Building the Ultimate White Box Server for under $2000

from: HAK5.ORG


When it comes to building a white box server for ESXi your best resources are vm-help.com, UltimateWhiteBox.com, the VMware Compatibility Guide, and the VMware community.

We carefully selected ESXi supported components based on reliability and value. If this were the ultimate $3000 white box server we might have picked a server board with dual Xeon’s and ECC memory, but to keep it under that magic $2000 price point we went with beefy “desktop” components such as the Intel Core i7 920, the ASUS P6T Deluxe, and 12 GB of Corsair XMS3 memory.

Drive wise you can’t go wrong with the 3ware 9650SE-4LPML. It supports four SATA II drives in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD. It’s bigger brother the 9650SE-16ML sixteen channel SATA II controller is hot too — just at three times the price. The 9650SE isn’t supported out of the box by ESXi, however 3ware provides a knowledge base article and drivers necessary to add support for the card after your ESXi box is built.

Drive wise we picked up four Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives since they’re cheap and reliable.

To make things easy when installing all these components in our Rosewill RSV-Z4000 4U rackmount case we picked up a 4 Drive trayless how swap sata backplane from StarTech. IcyDock makes one too. This was the only $100 spent for convenience over performance/value, but anyone who has dealt with 5.25″ to 3.5″ mounting brackets will agree it’s worth every penny.

Rather than installing ESXi on the RAID, we used a 4GB USB drive from Patriot. The Xporter XT. It boasts really fast read/write times. I’m sure any old 1gb or larget USB drive would have done but they’re so cheap, why not?

BCP

1. Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning for pandemic influenza is critical, particularly in the IT department, as your organisation will be relying on IT like never before. So identify a pandemic coordinator and/or team with defined roles and responsibilities for preparation and response planning immediately. The planning process should include input from all relevant stakeholders in your business including sub-contractors, outsourced services and the logistic providers needed to maintain business operations by location and function.

2. Business Impact

Talk to your suppliers about their swine flu plans and identify alternate suppliers. Train and prepare an ancillary workforce if necessary, for example, using retirees who have left the company. Develop and plan for scenarios likely to result in an increase or decrease in demand for your products and/or services during a pandemic. Determine potential impact on service delivery by using multiple possible scenarios that affect different services, products or production sites. Ask what would your department look like with a 20% or 40% cut in personnel and supplies?



3. Sustainable Plan

The critical question to ask is: When the pandemic strikes how long can you sustain service delivery? Any plan must include identification of key contacts (with backups), chain of communications (including suppliers and customers), and processes for tracking and communicating business and employee status. Implement an exercise to test your plan, and revise periodically. For a training drill select 40% of your staff at random and see how your department would function without them.



4. Preventative Measures

Implement guidelines to reduce the conduct of face-to-face contact for example, no hand-shaking among employees and between employees and customers. Critically, for IT and support staff there is the issue of hygiene around work stations (contact with mice, keyboards and shared resources like printers – invest heavily in antiseptic wipes and introduce a culture of your staff regularly washing their hands.



5. Attention to Detail
Critical to all this is the actual IT itself, or more importantly, the operation and support of IT by people. You need to ask, how hands on is your operation? For example, do backup tapes need to be changed manually every day and what will happen if they are not replaced? It is these types of details that need to be mitigated against with planning and preparation.

6. Impact Assessment
The key is to understand the impact on your department and have a strategy in place to suit the business needs. It is often underestimated how much human intervention is needed to keep IT services running, particularly those housekeeping tasks. It might be necessary in extreme circumstances to make fundamental changes to the operating model and make it less ‘hands on’ for a defined period of time whilst the risk of staff absenteeism is high. Some tasks may be able to be done by non-IT staff. However, it is not acceptable to grant non-IT staff systems administration authority, so it is critical to identify vulnerable skill sets that are held by key IT staff.

7. Failure Points
Consider the impact of an IT component failure, such as server, storage or network and the fact there may be no engineers available to resolve the problem. Are there single points of failure in your core infrastructure and implement greater resilience where necessary.

8. Eight Point Plan for remote working during a Flu Pandemic

1) Identify the employees can easily work remotely and enable them with the appropriate resources.

2) Develop a policy so that both sides understand the terms under which remote working is allowed and how much employees will be reimbursed for heat/light/phone costs etc.

3) Undertake a Health and Safety risk assessment for minimum working standards that employees must comply with when working remotely.

4) Provide the necessary IT and telecoms tools including call re-routing and wireless/ 3G data connection and secure access to your corporate network.

5) Enable access to corporate applications and data via a VPN or secure web-based email systems (make certain your company directory is up-to-date).

6) Ensure remote workers do not get isolated by facilitating tele/web conferencing and/or instant messaging.

7) Manage remote workers by regular line management communication. (Remember voice recording of re-routed calls and key stroke monitoring can keep the lazy on the straight and narrow.)

8) Trust your staff and don’t expect them to be working the same way they do in the office.

However, what issues might arise when remote access is oversubscribed? In many organisations it’s the ‘road warriors’ who have been the main users of remote access capability so you will need to plan for the most productive use of resources to prevent a free for all as staff compete for connectivity. The options are simple, increase capacity (expensive in a recession) or clearly outline who has access when and for how long.

-from Computerweekly.com

/etc/motd

This computer system is for authorized users only. All activity is logged and regulary checked by systems personal. Individuals using this system without authority or in excess of their authority are subject to having all their services revoked. Any illegal services run by user or attempts to take down this server or its services will be reported to local law enforcement, and said user will be punished to the full extent of the law. Anyone using this system consents to these terms.

Setting a firewall using ufw in ubuntu

First what is ufw, as per man - program for managing a netfilter firewall,This program is for managing a Linux firewall and aims to provide an easy to use interface for the user. Cool! easy to use so how do you use it as the man page said easy.

1. Run from the terminal "ufw"

:~$ ufw

Usage: ufw COMMAND

Commands:
enable enables the firewall
disable disables the firewall
default ARG set default policy to ALLOW, DENY or REJECT
logging ARG set logging to OFF, ON or LEVEL
allow|deny|reject ARG add allow, deny or reject RULE
delete RULE delete the RULE
insert NUM RULE insert RULE at NUM
status show firewall status
status numbered show firewall status as numbered list of RULES
show ARG show firewall report
version display version information

Application profile commands:
app list list application profiles
app info PROFILE show information on PROFILE
app update PROFILE update PROFILE
app default ARG set profile policy to ALLOW, DENY, REJECT or
SKIP
2. Enable it

:~$ sudo ufw enable

3 . default policies of DROP

:~$ sudo ufw default denay

4.Now look in to your rules.

:~$ sudo iptables -L -n

Chain INPUT (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination
ufw-before-logging-input all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-before-input all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-after-input all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-after-logging-input all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-reject-input all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

Chain FORWARD (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination
ufw-before-logging-forward all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-before-forward all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-after-forward all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-after-logging-forward all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
ufw-reject-forward all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

...............

note: if you have two network cards and one was eth0 and the second was eth1
and you were FORWARDing traffic to an internal network, maybe using NAT and having a firewall on the outside and you need to make sure that your /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward is 1

5. Check the status

:~$ sudo ufw status
Status: active

6. Check if its working.

:~$ tail /var/log/messages


thats it!

Thanks to beginlinux for the howto.

SWAP allocation

If M < 2
  S = M *2
Else
  S = M + 2

Swap should equal 2x physical RAM for up to 2 GB of physical RAM, and then an additional
1x physical RAM for any amount above 2 GB, but never less than 32 MB.

I been hook with this Series

http://watchweedsepisodes.com/ -This new series is a single-camera comedy about a single mother who makes ends meet by selling marijuana in the fictional suburb of Agrestic, California. The series exposes the dirty little secrets that lie behind the pristine lawns and shiny closed doors of homes in the of this gated community.

What does it mean to be free?

Got my hands on a Netbook

Since I have three jobs two in bicol my Internetshop, TCN and with HP here in manila. I always travel allot to bicol then back to manila so I always bring my 12" Fujitsu esprimo U9200 with me which is bit heavy despite its only 12" So I have decided to get a netbook. Since the release of the eeepc901 I was so eager to get that, good thing my wife stop me and waited till eeepc release 1000HE series. I wont write a review cause there are allot of reviews out there. I'm just saying that if you only need to check on your email read some info on the net and you travel allot get a netbook. If you need to develop some thing like a web app or other programing stuff just do a remote connection to a server and do your thing. just what I'm doing as I'm writing this. I'm setting up a dev server which I will just do a ssh and from there do some scripting and other project. I have two servers one in manila other in bicol to thinker with not the 1U super doom server its just a desktop that I clone it to be a server.Bytheway I still haven't change the OS yes its windowsXP I might keep it for a month since its a license one and still need to create a usb with ubuntu 9.04 but hey most of the apps Im using is open source.

MONEY?

Congrats! Dude

Atty. Solis Carlo Roberto C.

Apr. 3 2009 - http://bar.judiciary.gov.ph/bar2008.htm

#1161 SOLIS Carlo Roberto C

PS.
Now I could do some cyber crimes, lol!

Parshing data using grep -A NUM

Let say you have this data below lots of diffrent date and information about the memory.

and you just want to extract the physical info that is dated Mar 16 use grep -A NUM

# grep -A 2 'Mar 16' filename

You now have all the Mar 16 physical data.

my fav show almost forgot!

I been watching this show since 2007 at youtube, but I miss allot of there episodes lately now I vow to make it a point to watch this daily.
http://www.hak5.org


cool stuff there.

Our own podcast

Cool! we have our own podcast.

http://www.pinoytechpodcast.com/

Happy Birthday Mommy!

It was my wifes birthday last Mar. 6 and we celebrated it last Sat with her friends at home.

Principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business

Source: http://zak.greant.com/hacking-business-models

This might be good model for my shop.

Purpose

• Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
• Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
• Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.

Principles

• Egalitarian: The belief that all people should be treated equally. This includes equality, non-discrimination and inclusivity.
• Sustainable: We have a long-term view on our business. We watch our profits & spend wisely, we take care of each other, we support the things we depend on.
• Transparent: We communicate in an honest and genuine way. Any information or process that can be made open, will be made open.
• Fun: Create a workplace where people can have fun and want to work.
• Agile: Be flexible, receptive & adaptive, especially when dealing with staff and customers.

Methods

Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:

• Consensus-based decision making.
• Corporate transparency - any information or process that can be made open, should be made open.
• Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our partners and society at large.
• Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
• Don't try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
• Prefer to work with people who share our values.
• Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.

Monty's amendments

* Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy and support the Open Source community.
* Be a virtual company, networking with others.
* The company or its individual business units should not grow until they are
unmanagable by the chosen methods. If this happens, then the company needs to
be split up or re-organized into largely independent business units.

Default Employee Rules

Some employee roles may have different requirements - for example, someone
working on customer support may need to have regular hours. Of course, any
differences need to be noted explicitly in the employees contract in a section
that clearly details any differences from the standard agreement.

- The Employee works in distributed company and may work from anywhere.

- 75 working hours per two weeks. Ideally, employees should work schedules that
are kind to them and to others.

- Equal free (vacation) time; Everyone has 35 free days a year + Saturday &
Sundays. (This is basicly Finnish 5 week vacation + 10 (avg) weekday
holidays). Note that this means that one should use a free day if one
wants not work any Monday-Friday even if it's a public holiday in
your country!
Up to 25 free days will roll over to next year (ie, the vacation part not
the public holiday part); If the employee quits or is let go all saved
vacation money will be paid out.
One earns 25/47 vacation days / week of active work (This is used for
the first and last year of employment).

- Vacation money ("Lomalta paluu raha"). When you go on vacation that is more
than 3 weeks (or have used more than 3 weeks of your vacation for the year)
you get an extra 1/2 month of salary. If you don't keep your vacation
the vacation money is payed at the end of the year under 'get a life'
bonus plan.

- The employee will get a shared copyright to all code and documentation
he/she produces according to the spirit of the Sun's JCA license agreement.

- 80 / 20 rule
80 % of the time the employee should work on scheduled task, 20 % he/she
can work on any task of his/her choice, as long a it's will generate revenue
makes employees more efficent or enhances company recognition in a 2 year window.
The 20% tasks needs to be approved to ensure it follows the above
guidelines.

- 2000 Euro hardware allowance at start of position (for laptop, desktop etc).

- 1000 Euro/year hardware allowance for everyone that require new hardware
to be be able to do their work.

- The equipment bought with the hardware allowances (and any other
negotiated equipment) will be transfered to the employee after
5 years.

- The salary should be competitive in the area where the employee is
located. The bonus plan is not depending on where employee is living.

- If an employee has been of significant help in getting and delivering
in a customer order he is entitled to a bonus for this work. Everyone
in doing the sales will share 5% in the 'price - cost of sales'
part of the sale (in proportion of their involvement) and everyone part
of the delivery will share another 5%. This payed bonus will however
be deducted from their part of the end of year bonus (if the company
was profitable).

- Each employee will be assigned a VIP number of 1-5 (5 highest) to
describe his importance for the company. This number is used to
calculate the end of year bonuses and 'sell-shares'. The VIP number
will be adjusted each year as part of a employee review.

? Who sets the VIP number?
? How does the VIP number change over time?
? How do we stop people from feeling bad about their VIP number?

- The employee must be able to communicate fluently in English (at least
in written form). If necessary company will sponsor English classes
for employees that wants to learn speak better English.

- The employee is assumed to be cost efficient. This means he/she
should prefer to use:
- Cost efficient communication tools like Skype and VOIP.
- Economy travelling tickets.
- Medium priced hotels, rented cars and restaurants.
- When travelling he should strive to stay over at his fellow employees
places and/or share rooms with his fellow employees.
(This item can be override with a 'good cause' by his manager)
- If the employee wants better hotel, food, travelling arrangements,
working equipment etc this can be arranged, but the difference should
be reduced from his salary, contract money or bonus.

- When hired, the employee will during the 3 first months be 'on trial' basis.
After the trial period the Company and the employee will decide if things
seams to work out and either hire the employee or contract him under
similar terms as if he would be employed.

- If people are not working up to expectations they will first get warned
about this. If they don't correct this within one Month they will be
moved to 'on trial basis'. After 3 months the Company and the Employee
will have a discussion of how things are going and decide if it's
better that the Employee leaves the company with immediate effect.

- When employee is leaving he can buy out any Company equipment bought
under the hardware allowance. The price is
min(market-price, 'initial-price' * max(5 - years_old,0)/5)
(Ie, the price of the equipment is reduced by 1/5 each year)

—————

The Rules of the company:

- The Company is created to generate bonus for the employees (not to get sold).

- The Company should make it as fun as possible to work for the Company.

- The Company will be a distributed entity and strive to be small and
efficient. If growing too big it will split into several business units
or companies.

- Strive for long relationships with employees and customers.
(The Company is a family)

- The Company needs to respect the individuality of it's employees.
If the employee has reasonable 'extra' demands they need to be seriously
considered. (For example when it comes to work on weekends, room sharing,
not want to travel etc).

- The Company will employee people based on their merits. They will not
be discriminated based on their gender, race, religion, location,
married status or who they have married.

- The Company will not require people to work on weekends.
Company has the right to ask the employee for working on weekends, but the
employee has the right to refuse without any consequences.

- For time critical, high paid, high protifable projects that require double working
hours, the Company will pay tree times the salary and/or offer paid vacation days.

- The Company will actively encourage it's employees to take out their
vacation and not save it for later. This is especially imporant for employees that
are "burning out".

- Company needs to be long term cost efficient in it's daily operation.
This should be considered when choosing software, phone usage, equipment etc.

- The Company should budget for at least 3 travelling meetings for every
employee to ensure that people can work efficiently and get to know
each other. One of the meetings should be an all company meeting.

- The Company will recognise the importance of spouses/family members in a
distributed environment and have the following spouse policy:
- The spouse is encouraged to attend the all company meeting. The Company
will pay half of the spouses travelling tickets and allow the spouses
to share a hotel room (at no extra cost for the Employee).
- The spouse is invited to up to 4 dinners/years (if employees are gathered
over dinner).
- In the above rules another family member can be substituted instead
of the spouse.

- Company will actively help and sponsor open source projects (see bonus plan).

- The Company will strive for having as much of it's plans and
information publicly available. All rules of the Company will be
made public on it's web site.

- All software produced by the company will be open/free source (with the
exception to classified customer projects). At equal profit
company will prefer to do open/free software projects.

- At end of year the profit will be distributed as follows:

- 45 % will be saved for expansion

- 5 % will be donated to open source projects.
The project ('s) will be chosen by the employees of the company by voting.

- 5 % will be used to support charities
The projects will be chosen by the employees of the company by voting.

- 20 % will be used to pay off existing debts.

- 20-45 % (depending of payed debts) will be given out
(as bonus, dividend or some other form) to employees and investors
based on their VIP number and the number of working hours.

The bonus for each employee is calculated as follows:

employee_profit_hours = employee_working_hours*VIP.

bonus= profit/(SUM(all employee_profit_hours))*employee_profit_hours

An investor that as invested 100,000 Euro is treated as an employee
of VIP level 3 that has 37.5 hours a week for 47 weeks.

- At end of year company will distribute 100,000 'semi-shares' to it's
employees and active investors, in proportion to ones
'employee_profit_hour'. This share does not have any other rights
than if the company would get sold then the money paid for the company
(minus all costs, investments, loans etc) will be distributed among
all semi-share holders.

- At end of year the company should strive to pay of (part of) it's investors
if it doesn't expect to need the money within 2 years time frame.

Rules of the Company can only be changed if at least 75 % of the
company employees doesn't oppose to the changes.

——————–

Decision-making processes

(Note that these are only guidelines and may be changed. However the
changes MUST follow the spirit of the original guidelines).

The Company is lead by a CEO. His actions are governed by:

- The advisory board that is a team of external chosen experts.

- An governance team, which is chosen among the employees of the
Company and people from the advisory board.

The purpose of the advisory board is to give good advice to the CEO and the
employees of the company.

The purpose of the governance team is to give directives (that must be
followed) to the CEO and suggest changes to the rules and decisions
processes. The governance team have the right to fire and reinstate
people (including the CEO).

- Company will be lead in an open and democratic fashion:
- All (not customer classified information) information will be public
inside of the company. This includes salaries, bonuses, shares, birthdays
etc.

- Decisions will be done in a democratic fashion and all employees
should have a chance to have their say in things that matters to them.

- In case of disagreement things should be resolved by voting with
the 3 vote rule; 'Yes, No and Never'. A decision should normally not
be taken if there is a single 'Never' vote.
In exceptional 'life and death' cases, after through discussions have
been had and after all other options are exhausted, a decisions can
be taken even if there is 'a few' 'Never' votes, if 50 % of the company
will vote yes to the proposal.

- Company should work according to the moto: "Do good decisions fast
but be prepared to quickly change course if there is a way to do it"
This implies that the following should holds for 'controversial decision':

- If requested, the decision makers needs to clearly define the bases
for a decisions and give means for proving/disapproving that the
decision is in the Company best interest. If a decisions is proved
to be wrong, it needs to be reverted and the decision makers need
to analyse why it went wrong and put up measures that it shouldn't
happen again.

- Company should learn from it's mistakes and it's successes. It should
strive to repeat it's success and avoid it's mistakes in the future.

---

Final note:

The owners of 50 % of the voting shares in the Company (initially only
the founders) have the definite power to say 'NO' to any made decision
that doesn't have 75 % of the employees behind it. They can also
propose new decisions that will be be taken if 75 % of the employees
stands behind it. This rule can only be changed with 85 % of the
voting shares.

Happy 4th Birthday Son!

Happy 4th Birthday Linus , party is on Saturday!

FYI:
Im trying to learn Gimp here..

12 rules for microenterprise success

01/27/09
Posted under business strategies
I got it from INQ

1. Practice separate entities

Keep business cash and products that you sell separate from your personal money and family use. No family member or employee should ever take money or goods without paying for them. One good way to make this work is to regularly pay yourself a livable salary.

“Attitude determines altitude.”

2. Start small, think big

Some want to get really big, really fast. Too rapid growth, without experience or money in reserve, can kill a great business faster than almost all other mistakes. Learn from costly mistakes when the business is small, then grow at a sustainable pace.

“Anything the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve.”

3. Differentiate your business

Selling the same product as your neighbor is bad for business as it drives prices down which then hurts everyone. Make your business different by carrying unique products, displaying your products differently and not locating near your competitors.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

4. Buy low, sell high

To make money in business you must sell something for more than you paid for it. The difference between the price you pay and the price you charge for a product is the gross profit or margin. The bigger the difference, the more money you will make. Negotiate with suppliers for lower prices.

“Winners speak in specifics, losers speak in generalities.”

5. Buy on credit, sell for cash

Many owners have this backwards; they buy in cash and sell on credit. If you can get your supplies on credit and collect cash from your customers at the time of sale, you can carry a lot more inventory and possibly turn it faster. You must, however, pay suppliers on time.

“Compete with someone, even if it’s yourself.”

6. Turn your inventory often

If you buy a product for P100 and sell it for P300 you earn P200. If you do this 10 times a week, you earn P2,000 that week. If you do this 10 times a day, you earn P2,000 that day. Small inventory turned everyday is best.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

to be continue

E-books for linux

A valuable resource worth bookmarking. Read the article at Daily Artisan.