My place on the net to muse, share, and sometimes rant
Current projects I’m working on
So, doing some digging revealed some possible fixes to the black screen I’m getting on startup.
Now my problem is that I’ve updated my Thinstation build but now I can’t update the terminal because my flash drive died. ARG!
Going to wait until I can get another flash drive to boot off of, or get a PXE server to push SystemRescueCD so I can update the unit.
Progress!
I have successfully wiped out the WyseOS on the terminal device, and got Thinstation to boot.
My only problem now is that when it tries to load X, it stops displaying anything on the screen.
I noticed that X also craps out on SystemRescueCD when booted on the terminal.
It uses a Via Chrome 9 graphics chipset according to lspci, so we’ll see if there are any known issues or workarounds.
Too late for me though, we’ll see what tomorrow brings!
So I’ve had this Wyse terminal for a while now from the company I work for.
While the installed OS is nice, it’s lacking a few features I’d like.
So with their blessings I was able to take one some to see what I can do with it!
It’s got a 1GHz VIA CPU, 512MB of RAM, and a 128MB IDE SSD.
I initially tried to get Windows 7 Embedded on it after adding more RAM, but the performance from running Windows from a flash drive leaves a lot to be desired. Read More
So yet again my planned Xen hyper-visor is on hold.
After converting my Server 2012 R2 from a generation 1 guest to a generation 2 successfully it has jumped up greatly in performance. Short version: Converted boot drive from MBR to GPT and added EFI boot, see here. FYI, you can do this from a Windows 8 install disc, but it must be a 32-bit disc, as gptgen is not 64-bit.
Also the fact I was able to get Ubuntu Server to install as a Gen 2 and get great performance.
Considering how nicely Windows took to not only being converted from physical to virtual into Hyper-V, it also took to moving from MBR/BIOS to GPT/UEFI, I don’t think Xen will get me any better performance, especially with the lack of specific official drivers for devices.
I’d like to use Xen in the future for Linux boxes since they love it, but I’m holding off until I can get another server for that.
Finally converted my main server from a physical machine to a Hyper-V server.
Went fairly straightforward except that I should’ve initially added the VHDX to a Gen 1 VM and not a Gen 2. Oh well.
Now I’m getting some experience running and administrating a Server 2012 R2 core OS. Not too bad with RSAT on another PC. 😀
Links coming tomorrow to what helped me get up and running. Too tired right now.
So I decided not to go with Hyper-V.
After reading several sites trying to do what I am and having less than stellar performance I went back to Xen.
Amazingly Citrix completely opened up Xen and even made VGA Passthrough easy as anything else.
I’ve already tested with Xen on my main gaming rig and was successful in getting it to go through my main graphics card and display on at least one monitor.
Next step it both monitors, pass through USB for my devices, and test game and benchmark performance pitting my current Windows 8.1 rig against a virtual Windows 7. If it’s within a few percentage points I’m all in!
Trying my hand at a gaming hypervisor yet again.
Instead of using Xen I’m going to see how Hyper-V from Microsoft fairs using RemoteFX and vGPU.
Well, Microsoft has decided to discontinue free email hosting that uses Outlook.com as the backend.
I honestly don’t blame them. It sucks up a lot of traffic and unless someone is using the web GUI no ads or other types of revenue can really be generated.
So I’m moving back to my web host to handle my email. Which may be for the best anyway. Outlook.com was constantly blocking the email address I gave to my server for reporting, due to “spam like behavior”, oh well.
As much as I love and would prefer to keep using OpenMediaVault and Linux as my OS/Distro of choice, I must sadly migrate away.
I don’t like having to work off old code and while the plug in manager for OMV is great and the web GUI is top notch and simple; the time between updates is too large. The core OS is using, by today’s standards, an ancient kernel.
So it is with a sigh I migrate off of OMV and move to Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.
Read More
I scrapped my plans for a hypervisor a while ago when I found my original graphics card and new gfx card BOTH do not support FLReset.
Essentially it lets the hypervisor reboot my gfx card and give it to one of the virtual machines.
Without that, I can’t make a gaming hypervisor.
But now I’ve got another idea… Read More
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