Yann's blog

Creating new virtual machines with ubuntu-vm-builder

This could have been entitled "how to get a new operating system running in less than 2 minutes". Right, this post is intended for Linux Users only, but I know there are a couple out there... Virtualisation is a technology that is used to run several operating systems on one physical machine. In other words, on one server, I can run 2 windows XP, 3 windows 2000, and 10 linux - all running at the same time. There are many different ways to do this, ranging from XEN, KVM, Vmware to virtualbox and solaris containers... I made a small screencast (like a video) to show how easy and fast it is to create VMs using a script called ubuntu-vm-builder. To see the screencast, you must run Linux, download uvb.session and uvb.timing here: http://waste.mandragor.org/uvb/ , and run scriptreplay uvb.timing uvb.session . It is about 2 minutes long :) .

Posted at 11:49AM Aug 15, 2008 by Yann Hamon in General  |  Comments[1]

All other offices moved to Zimbra!

All the users in Mauguio, Lancaster and Cambridge are now all using Zimbra... We have made good progress in Oxford as well - the move should be finished soon! Was a lot of hard work and literally millions of emails to transfer, but we're nearly there :)

Posted at 01:28PM Jul 11, 2008 by Yann Hamon in General  |  Comments[0]

French website...

It's hot, it's new, it's the french website! Right no it's not completely ready yet, but nearly :)

You can follow the development at the following address: http://fr-dev.thehumanjourney.net/. At this stage, we would be very pleased with some feedback, either with the design, or the content for the one of you who speak french!

Posted at 07:05PM Jul 01, 2008 by Yann Hamon in General  |  Comments[0]

Windows XP acceleration & KVM

It seems I am not the first one to have troubles setting up a windows XP KVM guest. The main problem seems to be that it just won't install using acceleration; on the other hand, it works fine without (qemu mode). Here is a command line that works to boot from an ISO file to install windows XP:

Then install windows using your favourite VNC client:

Once the setup is finished, the VM will be defined as non accelerated; it will be using qemu instead of KVM, and will run much slower. Edit the file /etc/libvirt/qemu/xpsp2.xml , and set <emulator> to /usr/bin/kvm instead of /usr/bin/qemu.

Now you just need to redefine the VM and to start it:

sudo virsh
define xpsp2.xml
start xpsp2

Your windows VM is now accelerated :)

Posted at 10:02AM Jul 01, 2008 by Yann Hamon in General  |  Comments[0]

Hello World!

Hello World! Sorry for that blog which aim to be quite technical and may not be of big interest to most archaeologists. It is aimed to explain a little bit what I am working on, which technology we are using, why, some technical tips and tricks, why sometimes I keep sending mails at 3am... But well I may have other things to say - I'm convinced a corporate blog is also a good place to share political convictions ;) Anyway, this is my first step in the blogging world - hello!

Posted at 01:18AM Jun 27, 2008 by Yann Hamon in General  |  Comments[1]