chrishowie.com

I’ve been using VirtualBox for some months now. It’s pretty slick and doesn’t get in my way too much. Just for the heck of it I’ve been experimenting with a few other similar systems: OpenVZ, vserver, KVM, and Xen. OpenVZ and KVM are the only two I’ve tinkered with long enough to at least have a clue what’s going on.

I was trying KVM at the suggestion of someone in #debian who seemed to like it a lot better than VirtualBox. After playing with KVM I’m not sure where this opinion came from. Just getting KVM and libvirtd to the point where I could actually run a VM took over a half hour. The virt-manager GUI looked nice but was buggy in some spots, and the lack of guest OS drivers meant that many things were a bit sluggish. On the plus side, networking was much easier to setup — but only sometimes. (If you add a network card *after* creating a VM you cannot choose which mode to run it in and are forced to use usermode NAT.) Another cool feature was emulation of a tablet pointing device in addition to a regular mouse device. This means that KVM doesn’t need any guest drivers for mouse integration, because it set the pointer position using the tablet.

At the end of the day, VirtualBox still wins for desktop virtualization. I’m still keeping KVM on the radar though.

My DSL and phone service is due to be activated today. When I got up I had dialtone, which is a good sign. But a few days ago I had an interesting encounter that was just too humorous not to share.

On Thursday the DSL modem showed up but since I was spending the night at my parents’ house I didn’t tinker with it too much. Friday night I unpacked it and hooked it up. To my surprise it actually found DSL signal, but obviously failed on PPPoE authentication since I did not have my account information. I went out and got a cordless phone to see if I had dialtone, hoping to call AT&T customer service and get my DSL account name and password early. Of course I forgot that I needed to let the handset charge for a day. So I copied my order number and other info down and headed into the back room where I get good enough wireless signal from my neighbors to make Skype calls on my Pocket PC and called them up.

After giving her all the relevant numbers I explained the situation — that I had DSL signal and would like to try to connect. Hilarity ensued. This is a rough paraphrase of the conversation:

Me: My modem says I have DSL signal. Can I get my account info early?
AT&T: Hmm, I see here your line will be set up Monday, correct?
Me: Yes, that is the scheduled date.
AT&T: Do you have a dialtone yet?
Me: I have no way to check that yet. I don’t have a working phone.
AT&T: Well, if you don’t have dialtone then you cannot have a DSL signal.
Me: My modem says I have DSL signal. The DSL light is green and the modem diagnostics report that I have signal.
AT&T: What happened when you plugged the modem in?
Me: The DSL light flashed red for a few seconds, then it flashed green, and now it is solid green.
AT&T: Ok. It was flashing red — that means you don’t have signal.
Me: Well, it changed. It is not flashing red now, it is solid green.
AT&T: Yes, but it was flashing red when you plugged it in, and you don’t have dialtone, so you don’t have signal.
Me: I never said I don’t have dialtone… the modem is telling me that I have signal.
AT&T: That’s not possible, your line is not connected. You don’t have signal. That’s why the modem light was flashing red.

Around this point I gave up. Not so much out of frustration but I just could not believe what I was hearing. I could have understood refusal based on policy or simply that the person responsible for creating accounts had not yet created mine. But blatant denial of information presented to me by my equipment is ridiculous.

At least it makes for a good story…

A few fun things have been happening, but I’ve been too busy to write about them. Now that I have time, I’ve just finished moving into my new house for the summer and won’t have Internet access until this Monday (or later if past experience on this topic is any indication).

Anyway, here is a rough list of developments since my last post.

• I moved to a summer house nearer to my office (cutting my commute from one hour to about five minutes). But I already said that.
• My computer is now sporting a new power supply, motherboard, GPU, and hard drive. I also upgraded my RAM from 1GB to 4GB. Compiz Fusion looks sweet on an 8800GT.
• I’ve been in communication with two Mono people about the future of OpenVP. I don’t want to give too much away right now, but I can assure you that in the next couple of months OpenVP will be transforming into the visualization framework with the highest degree of ass-kickery around.