Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've been caught up with school and updating my FOSS on the side whenever I have some spare time.

The server that runs this site as well as diffingo.com and a few others is almost always idle - the load averages rarely exceed 0.5, and are most often sitting somewhere around 0.2 (it's a 1U/Core 2 Quad Q9550@2.83GHz/8GB RAM/2x1TB RAID 1). I have bigger plans for it in the future, but at the moment there just isn't a great deal for it to do since it handles everything so quickly.

I have been wanting to see how KVM VMs perform on it as well as try out the Darwin Calendar Server (DCS)... Seeing as DCS requires Python 2.5 and I didn't want to mess around with the live server's configuration (CentOS 5.x ships with Python 2.4), I installed Fedora 13 in a virtual machine so I could test the calendar server safely.

To my surprise, KVM works really, really well... I wasn't expecting that seeing as the versions I had used in Fedora were so much more recent. The performance is good - I haven't performed any stress-testing yet (which obviously will show a gap between the VM and running natively) but the DCS is running very smoothly and feels very responsive, so I'm confident that the difference in performance is not so large.

How I got the DCS running on Linux is a whole other story... I'll save that another post (F13/F14 DCS installation guides coming soon) but is it ever handy to have a CalDAV server! Previously, I was only able to sync calendars manually (with the USB cable) which made checking for homework assignments extremely annoying, as half of the information was always my iPod and the other half on iCal and I had to sync all the time. Now it's all over-the-air, so as long as there's Internet connectivity the calendar events can be pulled in or pushed out.