As of lately, the site has completely gone to hell. For starters, almost all the “big boys” with their premier ads have pulled out. The only ones buying banner ads are NON-LOCAL businesses. Then again, how could you even contact them? The contact system has been broken for over 2 years. And to make things worse, using the contact form on the site has never resulting in any response.

But what is even worse is this: nobody is buying anything on that site anymore. And I mean nobody. The only responses you get from listings on there these days are people wanting to trade crap like horses and used tires. And while I don’t mind a good set of used tires for a used car – what on earth gives some of these people the idea that I would even WANT a horse?!

Of coarse, my favorite are the ones that contact you all day long to see how much they can talk you down on your asking price – yet have absolutely no desire to actually buy anything. They are simply curious to see if you would have been willing to take a lower price. I cannot cound how many times I have responded with “how much are you willing to pay for it?” and was answered “oh, well – I don’t really need it – just curious”. WTF?

You know, I own mycookietown.com – perhaps I should create my own classifieds site on that domain….

…one that filters out useless trolls and actually responds to the inquires of those willing to spend money.

- Dean

Been messing around with alternatives to VMWares ESX and ESXi. Of the top contender thus far is KVM.

KVM is a true kernel-level hypervisor similar to ESXi. Unlike ESXi, you still load a typical Linux OS first – the KVM runs via a special kernel module.

At first glance, I was a bit confused: you install Qemu and KVM. “So is this Qemu or is it KVM”. It is actually both. KVM is largely comprised of two components: the kernel-level hypervisor and a handfull of shared libraries and binaries shared by Qemu.

At the core, you call the “kvm” command just as you would call the “qemu” command (they take the same arguments).

Installation on Ubuntu is easy-squeezy:

apt-get install kvm qemu

Currently, kvm supports all the neato stuff you would expect from a kick-ass virtualizer:

• Full virtualization that takes advantage of VTI and AMD-V extensions
• Supports snapshots and machine states
• Live migration of a running guest from one server to another
• Multi-processor support (up to 64 I believe)
• Good memory management with Windows guests

There are some GUI tools for managing the virtual machines – one of the neatest I found was virtual-manager. Similar to VMWares VCenter. I have not used this tool much however in favor of custom scripts for management.

Looks like I will be deploying this in an initial test phase at our TeirII data center in Franklin, TN for the Army National Guards website (http://www.nationalguard.com). I will keep everyone posted on how the tests turn out!