Home Server Projects

A complaint I've made once or twice, Linux is getting bloated has now been confirmed from the source:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10358024-16.html

Linus Torvald's says so too. (At least as reported by CNet. I tried to find the original quote. Probably only available through Conference proceedings.)

One of the biggest advantages of Linux is that you don't get trapped into one distro or version as with Windows. If you want a smaller footprint OS, you can find a Linux version that's a LOT smaller than Windows.

Most of the following relates to using XP Pro as host. As soon as you feel comfortable using Ubuntu or some other Linux as host do it since you will see a performance increase in the VM.

On VirtualBox, its like all other VMs from other manufacturers, if you can afford to throw more RAM at it, go ahead and do it since VMs are like JAVA, real RAM hogs. RAM is incredibly cheap right now.

The other area they like to gobble, is hard drive space. Usually 8 to 10 GBs at a time. A large hard drive is an advantage here. Intuitively putting the VM "virtual hard drives" on a drive other than the boot/system drive for the XP host should help performance.

Unfortunately by default VirtualBox will place the VM hard drive files in the Document and Settings User profile folder. Ugh. Be sure to put them some place else to prevent massive profile folder bloat.

When it comes to operating systems, especially Linux distros, trying as many as you like, yes you can. Create a new VM for each distro. Just remember that a running VM will grab RAM space. The more RAM you can give it totally uncontested, the faster the VM will run. So to speed up VMs, limit the number running at a time and give them as much room as is practical. That means if you aren't using it, suspend it or shutdown that specific VM.

Beware that the hard drive you have all of this running on is in good shape. What can't run or isn't running in RAM, is being swapped out to the hard drive. So drive swapping tends to increase rather remarkably. A high speed drive helps but its still way freaking slower than more RAM.

Each of the VMs will have a setting for the amount of RAM to allow the VM to use. That comes out of the total amount of RAM of the host. The host requires RAM space since its actually fairly busy responding to the services demands from the VM so don't totally choke off the host. Setting RAM below 512 MB on XP Pro SP3 system without shutting down a lot of the unneeded XP services is likely to generate a big performance hit to the VM.

When you get comfortable with Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) I find that running VirtualBox on Ubuntu as host, things runs faster than with VirtualBox running on a XP Pro host. Mostly because there isn't so much crap running like in XP Pro. But also because the OS can use the RAM above 3.7 GBytes like XP Pro can't in a 4 GB motherboard. This is an OS limitation based on a hardware issue. Might be different in differing OS or hardware. All my testing has been on Intel chipsets. Not a problem on 64 bit systems. The biggest argument I see for a 64 bit board is a VM.

Also another trick is to shut down as many services as you can in the XP host so that you can to give the VM more room. However do NOT shutdown networking, firewall, SMB, RPC, DNS, DHCP, workstation, secondary logon, error reporting, event viewer, or printer services. If you just stop the services instead of disabling them, when the system is rebooted they come back. There are others as well.

One special service ABSOLUTELY that needs to be turned off temporarily is Windows Update, especially if you have set it to auto-install. You don't want it trying to update while the VM is up and running! Especially since it seems practically ALL XP updates require a reboot.

You can shutdown dotNet related services, indexing service, help & support services, DCOM, Terminal Server like remote desktop and assistance, and anything related to dialup server (its not likely to want to stop) and you're not likely to need Hyperterminal!

In the case of Dialup Server and Telephone related services, if you aren't using a dialup connection, you can disable them but it requires a reboot to make it "stick". Just set them on disabled and then reboot. Its almost impossible to get the telephone services to shutdown from the MMC or Services applet. When the XP system comes up the services won't be running.

In the process window in Task Manager, you can also stop any of the software update processes, like Google, java (juschedule), realplayer etc. If you have a variation of SQL server or its agents or writers running in the XP host, shut them down. If the OS comes back and tells you that the process is vital, believe it and try shutting something else down. Anything with svchost attached to the process name is likely networking related so just leave it running.

If something stops working that you need to have running, just reboot the XP Pro host. As long as you haven't gone into the Services applet and DISABLED the service, it all comes back on the next reboot.

Please note that all of this "advice" is related to Windows XP Pro. I haven't much experience with Windows XP Home. In the areas of running VMs on XP Home, I've had no experience. I've considered XP Home the "runt of the litter" and haven't paid it much heed. My kids run it on their systems but that's about it.

BTW all of this advice works for everyday XP Pro operation or game playing even without a VM running!

I've tested Win7 in Beta and what turned out to be the RTM. On a dual core with 4 GB of RAM its a fine OS. Faster and much more reliable than Visaster. It did a number of things I was impressed with but there is no compelling reason to run it. That's at work or at home.

I try to install as little software as possible on a computer's OS to keep the running speed to a maximum. In Windows there are limited things that can be done like killing the taskbar tray, shutting off unneeded processes, etc. Even killing the Explorer shell can give you a little speed boost of about 1% and about 15 to 20 Megabytes of more RAM space in XP Pro. Most applications using Win32 API calls will still draw windows and do the Windows Form library functions without having to run a full Explorer desktop.

I find that Ubuntu 9.04 runs the exact same applications as XP I need at work and at home for 85% of my work. Word Processor/office suite, a web browser and email client application. For those situations where I HAVE to run Windows, I'll run XP Pro in a VM hosted on Ubuntu. Its about as fast as Win7 without a VM on the same hardware.

The complaint I have with Windows OS that Linux addresses to a certain extent, is that I can strip out or NOT install big chunks of software that is more rightly defined as application layer software instead of the bloat the has driven Windows into the ground performance-wise.

Considering the speed increases in the hardware, the operating systems ought to be running 5 to 10 times faster than they do. Mr Kingsley-Hughes timings on the install/upgrades confirms to me that the Win7 operating system is too damn fat. (check out his column over at ZDNET.COM yesterday)

Years ago I did tests comparing an application suite software our company wrote running on Windows 2000 Workstation/Pro SP4 and XP Pro SP1 on the the exact same hardware, same RAM, hard drive etc. Win XP Pro ran the software 20% faster than Win2K.

A similar test I've done running our current application on Windows XP Pro and Win7 Beta on the exact same hardware revealed that XP Pro was faster by 5%! What happened?

I went through looking at what processes were running on the 2 systems. I tried to optimize the running processes in Win 7 to approximate what was running in XP Pro. I did speed up Win7 a bit but not enough to be statistically significant. Win7 was still slower than XP Pro. Both tests were done again on the exact same machine with 4GB of RAM, both Windows OS versions were 32 bit and the video and network drivers were Microsoft's device drivers. XP Pro was running SP3 and Win7 was running the Beta.

If you open the Services windows in both XP Pro and Win7 and compare, there are approximately 3 times as many services running in Win7. A lot of them do arcane tasks that have little service for data display or word processor-like applications. The trick is to figure out what can be shut-off.

Its obvious that I will have to repeat the test again once Win7 comes out. I was very surprised by the results. I expected Win7 to blow past XP Pro.

I had a hard drive failure on my home Windows XP Pro DELL system last week. I decided this morning at about 4AM to rebuild the system as a dual boot with Ubuntu 9.04 on the second partition. The goal is to minimize my "Windows dependency" status as much as possible. Another goal was to come up with functional partitions that could be imaged and cloned. I couldn't sleep anyway.

I installed a replacement hard drive and started the task with DELL's XP Pro re-install disk. I have images of the system but they are loaded with a lot of stuff I didn't really need for future work. So I decided to re-install everything from scratch. The DELL disk was slip-streamed with SP2 and I have a network install for SP3. So maybe its not really totally from scratch, close enough.

This time I'm running a clock on the whole process. I won't fault Microsoft for the bad drive so the clock starts at 4:23AM after the drive is installed and the system has started booting from the CD.

I've partitioned the 200 GB drive I installed into 2 sections. The first partition is NTFS for Windows XP Pro at 90GB. The second will be for Ubuntu 9.04. At this point, the second section is just unpartitioned space. There is a second drive, 320GB in size, that is formatted in a single partition as NTFS. Both drives are Western Digitals. The final drive complement is a CDROM\DVD RW and a CDRW drive. The computer is a P4, 2.8GHZ with 1GB of DDR RAM, a DELL Dimension 2400. It has the stock Intel video 845 family chip turned on as primary video adapter and a Nvidia TNT2 Riva PCI pcb with 64 MB of RAM as the second video adapter. Drivers for all of this are from the DELL web site. The Nvidia drivers are in SP3.

Base XP Pro system install at SP2 level is done by 5:08AM.

In the end what's installed on the system is SP3 from the network install package already resident on the second hard drive and approximately 60 updates downloaded “live” from Windows Update. Not all of the ones offered, but most. Total size of the first of 3 Windows Updates runs was 149 MB, including IE8. There were updates that loaded specifically for IE but I have no clue what size the files were. I refuse to install MediaPlayer 11 or dotNet framework 1.1. MediaPlayer 11 gets dumped because of the DRM issues. As to dotNet 1.1, nobody should still be writing to that piece of drivel. Other ignored patches related mostly to security patches appropriate for NT domain membership or for multiple language options I'll never need.

I also installed Mozilla FireFox 3.5, OpenOffice 3.1, Google Chrome, InfraRecorder, mspgcc (a gcc toolset for the TI MSP430) and Adobe Reader 9.1. All of these were package installs from the same second drive. With the exception of mspgcc, these are what I consider essential function tools for a typical desktop.

I used the open source tools simply because the Ubuntu install will get the same applications installed to match the XP.

Clock stops at 6:30AM. Total install time for Windows XP Pro SP3+ selected applications is 2 hours and 7 minutes. Actually quite fast for Windows simply because I “cheated” and already had all of the packages downloaded minus the SP3 updates.

Clock started again at 7:15AM. Now Ubuntu 9.04 is getting the same installment routine into the open partition on the IDE primary master drive (sda). The base system has finished installing by 7:30AM. I go into System/Administration/Update Manager and start it to download all the updates released for Ubuntu 9.04. It downloads 145 MB of updates and starts installing them.

Clock stops at 7:55AM. Total time for install is 40 minutes. Google Chrome for Linux isn't out of early Beta although I really don't need it on Ubuntu. Infrarecorder isn't necessary on Ubuntu since Brasero installs as part of the base install. The base install also includes FireFox 3.x, an Adobe Reader substitute, and OpenOffice 3.0. I haven't looked yet but mspgcc might be available in Linux.

I did get one giggle out of all the keyboard banging and mouse clicking this morning. There was an option to import my User settings from the Windows XP Pro partition. Not ever having done that before I clicked it mostly to see what it would do. It grabbed my desktop picture from the XP Pro Settings & Documents folder for my XP admin account and dropped it on the Ubuntu desktop. Ba-da-bing.

So for the price of:
1 hour and 27 minutes more of my time installing Windows XP Pro versus Ubuntu;
20GB of hard drive space used by Windows XP Pro versus 8GB of hard drive space in Ubuntu;
no differences in functionality;
potentially becoming XP-ground-zero for every malware-writing jackass in the world;
I get the “equivalent” in Windows XP Pro?

No contest.

Ubuntu wins.

DANGEROUS TECHNIQUE DESCRIBED BELOW. THIS WILL MODIFY YOUR DESKTOP OR LAPTOP COMPUTER TO THE EXTENT THAT IT WILL BE EXTREMELY DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE TO RECOVER CONTROL OF THE SYSTEM. MAKE an image and put it on a bootable CD or DVD if you insist on playing with this on a computer you need to keep running.

My previous comments about Control-Alt-Delete not working still apply. Control C and Control-Break don't do much either.

In HKLM\Software\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Shell
replace Explorer.exe with the BATCH file as described in Not-so-Stupid Nerd Trick, a previous blog. The second step is to NOT modify the setting in IniFileMapping. Third step is to have the system Auto-Logon as described previously. On the next reboot, the fun begins. Done.

With the system set this way, it becomes a single-purpose computer, an appliance as it were. It will not run any User programs other than what you've programmed into the batch file.

With this registry entry you've basically shackled the computer to a single task and that is exactly perfect for kiosks, public information displays, embedded systems tasks etc. It doesn't matter what the User settings are, the system never bothers to execute the the User programmed shell.

An interesting experiment would be to set the System Shell to be FireFox or Chrome. Consider it a taste of things to come, if you believe the Cloud enthusiasts.

You could set the "XP appliance" system up to be a printer server for other computers in the office. Just set the printer management software to be the application started by the batch file. Make sure the Auto-Logon user has printer management permissions.

The old XP computer becomes your dedicated printer management tool. Make sure to share the printer(s) out to all other users. This could be a way to use an old XP Pro license on a slow system that can't run Visaster or Win7. Dumping the printer tasks to an XP Printer will speed up the rest of the desktops when printing. This should be possible with any sort of printer. Or multiple printers connected to the XP Pro box.

BTW if you set up another account as admin that has remote logon capabilities, you can use one of the VNC tools to "manage" the system remotely or to break into the registry and hack the shell back to Explorer.exe. Remember to spell out the file extension, Explorer.EXE.