[Systems] bender: new virtual host

[Bernie Innocenti]

As promised at Sugar Camp, I'm almost done setting my spare machine for
running a bunch of new virtual machines for Sugar Labs.  The machine
name "bender" is not really a reference to any particular Sugar Labs
member.  In fact, it was chosen years ago and follows my tradition of
naming computers after famous robots:

  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a6/Bender_Rodriguez.png

Bender is a Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz with 4GB RAM and 1.3TB of storage on three
SATA drives.  It's not a particularly solid machine, just a high-end
workstation, but it should serve us well for builds, automated testing,
and so on.

The machine is being racked in Develer's datacenter tomorrow, with UPS
and sysadmins available at office-hours.  The connectivity is only 4Mbit
over HDSL, which is being upgraded soon to something slightly better
(10Mbit fibre).  In either case, we shouldn't abuse it especially during
office hours.

Sascha will co-admin the physical host with me.  Please, feel free to
request a VM for any Sugar-related task.  If we're out of capacity, I'll
look for ways to expand RAM and disk space.

The underlying OS is a Fedora 11, for no particular reason but to have a
recent 2.6.29 kernel where KVM is well supported.  For maximum
portability of our services, we shouldn't really use it for anything
else but creating VMs.

One major issue is that we ran out of free public IPs (we had 8).  As a
temporary workaround, I've setup an IPv6 tunnel with sixxs.net in order
to access it globally without going through NAT.  We're only planning to
run backstage services, so it's not as impractical as it sounds.  If
needed, we could also forward individual ports to public IPv4 addresses
and do Apache proxying to expose web applications on IPv4.

WARNING: proper backups are not yet in place!
WARNING^2: not all storage is on RAID1 yet!

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/