Way Kool KVM (not) .. 2 PC's, 1 Keyboard

Ok, all that and a bag of chips.

So I sit at home with my laptop and anytime I want to put something up on the mediaPC in my house to show others I need to VNC into the machine, then use my Laptop's keyboard and mouse to control the machine.

This little tool allows you to create a "virtual desktop" accross machines and OS's. One machine is the "server" which means thats the active keyboard and mouse. Load a client on the other PC and then create a config that says client is to the right of server and server is to the left of client. Now drag your mouse off the right side of the server and you are now on the client.

Confused ? its ok, actually when setting it up I screwed up a few times myself. Interesting little side note, you can make your own pc a neighbor to itself (ok, explain that one). My machine is named goofy, in synergy goofy is to the left of goofy, goofy is to the right of goofy, goofy is above goofy and of course goofy is below goofy. How goofy am I now, well drag the cursor off the top and it shows up on the bottom. Yep go off the left and it pops on the right. Cute trick huh ?

But back to the main reason it exists. Now I can have 2 pc's and 2 monitors on my desk without needing 2 mice and 2 keyboards or some silly KVM.

Rick

IRQ Balancing on Linux

Having a multi-core machine is great, but if you do alot of I/O (Fileserver, network router, etc) then it is likely that you have more than one kind of I/O in your machine at a time.

The easy one is a fileserver. You have requests from the network to read/write files and you have the actual disk activity to fill the requests. Lastly you have network I/O sending the reply's.

With a multi-core system, letting different cores handle different operations is how performance is increased. In linux there is a service called IRQBalance which activly monitors the machine and attempts to insure that the I/O load is distributed.

Check out the link provided

Everything you wanted to know about Linux

The down and dirty about linux

Sun Buys Mysql

[QUOTE]
Sun Microsystems Inc. has acquired MySQL AB, the maker of the MySQL database management system, a move that Sun hopes will make it a more substantial player in the database market. But as these forces join, it also raises questions for IT shops juggling diverse hardware, database and operating system platforms.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe Sun is onto something here. The linux comunity dismantled the Solaris product line by providing no-cost replacement for Solaris and taking innovative ideas into kernel development.

What sun is doing amounts to taking the best Linux products and incorporating them into their product line at the same time as leaving them Open Source(d). A good clustered File System (see earlier post), a Database and other tools.

Clustered File System

GFS as built into linux is a nice idea, but doesn't scale when you get into it. Along comes "lustre" a new filesystem for linux.

If you wanted to see if its a valid product, Sun went and bought it last fall ..

Check it out

Virtualization for the Masses

Ok, why YAVp (Yet Another Virtual product). Well this one distinguishes itself in several ways:

• The "Host" (Host is the Virutal Enviorn running the Guests), can be a Windows, Solaris x86 or Linux OS.
• The Guests can be many different OS's including Windows, Solaris, Linux, Dos, OS/2, etc.
• The Host machine does NOT require VT-x or AMD-V hardware support. It does its own run-time re-write of the offending code.

I use VB to run several linux platforms on my laptop and when they are stable I migrate the disk image to my production linux farm when I am happy.

Some thoughts on the VTx vs. Virtualbox stratigies:

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2007/10/01/should-you-enable-intels-vt-x-in-virtualbox/