[ILUG] Impressed with lnux on the deskop (again)

[Conor Wynne]

Hi all,

My hardware is as follows:
P4 Hyperthreaded, 1GB RAM and 350GB SATA disk.

It runs (and will stay running at this stage) RHEL5.1 for Xen, samba, cup
server, iSCSI target and used as a workstation.
There are two Xen RHEL5.1 vm's running on it, 200MB RAM each, and one RHEL4
vm.

All three have iSCSI initiators to the server, and the two rhel5 vm's run
conga with an apache cluster, as well as clustered NFS. I'll add GFS to the
equation when I get time.

If only RHEL5 had a lighter GUI available as gnome and KDE are a bit bloaty
with all my VM's eating up 600MB of precious RAM.
When I run firefox and three vm's, then my system eats up 150MB swap. So I
simply run two of them and this provides decent perf.

For cups I have a PSC1500 all-in-one jobby -- surprised to see that it works
out of the box with cups, and even more surpirsed to see that xsane worked
(just did it a second ago)
and magically picked up the manual scan I had run. Dead easy!

All in all, well done linux, the perf of xen is amazing considering what I
am asking it to do.
Now if only xen would magically free up RAM when I shutdown a VM, why does
it not have this feature i wonder?

iSCSI is cool, I have tested it with rhel4, rhel5, and even VISTA! Works
perfectly everytime. I use it for vista to export my NTFS partition which i
no longer use on this box, so i can still access my files without rebooting
-- rhel don't support NTFS out of the box. -- i still have not gotten rid of
vista yet, maybe someday - its good for testing at the moment.

Gonna install SLES10 (vm) soon, and all the other distros I need to support.
Think I should buy more RAM first though, I don't like swappiness. :-)

regards
Conor.