Nov 04 2005

RPMStrap for Centos 4.2

RPMStrap now has an initial script for CentOS 4.2 , works for x86 only.

Nov 04 2005

Blue Prints for High Availability

I started reading Blueprints for High Availability since it was mentionned multiple times in different threads ao. by LMB. (eheh.. by looking up this link I noticed Lars updated his homepages and started blogging :))

If you ever plan on doing something that's higly available and you want to know where to start this is a must read, to be honest I was expecting more "Ah , so this is how you should do it " kind of things rather than
"Hmm.. yeah .. that's the way I do it" .. but that's probably more because of my background than because of the content of the book.

I also found them to be a bit to short on the fact that security is also an important part of High Availability since if your systems are compromised they aren't available anymore, let's blame that on my security background :)

If you are looking for a Hands on guide on how to build a HA cluster, this is not the book you need :) But I`m still not sure which book I should advise you to read then .., but this is the book you should have read before that one

I still want to repeat the most important rule in HA here :Keep it Simple !

Nov 03 2005

I Hate hardware !!

Yesterday I realised that already missed a zillion deadlines for different conference Call For Papers, too bad .. that will leave me with more time to actually work on some projects :)

Such as reinstalling some laptops that are still on Redhat 9 which now have been upgraded to Ubuntu , such as trying to fix the disks in my x220 so that my backups and picture archive are actually safe , trying to get a working kernel for my Hompaq with a crappy SATA RAID controller , so that it can be used for my cluster tests and trying to get some color on my HTPC when in X. (It s in color when it boots in text mode but it's in greyscale when in X, must be the TV-Set itselve) , and trying to get the HP PSC 2355 to also work as a scanner (the 2350 is listed to work but the 2355 currently only prints) and finishing a couple of articles that I have been working on :)
There's an openpower machine from IBM at the office that I haven't even looked at for more than 5 minutes .. luckily some of the other collegues have :) And the Nokia 770 is changing owner every couple of days at the office, I can wait . I don't have time to play with it anyway ..

Back to the virtual world then, if you want to play on a virtual Cisco check this out :)

Oct 27 2005

In the news this week

Intel to ship VT cpu's real soon now, which leads to the question how soon will Xen be able to host a nonfree operating system. I just hope they create a separate mailinglist for that.

People tell me that Bill read my blog entry about the San Diego Computer Museum but failed to fund the correct museum.

Oct 26 2005

Building a Massive Single Volume Storage Solution?

/. can be very interresting some times very annoying or irrelevant on other days, when an Ask /. question about storage and filesystems shows up I scrolled trough it.
This posting really made me laugh :)

PS. This posting is a lot more relevant if you look at the category I posted it in:)

Oct 21 2005

Flock??

Just got a mail in my inbox .. the Flock developer preview is out.. still curious what Flock is all about I clicked, clicked, waited and unpacked the archive.
So here's a first hint .. lots of mozilla related stuff in the tarbal, so it's a browser... with some extras..
Ok ..Let's have a loser look .. you need a blog, a del.icio.us acount and hmm.. that's it.. ok , that's not too much asked. Right so now I`m sharing bookmarks ..
Ok So flock integrates with del.icio.us for my bookmarks. But since I don't have a "compliant" blog , I can't use it's other features..

Still wondering why this is in Belgian Open source work ?

Well, they didn't get me as a new user yet .. I'll be looking again at new releases .. this looks interresting but it's not world shocking.. Yet

Oct 20 2005

Pics from the good old days

This afternoon there was like this "I've been using Linux since Slackware version X" and "I've been using it since version X-1" , "Oh no, I remember having to install Linux from floppies (SLS), then there was this old distribution called Ygdrassil something etc etc.. but none of us actually really remembered. However we ran into some pictures of early Linux events in Belgium, according to Fets it was in 1993

It was actually one of the first Linux info sessions held at the, InfoGroup at the VUB , upon arriving there I realised that the VUB was not going to be the place where I would study

http://www.macbel.be/activs/photos/landsc/img0046.jpg

Funky showed the audience how to Install Linux om a machine, that must have been my first Linux workshop ever :)

To be honest I only remember 3-4 people from these pictures , still wonder where they all went. If any of you is reading this mail me :)
Also I`ll buy anyone who knows who I am on above the pictures a beer :))

This links has more pics from these days

Oct 17 2005

Bookreports :)

With a full week vacation in a sunny environment behind me I finally catched up on some urgent reading.
I finished reading The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security,Blueprints for High Availability
and Automating Unix and Linux Administration

The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security just wasn't worth the money. It depicts corporate america as a bunch of idiots who pick up the phone and hand out confidential information to any moron who calls them.
The sad part is that it is probably nothing less than the truth, giant corporations are an easy target for crackers that dare to pick up their phones and so are governements.
The question is what kind of tricks they use to get into smaller companies. Anyway I spent a good time laughing with the stories which was afterall whta I planned on reading the book for.
The book contains a template for a security policy, the question if that policy was available under some free documentation license to be reused and modified by other people however still remains unanswerred.

I`ll be posting the other reviews later this week :)

Oct 17 2005

Back to "normal" work :)

So I've catched up with my reports on LinuxKonference in Hamburg, it was great as always :) I still haven't catched up with reporting on lots of reading I have been doing lately :)

Fred is off to Euroscon to give a talk about Mobile Tin laptops.
And I`m about to finish up on some code so I can finally put it online , clean up my presentation and paper so those can finaly be put online, and start working on openMosix at 2.6 again :)
Next to that I still have some work to do getting my PVR working, I also need to get the scanning part of our new HP All In one printer working (Till told me over dinner last week it should work so.. I need to make some time) and there is an IBM openpower 720 lying around at the office that I needs to be tested , SystemImager and LVM needs some testing
Oh did I mention I still need to get some work done during daytime also ? , the above mentionned stuff is only the fun stuf :)

Oct 17 2005

LinuxKongress 2005 Hamburg . Day 2

Woke up a bit later, but still managed to get in time for the presentations.

I started the morning with Jeffrey Moyer's talk about Automounter, then I Catched up on some mailreading, figured out the default gw
for wireless so I can actually read my mail in the talks :) Then continued with the Logfs talk from Jorn Engel , the thing that's
probably still the most annyoing about specialised filesystems for Flash is that we might be using them in some Linux based projects but the rest of the planet will continue using fat16 or some other antique type.
Our camera's and the USB disks we share with other people still are in a wrong type. I've been using different filesystems on my usb stick but the moment you want to copy something you have to create another filesystem on it.

Then went on to Harald's update on Netfilter which I should actualy have skipped since I knew lots of stuff from it David Millers Keynote at the UKUUG already well, at least it all sounded familiar :), I should have gone to Ben Martins talk :) I learned about nfsim , the Netfilter Simuation Environment however.

I opted for Volker's Clustered Samba talk. Lots of stuff in Clustering samba seems like it has already been done before in other
Clustering environments however the moment you realise that this stuff also has to work on about some totally other platforms such as Solaris,
HP/UX and AIX and also on top of different filesystems. Quoting Lars(MB) on that topic: "You have my sympathy" Always interresting to see
audience feedback from people such as Lars and Alan who actually give valuable input to a speaker who learns during his talk.
Everybody seems to be testing stuff on GFS/GPFS but not that many people are using OCFS2 yet, at least that how it sounded in Hamburg. Volker has been doing GFS / GPFS
testing, Philip told us yesterday that he didn't have time yet to do OCFS2 testing, he acutally mentionned that it was because he couldn't get it to work in 1 day, so he dropped it.

The conference closes with a Future of Linux Distributions discussion , opening with the question "Are there to many distributions and isthis a problem ?" Joey, of debian security fame, notes that we might need to look at why people start working on different Distributions, are the currentdistributions not listening enough ? Off course some distributions have their own specific goal, but a fork just for the reason of forking or just to be able "I maintain my own linux distribution (wich is used by me, my grandmother and my niece)" , that shouldn't happen.

There was some discussion going on about what's still missing in Linux, with suggestions ranging from Process migration , which obviously already exists for ages as in the form of the openMosix project trough automated system management tools. (I`m still wondering on which planet the guy who asked for those has been living for the past say .. 5 years.)

Headed back to the hotel and then into Hamburg City to eat .. a Hamburger with some other .be people