In my last post I was frustrated with getting some IE8 updates auto-installed during Windows install. For the few that that made any sense to I would like to mention I have in fact managed to add the IE8 install to SVCPACK.INF and added the four IE8 updates to the application install section of the Windows install. And now, and long looooooooong last, there is only two updates that come up when the auto-install is done: one is for the malicious software tool thing for August and the other is for the WGA checker thing. The only thing I haven’t added of course is some form of office. I think I’m a little exhausted from the stupid IE8 thing. Course it’s the new month and “patch Tuesday” is probably coming up. Unless it was this week. Whatever. Office is going to be like starting all over again with OS installs probably.
I was brainstorming again about my distant goal of a fun virtualized server environment in which all my data is contained in virtual hard disks. I re-re-re-remembered why I’ll be using virtual disks by the way: because anything else and Windows would not be able to mount it. I mean Windows does NTFS only and Linux seems to have issues writing to NTFS. Reading seems to be more or less workable but that hardly does me any good now does it? And no, I’m not dropping back to FAT or FAT32. Move forward not back. Friend don’t let friends use FAT32. So on and so forth.
Where was I? Right. Brainstorming. I was trying to figure out if it would be a good idea or even possible to just kind of dynamically allocate a new virtual drive every time I create a new VM. I’ll be using (in theory) PHPVirtualBox to create new VMs and other-wise managing the VMs so maybe this wouldn’t be an issue. I was just realizing I can’t really create any OTHER VMs ont he server if the whole storage is in fact filled with existing virtual drives waiting to be filled by the virtual WHS unless there’s some non-filled up space leaving enough room for some other virtual drives for other VMs. A special VM just for a PXE server for instance. I haven’t figured out if that will really be practical yet. That’s what I was thinking about.
I have a long way to go before I can even start thinking about that anyway so it probably doesn’t matter. There’s the new hard drives, eventually building a new super-cheap-server to host everything and I’m thinking about converting a little computer into some kind of NAS to backup all these VMs. Well it’s a super-small chassis anyway with what appears to be a first-gen Celeron and 256 Megs of memory. I was going to try and use that but I’m not sure it’s practical for reasons like not SATA connections on either the motherboard or the PSU. And the PSU is way over-sized and who knows how old anyway. So I could add a new more practical PSU and put in a SATA raid card I happen to have. But what if the RAID card fails? Well if it’s setup right that won’t be the only copy of it anyway. Still makes me worry. Also, this little Celeron I don’t think can boot from USB flash or USB much of anything for that matter. Also, I wanted to add my old back plane that can fit four hard drives. After heavily modifying it of course so that the drives are connected directly to the motherboard (had some issues with it) and also to add some fans. But this little chassis just has the one 5 1/4″ CD slot and a floppy slot. Behind the Dell plastic outside is a cold hard metal inside. So to use this chassis I’d need some kind of machine shop to trim that little bit out and size it. Which I could probably do. And the USB booting issue? Well that’s still an issue actually but perhaps maybe, and I haven’t tried this period before never mind on the little celeron in particular, but I do have a really, really old Zip250 I kept for some reason so this little Celeron might have that capability built into it that it could boot from something like that. Maybe….? I mean if it had room along side the back plane holding all those drives. Or the “internal” Zip250 would be REALLY internal as in actually inside the case. If there’s was room. Which there may not be. Something to think about over the weekend maybe or some other time when there is more time.