iNODE

Have spent several days this week reengineering the digital infrastructure of our ILS system (Endeavor’s Voyager). In mid-August, we’ll be upgrading to their latest release (6.1) and beyond the usual disruptions these “annual” upgrades bring, this one spells the end of Solaris 8 for our web OPAC. That’s too bad—I can administer a Solaris 8 server in my sleep—but nothing good lasts forever, right? Endeavor’s new web gateway requires a vendor-compiled version of Apache 2.0.55 and a minimum of Solaris 9.

My first impulse was to pull an older E250 out of mothballs and install Solaris 9 (after all, it’s pretty much an incremental update). But then I realized that I could no longer easily obtain new drives for this machine—all the “state approved” vendors on my list show only refurbs. Since I want to get this system running and then not have to think about it for at least a couple of years, I decided to go ahead and make the jump to the very different Solaris 10 and put the gateway on a new, much faster V240 I’ve had sitting around the office for a few months. I found a set of Solaris 10 (3/05) disks and got ready for the installation. It was an odd moment—with a simple “boot cdrom” at the ‘ok’ prompt, I was about to become really stupid about Solaris again. Of course, after months of mousing and clicking all over Apple OS X Server preference panes, it’s kinda cool to geek out by installing software on a headless server using a DB-9 terminal connection to a PC that’s putting the cursor off by one line because of confusion about proper terminal emulation…

I won’t recount all the problems I ran into trying to bring the 3/05 installation to current patched status—it just never worked right but the reason for the quirky failures was never obvious either. For example, I found a document on SunSolve that addressed many of the problems I was seeing (Document 101688: Multiple Patching and Packaging Issues for Solaris 10) but some of the information there was incorrect. It suggested I install patch 121297 but it turns out that number referred to an x86 patch. As you might guess, the 121296 patch listed for x86 was actually the one I needed for a SPARC cpu. There were other problems, as well. After getting all sorts of install errors on the “Recommended and Security” cluster I finally gave up, downloaded a series of .iso images for the 6/06 release of Solaris 10, burned 5 CDs and did a clean install. I should have done that a lot sooner than I did—everything worked great. I think Sun made some fundamental improvements in Solaris between the 3/05 release and the most recent (6/06) version.

Other Moves

Thinking about moving my focus back to Solaris for a while reminds me there’s another move coming up soon. In September, we’ll be closing LSO West (here in the Johnson Center) and moving everything back to Fenwick (where we were until the mid-90’s). The little photo is a sneak preview of the future “Library Systems Office” that’s being carved out of a portion of the 3rd floor of Wing B. Beyond consolidating our digital systems staff in this one location, we’re also building a new server room in the same area. Assuming the electrical and HVAC challenges of that retrofitting are solved, we should leave behind the many environmental challenges we’ve seen here in the Johnson Center.

Parallels is now “officially” released. Having done a “pre-order” I received my validation number this morning (yes, I would have preferred to have had it yesterday when the news first broke), but today’s OK too. Installed the “final release” package and my virtual PC came right to life. Nice product. For the next 30 days, you can get a copy of Desktop for Mac for $49.00 (a savings of $30 off what they say their full price will be on July 15th).

http://www.parallels.com

And this just in from our off-topic desk:

There’s now a webcam (operated by OxBlue) that will show near real-time updates of the construction site for the new Washington National’s baseball stadium. If I’m reading the charts correctly, this camera view is from beyond the outfield.
I think it would be kinda neat to save lots of these pictures and build a stop-action movie of the stadium’s construction–but I don’t have the time or patience for that. Perhaps I’ll write a script that grabs a photo around noon each day or something (of course, complicating the coding is the fact that the OxBlue image is done with Flash).

http://clarkconstruction.oxblue.com/clarkhuntsmoot/

Did a few more tests today and have not yet managed to crash the virtual Win XP machine. Today’s test—the potential dealbreaker—was installing Borland’s Delphi 7 and a few add-on function libraries, then compiling an executable of a menuing/security program I wrote for our public PCs. The install and patching of Delphi 7 went smoothly and after moving the source files to the virtual machine, the compile was quick and perfect. I can now safely give up the laptop I was using for these legacy Windows tasks.

Ran one other test which seems to threaten at least a small tear in the fabric of the universe: While “inside” my virtual XP machine running under Mac OS X on the iMac, I used Windows to “map” to a network volume. The volume was across campus on an Apple G5 running Mac OS X server and exporting its storage under Samba (so it appeared to my virtual machine as a Windows server). Seems to raise some basic questions about just what an OS is these days, doesn’t it?

Other things that worked well: printing to a networked printer and mounting USB keys. Also had success dynamically resizing the “partition” devoted to this virtual Windows machine—Parallels keeps the entire virtual installation in a single file. About the only thing I haven’t tried (and probably won’t since i have no need for the capability) is burning a CD from the virtual windows machine to the Mac’s CD/DVD drive. OK there is one other thing I haven’t tried (despite the geeky allure)—connecting to the virtual machine’s desktop from a copy of Remote Desktop Connection running on the host iMac.

“Deep inside of a parallel universe
It’s getting harder and harder
To tell what came first…”

– RHCP

Update: I was able to connect to the Parallel’s Windows desktop from my desktop mac across the room using Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop Connection.” So now with Apple’s Remote Desktop console running on my desktop G5, I can take over the screen on either OS running on the iMac.

Update 2: Discovered today you can copy the single file that represents your Windows XP virtual machine from your “host” mac to another drive or machine. Then delete the original…then put the copy back and the virtual Windows machine runs fine.  This means goodbye to “ghosting”…just keep a copy of your “last known good” Windows VM file and you can always get back a working virtual machine.  Right now the “.hdd” file for my Windows VM is about 4 GB in size.  Presumably (and I found a forum post that confirmed this for one user), you could move this to a new machine and if Parallels were installed there, boot right into a working version of Windows with no installation fuss. Nice.

An intel-based iMac (1.83Ghz, 1GB memory) arrived in the office yesterday and I let it live it’s first day of life as a Mac (utilizing it to offload a bit of video transcoding I was working on). Today I was all set to try out Apple’s “Boot Camp” beta software–enabling dual booting into either Mac OS X or Windows–so I could free up for other uses a Sony laptop I use for Windows-specific tasks. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a Windows XP disk with SP2 included (seems all we have around here are original XP disks and SP2 disks) and that’s what Boot Camp requires. Abandoning the idea I turned to Parallels–and I’m glad I did.

This is a really great piece of virtualization software (and I also like the idea that it’s coming from from a company right here in Northern Virginia (Herndon). Within minutes I had created a virtual machine and begun the installation of Windows XP. That went quickly thanks to my accepting the heavily-defaulted “typical” setup, and within perhaps 20 minutes I was tweaking my new “virtual” Windows computer–removing XP’s default Fisher-Price color scheme, installing and updating anti-virus software, and pulling down 45 “critical” Windows updates–you know, returning to the pain I happily abandoned when switching to OS X a couple of years ago. I won’t be using this virtual machine very often but when I do have to run the Voyager system administration client (for our library catalog system which I’ve tested and it works great) or do a quick compile in Delphi (haven’t yet found all my Delphi discs but will install and test this the next time I need to recompile our local public workstation menuing system) or check the look of a webpage under Internet Explorer (that too works well), I’m in business.

Unlike the dual boot approach, it just seems appropriate to have Windows running in a window—one I can just close and get back to more interesting computing. XP’s speed on this iMac seems about equivalent to the 1.5Ghz Pentium-M that’s in the Sony laptop I hope to replace with this solution. I’ll post more information on the speed, utility and reliability of Parallels in a few weeks.

Parallels for Mac appears to be an amazing product and based on a couple hours of testing, I recommend it. Right now you can purchase a “pre-release” license for $39.00 or you have the option of getting a free 30 day demo license so you can complete your own testing. This strikes me as a better solution than dual booting unless your particular Windows need dictates access to all the machine’s resources. It’s also easy to uninstall if you decide it isn’t right for your purposes (no repartitioning required).

http://www.parallels.com