Category Archives: English

Top 5 Spiders Visiting

Technology, , , , , , , ,

I guess you all know how search engines index the web. They send robots, or spiders, to surf the web and collect information about different pages. About a week ago I installed StatPress on my WordPress installation to collect some statistics about my visitors. 

StatPress is a plug-in for WordPress which allows for real-time statistics about visitors. It reports most popular posts, browsers, search terms used to find your blog and also which search company visits your site most frequently.

In these 7  days I’ve had StatPress installed it has collected the following information about the search companies indexing my site. The results are in percentage of visitors recognized by StatPress as spiders:

  • Baidu – 34.2% (344 visits)
  • Google – 14.7% (148 visits)
  • Yahoo! – 11.4% (115 visits)
  • MSN – 7.7% (77 visits)
  • Radian6 – 7.5% (75 visits)

The latter one I haven’t even heard about, but apparently they’re working on social media. Or in their own words:

“Radian6 created tools to help remove the barriers to effective social media monitoring and analysis.”

This list may not be 100% accurate since StatPress only lists spiders which is know to it. At least I think that’s what it does, because I have yet to see a single entry from any Norwegian search engine. But then again, maybe they’re not aggressive enough to get onto the list?

VI Client and VMware Server

Technology, Virtualization, VMware

Found a nice tip for using VMwares Infrastructure Client to manage VMware Server, a product which is usually managed via web interface. The tip is to simply add the port number of the web interface after the server name or ip address in Infrastructure Client. I.e. “servername:8333”, where 8333 is the default port number for VMware Servers web interface.

The reason for this is most likely that VMware Server is installed as an application on top of an operating system. This underlying operating system might very well use the default SSL port number, 443, for its own web service already.

However; If you’re running VMware Server exclusively, it should be possible to change the port number of the web interface to 443, thus avoiding this issue all together. At least my guess is that this will work.

If you want a free hypervisor, but don’t want the trouble of maintaining an underlying operating system, I would recommend taking a look at VMware ESXi. I’ve written a blog post about it. The only reason, as I can see, to run VMware Server is the hardware support, since the operating system takes care of this. VMware ESXi has limited hardware support by default. But there are ways to get support for SATA controllers, among other things.

Also; You might want to check out Citrix XenServer, which also has been released for free. This is a bare-metal hypervisor, meaning you don’t need an underlying operating system. But I don’t have any experience with XenServer, so I can’t really give any advice or tips yet.

Credit:

[1] http://www.desktop-virtualization.com/2009/02/25/use-infrastructure-client-to-manage-vmware-server/

Citrix XenServer Available for Free

Technology, Virtualization, , , , ,

Several news sites reports today that Citrix is going to make XenServer available free, which is based upon the open source Xen hypervisor. Last year VMware released their own hypervisor, ESXi, for free.

Apparantly the big money isn’t in the hypervisor anymore, but the technology to manage them. Giving away your product is the best way to get more customers.

Citrix says their hypervisor, XenServer, has a couple of features not available throught VMwares ESXi, at least not without opening your wallet. For instance, ESXi is a 32-bit bare-metal hypervisor, whereas XenServer is a 64-bit bear-metal hypervisor. XenServer can also handle up to 8 virtual CPUs, while ESXi only handles 4.

Citrix has released a list of features included at no costs on their site.

Threepwood Goes to VMware ESXi

Technology, Virtualization, VMware, , , , , ,

My home server, Threepwood, named after the main character in the popular game series “Monkey Island”, has finally taken the step out of this world and into the virtual space.

For a few years it resided within a Compaq Proliant 400 with whooping 384MB of RAM and 450MHz CPU. Running Ubuntu Linux, this has actually been enough for most of the tasks. It has mainly been used to host a few blogs, my brother and mine, thus running Apache2, MySQL and PHP5.

Now that I’ve got VMware ESXi running, I decided it was time to move already. To move it I used VMware Converter, which can move physical machines into VMware ESX and ESXi while the source machine is online. To minimize data loss I stopped the Apache and MySQL services.

The conversion took about 1 hour, but then again I only had a 40GB hard drive, so times may vary depending on hard drive size and network capabilities.

After the conversion I took the time to upgrade the kernel and other packages. Until today my server had 294 days uptime, so one might say it was due for a new kernel. I also gave it some more memory to play with, 1596MB to be exact, and a 2.40GHz CPU.

Yeah, I know. I’m spoiling him.