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Xarix Cloud Computing – Free $50 Credits Offer

Obviously having me working for Xarix Cloud Computing, I’m going to drop this here. They’re offering $50 of Service Credits to new clients of this service. And having this blog obviously hosted on their servers, it’s nice to scratch their backs by spreading the word.

They have a simple pricing structure for Virtual Machines (aka VPSes elsewhere):

  • 2.1 cents per GB of RAM allocated per hour
  • 1.4 cents per CPU allocated per hour
  • 0.01 cents per GB of storage consumed per hour

If you want to sign up, use this link below. (No, it’s not an affiliate link, it’s the same link we use to advertise to the general public):

http://www.xarix.net/free-trial

Of course, they do require valid payment card details to verify that you are a genuine person. Xarix Cloud Computing doesn’t charge the credit card at all for this type of check. Where applicable, their payment processor will attempt to run a $0.00 authorization before having to resort to a $1.00 authorization.

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CentOS 6.6 Updates and Fixes for Hyper-V Guests

CentOS 6.6 was recently released. As expected, there are a few fixes and updates for Hyper-V guests.

The changes I can remember off the top of my head for Hyper-V guests are:

  • Updated KVP and VSS user-space daemons
  • CentOS 6.6 is now fully supports virtual NUMA topology presented by the host. In the past, if you have a guest that had processors and memory that spanned across more than 1 NUMA node, the guest would crash due to a bug in the kernel.
  • The hv_balloon driver should now not cause a constant 1.00 load average due to the way how the driver reported the memory pressure back to the host.

Unfortunately, the documentation says that there is experimental support for CentOS 6.6 running as a Generation 2 guest. The installer runs fine, but since there is no hyperv-keyboard driver included in the initramfs image of the installer. You will need to install CentOS 6.6 via automated means by using a kickstart file. Unfortunately, when you first boot into the system, you will notice the guest crashes with a kernel panic. This makes Generation 2 support with CentOS 6.6 somewhat pointless at this time.

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Using the Smarty Template Engine for your Custom WHMCS Addon Module

If you ever wondered how one uses the Smarty template engine in conjunction with WHMCS’s _output function for custom addon modules, here’s a snippet that you can use for WHMCS 5.3.x and PHP 5.3.x:


function _setup_template() {
global $templates_compiledir;
$template = new Smarty();
$template->compile_dir = $templates_compiledir;
$template->template_dir = __DIR__ . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'templates';
return $template;
}

Include this in your functions file or whatnot and be on your merry way on creating WHMCS modules for your business! *cough* *cough*

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Ubuntu 14.04 Generation 2 VM Template Boot Issue Workaround

Recently Ubuntu 14.04 has native support for booting under a Hyper-V Generation 2 VM. Unfortunately, the VM will not boot if the VHD has been copied over to a new VM. This is a known issue and it has been reported on Ubuntu’s Launchpad bug reporting system by a Project Manager inside Microsoft who is responsible for making Linux run under Hyper-V.

Continue reading “Ubuntu 14.04 Generation 2 VM Template Boot Issue Workaround”