Mail migration
As a response to my crashed firewall, I decided to retire my hobby mail server running Postfix/Dovecot on Ubuntu Server. Instead I have decided to join the masses and go for a hosted exchange service instead. For a die-hard Linux freak as yours truly, this sucks. However, on the flip side, I gain better reliability and set of services, such as beside of synching mail to my Android HTC Hero mobile, I also get calendar and contacts.
Before summer I was looking intensively for a open source version of calendaring and contacts that allowed me to synch to a mobile phone. I tried eGroupware with Funambole client. But there were allways some part that didn’t work, whever I got something to work.
Now, when I’m on the move frequently I need a working solution for mobile mail/calendar/contacts that also works with a desktop client. Google mail wasn’t an option becuase they doesn’t seem to have a professional solution for a small-business.
As long as it comes to pure mail management using the postfix/dovecot/spam-assasin/postgray combo, it works flawlessly. But finding a decent (open source) calendar and contacts server, accessing them over HTTPS from a hotel room or via a mobile phone, is not possible.
Running a SOHO server(s) has its moments, when the broadband connection goes down, when the home assembled firewall crashes or just the cat plays with a cable that happens to be cord to the ADSL modem. Last summer (2008), the firewall crashed due to iover-heating. It was an old PC baught for my son when we were living in London 2001. The problem was, me and my wife was at the Canary Islands for another two weeks. After that I got some new hardware from a local computer store and it lasted for a year. The firewall software I’m using is Smoothwall, which used to be a very decent OS-based firewall. However, they haven’t upgraded the bundled drivers for many years, which results in it’s not able to install on modern hardware.
When the firewall crashed recently I bought a brand-new (cheap) PC, just to discover for the second time that Smoothwall doesn’t install on contemporary hardware. I wasn’t particulary tempted to build my own distribution with the appropriate drivers, at the same time I was cut-off from the net. So, I found a spare machine from 2004, which allowed installation of Smoothwall. But, as I said in the beginning of this post, I will not wait for this junk to crash, so I have migrated the mail handling elsewhere.
The next step will be to migrate the webs {www, blog, lib}.ribomation.com. I will write another post, when it’s done. Probably it will take some time, because I will be on the move for several weeks during September and October. Next week I will run a series of seminars on Cloud Computing, Groovy & Grails and trends in Application Development. The following weeks I will teach Erlang, Real-time Systems Programming in C++, more seminars and then more Erlang and RT++. It goes on like this until November. It’s fun and intensive.
Convenient installation of Ubuntu @ KVM
This is my second post regarding virtualization using KVM on Ubuntu. You might want to read the previous tutorial first.
The last thing we did was to install Ubuntu using an ISO file and then after within the new VM, install Apache and show how one could access it from somewhere else at the LAN. This is all you need in order to start create your own VMs. However, the creation process can be improved in several ways. First, there are high-level tools like the virt-* tools, which I will address in some other post. Second there is a way to improve how a Ubuntu VM is defined.
JeOS
There is an ingenious shell script named ubuntu-vm-builder, that both creates the virtual disk and downloads all required packages of Ubuntu and creates a ready to use system, without the need to first download the ISO and then proceed through the (tediuos) installation process.
In addition, the flavour of Ubuntu is (normally) JeOS (Just enough OS), which is a shrink-wrapped Ubuntu Server OS optimized for running within a VM. It’s foot print is just 300Mb.
Installation
Start by installing the script
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-vm-builder
Usage
The minimal command line you can use to create a Ubuntu (8.04) system on KVM is
sudo ubuntu-vm-builder kvm hardy
This will create disk file in a generated sub-directory, download and install the JeOS packages and leave you with a fresh VM which you can launch (as usual) and logon to using ubuntu/ubuntu as usr/pwd. There are of course plenty of command line switches you in practice want to use. See ‘man ubuntu-vm-builder’ and/or ‘ubuntu-vm-builder –help’ för more information.
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Jens Riboe
