Stockholm, Seoul, Tokyo

How to enable ssh access to a VirtualBox guest

Posted Thu, 2009/07/23 - 6:07am by alex

Enable ssh access to a virtualbox guest instance using VBoxManage. The guest is the guest machine name and should be quoted if the name contains spaces.

$ VBoxManage setextradata 'guest' "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
$ VBoxManage setextradata 'guest' "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
$ VBoxManage setextradata 'guest' "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

My essential Mac applications

Posted Tue, 2009/03/31 - 8:45pm by alex

About 2 years ago I switched from using Windows XP/2000 workstations to a Macbook Pro running on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and I've not looked back since. Now I'm on my second Macbook Pro running Leopard, making backups on a 500GB time capsule, downloading music and pod casts from iTunes and also using an IPhone.

I won't be able to go back to MS land anytime soon.

As a relative new switcher these are some of the 3rd party applications that I've come to rely on and have to install on any new Mac that I would use. Practically all applications are open source or free to use.

Growl notifications with irssi

Posted Mon, 2009/03/30 - 3:32pm by alex

One thing that I've been wanting is to get Growl notifications from irssi, which I'm running on a remote server, as I do when using, e.g., Colloquy. By googling a little I found this great write up on how to enable growl notifications. 

Gnu Screen

Posted Sun, 2009/03/29 - 9:12am by alex

I'm a big fan Gnu Screen since I work a lot with the console. It multiplexes several shell sessions into one physical console window and it's especially suited for remote server adminstration as it keeps your sessions runing even if you disconnected. It's basically a tabbed shell instance browser.

Getting Started with Sailfin clustering and MySQL Cluster

Posted Fri, 2009/03/27 - 10:00am by alex

Sailfin is the open source implementation of Sun Glassfish Communications Server which basically is Glassfish with support for SIP servlets. It allows you to create converged communication services and has some interesting features that together with MySQL Cluster creates very a nice highly available and high performance service execution environment (a white paper on this at mysql.com). 

Quick Start with MySQL Cluster

Posted Thu, 2009/03/26 - 8:30pm by alex

MySQL Cluster (NDB Storage Engine) is a shared-nothing distributed in-memory database with support for disk-data tables as well. It provides a DB environment with high availability, near-linear scalability, realtime performance, automatic and user defined data partitioning, load balancing and transparent failover.

The data is distributed using a partitioning key (hash calculated on primary key as default) so the performance is especially great for primary key lookups and parallel data access.