Posts tagged Hosting
Speeding up CSS
Jan 31st
As web pages become richer and more complex, they can also become burdened with numerous CSS files, background images, icons, and scripts which put additional load on your network and degrade the user experience of your website. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to improve things.
The Value and Cost of Persistent Data
Jan 27th
I’ve been cleaning out my house recently. There’s a lot of crud that’s just been lying around, collected through years. My wife describes me as a level 2 hoarder; she says that I would be a shoe-in for that A&E show. Going through many, many boxes that I’ve collected in the basement, I pick through each cord and think “I might need that.” I won’t need it though, so with a small mental push, I put it in the trash bag. Persistent data is a lot like that. A lot of companies have, either through policy or inertia, tons of useless information sitting on disks, or tapes, or CDs, that may be useful one day, but probably will not ever be.
Clone-tastic!
Jan 20th
There are many things about virtualization is the ability to clone virtual machines. It’s really cool! Unfortunately, after you work with virtualization for a while you start to take it for granted. I can’t tell you how many times I roll out a new physical machine and sigh because I can’t simply clone it. Well, I can but that’s a discussion for another day.
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Building things: cubicle analogy time
Jan 4th
This week, I’ve been building (actually, rebuilding) cubicle desks in our new office space and comparisons were naturally drawn to building virtual machines a few weeks ago.
Kickstart your Linux install
Dec 30th
I’ll admit it, I’m not a huge fan of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I’ll administer it, I’ve worked with it. It’s a good distribution. I just have a bad taste for RPM based distributions based on my first forays into Linux back in my Mandrake days. I also first started to professionally work with Linux during the last couple of years of RHEL 5, when things were getting long in the tooth. Red Hat’s release schedule also conflicts with what most of my users want and expect; it’s far more suited to an corporate environment where having the latest features is not nearly as important as having consistent software versions. That being said, Red Hat has some fantastic tools; Anaconda and Kickstart being my favorite. So I was overjoyed when I discovered Ubuntu had support for Kickstart files! The Ubuntu installer can take Debian style preseed directives but in my opinion is overly complicated.
A Kickstart file basically answers the questions that pop up in the installer as the installer goes removing the need for human interaction. If an question isn’t answered, the installer pops up with the proper dialog, takes user input, and continues. I can pick and choose what information I want to populate automatically and which information dialogs I want the customer to answer. In my auto install ISOs I prompt the customer for a username and password as I want the users to enter that information.
When I was tasked with making an auto installing ISO for our customers I was able to create one quickly by using a kickstart file.
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