vm

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To support the UABgrid2 pilot we purchased a few Dell systems that arrived in April: two [Dell 2950s| http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_2950?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] with dual 3.0Ghz Xeon, 8Gb RAM, and 300Gb SAS disks (Perc5/i-based mirrors), a [Dell 1950|http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1950?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] with dual CPUs and some local storage, and an [Dell/EMC 6TB SAN|http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_ax150?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] to connect to the 1950. The 2950's will host various aspects of the UABgrid2 infrastructure including the identity management (VO, CA, and MyProxy) and application support (GridWay, Gridsphere, and other collaborative apps) systems. The 2950s will be hosting VMware-based virtual machines to carry out most of these tasks, with the goal of easing application deployment when conflicting system requirements arise. The 1950 will act as a quasi-NAS device, supporting traditional network shares locally and high-bandwidth file transfers via GridFTP (and potentially other protocols) for UABgrid job management. Together these systems will form the UABgrid infrastructure cluster.

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It is my pleasure to announce the first release of myVocs box, an integrated collaboration platform. myVocs box is a virtual machine that delivers the technologies that drive myVocs.org wrapped up in a
self-contained system that's ready for you to enjoy.

Please visit http://myvocs-box.myvocs.org for details on the three simple steps to download, run, and enjoy a collaboration platform of your own.

The technologies in this release of myVocs box include:

* A complete Shibboleth 1.3 identity system (IdP and SP)
* Simple collaboration group setup and management via Sympa
* Flexible resource integration powered by YubNub

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VMWare Server has been acting up lately. The network connection to guests gets dropped seemingly randomly. The problem is noticed as dropped network connections are normarlly noticed: web pages are unavailable, logins fail (eg. on XP a message about AD not accepting connections or not recognizing you), and if the guest runs a service, the service is unavailable.

The problem can sometimes be fixed (or even avoided) by pinging from the guest to some external address. I've also had luck in disconnecting and reconnecting the network device for the guest.

The host is always available and the guests can be controlled via the VMware remote interface. Our VMware Server boxes use bridged networking, so that the host and guests are all on

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The Internet2 2006 Fall Member Meeting was held in Chicago, Illinois from Monday December 4th through Thursday December 7th. I attended the meeting to participate in a SURAgrid presentation and demonstration of applications running on SURAgrid, including the UABgrid BLAST application which leverages DynamicBLAST to distribute gene sequence queries across grid resources. I also participated in a meeting to discuss next steps for the continuing myVocs and GridShib integration efforts and project updates.

SURAgrid is a collaborative effort to build a production grid computing environment leveraging existing infrastructure and applications.

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After installing the new free VMware Server product I couldn't get the
vmware-mui-distrib tarball to install. It kept aborting with the message
"Failure" after saying it detected an previous install of vmware. Duh!, I
had put it there.

The previous install wasn't actually the problem though. I found the
[limited instrux for the new release|http://www.vmware.com/support/server/doc/releasenotes_server_beta.html#install]
and the said make sure libdb.so.3 is installed, which comes in the
compat-db rpm, btw. I installed it, still no luck.

Looking at the perl code it seemed to be looking for a previous install of