, I have mostly running in production state:

Thermaltake Kandalf Full ATX Tower Case
Dual Core P4 3.4Ghz CPU
8GB ECC DDR2 RAM w/ 800 Mhz FSB
Asus Workstation Motherboard based on i975x chipset (P5WDG2-WS)
MB includes ~8 SATA Ports, 2 x PCIe, 2 x PCI-x and 2 PCI, Intel HD Sound
Dual Sky2 GigE Nics, Firewire, and lots of USB2 ports on MB
Nvidia GeoForce 8800 GTS 512 w/ Two Dual Link DVI Ports
Dell 30" LCD Monitor
VF0560 Live! Cam Optia AF Video Camera
Logitech Z520 Speaker System
3Ware 9550SX 8 Port SATA-II RAID Controller w/ 128MB Battery Backed Cache
5 x Seagate 7200RPM 250GB SATA-II Drives in RAID5 for /home filesystem
1 x Seagate 7200RPM 250GB SATA-II Drive as Hot Spare
2 x Western Digital 2TB "Black Cavier" Hard Drives in RAID1 for all other filesystems
1 x ReadyNAS NV+ NAS w/ 4 x 750GB SATA-II in RAID5 for Daily Incremental Bkups
Multiple Internal Hard Drive Cages w/ Integrated Fans for Tower Case
Additional Low-noise directed case fans and BIOS tuning for stability/performance
Plextor PX-Q840U External USB DVD/CD Burner for easy access to drive
Plextor PX-B940SA Internal SATA Blu-ray Burner for creating offsite backups
Honeywell Firesafe next to system for safe keeping of critical media

Desktop configured for KDE because KDE makes inspiring apps and the gnome equivalents are boring and life draining.

For the last decade, I have been of two minds about VMware.  My roots are in open-source but I keep buying expensive proprietary software licenses for VMware ESX and vSphere because VMware's products are proven and continue to be the driving force of innovation in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

This is not completely out of tune with being a Linux evangelist. Linus Torvalds himself has said he nothing against commercial software, and that businesses should be pragmatic when choosing which software to deploy. 

But, how the soul tears when a new CEO of VMware arrives from no less than Microsoft.  Is this just the first prong in a multi-staged cultural invasion of sales/marketing over technical staff. 

I ask myself whether I am really supporting the growth of what will be the Microsoft of the next generation? 

Sometimes, one can certainly think so - Short of Amazon EC2, no one and nothing has gotten in the way of VMware's skyrocketing usage and to a certain extent (skyrocketing prices). 

Of course, VMware has a wonderful ecosystem of enterprise tools to support deployment of virtualization in business, including stage manager, life cycle manager, etc.  However, none of these products are open-source and almost all of them are out of the budget of most internet start-ups that I perform consulting projects with.     Yes, I know vmware offers some "free" tools like vmplayer and vmware server, but I do not consider these really production business tools.

Nor is VMware exactly open about its development plans, progress towards fixing bugs, or even really support.  Their are some awesome websites, forums, blogs, and irc channels.  But these are mostly user run and you dont see the constant back and forth between developers and users that one might normally experience in an open-source project.

And, yet.....VMware acquires Spring Source, Hyperic, and now Zimbra in a relatively short period of time.   VMware is not just acquiring open-source companies, they are acquiring the cream of the crop when one narrows the search to focus on open-source innovation in the business application market.   I would not be surprised if VMware tried to acquire EnterpriseDB (makers of postgresql plus) next.  With the sagging of mysql and resurgence of Oracle, this would be smart.....for VMware.

I am aware that RedHat hopes to take a lot of the virtualization market away from VMware, but I wonder if they playing last years war and thus distracted from the current battle being played out to determine the shape of  the future of open source business application market place.

There was palpable excitement in the Linux community throughout the 1990's as we knew that while enterprises move slowly, eventually they must and do deploy the most innovative and reliable software and thus the age of supporting defective closed-built buggy software would eventually come to an end when open-source business applications matured.  We are there.  It is happening, but how much of that success will be reinvested back into creating new open-source products if the real cash out goal of all developers creating innovative business applications is merely to be acquired by VMware?  Will VMware in the business applications space be like Cisco Systems is in Networking - a constant ever growing technical company that purchases anyone that out-innovates it?

At least, this will be a step up from Microsoft. 

On the other hand, maybe VMware will surprise me and actually adopt more open development processes and become not just a consumer and beneficiary of open source, not even a major source of patches to open-source projects, but a real evangelist of the philosophy of being transparent, sharing by default, and communicating constantly with clients and customers.

I would hope so.