Via a cc’d tweet from Martin Hawksey, this lovely post from Tom Smith/@everythingabili (who has the best ever twitter bio strapline) on How I Learn ( And What I’m Learning ). I like to think that I used to write blog posts that had the same sort of sense as that post… …but for the … Continue reading “Confused Again About VM Ecology… I Blame Not Blogging”
The story so far… We’re looking at using a virtual machine (VM) preconfigured with all sorts of software and services for a distance education course. The VM runs in headless mode (no graphical desktop) and exposes the applications we want students to be able to run as services accessed through a web browser. The VM … Continue reading “Thoroughly Confused About Student VMs & Docker”
Having spent bits of last year tinkering with vagrant and puppet as part of a workflow for building and deploying course related VMs in a scaleable way for a distance education context (trying to be OUseful here…) I’ve more recently started pondering whether it makes more sense to create virtual machines from linked data containers. … Continue reading “Using Docker to Build Linked Container Course VMs”
Eighteen months or so ago, I started looking at ways in which we might use a virtual machine to bundle up a variety of interoperating software applications for a distance education course on databases and data management. (This VM would run IPython notebooks as the programming surface, PostgreSQL and MongoDB as the databases. I was … Continue reading “Kiteflying Around Containers – A Better Alternative to Course VMs?”
So this is how I currently think of the TM351 VM: What would be nice would be a drag’n’drop tool to let me draw pictures like that that would then generate the build scripts… (a docker compose script, or set of puppter scripts, for the architectural bits on the left, and a Vagrantfile to set … Continue reading “A Peek Inside the TM351 VM”
A few days ago I saw Jim Groom having fun getting Sandstorm,io running on VM hosts Linode. I haven’t tried running full VMs on remote servers yet, so I thought have a quick look to see if I could get some chunks of the TM351 VM running on a Linode box using Vagrant. I chickened … Continue reading “Using Vagrant to Launch OpenRefine Running in a Linux VM on Linode”
Tinkering with the OU TM351 VM, looking at putting together an Amazon AWS AMI version, I started to wonder about how I could add a simple authentication layer to mediate public web access so students don’t fire up an image on their dollar and then find other folk using it. So… h/t to Adam McGreggor … Continue reading “Simple Authenticated Access to VM Services Using NGINX and Vagrant Port Forwarding”
One of the things that’s been on my to do list for ages is trying to get a version of the TM351 virtual machine (VM) up and running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI). This would allow students who are having trouble running the VM on their own computer to … Continue reading “First Attempt at Running the TM351 VM as an AMI on Amazon Web Services”
In passing, I noticed yesterday that Vagrant Cloud (docs) can be used to host and distribute public Vagrant base boxes. So I exported a box file from my V-REP’n’Jupyter VM: vagrant package uploaded it to Vagrant Cloud – ouseful/ou-robotics-test – and tweaked my Vagrantfile to use that copy as the base box: config.vm.box = “ouseful/ou-robotics-test” Now I’m thinking … Continue reading “Sharing Pre-Built VMs Via Vagrant Cloud”
Ever since I joined the OU, I’ve believed in trying to deliver distance education courses in an agile and responsive way, which is to say: making stuff up for students whilst the course is in presentation. This is generally not done (by course/module teams at least) because the aim of most course/module teams is to prepare the … Continue reading “Sharing Folders into VMs on Different Machines Using Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive etc”
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