Going Virtual

It has been quite a while since I posted here on the Obsessive Collaborator. This has been due primarily to the migration of my server to a new machine (alas, it was not purchased with bailout money). I thought it was time to retire my five-year old server, at least from the front line, and replace it with a new server that would be set up to run virtualized servers. This would allow me to both test many server applications in isolated environments, and allow me to regularly backup and move offsite full functional snapshots of my servers (I am perhaps more obsessed with backup than I am with collaboration).

The process of migrating was fairly slow (mostly due to the fact that I did my work in my spare time). I was able to keep the old server running side by side until the final switch which took about an hour. While there are ways of moving from physical to virtual servers, I didn't think that they were worth the effort. Instead I started from a new CentOS 5.2 image that I created, built up the services I needed and then rsynced over the directories that I needed moved. I also used webmin to migrate settings for many of the services I needed.

The base server is also a CentOS 5.2 bare bones image. I probably could have used something lighter weight, but I now CentOS and stuck with that. Mostly that OS needs to run vmware and lots of backup scripts. I tried some premade backup scripts for vmware images, but they didn't work real well with vmware 2.0. I wound up writing my own script that progressively has each virtual machine suspend, copies the whole directory elsewhere, restarts the server, tars and gzips the directory and erases the backup directory, With a fast eSATA external drive the copying is done fairly quickly.

Vmware server 2.0 itself is quite good. I waited to go live until the official release came out. It is as easy to use as the older vmware server, the major difference from my perspective being that all management is done through a web console. For the most part I like this, making managing servers and even running console sessions quite easy. It will install firefox plugins or activex controls to run the console sessions wherever you'd like. Unless that place is a Mac, which mine often is. So I need to default to a windows or linux host for running those console sessions. I considered the now free Vmware ESX instead of server, but it is very temperamental about the hardware it runs on, and the server I built wasn't up to it (it wouldn't recognize the onboard sata).

Now I'm exploring the world of vmware images, and am disappointed when an app I want to test doesn't have an available appliance. Fortunately there are many to choose from (and I also have a bare bones image that I can build up from, and will also build a new Jeos image to make it even lighter weight for applications I want to keep).

In my search for a Document Management solution, I've looked at Alfresco over several iterations. It is quite capable, but I'm not thrilled with the UI, and the open source version has an unclear relationship with the enterprise version. I have read a lot about KnowledgeTree, and I thought I'd give that a try.

I found a vmware appliance from Rpath. Rpath has quite a number of good vmware appliances. Their documentation is somewhat sparse (as has been discussed in various forums), but most appliances now have a wiki page on their site. I found this wiki page early on, and it gave some basic setup information for Knowledgetree. But it wasn't until I found the separate wiki page over at Knowledgetree that I was able to get everything configured.

Once I got that documentation configuration was better than easy, it was easy and filled with options through a web interface.

I was able to make changes to the appliance itself (like network settings) and configure the major Knowledgetree options that normally involve messing with a config file.

When all was set up, it was a pretty straightforward operation. Log in to the site and you can upload documents, create folders, move documents, provide permissions for documents and send email alerts about documents to others.

One of the things I liked about Knowledgetree was that while it supported advanced features like checkin/checkout, workflows, etc. it also seemed like it could just be a simple document repository. Making it even easier was the ability to map the directory structure to a webdav drive. Once I actually followed the instructions, it was trivial to get the webdav working from a mac and linux clients (I didn't try windows).

I may or may not used Knowledgetree. I haven't decided whether the document management is so much better than other integrated packages I use to warrant it. But I'll keep experimenting.

A few more notes on recent upgrades. Elgg is now at 1.1 and has a lot of community plugins going for it. Opengoo just went 1.0 and looks pretty slick. And I'm looking forward to the upcoming release of Liferay Social Office. On the negative side, I've pretty much given up on Peopleaggregator. Their upgrade cycle fell short and there were too many hacks that I had to apply. Elgg looks like it is filing that open source social networking space just fine.