On Mar 19, 2012 9:41 AM, "walt" <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 03/18/2012 04:31 PM, Pandu Poluan wrote:
> >
> > On Mar 19, 2012 5:31 AM, "walt" <w41ter@gmail.com
> > <mailto:w41ter@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 03/18/2012 11:52 AM, walt wrote:
> >>
> >>> The other nifty hint was to add "panic=10" as a kernel parameter
> >>> in grub.conf (menu.lst) so that your remote system will reboot in
> >>> 10 seconds if the kernel panics during boot.  That will let you
> >>> test (remotely) if a kernel parameter like "noinitrd" breaks your
> >>> machine.
> >>
> >> Heh.  I learn a lot from reading my posts -- when I figure out why
> >> my first reply was wrong :p
> >>
> >> Now that I've thought about it, I assume you have only ssh access
> >> to your remote machine, so you can't see the grub boot prompt,
> >> right?
> >>
> >> Maybe the remote machine doesn't even pause at the boot prompt
> >> because no one is there to watch it?  I'm curious how remote
> >> servers work in real life because in my next life I wanna come back
> >> as a sysadmin :)
> >>
> >
> > When I started administering remote servers, Citrix's XenServer is
> > Good Enough™ to deploy in production, so now it's the first thing I
> > install on a virgin box, even if said virgin box will host only one
> > VM.
> >
> > This provides me with a usable Virtual Console through which I can
> > watch the boot process.
>
> Bless you Pandu, you just answered a question I didn't ask (yet :)
>
> My workplace recently began providing us (peons) access to its Holy
> Intranet even when we are (shamefully) not actually in the workplace.
>
> When I use firefox to access their intranet I have no problems: I
> see a small popup dialog box that announces that Citrix is allowing
> me to see a window containing an instance of M$ Internet Explorer,
> which is displaying the intranet web page I clicked on in firefox,
> (which is running on my gentoo desktop, of course).
>
> I can see that this whole process starts a java vm running in the
> background, so I suppose that the Citrix app (whatever it is) is
> a java applet started by my firefox browser.
>
> But, when I try to access the same intranet web page with google
> chrome, it hangs forever instead of starting the Citrix app.
> (Other java-powered websites work normally with google chrome.)
>
> Does any/all of this suggest that their web servers are running the
> same Citrix XenServer you speak of?
>
>

That's XenApp in action, and despite having "Xen" in its name, it's not Xen. IOW, that's application virtualization not baremetal OS Virtualization.

You won't ever know if your server is running XenServer or not, unless you ask the SysAdmin team. Yes, it's that transparent.

XenApp is a love letter from hell, if you ask me. Here in my new employer, it's used extensively to access apps that actually live in the Windows Servers. The (quite sizable) dev team is currently feverishly trying to finish proper client/server apps to replace them. Reason for replacement? Well, your experience is but one of the teeth-gritting problems we're experiencing :-P

Rgds,