Check out the image, what you’re looking at is a graphical representation of the worlds top 500 supercomputers filtered by “OS” (operating system).

The top 500 list has been maintained bi-annually since 1993 by http://www.top500.org and for extreme geekery you can’t beat digging about in the stats and facts. For example, the present top dog is the US based “Jaguar” system based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory running AMD x86_64 Opteron Six Core 2600MHZ CPU’s topping out at 224162 cores in total, yes, that’s 224,162 cores, and yes, your home computer only has 2 cores.

Supercomputer time is quite something, for example a 1 second calculation would take your home system a full 10 hour day to match whilst an hours worth of processing would tie up your processor for 4 whole years (24/7..!). Clicking through the other tabs is also interesting, although it’s no big surprise to see IBM and Intel heading the manufacturer and processor categories.

Stats aside, its the OS which I think highlights the biggest point here. Yes, it’s Linux, but not “just” Linux, it’s virtually ALL Linux, no other operating system is as scalable or as stable, and what’s even more fun is knowing you can enjoy such super-computing resilience yourself for FREE by simply opting for one of the excellent desktop Linux releases such as Ubuntu 10.04 (for business) or Linux Mint (for home).

Admittedly you’re not going to match the actual processing power – well, unless you’ve some serious hardware going on under your desk

TooMuchGreen has officially regressed to it’s former blog status, it likes being a blog and we enjoy blogging through it.

The “business” side of things is now fully re-branded as the wonderful MEBBI™ Solutions.

MEBBI™ Solutions provide all the services previously offered by TooMuchGreen plus a few new additions, why not visit our lovely new website and have a look around..

http://mebbi.net

Sector awareness for the benefits of open source adoption is rapidly growing amongst the forward thinking enterprise. An open source solution provides not only a comprehensive replacement but delivers added security and performance boosts to existing systems whilst offering huge reductions in immediate expenditure and long term cost of ownership.

Perhaps it’s time you spoke to MEBBI™.

We’ll shortly be holding some integration workshops at NTI in Leeds so keep an eye on the TooMuchGreen blog for details. Areas covered will include..

• Ubuntu Linux client builds
• Network & domain configuration
• User account creation and access
  
• Microsoft application optional installs
• Network share (SAMBA) connectivity & mappings
• Microsoft Exchange eMail & groupware integration with Evolution
• Microsoft Active Directory connectivity & authentication with Likewise
• Active directory enterprise user account management (GUID & OU configurations)

I’m a huge fan of the Mac Mini and think it has been one of Apples most under developed and under rated units, in fact I’m on my 3rd one at the moment now the MacBook Air has been eBayed. Needs as must however and although it’s the somewhat older 1.42ghz G4 model it’s no real detriment to me as (compared to the video hungry masses) all my own daily apps are probably as low end as you can get these days (“Terminal” isn’t that resource intensive). Obviously I would relish the prospect of owning an 8 core Mac Pro but I honestly have no need for one.

The new Mac Mini “Server” is a most welcome addition to the range and although not yet in the realms of what would be classed as real server technology it’s certainly heading in the right direction with it’s two hard disks, redundancy is the name of the game when it comes to servers and multiple drive RAID configurations are a must.

With a mere two disk offering your options or still somewhat limited and in this instance you’d be advised to opt for RAID 1 (mirrored disks), yes you lose half of the available storage space by doing so but the other option for a two disk setup, RAID 0, merely stripes data across both drives. Although RAID 0 does provide a performance increase two disk stripe sets offer no inherent redundancy, if one disk fails it’s game over for all your data (unless you’ve backed it up of course).

Ideally I’d have liked Apple to have added an extra ethernet port for network redundancy, adapter teaming options and as provision for limited LTSP, after all if they’re tagging this model as a server then what need is there for a bank of four USB ports? You only need one to rebuild the system (there’s no DVD drive in this model).

Technical shortfalls aside it’s the form factor and power efficiency of the Mini which are the winners here. During 2007 I ran a clients property management website from an OSX 10.4 Server enabled G4 Mini sat in the airing cupboard of my current lodgings at that time in Harrogate, the web link was provided via DynDNS across an 8mb Orange home internet connection and everything ran quite literally problem free for six months until we migrated it to some “real” hosting. Page delivery times were more than acceptable and apart from the notably generic web address provided by the free DynDNS service there was no other indication of it’s rather interesting location.

A few years ago there was talk of the Mini drifting into end of line but with increasingly realised adoption for it’s amazing versatility and new forays into Mini Server world it’s nice to see it now standing even taller in the line up.

Good things come in small packages.

As has been the case with me over the past two years I’m once again in a rented apartment at the mercy of someone else’s Wi-Fi with no resulting control or access to the router. It’s all somewhat limiting should I wish to dabble in any external DynDNS malarkey (which I do) but I get by SSH-ing around the LAN to the wondrous little Dell Mini 9″ and it’s certainly a notch up from running a virtual machine on the MacBook Air, in fact it’s actually a most useful set up and a really don’t know how I ever managed before.

The landlord here has been most accommodating and credit to him has tried to arrange my own connection, however due to a six week string of banal events revolving around the comms guys continually turning up at No.4 instead of No.11 (me) we’ve given up and canceled the request, fair enough, I’ll save €15 a month and the knock on effect of doing so has stuck another feather in the Mini’s cap for use as a DNS caching unit.

For those who aren’t sure what I’m on about basically a DNS server is a special “network” computer which translates IP addresses to recognisable names (and vice versa), i.e when you type www.google.com into Firefox a combination of DNS servers translate behind the scenes and deliver the search page to you from the actual IP address of Google (66.102.9.105), the server also remembers addresses it’s visited and keeps a record of them to speed up delivery for future requests.

The pipe to the outside world here tops out at just under 2MB (on a good day) however it’s connected through the pool.einsundeins.de domain which isn’t the most dynamic, couple that with a stretched Wi-Fi signal and things become a touch laborious at certain times of the day, so I thought I’d try a bit of local DNS caching to see if I could help things along.

Your computer at home (or at work) invariably makes it’s “DNS” calls to your ISP’s servers out on the internet, this process is relatively quick but obviously not as quick as if it were pinging a unit sat on your local network and with Ubuntu this is very easy to set up using something called BIND9 (Berkley Internet Naming Daemon Version 9). By default Bind is configured to act as a caching server however you need to tweak a few settings so it’s relative to itself and knows where to go to look up un-cached domain names it doesn’t know about (forwarders).

The first thing to do is fix the IP of the unit you’ll be using from DHCP to static, once done install BIND..

sudo apt-get install bind9

..next type..

sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.options

..uncomment the “forwarders” section and add the following (I use OpenDNS IP’s, OpenDNS is superb)..

forwarders {
208.67.220.220;
208.67.222.222;
};

..save the file.

Now we need to edit the /etc/resolv.conf file so it knows where to find the “namerservers” (including itself), at the command line type..

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

..and add/make sure the file reads as follows..

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 206.67.222.222

..close the file and save then restart BIND..

sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart

That’s it, you’re done.

To test delivery times open a terminal and dig the URL of a website you haven’t visited before, for example..

dig www.ubuntu4business.com

Check the query time then execute the command again, see the difference? Admittedly it’s only milliseconds we’re dealing with here but you WILL notice a boost.

The beauty of this solution is that it provides a browser boost to any type or any amount of computers on your LAN, it’s a great quick, easy and cheap solution for both home and business, just point all primary DNS entries at your new caching unit’s IP address and away you go. My IMAP mail account performance has been painful for the past few months with continuing hangups ranging from folders not displaying to general time outs but now it’s happy and snappy again.

Mobile server development can be tricky, or do I mean mobile development for servers? A few weeks ago it would have been the latter however thanks to the superb little Dell Mini 9 I can now deliver both whilst simultaneously sipping a nice latte in the Cafe “Tous les Jours” across the street

Presently ensconced as I am for a couple of months in the contemporary and alluring area of Prenzlauer Berg in the new East of Berlin my initial idea was to pull server development out of VMWare Fusion on the increasingly tired MacBook Air over to some real hardware I could leave powered up 24/7 in the background *doing stuff*, the plan involved a recently purchased Mac Mini G4 which I intended to use headless as the Ubuntu Server box, the less mirrored 9.04 PPC version was readily available so I loaded it up before I came, it was impressively quick too and after a year of patience with struggling VM instances I was really looking forward to getting down to business with it.

Anyway, as is the case with my life over the past two years things didn’t pan out as expected, predominantly down to the lack of a hard-wired internet connection in the apartment, there’s Wi-Fi sporadically drifting in and out but with a flaky up and down signal varying anywhere between 0.3 and 1MB things weren’t that conducive from the start, yes the Mac Mini has Wi-Fi but with no monitor and a text based server install of 9.04 sat on it there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting that fired up, OK then, time to create a plan B.

Plan B came in the shape of a refurb Dell Mini 9 off eBay and a view to utilise the internal Wi-Fi network infrastructure, however as this is the Rich B of today once again things didn’t go exactly as I hoped. The poor link to the outside world I could have coped with however when the Mini 9 arrived the discovered lack of any internal routing whatsoever around the already lacking network meant there was no Webmin, no local Apache browsing, not even any SSH, and as for syncing my wireless iPod Touch apps, forget it, not ideal, my I.T can’t communicate, snookered again.

Internet connectivity is now booked for this Thursday and even though I’ve lost almost three weeks I’ve managed to occupy myself and I’m now just hoping it comes together, what work I could do with the Mini has actually being quite upbeat, albeit just not “server” orientated.

Firstly I stuck full blown 9.04 on it so I could further install the server tools (there’s no tasksel option from the 8.04 netbook remix), this was quite straightforward and just involved a bit of Unetbootin to my spare USB pen drive. Once fired up I was super impressed to find out all the essentials worked straight off the bat and after a few codec tweaks plus installs of Twitux, Thunderbird, Skype & VLC I began to realise what a great little unit it was becoming, as such I took it for an afternoon out across the road to “Tous les Jours” for some latte drinking and review writing, 3+ hours later I returned to the apartment with a reported 1 hour battery life still backed up, very impressive to say the least, especially as I’d had the W-Fi on continually sucking away at their ego bashing 3.5MB free connection, were I using the MacBook Air I’d have had to go back for a re-charge and long missed the finalising session and leisurely cup of afternoon Earl Grey.

I’ve since stuck DropBox on the little beast (an idea I had during the 1st latte) so I can keep things in sync with the Air and although the 9 only comes with a potentially limiting 8GB SSD (of which it reported 3.5GB free btw) I just pointed things at my 64GB SpaceLoopXL pendrive, I could use a card in the SD slot of course but I just don’t have one and don’t really see any need, the SpaceLoop is fine.

So, that’s it for now, at least it’s primed and ready for Thursday and I have no doubt it’s going to be gem for server dev also, so much so it’s all really got me thinking about increased potential for SSD storage as an option for servers. SSD’s are quiet, energy efficient, super quick and I’m wondering how long it will be until the first fully SSD’d server room get’s exposure and how much reported air con resource it will save as a result of losing all those mechanical spinning monsters? The Mini 9 also runs Vuze and I’ve noted after it sitting there all night working away with the lid shut come morning when re-opened there’s nothing heated or untoward going on and it’s as cool as it was when I said goodnight, figuratively (of course), contrary to what people may think I don’t talk to my computers (although I will take them for a latte if they’ve been good).

So, you’ve registered your domain and have your Linux VS ready to roll, what’s next? Well, rather than wrestle with the bottomless world of hardcore geekdom at the convoluted CLI you could do a lot worse than install the ECHP domain management tool.

EHCP is open source and thus free to download and use, it comes very well supported and the website supplies what could be THE all time best procedural “How To” for installation I have ever come across (if you excuse the ‘interesting’ english) with clickable “Yes/No” confirmation checks and resulting problem resolves after each stage (admittedly the ‘concept’ sections aren’t as yet fully complete). Install is as follows..

sudo apt-get install wget
wget www.ehcp.net/download
tar -zxvf ehcp_latest.tgz
cd ehcp
./install.sh
#

..it’s an incredibly long old install (seemingly at least three to four times longer than a base server install alone) and you’re asked various bits and bobs along the way so pay attention (MySQL passwords etc), however it’s all nothing too major and to be honest if you’re at a stage of wanting to manage your own domain hosting you’ll more than likely be at an easy level of suitable technical knowledge to cope with both the install and later domain import and configuration, if not you’ll work it out.

Once installed you access the admin interface through http://”your IP number“/ (if you haven’t fully configured base domain & DNS access it will tell you and either click through or use http://”your IP number“/vhost/ehcp/ then once in resolve things alongside the main domain config), username is “admin” and the password will be one you created during the setup.

An interesting point of note which could speed things along during later LAMP installs is that EHCP installs phpMyAdmin for you, which is useful, useful also are the included modules for eMail, FTP & MySQL services & config, however it’s the “Easy Add”, “Bulk Add” and “DNS Only” domain click throughs which are the bread and butter, or there again, you could always wrestle with the command line for days on end (personally I’d rather use the time more productively to drink beer and watch TV).

Optimised I.T ‘Virtualisation’ is finally becoming the realised norm across the carbon hungry server rooms of today, and not before time either.

For those who aren’t fully aware the term basically describes a method of installing multiple software ‘machines’ on a single hardware unit (a server) and saves untold amounts of previously wasted, and increasingly expensive, electrical energy. Contrary to what you may think the vast majority of server operating systems don’t need all encompassed access to the full power of the hardware they’re installed on, those expansive arrays of hard disks and fans which suck up the amps are there merely to provide resilience and scalability than contribute to any high end processing delivery, plus, unlike that desktop PC of yours there’s no requirement for the pull of high end graphics engines either.

Although already widespread across internet hosts thanks to the lucrative cost effectiveness of being able to rack up (and sell) a box with umpteen virtual servers installed on it it’s in the business enterprise where the necessary attention has been seriously lacking up until quite recently. I know from first hand experience that it was far from unusual to have a room full of energy hungry high end servers sat sucking up electricity and air-con resource whilst ticking over at 5% load (maximum), most certainly. You’d have your mail server, your storage array, a domain controller (or two) and quite possibly several more disparate database units and/or ad-hoc legacy departmental W.H.Y’s all just sat there in the rack happily gorging through enough power in a week to keep several third world communities in light and heat for substantially longer than anyone would care to believe or be bothered about even if they did, a blinkered, inefficient and shamefully decadent state of affairs to say the least.

However times are changing and needless to say the progressive world of Ubuntu is once again smoothing the way for us, as of version 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Ubuntu Server comes combined with a ‘Virtual’ install option, previously (up to 8.10) this was a seperate download tagged as the jeOS version (pronounced “juice”).

jeOS (and now the Virtual option) was (and is) an efficient variant of the full server OS optimised for installation inside virtual environments from the likes of VM Ware or KVM, benefits include a substantially reduced footprint, better performance and fewer updates (resulting in less maintenance), not only that but the option for installing it couldn’t be simpler, seriously, check this out.

• Pre-configure your virtual destination drive

• Boot as usual from the regular Server CD (or .ISO / .DMG file).

• Select the F4 (or fn F4) “Mode” Option

• Choose “Install a minimal Virtual Machine”

• Proceed as normal selecting your required server components.

That’s it.

I had another day tweaking our office based Jaunty 9.04 development box this week and was reminded just how easy it is to set up an open source e-commerce platform these days, in under an hour we had OSCommerce running alongside a populated installation of ZenCart. With the rest of the day to kill (the buses aren’t that regular back from El Llano to Tamarindo) I stuck some CMS on there too for James to fiddle with, you can never have too many development platforms, especially on a 64 bit unit.

When I say that the buses aren’t too regular they actually are (regular) as it goes, regularly either one or two in an afternoon, with *afternoon* starting around 4pm and quite easily extending until  after 7pm. I had the pleasure of one such endurance session at the bus stop there the other night and although it was entertaining (up to a point) watching the assortment of battered locals on even more battered motocross bikes visit the garage to top up various cola/water/lemonade bottles with petrol (for what I can only imagine to be even more battered motocross bikes back home) I’d had enough after two hours and trudged back down into the mosquito rich darkness of the village to prey on James good nature for a lift home (Thanks mate).

Anyway, the server, WordPress and Joomla went in seamlessly (as they always do) however Drupal was a bit of a pain, for some reason it kept looping back to the installation stage after re-securing the php config files (which you have to do post install), anyway I worked it’s game out after several round trips, or should I say *my* game, I’d been forgetting to check ‘execute’ on the file permissions and was just leaving things as read only, the half wit that I am (we all have *those* days though I suppose)

All done though and it’s happily sat there as a fully loaded and updated 9.04 development box, php scripting is whipping along quite happily with sendmail (after I stuck some manual domain entries in the resolv.conf) and it’s now sending in seconds rather than minutes, I’ve even put curl on there for added sauce (source?).

As I’m going to live in Berlin for a while from July what I could really do with is some sort of firewall bypass ‘LogMeIn‘ style SSH CLI access across the internet, I *can* connect to James’ Vista box and putty across but it would be much cleaner if I could get straight on the Server itself, I’ve been mooching round Hamachi and may be getting closer, just not that apparently, more in optimism then resolution in fact. For info (and before you offer it as a solution) port forwarding isn’t possible or else I’d use VNC, no, not in Costa Rica, well not in our office anyway. The office web connection routers’ external IP is in the 10.XXX.XXX.XXX private address range, it’s insane, the whole area is part of one big private class A business network served by Cabletica from Liberia under a singe web facing IP, it’s unbelievable (and further explains why I had to manually tweak the resolv.conf, systems behind our office router don’t even pick up the “domain.name”).

If anyone’s got any ideas for quick, easy (and free) tunneled SSH (without a need for port forwarding) I’d be keen to hear them, up until then (and until the Web VS comes online) then it may have to be the long way round for a while (if and when of course), I can’t be spending much more time at that damned bus stop.

As both an OSX user and a Linux developer find a localised LAMP installation somewhat useful. There are a couple of methods to achieve this, the quick way, and the *real* way.

The first method is to simply download and install the MAMP bundle. This comes as a self contained single package which runs completely from it’s own folder with *one click* stop and start (see the header image) , it’s free, it uses it’s own version of Apache and removal is as easy as just deleting the folder. MAMP is quick and stable and it couldn’t be simpler to install, it’s ideal as a quick test platform for your dynamic websites and php scripting however if your drop is more toward the actual ‘LAMP-ness’ of LAMP development you may prefer to install the real deal using a more professional approach, if so here’s the How To.

Apache

OSX comes with it Apache2 installed so it just needs enabling. Very simple, in System Preferences look for the ‘sharing‘ tab and just click ‘Web Sharing‘, that’s it, remember this as you’ll need to use it for restarting Apache later.

Php

Leopard comes with php however it’s a basic version and doesn’t have all the goodies needed for full MySQL functionality, as such it’s recommended to use the excellent entropy packaged installation from Marc Liyanage. Download from HERE, click and install.

To test php create a text file containing the following single line..

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

..save it as test.php in your /’username’/sites directory, re-start the webserver (web sharing) through system prefs and go to http://localhost/test.php, you should see an extensive list of resplendent php goodness

MySQL

I presently find version 5.0.82 works best with phpMyAdmin under OSX as oppose to the newer 5.1 release, download it (HERE) and install the main package, the startup item & the preference pane, it’s all quite straightforward. Once done it just needs a touch of fine tuning, open up terminal again and type the following (entering user-name & password when requested)..

cd /usr/local/mysql

sudo chown -R mysql data/

..start the service through the newly installed utility under System Preferences and in Terminal type the following (this is to secure the DB and set a password)..

sudo mysql_secure_installation

..quite self explanatory, and it will prevent a nasty #1045 DB access error when firing up phpMyAdmin for the first time.

PhpMyAdmin

To install firstly download the latest stable release from HERE, click to expand, rename the folder to just ‘phpmyadmin’ and move it to the sites directory alongside the test.php file you created earlier.

Inside the phpmyadmin folder locate the config.sample.inc.php file, open it in a text editor, at the top of the file you’ll see the following line..

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ”; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */

..input a string of letters and numbers (of your own choice) as follows and re-save as config.inc.php

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ‘insert1234567′; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */

Restart Apache again and that should be it, log in at http://localhost/phpmyadmin with ‘root‘ + the password you created earlier.