DBG/400 Latest News

The host server has been throwing a lot of kernel page allocation errors, mainly with kswapd, but other apps feature occasionally. Running Memtest86+ didn't show up any errors. As there was a new kernel release on Ubuntu yesterday, from 2.6.31-15-generic #50-Ubuntu to 2.6.31-16-generic #52-Ubuntu, and I've built a new VirtualBox 3.0.12 OSE package, I'm hoping it will be sorted. So far there's been no repeat of the errors in the logs.

-- MartinRowe - 5 Dec 2009

Updated Foswiki to Release 1.0.8.

-- MartinRowe - 30 Nov 2009

Host OS updated to Ubuntu 9.10 and now using VirtualBox 3.0.10 OSE.

The first Foswiki summit has taken place this weekend, and the Association voted in the initial board members.Thanks to those who made remote participation feel less remote, with mumble audio and an EtherPad session, along with the usual IRC channel.

-- MartinRowe - 22 Nov 2009

Reverted back to VirtualBox 3.0.6 OSE as I've had some weird issues with the system time on the virtual machines, particularly this main server. It got to the point where the time was only advancing by a second (or less) for every minute elapsed - not good. Looks like it might be an issue that has been in several 3.0.x versions of VirtualBox, but no common pattern that I can see.

-- MartinRowe - 21 Oct 2009

VirtualBox 3.0.8 OSE is now installed.

-- MartinRowe - 15 Oct 2009

Minor update to Foswiki - Release 1.0.7.

-- MartinRowe - 22 Sep 2009

Server now running VirtualBox 3.0.6 OSE. Had a few issues with it not bridging the network on one of the virtual machines, but that seems to have fixed itself.

-- MartinRowe - 18 Sep 2009

The server's been updated to use VirtualBox 3.0.4 OSE, again using packages built from the source. Foswiki is now at version 1.0.6 (actually done a couple of months back).

-- MartinRowe - 27 Aug 2009

VirtualBox 3.0.2 OSE is out. The Ubuntu packages have been built but are only available for Karmic (the 9.10 release, due in October). I want the SMP support it offers so I've rolled my own packages from the OSE source, using these build instructions. As a result this server is now back on two CPUs again

-- MartinRowe - 26 Jul 2009

I've been experimenting with VirtualBox as an alternative to using VMware, partly to see if there was much of difference in performance but mainly because I prefer to use FOSS applications where possible. I'm using VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) which does the job well. My backup server has been running without issues for the last few weeks, so the main server was switched over today. The only downside is that VirtualBox doesn't yet support SMP, though the host application does seem to spread the guest's load over both host CPUs, though never amounting to more than 1 CPU overall.

-- MartinRowe - 13 Jun 2009

Had some printing issues with the server's host OS Ubuntu 8.10. That's been fixed but only in Jaunty so I've taken the plunge and upgraded it to the 9.04 Release Candidate. That's fixed the print problem and everything else looks fine.

-- MartinRowe - 19 Apr 2009

The server is now running on new hardware from http://www.dnuk.com, who sell pre-installed Linux systems. I've bought a little Deskcube D500 with a low power AMD Athlon X2 dual core CPU & 4Gb RAM. As before, the hardware is running VMware server on Ubuntu with my web & mail servers running on a Debian virtual machine. I have the same setup on another machine so I can switch servers easily for maintenance, etc.

-- MartinRowe - 11 Apr 2009

Upgraded the server to Debian Lenny.

-- MartinRowe - 19 Feb 2009

Another broadband upgrade completed today. Download has more than doubled; 20mbps to 50mbps. Upload has doubled too; 768kbps to 1.6mbps. It still remains a tiny percentage of the download speed (even more so now).

-- MartinRowe - 14 Feb 2009

Hmm...It has been a while since I last updated this page. The biggest change has migrating the site from TWiki to Foswiki. You can read up on the reasons at http://foswiki.org/Home/WhyThisFork and given that pretty much all the core developers went with Foswiki it made sense to upgrade.

-- MartinRowe - 13 Jan 2009

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