Thursday, March 24, 2005

Run XP Native or Sandbox: You decide Ken's post reminds me of a related blog post I read at sanbarrow.com. Ulli(?) describes using a system recovery liveCD that boots up Linux and allows you run VM workstation to revive and troubleshoot a Windows (or whatever) partition. Do you know that you can use WS 4.5.2 and the vmware-vdiskmanager running from Bart PE to do P2V in one step? Ghost or any other imaging tool is no longer necessary. Go to the box that you want to transform into a Virtual Machine - start from Bart PE - create a raw-disk with WS 4.5.2 and convert this raw-disk into a vmdk that can be stored directly on the VMware-Server. Any reconfiguration can be done on the physical box before you start vdiskmanager. If you have no access to the VMware-server you can store the vmdk on the physical box and write the image to DVDs. Looks like this can be handled very flexible. It is in almost every way an architectural mirror image of the slashdot-announced QEMU-enabled WinKnoppix, and my ex-physicist brain appreciated the symmetry. 4:20:33 PM      comment []  trackback []

Ingres DB: More than abandonware? The reg has an interesting piece on a company porting their warehousing appliance from MySQL to Postgres to Ingres, and seeing big gains each time. I was initially skeptical of the Ingres release -- it's hard to envision them getting around the mindshare deficit and finding a niche in the crowded world of open source db's. Somehow, I don't think dominating the niche for open source data warehousing appliances will get them very far. At an OpenACS bug bash a few weeks back, Dave Bauer mentioned that he'd taken a quick look at Ingres and was impressed by the polish of their admin tools. If the admin tools made failover/clustering/replication/etl easy and they started to work their way into the mainstream so you know your clients weren't stuck with you, I guess it might be worth taking a look. Anyway, I see that their $1M porting bounty contest ended last month. It will be interesting to see if any good sql rewriter work comes out of it (and if any of it can be ported to Postgres :-) ). 4:05:54 PM      comment []  trackback []