That’s fine for users running proprietary software, but I have found a simple solution to flash your BIOS without even have to run WinFlash with Wine (which did not work for me anyway).

1) Download the BIN file provided on the Shuttle website for your version of the Shuttle

2) To install the flashrom package on Ubuntu (from the universe repository) enter

$ sudo apt-get install flashrom

3) Determine what is your BIOS by entering

$ sudo flashrom
[sudo] password for user1:
Calibrating delay loop… OK.
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset “NVIDIA MCP67″, enabling flash write… OK.
Found chip “PMC Pm49FL004″ (512 KB) at physical address 0xfff80000.
No operations were specified.

I obviously own a PC with the chipset Nvidia MCP67 and I check if this chipset is supported
I perform a backup of my existing BIOS and then I flash it

$ sudo flashrom -r backup.bin
$ sudo flashrom -wv SN68SP0P.BIN

SN68SP0P.BIN being the file downloaded in 1)

Reboot to check if you really have the latest version of the BIOS (press Del if you just see the hiding screen instead of the real BIOS screen) and you should see “SN68SP0P” on the top-left corner of your screen.

ATTENTION : to flash a BIOS can have severe consequences for your PC so be careful when doing it and do not make me responsible for having screwed your box

sudo modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In order to fully use your Intel processor on a HP laptop, follow the following steps :

- boot your computer
- when the BIOS window shows up, enter the BIOS manager
- enable the Virtualization technology in the BIOS menu
- save the changes and exit
- shut down your computer
- remove the battery and put it back in your PC
- boot your computer

and Intel VT should work without problem.

The usage of Linux is fostered within the company : each employee has access to LinuxCOE (which is a HP product and licensed under the General Public License) and can install his favorite distribution pretty easily on his personal computer. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Gentoo and others are at disposal and HP even provides licenses for SUSE and Red Hat.
Since MS Office is the most widespread office suite and most of my colleagues have Windows XP, it is unfortunately hard to work without it. With Crossover, which is a product based on Wine, allows me to use the MS Office suite as well as Internet Explorer 6 in some cases (*sigh*…).
The officially supported instant messaging protocol was Jabber, which is ideal to use in a GNU/Linux environment (for instance with Pidgin) but has been changed for Microsoft Communicator that I use via its web-based interface.
Due to the massive demand of employees, Firefox is officially supported by the internal IT service, in addition to IE.
On the customer side, HP is committed to Linux : the ProLiant servers are the most sold servers running GNU/Linux on the world and the Integrity servers shipped with the Itanium processors also run RHEL 5 and SLES 10 SP1. Moreover, there are lots of people at the company working as developers for open-source projects or kernel developers.

Nevertheless, the situation is not perfect for GNU/Linux or alternative software desktop users.
Linux is not officially supported by HP’s IT and there is an evident lack of communication around LinuxCOE. I even personally made senior technical consultants aware of it.
Not all internal web-based applications run correctly with Firefox and some multimedia streamed videos are encoded with codecs Linux cannot play.
I cannot share my calendar with my colleagues because Evolution does not work perfectly with Exchange 2007 (even if my e-mails and meetings invitations work fine) and there is no native application to take part to Netmeeting conferences (did someone try this solution ?). The move to Vista and MS Office 2007 is also planned but, so far, Crossover does not support this version so I hope there will be a workaround until here.

So far, using GNU/Linux as a primarily desktop operating system as an HP employee was not hard and I have been pleasantly surprised by the LinuxCOE offering, among other things. Even though I experience a little loss of productivity, I prefer to stay a little longer at work than use an other OS than GNU/Linux. If things need to do something which is really urgent and only doable under Windows, I have a VMware virtual machine ready to boot, however, this happens really rarely. So if you are hesitating to apply for a job or an internship at HP, thinking that you will not have the right/possibility/authorization tu run GNU/Linux, I hope this article will help to change your mind.

Of course, HP is a huge company and from an IT perspective, support multiple operating systems is a big effort. One the other hand, this is the best example of the advantages of respecting standards (real ones…) in order every user to have access to the information, independently of his OS.

After I wrote my degree dissertation about Xen, I took a Citrix Xenserver 4.1 training and I successfully passed the Xenserver certification.

Even if I disagree on the evolution of the project (Red Hat resigned from it, Linux distributions are optionally supported if you install the Linux pack from another DVD and, as we expected from Citrix, virtual servers running Windows are the priority of this platform), I already have a good knowledge of this technology and since it will be soon part of HP’s Insight dynamics, a management software managing virtual machines, I thought it was a good opportunity to go on with Xen. Moreover, it is still an open-source project and that is the reason why a VMware training would not have interested me that much.

Finally, I hope that HP will continue to support other virualization projects such as KVM, which is already part of the Linux kernel, and is really being pushed forward by IBM and Red Hat, for example. ]]> http://www.hmarcy.com/2008/09/citrix-certified-administrator-xenserver-enterprise-edition-4/feed/ 0 http://www.hmarcy.com/2008/09/disaster-recovery-with-xen/ http://www.hmarcy.com/2008/09/disaster-recovery-with-xen/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:45:21 +0000 admin http://www.hmarcy.com/?p=23 Xen has been the subject and of my degree dissertation (German : Diplomarbeit) I have been writing between June and September 2007.

I have been doing an internship at Hewlett Packard Germany between April and September in the Technology Solution Group division (the business division of HP for servers, storage and so on…), in the Outsourcing part of TSG.
This degree dissertation is a report of a disaster-recovery program implemented for the German bank MLP located in Wiesloch. This program has been designed by both MLP an HP people and implemented by HP colleagues and myself.

Basically, the concept is to shift a complete productive environment from one data center to another. This is achieved by a virtualized environment based on two servers SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 with Xen, two EVA 8000 (SAN solution of HP) and a HP product named “Continuous access” that mirrors constantly the content of one SAN to another.

If you want to learn more about my work, here is a link to my degree dissertation (only in German available). It is, of course, licensed under a Creative commons license.

Create a log-directory into your Subversion repository

$mkdir logs

and save the following script into the repository as svn_cron.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# Variable REPOS is the path to the repository on the server

REPOS=.
echo “”
date +”%B %d %Y”

test $# = 0 || ( echo “Please enter the path to the local copy”; exit 1 )

cd $1 2>&1 >/dev/null || ( echo “$1 does not exist”; exit 2 )

/usr/local/bin/svn info 2>&1 >/dev/null|| ( echo “$1 is not a working copy”; exit 3 )

if [ `/usr/local/bin/svn update $1 | sed -n "/^C/p" | wc -l` -ne 0 ]
then

# Collects all files and directorys which are to add on the repository
/usr/local/bin/svn status | sed -n “/^\??*/p” | sed “s/^\? *//g” > $REPOS/logs/toadd

# Collects all files and directorys which are to delete on the repository
/usr/local/bin/svn status | sed -n “/^\!?*/p” | sed “s/^\! *//g” > $REPOS/logs/todelete*//g” > $REPOS/logs/todelete

# Add and delete Subversion actions
cat $REPOS/logs/todelete | while read line; do /usr/local/bin/svn delete “${line}”; done
cat $REPOS/logs/toadd | while read line; do /usr/local/bin/svn add “${line}”; done

# SVN commit in order to save the changes with a log message
if !(/usr/local/bin/svn commit -m “Daily commit for changes done directly on the server”)
then echo “A problem has occured during the commit”
exit 3
fi

else
echo “Problem with the daily update, there may be a conflict within the following files  \! ”

# Displays the files which are currently in conflict
svn status $1
exit 4
fi
exit 0

Then edit the crontab

$crontab -e

or if you want the uploads to be done by another user

$crontab -e -u username

Of course, the user must have write permission to write on the logs directory.

Put the following lines at the end of the file

##Automatic update of the Subversion repository every day at 0:00
0  0   * * *  /path_to_your_repository/svn_cron.sh /path_to_your_local_copy >> /path_to_your_repository/logs/script_cron

And that’s it !