Helpdesk can be annoying, even more so if your using spreadsheets or text files to manage what you're doing. Back in June of `07 I was tasked with finding a helpdesk package to use. In previous lives I've used custom web apps, excel spreadsheets, trackit and many, many other solutions. Each had their own drawbacks and annoyances. I finally settled on a free one (the boss loved that) called SpiceWorks. Its an ad-supported free helpdesk software that runs on rails. Seems there is an ability to install on linux (with a lot of work) but more meant to run on a windows based system. It does have its own issues but for the most part, it works better than some of the paid solutions that i've used and tested in the past. Now almost 1.5 years into using it, we have well over 2,000 tickets tracked in the system and while we've had hiccups from time to time, its been for the most part rock solid. We've never lost any data, even during the upgrade process and at most the service has stopped resonding during very heavy usage. We haven't had this problem since the 3.0 upgrade, however.
If you are low-budget, or even high-budget I reccomend spiceworks. Their community is a big help, if you want you can get ads removed by paying a $100.00/yr fee and it just plain works. Not only does it do ticket tracking but high-level reporting, software and hardware inventory, basic vendor (called Service) tracking and email integration for easy auto-logging of tickets and up-to-date information being sent to the requestor as the ticket is worked.
Overall, a great little package and highly reccomended!
Helpdesk software on the cheap...
Voting...
Whomever you support; Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or even Socialist. Today is the day to vote! No excuses, no complaints. Unless you early voted, its time to pay your due and select our new president. It comes up only once every four years, and whomever is picked, we get to deal with until 2012 so make it count.
Friday's random thoughts.
Got some more guides planned soon, have had a lot of projects planned for the coming months and if all goes right, some good will come out of it. I'm considering whether or not I want to sell my other domain name (tekpharma.com) or even if there is any demand for it. I had grand plans for it, but times just do not permit and I'm not entirely sure if it would present a conflict of interest or not now that I'm part of a larger corporation. Honestly, I don't care enough to research that aspect nor do I have the time to maintain a site as grand of a scale as I thought I would. Work just keeps me too busy as is and I like to reserve my personal time for personal projects of a smaller scale and spending time with my girl.
Some links I found interesting during the week;
Amazing homemade Lamborghini Countach (jalopnik.com) - Guy builds himself a Lamborghini Countach from scratch, in his basement. Then has to knock down wall to get it out.
AT&T filters own TOS update as spam (consumerist.com) - Spam filters at AT&T are set a little high it seems, they updated their terms of service agreement and sent it out to users. Unfortunately, the users' never got it since it ended up in the spam folder.
YO MAMA political fights on twitter (boingboing.net) - "Yo mama so fat, she thinks sub-prime is a steak cut." - hah!
Nintendo kills Wii homebrew with update (gizmodo.com) - Latest Wii update prevents the installation of the homebrew channel, those with the homebrew channel already installed seem to be working fine.
Microsoft sued in China for WGA 'black screen' (theregister.co.uk) - Recent WGA update 'blacks' screen every hour instead of nags when a pirated copy is detected, causes huge problems in China where a large (extremely large) number of users buy pirated windows for 'bout $1 USD.
Fake cop pulls over real cop (chigacotribune.com) - just as the title says.
The Sebring Story
Ok, so now that I've redirected people from my myspace page and other locations to my blog I figured here is a better place for the Sebring story.
About 2 months ago I purchased a Champagne colored 2000 Sebring Convertible JXi with around 80k miles and in excellent condition for around $5,200 or so from a local dealer. Checked it out, everything seemed fine mechanically and electrically. I bought this car to drive between home and work (64mi round trip) on a daily basis. About a week after purchase on my way home I heard what sounded like lifter knock as a car was passing by, about 2mi later I heard 'tap-tap-tap-tap-tap' getting louder the further I went. Since I was so far out of town, I did a very bad thing and drove the rest of the 30 or so miles home when the car finally died.
I got the car towed home, then to a shop not far from mine to look it over. Once the mechanic pulled the oil pain, they noticed a lot of play in the connector rod (bad bearings), no biggie, around $800 or so of work. After that peice was completed, they turned on the car and heard a lighter 'tink-tink-tink-tink' in the top of the engine. Thinking it might be the cam bearings going bad, they pulled the cam and noticed something not so good; a 1/2" chunk of the number 1 piston missing. Most likely due to the pistion slamming against the top of the #1 cylinder. Repair just got a whole lot more expensive.
My choices were to get the engine rebuilt or purchase another used engine. I went with a used engine from a wrecked 2000 Sebring Convertible Limited, 66k/mi total. The only other snag was a bad waterpump on my engine (the new engine didn't include one) which added some additional cost.
Once everything was resolved, the repairs cost me around $1,925. Not a drop in the bucket. But seeing how most 2.5L Mitsubishi engines run in the 1G 'verts, I'm expecting around 200k/mi out of this new engine before any major issues (aside from general maintainence).
I got some new plans, some cheap like the TPS and TMRS mods, some that'll cost money down the road (within the new year or two) as money and time permits; like a new sway-bar, new cat-back exaust system, new cold-air intake, MSD ignition, etc.
For those with Sebrings, I recommend the Sebring Car Club, Tom Vago's site as well as Stratusphere. All these places have excellent resources for your Sebrings or cloudcars in general.
VMWare Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS Server
A few years back VMWare released VMWare Server, a free version of their VMWare GSX Server line that gave the ability to host virtual machines for corporation and users alike. A wonderful peice of software. VMWare Server 2 has recently been released and is what's covered in this post. VMWare Server 2 comes in two flavors, Windows and Linux. We'll be using the Linux version with Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS Server. The machine we will be building is for a dedicated virtual server, its primary job is to host virtual machines. My setup is not too far from VMWare's Flagship ESX server product, with a few exceptions; While ESX server sits on top of a low-profile linux core OS (along the lines of what I plan to do here) ESX does offer some higher-end abilities that make it worth using in a true production environment;
- VMotion which moves machines from Virtual Server to Virtual Server for either load blanacing or failures depending on configuration
- SAN Path Failover (in conjunction with the above, VMotion)
- Virtual VLAN
- SLA for CPU, Memory and Disks
Notes: For this article, I'm going to use a custom PC with an AMD Athlon64 x2 (dual-core) 5000+ Processor, 4GB of RAM and 4x500GB hard drives in a raid 0+1 configuration. I'm also assuming you have a fair amount of PC and Linux knowledge for this article.
Preflight
Now, first we need a copy of Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS Server Edition, you can pick that up at the Ubuntu website under Get Ubuntu. Whether downloading or purchasing the CD, be sure to select 'Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition - Supported to 2013.'
You'll also need a copy of VMWare Server 2 and the licensing keys to go along with it. Don't worry, its free, you'll just need to sign up to get the keys. On VMWare's website, hit the 'download' now on the VMWare Server page. Register for the keys and download the .tar ball (not the deb, rpm or any other version of the file, you want the .tar/.tar.gz).
Other tools will come in handy, for example PuTTy and WinSCP if working from a Windows machine. PuTTy to SSH to your Ubuntu box and WinSCP to transfer the VMware Server install you downloaded. In my case, I'm working from my primary windows machine.
Ubuntu Install
Once you have obtained or burned the CD or USB stick, boot the PC and start the installation process.
Hostname
Under hostname, my server will be called DRGNSVR01, I'll refer to that name here on out.
Partitioning
Now at the partition configuration, you can go with defaults if you would like. For a production system, I strongly recommend against this, especially if you are using growing disk virtual machines from vmware workstation as you can easily fill your available space and if root ("/") is on the same partition as your virtual machines, could mean very, VERY bad things.
My partitioning is like so (1TB of Space);
Partition - Size
/boot - 100MB
/ (root) - 150GB
/var - 50GB
/virtualmachines - 800GB
Software Selection (packages)
For this server, i'm going to select OpenSSL and leave everything else blank. When prompted, change the settings to your liking/environment.
Ubuntu Configuration
Once Ubuntu has booted, login and do the following to update your apt-get lists and update your instance of ubuntu. You can do this by issuing the following command;
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgradeThis can take anywhere from 5 to 35min depending on how fast your connection is and how out of date Ubuntu is. After its complete, now would be the time to reboot. Since you made a pretty major change and the Kernel just got updated.
Webmin Install
Webmin is an excellent management and reporting utility for linux, webmin basically gives you the ability to manage most of the features/servers of ubuntu through a handy web interface. In my opinion, its a lot easier to manage and more secure than having X installed. First, you'll need to install the prequisits by issuing the following command;
sudo apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl libmd5-perlNow, look at the webmin site under the download section and either download the webmin_1.430_all.deb file to your machine and transfer it over via winscp or issue the following command on yoru ubuntu box;
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.430_all.debOnce the file has downloaded, issue the dpkg -i command as follows;
sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.430_all.debNow, one more thing you'll have to do is set a root password so you can connect to both webmin and later, the vmware server web interface. Run the following command to change the 'root' password;
sudo passwdOnce the password has been changed, you can now connect to the webmin interface at https://servername:10000 (in my case, https://DRGNSVR01:10000) and login via the root username and password.
VMWare Installation
Before installing VMWare Server 2, you'll need to install the prequisits by issuing the following command;
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-kernel-devel linux-headers-server xinetdAs with any major change, now is a good time for a reboot. Once the server is rebooted, copy over the vmware installation to your ubuntu server. You can do this a number of ways; SCP, CD or USB. I'll use SCP via WinSCP to copy it over. Once its over, decompress the file;
gzip -cd VMware-server-2.0.0-116503.i386.tar.gz | tar xvf -Now enter the vmware-server-distrib directory and run;
sudo ./vmware-install.plFrom here, follow the defaults and let vmware do what it wants to do. If you created a seperate store for the virtual machines, be sure to specify that when prompted. If you didn't, you can always change it via the console. Keep an eye on what vmware asks you, this will take about 10 to 15min or so since it has to configure various portions and compile supporting applications and kernel modules.
Once VMWare Server is installed, I recommend a reboot. Its not required but its a good idea to reboot prior to running virtual guests on it (I've seen wierdness). Once you've rebooted, you can now login to vmware by going to https://yourserver:8333 (in my case, https://DRGNSVR01:8333) and login with the root account (you did set the password earlier, right?)
Post installation notes
- Be sure you set the root password, look up under the webmin install. If you haven't you won't be able to get into webmin or vmware console.
- In the webconsole, you can change datastores (where your virtual machines are located), users who have access to the system and many other aspects of vmware.
- If you plan on copying virtual machines over, I recommend installing samba (sudo apt-get install samba) and configuring a share via webmin. I find it faster than using winscp, which is odd, but it works.
- Becareful using apt-get dist-upgrade if the server is in a production environment. If a kernel upgrade is in place, you'll need to re-run vmware-config.pl (sudo vmware-config.pl) to have vmware config recomplile the modules, otherwise your virtual machines WILL NOT START UP after a reboot until you do so. I recommend; shutting down any virtual machines, running the dist-upgrade, rebooting, running vmware-config and rebooting once more. As always; if you have a production box its a stellar idea to have a development box you can test large upgrades on FIRST. That way you know what to expect if something doesn't go right.
HP Advanced ILO
If you're running any HP based servers that support ILO, its best to spring for the advanced package. Typically around $400 or so but provides you with some pretty rock solid features.
- Virtual KVM
- Terminal Services Integration
- Virtual Media & Folders
- LDAP integration
- Historical reporting on Power
- Console Replay
Seriously, the Virtual Media and Folders pretty much make the whole package worth it. Even if you're not with HP based servers, Dell and IBM both offer their own ILO alternatives. Being able to troubleshoot a machine via console over VPN is a valuable tool.
