2023-12-14 - Create Linux Cluster Virtual Machines

• I would usually just worry about my own personal projects on project day, but a bunch of stuff needed to be done that would allow us to do other cool projects in class in the future. Part of the batch of projects that really needed to be done was creating Linux Cluster virtual machines. 
• Why would you do this? I don't know but throughout this assignment I will hopefully edit this portion to make this sound really cool and something you would totally want to do, or you will have to make a decision about leveraging your time and potential risk of ultimately not caring. 

• Here are my instructions: 

• We are going to begin using Linux servers in order to manage company sites and services.  The first thing we need to do is create a web server cluster.  This cluster will consist of five machines that will work together to host our company website for public users:

• Production Web Server
• Production Database Server
• Production Reverse-Proxy Server
• Development Web Server
• Development Database Server
• Using this cluster method, we will be able to secure our data while still providing easy access to what is needed through the website.
• The first thing that we need to do is create and set up the virtual machines that will be these servers.  Please create three new virtual machines on our company hypervisor.  The virtual machines should have the following hardware configuration:
• 1 CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 16GB Storage
• The machines you are creating are the three production servers.  Please adhere to the naming scheme we have decided upon for these servers.  You can ask Tier 2 employees about this if you are not yet aware.
• Each machine should have a bridged network connection so it will receive a real IP address on our subnet and can be accessed from that network.

• As a side note, I was talking to Doug about doing this assignment and asked him if I could simply SSH into the server to do this from my laptop and he said yes, but I would have to be connected to the "hidden network" student project WIFI, and all of the sudden I thought, oof, and due to my experience with previous projects and needing to use the student router WIFI which always goes down, I asked him if there was a way to be connected to two WIFI's at the same time. He said yes...if you have two WIFI cards. I said, hey, I have a WIFI card and a WIFI  dongle at home. But then he said that windows isn't good at load balancing so I would have to do something that sounded complicated. I thought it sounded like a cool project for the future. But then he asked why I don't just use the student WIFI for my internet access if I want to ask questions or write in my blog at the same time and I mentioned the student routers questionable performance and he said well we're not doing anything to it today that would cause problems. Okay. Here we go. Firstly, I have to have his help connecting to the hidden network to do this because I tried to connect to it last week because I was going to help Jack finish the hackathon project from a month or so ago and I couldn't connect. 
• Apparently I was on drugs because it worked without any problems this time. For good measure, the problem I had connecting to hidden network last time was that Jack asked me to connect to "HiddenNetwork" and I tried, and then I couldn't access anything, and then I would go back to WIFI settings to check the connection, I would be connected back to the regular WIFI network for some reason, and then I would reconnect to it like five times and started noticing as I went that my WIFI list was creating HiddenNetwork1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I gave up at that point. Not the issue this time. 
• I will be following the instructions from the project ticket above. I just connected to the server and I have a screen that says Proxmox on it. I.ve heard of this from various classmates and never actually touched it myself, which is why I am not objecting to being diverted to another project now. Ever so often I see other students working on projects that I would actually like to be doing if only it didn't conflict with the project that I am currently doing. But I just thought today, hey, why not do these regular class projects on Thursday project days, and then do my own projects on all other days since I am after all doing all my classwork from home in order to have this privilege. 
• I clicked on a link from our Talos student ticketing interface Doug set up for us. It just occurred to me, is Talos a database? He diverted me to another page on Talos which held a link to the server, where I am now. Proxmox  is a Windows server that we're running in our classroom, and it is a type 1 hypervisor!
• I was about to name my first virtual machine "Production Web Server" and all the options at advance to the next window for creating a virtual machine remained grayed out. Then Doug then explained that you want to abbreviate words and not capitalize or use spaces, so instead type something like "prodwebserver" because you're going to be typing it a lot. And then he explained you want to add something to the name that differentiated it from other virtual machines and everyone can keep them straight. I changed it to "biff-prodwebserver". Biff is an old nickname of mine from high school and stuff. So everyone like my buddy Josh from back then all call me biff every time they see me. It's still one of my common email addresses so I am used to it. But then to actually be called Biff is always a shock because I haven't heard it uttered from someone else's mouth with any regularity for a few years. Doug approved of my modification and all the Next buttons and everything that were grayed out were suddenly reenabled. 
• For the OS tab, Linux was already selected, CD/DVD disc image (iso) was already selected, storage had "local" selected, I didn't touch the Kernel type, but for the specific ISO image dropdown menu of what we had available, which was Ubuntu 22-04 and Ubuntu-server, and then a few Windows servers and things that didn't apply here, I selected Ubuntu-server from the available images we had. I clicked next. 
•  For the System tab, I left it as is and then went to the hard disk tab, left everything as the default but I changed the hard drive space to 16GB. On the CPU tab, I left everything as default, sockets and cores were all set at 1. On the memory tab it was set by default to 2048 in  MiB, and we need 2GB so I left it at 2048. For the network tab, all the defaults were pretty much already set as what I needed. I knew we needed a bridged network connection for a real IP address on the subnet so that we would be able to access it from the network in class. So Under Bridge, it was already set to vmbr1, which is virtual machine bridge 1, or it might be virtual management bridge. Under Model, VirtIO (paravirtualized) was already selected. This means that it uses part of the actual hardware and runs parallel to it. <<<<<<_______________________??????????????? MAC address was set to auto which is good, No Network Device was not selected, which is what we want. 
• I pressed finished after I checked the confirmation tab. 
• I progressed to do the same thing with the other four VM's. 
• I decided to help the student that was then going to install Ubuntu server on each of the machines. 
• I installed ubuntu server twice before class ran out. I really need to find a way to say what I'm saying faster so I don't waste so much time. The other student that was going to actually install the operating systems on each of the virtual machines had only a half hour of class left after I was done configuring the virtual machines. The first one took me considerable time because I had never done it before and  didn't realize how simple the process actually was. So I was being overly cautious, but still trying to make sure I understood everything before I did anything. However it was still a waste of time in this particular case. 
• I only left Cade, the other student, like a half hour to install the operating systems on the machines I just created. I had no idea that he had a part to do that relied on me getting my part done in a timely manner--I thought I had all class to do my part even though it turned out to be a simple thing to do. 
• Cade looked irritated, so I decided to help him with his task. I installed two machines by the time class was over but he left early.  

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