The Well Tempered Hacker: Supermicro AMD Hardware with Xen Linux Virtual Machines

I'm starting a little screencast show called "The Well Tempered Hacker" in which I take a look at some of the technologies I've been using. I had been writing about HOW you do some of these things on this website, but sometimes it makes more sense to get some context surrounding WHY you would want to do some of these things. I figured the best way to do this was to give examples from real-world situations and hence came The Well Tempered Hacker.

In this episode, we look at a dual AMD Supermicro machine with 32 Gigs of RAM and 9 hard drives from NewEgg.com. We create a RAID5 volume in software with 8 1TB drives and use LVM to slice that into logical volumes for xen virtual machines. We also take a look at the remote management capabilities of the system and see how you would rarely need to be near this machine to manage it!





Please let me know what you think of the show.

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Well Tempered Hacker Xen LVM RAID Linux

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Comments (3)

Tuf from Atlanta

Very nice demo. Thx for posting it.

Frank from

"Please let me know what you think of the show."

Alright, but do remember that you asked. :-)

Seriously, though, first and foremost, anyone willing to take the time/energy/effort to put together any kind of podcast/video/blog/tutorial where they help others learn is ok by me. So thanks for doing that at all.

Now, as for topic/content, very interesting. Definitely did not know technical aspects of these latest AMD Supermicro systems. I learned something from the videos, so to me that's a winner. :-)

Video quality itself was good. Audio was clear as well. Now that covers the technical.

Alright, now for possible suggestions. First, I would strongly encourage you to at least partially script out your sessions if you can, even if just outlines. Nothing kills an audience's attention like "Um"s and "aw"s in the audio. Of course, this could potentially be handled after the fact by judicious editing since this isn't a live feed, but you might want to focus on not saying "um" and "ah". I refer to this as "think, process, speak". People say "um" and "aw" when they're working out what they want to say, and they feel some inane need to make noise while their brain is processing. You're better served by simply being silent in those moments.

Second, please consider zooming in on the screen any time you're doing command line work. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched videos where folks are showing command line work (especially your typical YouTube tutorial) where you can't see a darn thing. You did, at least, verbally articulate what you were typing, so that did give a much better reference (and it's always good to do that). But it was almost impossible to actually see what you were typing in the 360p version. And as you can't assume everyone watching will upscale to the 720p version, at least review your work once done using the lowest resolution to see what the viewer can see.

In fact, I'd recommend showing the screen up close any time you want people to be able to see what's going on. During the entire boot sequence, you really can't read a thing, so I just went along for the ride as you describe what's happening. But for anyone that's seen Linux boot, they get the idea.

And that, in general, brings up the point I always make to anyone who asks me to proof their writing/etc. Always take the time to put yourself in the audience's shoes and read/watch/listen/etc., NOT as the person who knows the content, but as your intended target audience.

That, of course, assumes that you did what I was always taught when writing, which is that before you begin, you must define WHO your audience is exactly. Are you aiming this at hackers who already know all the terms you mention? Is this aimed at non-technical grandmas who are interested in learning? You get the idea.

If your audience are those already "in the know", then the content was fine. If, on the other hand, you were hoping to aid those not yet familiar with the various aspects of what you were doing, you might consider quickly (and simply) defining that various technical terms you use, from what a RAID is, to the various acronyms/terms used (e.g., LVM, Gentoo).

[You mention using Gentoo on a Flash drive to initially boot/configure system. Looking up details on that, I can see you glossed over some fairly detailed steps (it doesn't appear to be a simple "burn ISO file to disc" sort of process), so I'm going to guess the intended audience for this video are relatively high-level Linux users and not your typical Linux newbie.]

More minor but worthwhile points: you may want to provide URLs or some kind of reference to the things you mention, such as where to get the MPT2 driver you mention that is not part of Linux, or where someone can get the box. (I recognized the NewEgg site in the video, but not so much because I could read it as I just visit it often enough :-) ). This can just be done verbally or, ideally, with some kind of textual overlay on the video, though I realize the latter takes more time/effort on the editing side. :-/

Overall, though, thanks for posting this. Though I don't have a current need for such a setup, just knowing it exists (and that it's a lot cheaper than I expected when I looked up the price on the box) is good to know. Kind of a "poor man's bladecenter" if you will. :-)

Anders from Boston, MA

Frank: Thanks for all the feedback, much appreciated. This was my first attempt so I'll roll your suggestions into follow-up works. I suppose I'm shooting for a more experienced Linux crowd but I can't imagine a few quick definitions would hurt to bring in a wider audience, so I'll try that.