Saturday, July 28, 2007

Built myself a kitwing

With windsurfing being one of my passions i found the "kitewing" (http://www.kitewing.com/), a combination between a surf-rigg and a hang-glider. Funny thing :) ... decided to build one by myself.
Here pics from the final design and development :)


Ok, looks good so far.
For now i was able to only test it shortly on a small path, during rain and with very mixed wind and it worked ok. After this first test i optimized some tubes and now i am waiting for wind .... I plan to take it with me to one of the next surf-trips to the dutch coast. (will post a video from the next session)

hang loose


disclaimer:
(afaik) Kitewing is trademark of Kitwing Sports Ltd. I do not have any associations with this company but just like their idea and product

Monday, July 23, 2007

openQRM at the Virtualization workshop at Linuxhotel

As announced the virtualization workshop at Linuxhotel took place this weekend (20.7. - 22.7.2007). One topic of this event was how to manage diffrent virtualization technologies with openQRM. As member of the openQRM-Team i (happily) was invited to contribute and to provide some details about the virtualization features in openQRM.

Here a report of the weekend :

Friday (evening):

At friday evening all participants of the workshop arrived at Linuxhotel in Essen.
At first Michael, from the Linuxhotel, gave
us a guided tour through the hotel, showed us all its nice features and the awesome garden.

The hotel is located in a quiet area upon a hill,
surrounded by a small forest, with a wonderful view across Essen and the river Ruhr. On the computing aspects it provides a full equipped conference room, free wifi, a linux-computer at every guest-room, direct network-access by ethernet cable in the rooms and additional computer/laptops to use by the guest.
This is really the place to be when it comes to Linux workshops and courses!

Because of mixed weather conditions the barbecue was moved to Saturday.
We had a huge Pizza for dinner, yummy. The event started by an introduction round and people were starting to move to the conference room, preparing for saturday until about 3 o'clock in the morning.


Saturday:

After a good night and a great breakfast we immediately started to work on
the different topics of virtualization. While some people were playing with Xen, Qemu, Drbd + live-migration of vms others were installing openSolaris to get into zones or using FAUmachine to virtualize hardware. Myself i was setting up some computers from my development lab to get an openQRM-server plus the Xen-plugin (and several other plugins) running. Meanwhile i assisted Henning who was compiling and installing openQRM.

At about noon i gave a presentation of openQRM's virtualization features and how openQRM manages and conforms the differnet virtuliazation technologies followed by a demonstration of the Xen-plugin on the openQRM environment set up before.

In the afternoon Stefan, from the FAUmachine project, gave a great presentation about the capabilities and features of FAUmachine. Its virtual machine runs completely in user-space and is able to simulate specific hardware even with the possibility to inject errors to e.g. simulate a faulty hardware. A really cool project especially useful for automated testing.

At the end of the day we had a wonderful and tasty barbecue as planned. On all tables people were discussing the varios experiences made during the day. Lots of tips and tricks were exchanged and new connections were made. At late night people again started to move the the conference room and continued working. Some of them until about 5 o'clock in the morning.
Loong day, short night.


Sunday:

Again a good breakfast after the short night.

People were forming loosely groups, walking around in the wonderful green area of the Linuxhotel talking about further plans and new ideas while others were sitting in the sun with the notebooks or at their computers in the conference room continuing working on their favourite virtualization technology. The offical part of the virtualization workshop was finished by a barbecue again. Nice !


Results of the workshop regarding openQRM :

- We need to get better on Debian !

- Build requirements checks should be enhanced to make compilation easier + more robust
- More documentation and howto's are needed especially about openQRM + virtualization


Summary :

At all a very interesting and successful weekend at Linuxhotel !

Many thanks to all participants and contributors for the interesting discussions on the different aspects of virtualization and to the organization and staff of the linuxhotel for giving everybody a really good time. Big thanks also to the sponsors and of course to Henning, the organizator of the virtualization workshop.


Urls :


Virtualization workshop

openQRM project
FAUmachine project
DRBD
Linuxhotel

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Automatic installations for Suse and Debian now working fine

Currently working on the LinuxCoe-plugin for openQRM and just got the Suse- and Debian-based automatic installations working fine :)

Here a developement-screenshot from an automatic openSuse-installation monitored via vncviewer (a feature of autoyast):



Need to do some more tests now and will prepare a new release soon.

Enjoy !