Changing the network settings with VMware player 3.1 on Linux

I came across an issue today, where I wanted to remove one of the virtual network interfaces that gets installed when you install VMware player. This turned out to be relatively straight forward, once you know where to look.

In VMware workstation , you get a great graphical tool to amend and alter the virtual network configuration, but not so with the free VMplayer.

The reason I wanted to do this was remove the virtual interface vmnet8, as I'm not using any NAT's interfaces, so this is not needed and will only consume resources.

Firstly point your favourite editor at /etc/vmware/networking as a root user and then modify the file like so.

7 answer VNET_8_DHCP no
8 answer VNET_8_DHCP_CFG_HASH B9130F0FB783D3AC081BDA79708F4635E63130A4
9 answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_NETMASK 255.255.255.0
10 answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 172.16.73.0
11 answer VNET_8_NAT no
12 answer VNET_8_VIRTUAL_ADAPTER no

The key , is that you have turned all the VNET_8 answers to no instead of yes.

Once this is safely saved, run the following commands to re-start the networking.

sudo vmware-networks --stop ; sudo vmware-networks --start

Once you have done this, if you now issue an /sbin/ifconfig you will notice that vmnet8 does now not appear.

I have decided to become an Android Polytheist ;-)

Well, after many years of trying to stick to just the one omnipotent & omniscient Deity, with no success, and all my prayers being completely ignored I decided to bring in a legion of Deities rather than rely on just one.

This course of action was brought on by the loss of my beloved Android Smartphone, so I duly put in a call to his Holiness Lord Android of Google.

I burnt a chicken - normal with my cooking skills , ran around the office like a headless chicken, and then asked for the return of my phone.

Alas, like all previous attempts with just the one, switching to a few of them seems to have the same pointless effect, but at least I got the feeling I was talking to someone via my blog , and perhaps the odd person who reads this will feel the power of the Lord Android and send me a new phone ;-).

I had a lot more success talking to the nice chap in the Phone store , who gave me a new sim chip to stick in an old phone.

Ironically, later in the day I did get an email from Google asking to have a chat about a job they have going, so perhaps Lord Android does move in mysterious ways, and I'll end up getting a Google Android phone as part of the deal.

The Christmas Tale - or the coming of our saviour Amazon.com

If you have ever worked for a large multi-national company or a city based financial institution then you fully understand the concept of global capitalism. The bull faced financial and social methodology we humans have chosen for the 21st Century over and above all the leftist methodologies we tried and threw in the rubbish bin in the 20th Century.

This time of year everyone on the planet is able to get a glimpse of this system. The system we have chosen to organise our existence is in full swing, and the marketing arm is working overtime everyday to get as many people as possible involved.

The Victorian capitalist's did a fantastic job of wrapping up this cold system in tinsel and Christmas trees, snowy pictures and pretty cards. It has been embellished ever since with even the multi-nationals chipping in with the dress code for some of the fantasy members of the Christmas cast. The irony of Coca-cola giving us the red suited Santa clause is just pure marketing genius.

You of course get all the Christians , trying their hardest to try and sugar coat this time of year with fairy stories and ridiculous tales from a discredited book of scary tales, but they are now so removed from the real meaning of Christmas that it is sad to witness.

The Christmas marketing engine now appears to kick in around September, with the children coming under increasing bombardment with television adverts priming them to get their Christmas demand lists in order. The pressure increases until around December,when the full might of capitalism is thrown into the fray and then everyone is subjected to posters, TV adverts and on-line interrupt's. We are told that if only you or a member of your family owned this extra piece of Chinese plastic, their lives will be complete and full-filled. This crescendo goes on, well into the new year with January sales, where you can now purchase all the things you couldn't afford before Christmas at a knock down price.

If most people are brutally honest, the most enjoyable parts of this time of year are the meals and get together with friends , not that single day of excess. The shopping trips before hand with the stress and agony written into the faces of millions of men on every high street and shopping mall on the planet. I think some Women do enjoy it slightly more, but then all the Women in my life enjoy shopping all year around, so this is not that surprising.

Well, I have now seen the light, and have chosen Amazon this year to do 80% of my Christmas shopping. I have for years trudged around the shops, with millions of others getting hot and bothered, but not this year. It is also not a co-incidence that capitalism has invented a way to make this whole process even easier to open our wallets, in the guise of on-line shopping.The beautiful side effect is we no longer have to find this whole process as difficult as it once was.
We can now spend time on the Christmas shopping in a more civilised manor and perhaps even start to enjoy the little bit of high street adventure that is required. The visit to the Christmas market can be more about mulled wine and a gentle walk around, rather than the frenzied fight to get as many things in as short a space of time as possible. I welcome this change, and I can't ever see myself going back.

Have a merry Christmas and Happy New year, and oh yes, don't forget to keep spending, it's what the system requires of all good capitalist citizens.

Speeding up your Linux browser using a ramdisk

I came across an interesting article yesterday, about someone who had speeded up their browser on Windows by using a ramdisk, and knowing that Linux can happily do this, I decided to write down how to do this for the Linux user.

Firstly we need to create a directory that we can use for the ramdisk, and get it to automatically mount everytime we start our machine.

1) create the directoty - sudo mkdir /var/ramdisk

2) then edit this file and add the following line at the end - gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

/var/ramdisk /var/ramdisk tmpfs size=512m 0 0

3) Now mount this new ramdisk to test

sudo mount /var/ramdisk

We now have our ramdisk, and we can add this to the start options for Chromium and Firefox.

Firstly we will do Chrome as it's the easiest, simple add the following line to the startup options/icon that your use to start Chrome.

--disk-cache-dir=/var/ramdisk

See below:

If you now click on Chrome, you will now be using a Ram disk, and you can look at what you are storing in that cache, but looking in the directory you created earlier.

Now, for firefox we use a different method,

Mozilla Firefox

• Type about:config into the address bar, accept the warning ("I'll be careful, I promise!")
• Right click > New > String
• Type browser.cache.disk.parent_directory into the box and press OK
• Type the path of your BrowserCache directory -- /var/ramdisk press OK
• Close all open Firefox tabs and windows
• Open the browser again

(Part of the above section was lifted directly from this web page to save typing - http://goo.gl/RKr7z)

That's it, you now have you cache being stored in RAM instead of on disk, which is significantly faster, for saving and reading cached pages. I have started with a RAM disk of 512m, which may be too large for you or too small, but you can adjust that once you see what your usage profile is like.

Is upgrading to the Intel i5 laptop processor worth the effort

In a word, yes . As you may have read on this blog a few weeks ago , I tried an experiment with using an SSD harddisk for the operating system in conjunction with an external 500GB hybrid disk for all the more volatile parts of the OS, like /var and /tmp.

This was a resounding successful with a marked ramp in performance across the whole operating system and applications, to the point now , that all other machines seem like sloth's in comparison.

I had a need to upgrade my work laptop recently, specifically for more CPU cores and access to that lastest hardware virtualization extensions. I use the laptop extensively for virtualization, so I picked the Dell Latitude E6410. This is a really good work horse, but more importantly it comes with the Intel i5 processor.

This has had a very positive affect on the whole systems performance when running virtual guests with VirtualBox - my current virtualization platform of choice - to the extent that I can now over commit on memory and cpu's , plus the density I can achieve on this box has literally doubled.

I always keep a system monitor going to see how hard the system us working, and while on the old E6400, with two virtual machines running , the system would be noticeable slower, now with four virtual guests running, there is still plenty of head room for the other applications I need to run.

If are about to upgrade, and you need the ability to run multiple virtual guests, then I would definitely recommend the extra spend on this processor. The more memory the better, but I'm happily working with 4GB currently, but I can take this up to 8GB if the need should arise.

Well done Dell this is a grand machine for running Linux.

Ubuntu 10.10 is released and raises the bar for the Linux desktop again

Well, we have been testing it for five months, and playing with all the new features and functions that the latest software from the open source community can give us. So, if you want to be pleased with just how easy this release is to install or upgrade, then give it a try.

You can read the full release notes at the Ubuntu web site for more detailed information on exactly what each version of this Linux distribution is going to deliver, but it has impressed me on every server, desktop and virtual image I have installed it onto or into, and this post is coming from my just up dated work laptop.

Ubuntu is not every Linux users friend, and I understand some of the resistance, but most open minded open source people can see a definite role for this in the whole open source universe. I use a great deal of Linux, in many different forms, but if you want a desktop that just works, then certainly look no further.

If you are currently using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, you will need to modify your software sources to allow updates from newer releases, and not just LTS releases. Once you have done that, you will be offered the choice of this new version. This will ask a few simple questions, download about 1,000 files, and prompt you during the process for a few answers. That's it , you are now on the latest version.

An amusing thing about the date of release, is that it was 101010, which in decimal is 42. Douglas Adams has already informed us that this is the meaning of life, the universe and everything, so you can't get much higher praise than that. We can now use this release of Ubuntu to figure out what the question was ;-)

Anyway, go and grab a copy and give it whirl , you won't be disappointed.

Using SSD and hybrid disks to speed up your computer

I have been reading for a while about the advantages of using SSD disks for starting/booting your computer, which can be especially useful on a laptop, which you are far more likely to restart. Well I decided to put this into action and see what speed improvements these changes would make, and how it would improve the speed in several tests.

The hardware:
Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop with 4GB Ram and an Intel Core 2 duo P8700 2.5 Ghz
OS Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS fully patched
Primary new disk drive Kingston SSDnow V+ 64 GB
Secondary disk Seagate Momentus XL hybrid drive 500 GB / 4GB SSD

After considerable thought, and reading that the SSD disk would be good for 1 million reads, I decided that I would use two disk's instead of one, and all variable data would go on the hybrid drive. This would be true for any OS, basically if the partition is going to be written to on a regular basis , then move it onto an external disk. Luckily the Dell comes with a built in eSata connector, which offers really good performance for an external unit, and I wouldn't recommend using USB 2 or firewire unless thats all you have.

I therefore moved the following disk partitions onto the Seagte hybrid drive - /tmp, /var, /home - and made sure that their UUID's were correctly configured on the internal Kingston SSD disk in /etc/fstab. The hybrid Seagate drive is housed in an Icy Box external eSata 2.5" enclosure which works really well.

So to the tests, with the original 2.5" Seagate Momentus 7200 250GB internal disk. I used my stop watch, and with the SSD fitted I suspect some of timings are do my lack of ability to react that quickly.

1) From the end of the BIOS post to a login prompt averaged - 30 seconds
2) Loading firefox 3.6.8 with 25 tabs open - 18 seconds
3) loading Google Chrome with 25 tabs - 10 seconds

with the new configuration

1) From the end of the BIOS post to a login prompt averaged - 5 seconds
2) Loading firefox 3.6.8 with 25 tabs open - 4 seconds
3) loading Google Chrome with 25 tabs - 2 seconds

It is obvious that the new system is significantly faster than it was previously, so the claims being made by the SSD manufacturers are true, your system will be quicker. I would also comment, that everything now works at a much smarter rate, and I have no doubts if I had tested more applications the same performance boost would have been measured.

This was not a cheap experiment however, and the two drives cost me in excess of £250. I was looking for a speed boost with my virtualization requirements, and that is what I have achieved, but unless you have a real need for this performance improvement , then you may well find your money better spent of other needs. I would also now like to try this with the latest Intel processors to see if I can squeeze even more performance out of the laptop.