Zen: November 2005

View from Bottom of the SEA

Wheni fell into d sea & almost drown; there are fish dat will watchmedrown & whisper 2each other on how silly dat i can't swim; & fish dat is kind 2 try 2 help me by letting me pull its tail so dat it can drag me up(too heavily lor);& fish dat will just give me a SLAPn make me so angry dat i miraculously "know how to swim" cos i dont want 2b in the same SEA with it (hahaha)..

Realised:The sea needs all these fish to complete the ecosystem.Without an uglyfish, I wont realised how beautiful other fish is,without being bitten,i wont know dat fish BITES..I thought they swallow..hehe.

Groupwise 7 on Windows installation

So far I already capture the movie for the following step :

1. Install Windows 2003 server
2. Install NDS
3. Patch NDS
4. Install ConsoleOne
5. Upgrade ConsoleOne

The step still need to capture is :

1. Install Groupwise 7
2. Install Groupwise Internet Agent
3. Install Groupwise Webaccess Agent
4. Install Groupwise Windows client
5. Install Groupwise 7 messenger for windows
6. Install Groupwise 7 messenger for windows client
7. Install iManager for windows
8. Uninstall NDS

Today only notice I forget to capture movie for installing imanager for linux, I think I will capture the movie after preparing the rest of vmware image.

--

I don't think our boss is reading this blog.

I don't think our boss is reading this blog after he post his one.

Because I been keep on updating this blog about my progress on preparing groupwise vmware image and capturing movie during installation , so that I can share with my colleague later. But this morning he come to me and ask me to prepare an vmware image of groupwise, in fact I already posted that the groupwise's vmware image was ready.

May be I didn't write it correctly , that why he can't understand.

He might even think that these few days I was sitting in the office and doing nothing.

--

Groupwise 7 on Linux installation

Finally I finish the Groupwise 7 on Linux installation

So now I have the following snapshot and raw movie in hand:

1. Install SLES 9
2. Install NDS
3. Uninstall NDS
4. Patch NDS
5. Install Consoleone
6. Upgrade Consoleone
7. Install Groupwise 7
8. Install Groupwise Internet Agent
9. Install Groupwise Webaccess Agent
10. Install Groupwise Cross platform client
11. Install Groupwise 7 messenger for linux
12. Install Groupwise 7 messenger for linux client

I had test the messenger system with the gaim and it work.

The vmware image also ready.

Anyone who need it can request from me. Of course when come to the right time , I will release it to public.

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SuSE 9.1 Upgrade breaks VMware 4.5.2

Running the Online Update in YaST results in a SuSE 9.1 upgrade to the 2.6.5-7.108 kernel. The vmware-config.pl command then complains and fails to execute properly. Tried patching vmware using the vmware-any-any-update83 and running the vmware-config.pl script again, but no luck. Any suggestions?

This also works for Suse 9.3 / Kernel 2.6.11.4-20a
This also works with GSX Server 3.2.x on Suse 10.0.

Summary:
Install correct Linux Kernel Source.

As root:

cd /usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig
make modules_prepare
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

How to improve disk I/O performances with VMware Workstation 5

Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes.
This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues:

Antivirus real-time protection
You probably run VMware Workstation on your everyday working computer, and you probably want to stay secure running an antivirus software.

The most useful feature of any AV is the real-time protection, catching and monitoring I/O accesses of every process for suspicious activities.
This feature can greatly impact on your VMs performances and should be fine-tuned for virtualization.

So be sure to create an exclusion filter on your real-time protection settings for .vmdk (VMware virtual disk) and .vmem (VMware virtual memory) files. In this way countinous I/O operations on your virtual machines will not be hit by antivirus checking.

HostOS disk fragmentation
A really performance hitter for virtual machines is a fragmented host OS disk.

VMs virtual disks are very large (4 GBs at minimum on the average) and are created by default as non preallocated. In other words your virtual disk grow as you install more software on the guest OS till reaching your defined disk limit.
If you use only one physical disk for everyday work and VMs storing, you probably will use space around a growing virtual disk, obliging your host OS to fragment virtual machines more and more.

So be sure to:
- Create a dedicated partition for virtual machines only
- Create guest OSes virtual disks with Allocate all disk space now option
- Schedule a daily defragmentation for your virtual machines directories (maybe at launch time or during the night)

Memory trimming
Workstation checks which part of the guest OS virtual memory is not used and allocates it back to the host OS. This permits to have more concurrent virtual machines running but everytime the guest OS asks back for its memory it suffers a performance degradation.

So, if you have enough free RAM for all planned concurrent VMs, be sure to disable memory trimming for guest OSes adding the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:
MemTrimRate=0

Page sharing (quoted from VMware documentation)
VMware uses a page sharing technique to allow guest memory pages with identical contents to be stored as a single copy-on-write page. Page sharing decreases host memory usage, but consumes system resources, potentially including I/O bandwidth.

You may want to avoid this overhead for guests for which host memory is plentiful and I/O latency is important. To disable page sharing, add the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:
sched.mem.pshare.enable=FALSE option

These suggestions will work well even for upcoming VMware Workstation 5.5 and Player 1.0 since both share same engine.

From this page:

How to improve disk I/O performances with VMware Workstation 5

Art Of War

In the Art of War , Sun Tzu said:



17. Thus we may know that there are five essentials
   for victory:
   (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when
       not to fight.
   (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior
       and inferior forces.
   (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same
       spirit throughout all its ranks.
   (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take
       the enemy unprepared.
   (5) He will win who has military capacity and is
       not interfered with by the sovereign.

18. Hence the saying:  If you know the enemy
   and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
   hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy,
   for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
   If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.



That why I always feel that , when we want to sell our products

, we have to know very clear about our competitor's product. That

the reason why I feel that doing research and comparison of two or

more products is very important to us.


Refer Site:

http://www.chinapage.com/sunzi-e.html

I found this in the bookshop.

I found these books in the bookshop recently. Publish by QUE. I think this is because only recently Novell aggressively promote their books.

You can find "ZEN" everywhere. part 2

You can find "ZEN" everywhere. part 1

Noam's "Founder Frustrations" blog

For those who like to read about MBA, for founder

http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/

Can't sleep at night

At friday night (em... now should be saturday morning), I can't sleep at all. Don't know why. That why I jump out of my bed and start typing this .

In my mind keep on thinking about the presentation. At first yap want me to share the experience of installing groupwise on linux , because he can foresee that this kind of order will be increase. From my point of view , installing groupwise on linux is very easy but to gather engineer to attend the session will be a bit difficult, next week Khairul and Thaddeus will be out for kaneka project.Other than that , I think there is a lot of functionality question that we haven't got the answer yet, so instead of just sharing the installing experience, I would like find out the answer of the functionality question and share with everyone. Hope next week I can have free time to prepare the following system :

groupwise on windows
groupwise on linux
groupwise on netware
exchange 2003
answer about how the email store in the server
groupwise client on windows
groupwise client on linux
outlook that communicate with groupwise server

Prepare server 1 to 4 is to show that groupwise can run on multiple platform and the groupwise can work with exchange. Item 6 to 8 is show the functionality of the groupwise client.

Tentatively I will have a session on 21/11/2005 (monday) after office hour to share idea on how and what to sell in groupwise. This session is non technical session. If I have time to conduct testing , I may be able to come out a features matrix between exchange and groupwise.I think this session is important because so far we still don't have any idea about doing groupwise demo, hope after this session we can draft idea about the demo.

Tentatively I will have another session on 22/11/2005 (tuesday) after office hour to share idea and experience on how to install groupwise. This is a technical session.

When I rolling on my bed , an idea pop up in my mind. Can we have a brainshare with our organization ? I have this idea is because yap want me to prepare a proposal, at the same time I also would like to share some experience that we gain from bankrakyat project. Since I am going to do presentation , why don't make it like brainshare session , so that it will be more interesting.Of course the first brainshare session will only have one speaker , that is me , but I hope after that for subsequent brainshare session will have more speaker, that is our engineer.

If I am going to have such session , I have these in my mind:

tools and utility we found during the bankrakyat project
how to make us serve our maintenance contract customer better and easier
what do we need in our office , so that we can work more efficient and easier
some word/idea to share

For the time being , I think 26/11/2005 (saturday) could be a good day.

I put up this is to remind myself about the idea I have in my mind now, so that I wouldn't waste my sleeping time.

If someone read this , please forget about the date, because it is not confirm yet. I will send email to everyone to inform the actual date and time.

Actually after the previous session about the zenwork desktop management, I didn't get any feedback from my audience, so I am not sure whether they like it or not, they happy with it or not,where is the room for improvement. It is my fault, I should send an email to gather these information.I am not sure whether it is too late to do so by using this blog . I need your opinion to become better.

Thank you.