About Vaclav Smil

-
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/

I really fell in love with this man. His some-how provocative argument is really thoughtful. Through his short interviews, I also draw several lessons for myself.

I will put his books in my reading list!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Technical Memo: Disk Encryption using Cryptsetup with Vault as Key Management Service

-
In Linux Operating system, full disk encryption could be achieved by various solutions: encryptfs, dm-crypt, cryptsetup… While a step-by-step setup of disk/partition encryption can be referred from official documentation, integration disk encryption with Key Management solution like Hashicorp Vault is unobvious. Fortunately, there are a package named vaultlocker in Ubuntu Universe repository that ease this integration. I decided to spend my free time to make cryptsetup work with Vault. Notes: A similar request has been made to Cryptsetup but it goes outside of cryptsetup so it was closed. 1. Install Vault As JuJu charm store has working Vault/MySQL charms, Vault deployment is as simple and easy as following commands $ juju deploy percona-cluster $ juju deploy vault $ juju relate vault:shared-db percona-cluster Vault needs to be initialized and unsealed before it can provide its secure services. I followed below steps to initialize Vault $ juju ssh vault/0 $ export VAU
Read more

Technical Memo: Convert an ova image to qcow2 format

-
From Wikipedia of Open Virtualization Format , I learnt that an the ova file is just a tar file of ovf directory. So I went open a Windows 10 Developer Evaluation ova file to see what exist inside it. $ tar -tf WinDev2001Eval.ova WinDev2001Eval.ovf WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.mf So inside the ova file includes A virtual machine specification definition .ovf file A hash checksum .mf file A disk image in .vmdk image As qemu-img supports vmdk as disk image file, we actually could convert vmdk file to any other format that we like. 1. Convert .vmdk to .img $ qemu-img convert -O raw WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.img 2. Convert .vmdk to .qcow2    $ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.qcow2 All supported formats can be confirmed by qemu-img -h The converted qcow2 image could be used to create a new virtual machine using virt-manager. I used to think that .ova file is the file format of Virtual Box (There
Read more

Use MaaS to manage local computing resource

-
Image
Besides managing bare metal machines, MaaS (Metal as a Service) can also manage KVM guests as long as those machines are boot from network PXE. This feature allow us to efficiently manage local computing resources, while at the same time, leverage JuJu for automatically middle ware deployment. In this blog post, I will detail steps to manage KVM guest machines using MaaS. System diagram MaaS Managed Machine : MaaS Virtual Machine creates other Virtual machines through KVM Pod. All VMs access the internet through physical machine's NIC using NAT. The MaaS server will be deployed to a virtual machine running inside the physical machine. The reason for installing MaaS into a virtual machine instead of directly install to the physical machine is that we want to have the flexibility of VMs as we want to update MaaS version, or backup... The MaaS server will manage its "parent" physical machine resources through KVM pod. All machines will access to the Internet thr
Read more