Virtual Machines with KVM under Ubuntu

What about setting up a little datacenter at home ?
That was my decision several months ago, when I started to think about building my “own cloud” at home.
For that, you need one ĥysical server, and a good Linux distribution running a virtualization environment. I chose KVM over Ubuntu.
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Automount usage

As you know, I have several machines running Linux, and I would like to provide anybody in my family the same environment when using any of them.

I already setup a LDAP centralized directory, to manage consistency of the authentication (see LDAP server installation article)

But I would like to find the same files at the same place.
Solution: centralized resources, shared by NFS + automount
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LDAP server installation

I’m starting to get quite a number of systems at home. Physical machines, virtual machines, desktop, laptops, smartphones, tablet,… most of them running Unix flavor (I still have a few Windows, but less and less 🙂
At home, we are 5: 2 parents, and 3 kids. Guess what ? All of them are willing to use a computer…

So I build up a little network that I’m trying to manage as simply as possible.
My challenge of the day: centralize logins and passwords to ensure consistent authentication across any device at home for everyone in the family.
When I started as Unix administrator, we were implementing Sun YP (yellow pages), which turned into NIS soon after.
I was looking for something even more flexible and more “in-line” with today usage of authentication…
This is how I came to look at LDAP (OpenLDAP)
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Audio/Video with SIPE on Ubuntu 12.04

I don’t know why, but Ubuntu packages for SIPE keep being defined without Audio/Video support…
Why ?

If you want to get things working, you need to compile it yourself.
I already did it for Ubuntu 10.04 in article Pidgin & SIPE latest versions on Ubuntu 10.04.
Things are even simpler on Ubuntu 12.04.
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