Category Archives: Virtualization

Full Screen Windows 10 in MacOS Parallels

As a Mac user, I sometimes find my self needing to use Windows 10. To do this, I run it using the Parallels virtual machine manager.

One thing that bothered me, when was running Windows in full screen mode, was that the MacOS dock would pop up when I moved the mouse pointer to the Windows task bar.

I would have to move the mouse pointer away from the dock, let it drop back down, and then move the pointer back to the Windows task bar without going to the bottom of the screen.

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Lightsail Network Isolation

Amazon Lightsail started offering a managed database service a few months ago.

I took a look at it … and tried it out … a while back and wasn’t really happy with it.

Although it had some nice features, I wasn’t given a ‘root’ (or super user) account and (as I sometimes do) was able to completely trash the instance within a few hours of creating it (I tried to manipulate the permissions on the master database user and ended up revoking all of them).

So I was considering creating my own database server using MySQL on a stand alone Amazon Linux instance.

This would give me a stand alone database with the flexibility to do anything I wanted.

My big concern was network security. I wanted to make sure that only my Lightsail instances would be able to communicate with the database server.

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LetsEncrypt, Certbot, and Lightsail

Although not directly supported, it’s quite possible to use the LetsEncrypt certbot client on Amazon Lightsail Linux.

First of all … what is LetsEncrypt?

Let’s Encrypt is a free service that offers basic SSL certificates any web site.  The certificates are good for 90 days but can be renewed indefinitely. With the proper software, the installation & renewal of the certificates can be fully automated.

There are a few things to be aware of and workarounds that need to be done.

First, download the certbot-auto client itself…

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Xen, LVM, and Grub

I ran into an interesting problem with my new server the other day.

Due to a hardware problem with an external USB hard drive, I had to reboot the XEN host.

I had to do the reboot remotely … so I couldn’t intervene if something went wrong.  Yes, you guessed it, something did go wrong.

When I finally got home I found the system trying to boot ‘bree’ … which is one of the XEN guest machines.

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Virtualization Advice

I need some virtualization advice.

I’m currently running this blog, among others, on XEN 3.1.2 based virtualization on CentOS 5.5.

At the present time, I have three physical machines running … rivendell, gondor, and middle-earth.

Middle-earth”is the XEN host.

Rivendell and gondor are stand alone servers running Fedodra 10.

Currently gondor is primarily a web server and backup mail delivery server.

Rivendell is the main system and acts as a NIS server, MySQL server, samba file server, chat server, mail server, etc.

My goal is to migrate all the functions from rivendell & gondor to XEN instances on middle-earth.

My questions relate to where to run services, file systems, and processor allocation.

Specifically …

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