The Informix Zone blogs

KVM virtual machine copy

dkremenjas — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:05:14 +0200

To finish the KVM series (part 1 and part 2), this last part will show what has to be done to have another virtual machine up&running. This assumes you're using some of the newer Linux distros with udev enabled. The example is for Debian, I guess it's very similar on others.

Let's assume you have your first VM all setup, with IDS running and everything configured the way you wanted. Then you want to setup another one, almost identical (to play with HDR for example), with only minimum necessary config changes, both on OS and in IDS.

Can't be easier: just shut down your VM to save a stable state and copy the image.

Blogging 101

Spokey — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:04:48 +0200

Have you ever felt the urge to blog, share your thoughts, wisdom and wit with the world? Adam Gartenberg of IBM is holding a Blogging 101 webcast on Wednesday, 26 August at noon, EST. More details here.

Adam is a really cool guy, and he's passionate about social marketing. Learn how it all works and join the Informix blogging bandwagon!

Extending the Open Admin Tool (OAT)

eherber — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:57:05 +0200

Extending the Open Admin Tool (OAT)

If you like programming in PHP, you might be interested in developing new functionality for the OAT (Open Admin Tool). A new Plug-In Manager makes it now easier to develop and integrate your own OAT PHP modules. An interesting article from Erika Von Bargen, which describes this new functionality, has been recently published on IBM developerWorks:

Informix Success Story

Spokey — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:14:05 +0200

Bell Micro have released a new Informix success story. Download it here. (Adobe Acrobat reader required.)

KVM networking

dkremenjas — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:51:20 +0200

My last KVM blog entry showed how to install all the prereqs and do the initial install of the virtual machine to host your IDS toy instances.

To really start playing we'll need networking of course.
I'm not going into the details explaining every single line of config, much better explanations are already written on the web. But I'll try to give a reasonable overview.

To connect the VMs both to the outer world and between themselves we'll need a kind of virtual switch running on host machine and "wire" network interfaces in VMs to it.
We'll use virtual TUN/TAP network interface and promote it to the virtual switch using VDE utility.

Spokey Elsewhere

Spokey — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:24:05 +0200

At IBM Database Magazine: Just how difficult is it to retro-fit an auditable security framework?

New Content at the IDS Wiki

eherber — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:57:09 +0200

New Content at the IDS Wiki

New content has arrived at the IDS Developer Edition Wiki:

onstat Commands (Message Log) - Thank you Spokey for writing this article !
HDR - High Availability Data Replication

Informix on youtube

Spokey — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:58:23 +0200

Some Informix Channels and videos on youtube:

The Journal of Informix

Informix World

Jean-George Perrin's Channel

The Impire story

IDS ROI Tools

Spokey — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:47:15 +0200

IBM has a couple of tools that are aimed at showing return on investment on various aspects of the technology:

IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Low Administration ROI Tool

and

Informix Dynamic Server Continuous Availability Feature ROI Calculator

Making your online.log more readable with IDS 11.5

eherber — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:15:43 +0200

Making your online.log more readable with IDS 11.5

IDS 11.5 comes with a helpful new onconfig parameter which I didn't realize during the closed beta. It is also not mentioned in the New Features section in the releasenotes.

The name of the onconfig paramter is MSG_DATE and the allowed values are 0 (disabled, DEFAULT) and 1 (enabled). It could be dynamically set thru onmode -w[f|m]. If MSG_DATE is enabled, every message written to the online.log will be prefixed with the current date. Take a look at the following examples: