Tag Archives: Vmware

Programs I use for Windows in my Workstations

I love Linux and Linux tools and I’m a big fan of it, using it for Servers since 1995.

However some companies use Windows for the Workstations, and that’s not necessarily bad.

So I describe here the tools I use to maximize productivity.

Antivirus

That really depends on my employers. I’ve my opinion about several of them.

Apache Directory Studio

For working with LDAP.

BalenaEtcher

To flash images to USB and external drives. https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I also use Rufus https://rufus.ie/

Chrome

Debut
This is a Commercial Software to capture video. I record bugs, tutorials, internal web training sessions…

Docker Desktop for Windows

But not in the laptops cause the hyper-v may conflict with the BitLocker drive encryption and may cause the entire drive to be lost.

However as much as possible, I will do everything in Linux Workstations and Servers.

(CRLF problems in Docker Linux are horrible)

Editplus

Very powerful for doing replacement over large CSV files.

Firefox

Filezilla

GIMP

HeidiSQL

Free Database Manager for MariaDB, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL.

Is compatible with Wine, so you can use it on Linux.

LastPass (for Teams)

With Chrome’s plugin.

LibreOffice

MobaXTerm

With zmodem, sftp, SSH, tunnel….

MyDebugger

A MySQL debugger. Specially useful for Stored Procedures.

Is compatible with Wine, so you can use it on Linux.

OBS

https://obsproject.com/ is a screen recorder Software, for Linux, Mac Os X and Windows.

One Note

OpenVPN

Opera

Specially useful the option of using a VPN.

Project (Microsoft Project)

PuTTy

PyCharm, PHPStorm, CLion from JetBrains

Python

Radmin

A powerful Server Remote Control for Windows, much more stable than VNC.

Remote Desktop Connection

Rufushttps://rufus.ie

To toast ISOs to USB.

Slack

Toad for Oracle

Videopad

Video editor

VirtualBox
Yes, I always have a Linux VM.

Visio

For the Diagrams.

VLC

Video player

VMWare Player

VNC

Normally RealVNC.

WinRAR

Zoom

News from the blog 2020-08-19

  • I assisted to the OpenZFS leadership meeting.

I tried to continue following it since I left Sanmina. ZFS is really an amazing Software and it’s lead by an amazing Community of super cool Engineers and companies. I would like to continue contributing ASAP.

I bought some new hard drives in order to work a bit on this. You don’t need to have dedicated hardware if you want to test features. You can run in a VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.

  • I received more books about DevOps and Python

None is perfect. I see flaws in all of them and bad architecture practices*, however from all I learn interesting things.

*I guess that’s why I wrote my own book :)

You know, I study every day. At least 30 minutes, after work. As part of my healthy routines.

But I also study and learn during the work, as we have time available for this.

I’m very fortunate that Blizzard gives me time every day to study. That’s amazing. They also send us to events paying the ticket, travel, hotel, expenses… now with covid-19 we only go to virtual events, but the company still pay for this and give free days. Is a very nice company.

I use a lot Linux Academy too:

I continue having purchases of my book, and I’m very happy about that. I’m working on improving it and providing more contents and samples going from the scratch, with step by step code samples. From spaghetti code reading CSV files, to OOP with Full Coverage.

  • My application for a Higher degree Computer Science Cloud Computing (Level 8) has been accepted. The Irish government pays me 90% of the degree, and Blizzard will pay me the other 10% after I pass the first year course.

I’m really grateful to this beautiful country, Ireland.

Having an Irish degree is something that brings me an special illusion.

  • I have updated CTOP.py with some interesting features

It allows to pass a fixed width and height for the terminal render. That’s very useful when you run CTOP in a Docker non interactive session, or from a Cron, with the –iterations=1 so the output can be captured programmatically.

  • Jetbrains has provided me with a Free License of all their products, in order to support my work in Open Source projects. That’s very nice. I’m using now mainly PyCharm and PhpStorm.
  • At the beginning of the covid-19 I wrote a simulator in Python. That’s why I was able to anticipate that the number of cases and deaths would be very much higher when nobody around me knew what was going to happen. My first simulations were simple, and the algorithms were growing in complexity until I had a full rich Object Oriented modeler. Maybe I’ll write an article about this someday.
    • I based my data in https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
    • I studied the evolution of several countries and I was working with simulations in Spain until their government started blocking the information and stop providing transparent and accurate metrics.
  • I’m seeing how the covid is affecting and transforming several kind of business:
    • Meetup.com I see meetups with more than 1,000 users closing, as they are no meeting anymore
    • Airlines, obviously
    • Hotels, offering less services
    • Metasearchers and OTAs (Online travel agencies)
    • I can imagine the impact on airbnb
    • Discos, nightclubs are closing doors
    • Restaurants, they will lose the Christmas season (with families and companies doing lunch and dinners)
  • At the same time, other companies are hitting records in sales
  • After doing a Masterclass to some colleagues about Refactor, Code Reliability, Quality, The non-happy path and Unit Testing, I’m preparing some contents that I’ll publish to the Community soon. So far I created this repo, where I added the source code for lesson 0: starting to program in Python videos that I created few months ago to help beginners.

https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/teach-unit-testing/-/tree/master/lesson0

I also added some contents to lesson 1, where we refactor pure spaghetti code with no error control, to something more elaborated with unit testing and full code coverage. Still procedural, but I will jump to next class in two weeks, where we will move to OOP and Dependency Injection.

  • Here my “Harley” assembled :)

Upgrading my new HP 14-bp060sa

As the company I was working for, Sanmina, has decided to move all the Software Development to Colorado, US, and closing the offices in Bishopstown, Cork, Ireland I found myself with the need to get a new laptop. At work I was using two Dell laptops, one very powerful and heavy equipped with an Intel Xeon processor and 32 GB of RAM. The other a lightweight one that I updated to 32 GB of RAM.

I had an accident around 8 months ago, that got my spine damaged, and so I cannot carry much weight.

My personal laptops at home, in Ireland are a 15″ with 16 GB of RAM, too heavy, and an Acer 11,6″ with 8GB of RAM and SSD (I upgraded it), but unfortunately the screen crashed. I still use it through the HDMI port. My main computer is a tower with a Core i7, 64GB of RAM and a Samsung NVMe SSD drive. And few Raspberrys Pi 4 and 3 :)

I was thinking about what ultra-lightweight laptop to buy, but I wanted to buy it in Barcelona, as I wanted a Catalan keyboard (the layout with the broken ç and accents). I tried by Amazon.es but I have problems to have shipped the Catalan keyboard layout laptops to my address in Ireland.

I was trying to find the best laptop for me.

While I was investigating I found out that none of the laptops in the market were convincing me.

The ones in around 1Kg, which was my initial target, were too big, and lack a proper full size HDMI port and Gigabit Ethernet. Honestly, some models get the HDMI or the Ethernet from an USB 3.1, through an adapter, or have mini-HDMI, many lack the Gigabit port, which is very annoying. Also most of the models come with 8GB of RAM only and were impossible to upgrade. I enrolled my best friend in my quest, in the research, and had the same conclusions.

I don’t want to have to carry adapters with me to just plug to a monitor or projector. I don’t even want to carry the power charger. I want a laptop that can work with me for a complete day, a full work session, without needing to recharge.

So while this investigation was going on, I decided to buy a cheap laptop with a good trade off of weight and cost, in order to be able to work on the coffee. I needed it for writing documents in Google Docs, creating microservices architectures, programming in Java and PHP, and writing articles in my blog. I also decided that this would be my only laptop with Windows, as honestly I missed playing Star Craft 2, and my attempts with Wine and Linux did not success.

Not also, for playing games :) , there are tools that are only available for Windows or for Mac Os X and Windows, like: POSTMAN, Kitematic for managing dockers visually, vSphere…

(Please note, as I reviewed the article I realized that POSTMAN is available for Linux too)

Please note: although I use mainly Linux everywhere (Ubuntu, CentOS, and RedHat mainly) and I contribute to Open Source projects, I do have Windows machines.

I created my Start up in 2004, and I still have Windows Servers, physical machines in a Data Center in Barcelona, and I still have VMs and Instances in Public Clouds with Windows Servers. Also I programmed some tools using Visual Studio and Visual Basic .NET, ASP.NET and C#, but when I needed to do this I found more convenient spawn an instance in Amazon or Azure and pay for its use.

When I created my Start up I offered my infrastructure as a way to get funding too, and I offered VMs with VMWare. I found that having my Mail Servers in VMs was much more convenient for Backups, cloning, to scale up, to avoid disruption and for Disaster and Recovery.

I wanted a cheap laptop that will not make feel bad if transporting it in a daily basis gets a hit and breaks, or that if it rains (and this happens more than often in Ireland) and it breaks is not super-hurtful, or even if it gets stolen. Yes, I’m from a big city, like is Barcelona, Catalonia, and thieves are a real problem. I travel, so I want a laptop decent enough that I can take to travel, and for going for a coffee, coding anything, and I feel comfortable enough that if something happens to it is not the end of the world.

Cork is not a big city, so the options were reduced. I found a laptop that meets my needs.

I got a HP s14-bp060sa for 439€.

It is equipped with a Intel® Core™ i3-6006U (2 GHz, 3 MB cache, 2 cores) , a 500GB SATA HDD, and 4 GB of DDR4 RAM.

The information on HP webpage is really scarce, but checking other pages I was able to see that the motherboard has 2 memory banks, accepting a max of 16GB of RAM.

I saw that there was an slot, unclear if supporting NVMe SSD drives, but supporting M.2 SSD for sure.

So I bought in Amazon 2x8GB and a M.2 500GB drive.

Since I was 5 years old I’ve been upgrading and assembling by myself all the computers. And this is something that I want to keep doing. It keeps me sharp, knowing the new ports, CPUs, and motherboard architectures, and keeps me in contact with the Hardware. All my life I’ve thought that specializing Software Engineers and Systems Engineers, like if computers were something separate, is a mistake, so I push myself to stay up to date of the news in all the fields.

I removed the spinning 500 GB SATA HDD, cause it’s slow and it consumes a lot of energy. With the M.2 SSD the battery last forever.

The interesting part is how I cloned the drive from the Spinning HDD to the new M.2.

I did:

  • Open the computer (see pics below) and Insert the new drive M.2
  • Boot with an USB Linux Rescue distribution (to do that I had to enable Legacy Boot on BIOS and boot with the USB)
  • Use lsblk command to identify the HDD drive, it was easy as it was the one with partitions
  • dd from if=/dev/sda to of=/dev/sdb with status=progress to see live status and speed (around 70MB/s) and estimated time to complete.
  • Please note that the new drive should be bigger or at least have the same number of bytes to avoid problems with the last partition.
  • I removed the HDD drive, this reduces the weight of my laptop by 100 grams
  • Disable Legacy Boot, and boot the computer. Windows started perfectly :)

I found so few information about this model, that I wanted to share the pictures with the Community. Here are the pictures of the upgrade process.

Here you can see the Crucial M.2 SSD installed and the Spinning HDD removed. Yes, I did in a coffee :)
Final step, installing the 2x8GB RAM memory modules

Why you should not use t1.micro Amazon Free Tier

speed-0When I first tried some years ago Amazon t1.micro Free Tier, I was really disappointed.

I moved one of my blogs there, from a vmware instance that I was running in a physical server of my own, hosted at Colt Telecom, and my deception was huge.

That instance frozen often! According to Amazon EC2 web it was Ok, but it was totally KO. No ping, unable to log by ssh.

The only solution then was to shutdown the instance from the EC2 console, what it takes some time, because in fact, machine was down but the console didn’t know.

Once down, then start again. Reassign the static Ip address (Amazon calls it Elastic Ip).

And once or twice per week I had one of those frozen.

I tried to found a pattern of why instance freezes, but no luck. It simply happen.

I was about to leave Amazon forever when I decided to try the next instance size, just in case, the Small, and problems disappeared forever.

Now, that I have started my project CMIPS to measure and compare the Cloud performance (different providers and instance types), I see how bad it was t1.micro.

Even without the freezes, my not-so-modern ultra-portable laptop performs several times faster (x9.39 times faster), so any project hosted in a t1.micro will suffer a pathetic performance.

Later I discovered that sometimes the Amazon servers where your instances are running have a hardware problem or die. A reboot doesn’t help, since when you reboot, you don’t change the server that hosts your instance (guest).

Only poweroff makes Amazon to assign you another physical server.

And as later I learned, from time to time, no matter how good your instances are -but with expensive instances it happens much less-, without a reason one of your instances can freeze. So if your Startup has 30 instances, monitor them, because one can freeze some day. It just happens. I guess hardware crashes. And it could be one of the databases that gets knock down.

If you’re lucky you’ll have no corruption in the network storage, if not you will loss data. So backup.

It has occurred to me twice with my private instances in Amazon (not counting the nightmare t1.micro), but we suffered it from time to time when I worked for a videogames company where we had many always-on servers and where we were creating on the fly, scaling the number of instances, according to the increasingly or decreasingly number of users.