Fedora 14

[Void Main]

Is out...

[Void Main]

Wow! I upgrade my laptop this weekend to Fedora 14 from 11. Well, I had to upgrade from 11 to 13 first, then to 14 because the installer didn't want to jump more than 2 versions. After updating and getting all the usual broken packages fixed after the upgrade I had things going pretty well.

When I was on Fedora 11 I had been using VMware for some XP stuff at work but after updating my memory and hard drive my VMware kept crashing and it was very slow. I also had tried Virtual box with the same problems and I assumed it was related to the hardware upgrades. Well, I had been hesitant to upgrade because things did work. Well, I didn't have any luck with VMware Server but I decided to try the latest VirtualBox again. To my surprise it works flawlessly and it's fast! I also am able to get my java based SSL client to work that I was having trouble with before.

Basically there isn't anything that doesn't work great as of right now, at least as far as I have been able to detect at this point. Now, I did have a motherboard failure in this laptop which I got replaced under the service contract and I don't remember if I tried VMware since I got that replaced. Who knows, maybe it was the motherboard that was the problem all along. :) I guess I did have a little trouble with VirtualBox until I upgraded the BIOS so that also could have been a factor. Bottom line, I'm a happy camper on fc14. :)

Guess the server with all the KVM virtual hosts (and this site) on it is next. That one might be fun. :)

[Basher52]

Just don't brake anything on this place so all my perfect answers gets lost lol
just wondering: KVM Hosts...
how many machines you got running?

[Void Main]

I just have 3 VMs running on that particular host. One is for all the web stuff, one is for DNS, mail and a few other things and an XP guest for testing. I have several other machines running in the house that I could move into guests, just waiting for them to die. :)

[Void Main]

Well, got the host upgraded and went to upgrade one of the guests and the fc14 DVD wouldn't boot in the guest. I dropped the number of CPUs from 2 to 1 and it boots. Am upgrading it now and will try and put the CPUs back to 2 once it comes up. Can't believe that slipped through and got released like that.

[Void Main]

Not sure what the problem is but after I upgraded my mail guest I can't run it with more than 1 CPU. Haven't found much on it on a search. I can now only select 1 CPU in the virt-manager configuration. Gotta be something with the kernel.

[Void Main]

Looks like this is the bug I am seeing:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=652373

Should be fixed in a future kernel.

[Void Main]

I installed the kernel from the bug report that has not yet been released and now have more than one CPU in my guests again:

http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/sysinfo/

fc14 upgrades complete.

[Basher52]

You say usual broken packages?
I've had that once before I think and you helped me out with it. Does this now happens every time when upgrading? like from F12 and up?
(I had broken packages from 12 to 13)

...and why call these upgrades "upgrade", really? all privately changed config files is not upgraded, the new is just renamed to *.newrpm and if there are lots of them... is there a way to see all these? 'cos I don't wanna sit and watch the screen all the time during an up upgrade and write them down.

Right now I only got one "CPU" in my machines, but when I got more then one, how to I tell the OS it just has one?
(and will that also tell it to just use one CPU? and is this also related to virtual CPU cores?)

and last... then I saw you wrote KVM I was thinking you had a machine that could act like a KVM switch, that's why I really asked this before, but you meant 'VM' as in Virtual Machine right? (donno about the 'K' tho)

[Void Main]

I shouldn't have used the term "broken packages". What I meant was it only upgrades what is on the disk so you are left with several packages that didn't get upgraded and usually have dependency problems that have to be sorted out. How many 3rd party RPMs you have installed usually determines how much of a dependency problem you'll have to deal with after an upgrade.

Yeah, KVM is what Fedora uses for virtualization out of the box. It provides basically the same thing that VMware or VirtualBox does except it's included with Fedora. This site is running on a KVM Guest (Virtual Machine) that is running a copy of Fedora 14. You can see the real time system stats from the guest's point of view here:

http://voidmain.kicks-ass.net/sysinfo/

Notice it's running the fc14 kernel (rc1 which I downloaded from the Bugzilla link). Also notice under the "Hardware" section it sees 2 CPUs and notice the model is "QEMU Virtual CPU" where normally you would see "Intel Pentium blah blah" or "AMD Athlon blah blah". You can also see all the other hardware items that it detects are virtual. Now the actual physical "host" that is a desktop (well, it's in a tower case actually) with an AMD Phenom 9500 quad core processor. It's a single CPU with 4 cores.

You can actually give your virtual machine more virtual cores than you have physical cores and it would thread the workload out across the physical cores although I am not sure it would be advantageous to do that. You can also limit which physical cores you want the guest to be able to use. Your guests do not have to run the same OS as the host (and in fact I have an XP instance running on this host as well as another Linux instance).

Here is a drawing I did of the same machine a couple of years ago when it only had the XP and one Fedora guests:

http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/redhat/vlan/

I have since added this Web guest and moved this site into it. Notice the two guests are on two different network VLANs. I have a private VLAN zone (in green) that the XP guest is in and a DMZ VLAN zone (Yellow) that the mail server is in and the new web server also resides in the DMZ zone.

[Void Main]

I also successfully upgraded a few more machines using yum. Just follow the instructions on the Fedora site and it's a piece of cake:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

Wish I had done them all that way now, would have saved me some down time while upgrading the web server.

[Basher52]

But is this safe really? I tried installing and once even updating through FTP instead of DLing the DVD and do it locally. I lost the network for a second or two and then the whole installation got bad
Is this better? like, does it download all files needed for the upgrade and THEN start the upgrade process, just like if you DLd the files yourself?
If not, I can't understand how this can be better???

But if YOU do it, it gotta be

[Void Main]

Yes it does actually download all the files before upgrading, just like a regular yum update.

[Basher52]

Well, then what is the positive side of this instead of DL the DVD and upgrade from that? If you do DL the DVD, you at least got it "in" your house.
Any other feature(s) this will give you that "an old" upgrade won't?

[Void Main]

I have a DVD as well and did 2 DVD upgrades first. The problem with the DVD upgrade is you can't upgrade it while the system is still up and running. If you upgrade with Yum all you have to do is reboot for the new kernel after the upgrade. With the DVD you are down for however long the upgrade takes (I was down 2 hours one day for the host and 2 hours the next day for the web guest. Could have cut that to about 5 minutes total doing it with yum.