Peregrine

I have known Marc Christiensen for years and have a lot of respect for him. He does a great job of keeping on top of things, which is why I was surprised that he didn’t catch the problems found in the Oracle press release he quotes in his recent post.

I’ll quote the part he quoted and intersperse it with my comments.

Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes.

Sound like what CentOS and White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) do. OK, that’s fine.

Currently, Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software.

Wrong.

Red Hat provides seven (7) years of support from the release date of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) release (since RHEL3, only 5 years for RHEL2.1), including the production of errata packages for both security and bug fixes. This means that support, including updates, will not be terminated until after October 2010 for RHEL3 and February 2012 for RHEL4.

This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed.

Wrong.

However, it is true that Red Hat does not backport drivers or other new feature support to released versions.

Oracle’s new Unbreakable Linux program …

Oracle’s “Unbreakable Linux” program has been around for years. Perhaps, they meant to convey that this new incarnation of the (existing) Unbreakable Linux program, which now includes an Oracle branded Linux distribution.

… will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems.

Thus implying that Linux is backwater, until Oracle steps in and makes it acceptable. Sounds like big software company marketting people to me :) .

Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support.

Given that Red Hat has support option from nothing (no support contract is required) or pay-per-incident phone support up to 24×7 on-site Red Hat employees managing your systems with a couple dozen options in between, “best support” could mean a lot of things.

Of course, tons of people get confused easily by Red Hat’s “licensing” costs. No! They are not charging you for a license. Everything in RHEL is free and open. You can buy both a support contract and/or (a) subscription(s) to Red Hat Network (RHN).

“We believe that better support and lower support prices will speed the adoption of Linux,

Well, duh!

… and we are working closely with our partners to make that happen,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Intel is a development partner. Dell and HP are resellers and support partners. Many others are signed up to help us move Linux up to mission critical status in the data center.

I’ve got news for you Oracle, Linux is already mission critical in lots of data centers, including yours. That’s right, Oracle has been using Linux as the platform for delivery of their hosted applications services for years. I am also personally familiar with enough Fortune 500 companies data centers to say that they all have at least one of their mission-critical applications running on Linux. But don’t take my word for it; almost all of them have made public statements in some form or another which indicate that this is the case.

Please, will you folks stop treating Linux like something you are coming along to save from “certain self doom”. You’re not. Most of you are, on the other had, making wonderful contributions, but all of our Linux are not belong to you.

Although this last one isn’t really that big of a deal, it’s yet another example of how marketing people in companies that should know better keep implying that Linux isn’t ready for “real world” workloads.

BTW: I’m sitting in a lousy hotel room in Austin, Texas with NyQuil in my system, feeling sick and extremely drowsy. Maybe I should post while in this state, but I’m doing it anyway (isn’t that one of the corollary definitions of “stupid”?). So, if I messed up a detail or a link, please, let me know, but bear with me. Also, I only have Internet access in the evenings, if it’s working (took a couple of hours to get a stable connection tonight). I’ve gotta go sleep now. I sure hope I don’t feel this crappy, tomorrow. Goodnight.

It hasn’t been very long since I upgraded the storage on my home file server. One evening last week while I was in Los Angeles, my wife told me that there was a “funny” sound coming from the “server room”. Her description made me think it was a fan. Oh, how I wish that had been the case.

Saturday, after I was home I had tried to access some files on the file server and couldn’t. I tried to log into it via SSH and that hung. I logged in as root on it’s console without problems. A df worked fine, but trying to access anything mounted from the new drive’s LVs failed, hanging the command indefinitely. Trying to shutdown the box also failed as it hung on trying to unmount those volumes. I used the good-ol-power-switch to kill it, waited for everything to stop spinning and tried to start it up. The drive controller can’t even make sense of the drive. I simply powered the box down and left it that way for the weekend.

Tonight, I’ll be pulling the new drive out. I’ll hook it up to my home workstation (only other SATA box I currently have) and see if the drive will run. If so, I’m still not putting it back in the server. Instead, I’ll verify everything, wipe it and run it hard to try to fail it again. Even if I can’t get it to fail again, I’m still going to get an RMA and have it replaced. I think I’ll grab 1 or 2 more while I’m at it and set up either RAID 1 or RAID 5.

Let the hard drive games begin, I guess.

Recently, Migueal de Icazza wrote this as part of a blog post:

X applications do not open sometimes: this is caused because DHCP is set to “change hostname on DHCP” requests. For some reason X applications are not happy with changes in the hostname. I have no idea why. I personally have not experienced this, but I guessed that it was DHCP changing the host name.

Solution: Make sure that your network setting does not change the hostname. I have no idea why this happens, but this is what happens. Just do not let DHCP change your hostname.

He was right. The X server uses the machine name of the box it’s running on as part of the filename for some socket files (in /tmp/) that allow local apps to connect to the X server. If you change the systems hostname during a running X session, any X apps you launch thereafter will use the new hostname to look for an appropriate socket and not find one.

The fix for getting into this situation is easy; just kill the X session and log in again. Trying to “gracefully” log out of such an X session will probably fail, as the logout dialog box applet can’t be launched. Press <ctrl>+<alt>+<backspace> (all together) to kill your current X session. A new display manager should be started in it’s place.

Try visiting Hilton Hotels‘ website with any browser other than IE, Netscape 7 or Firefox 1.0. Argh! It dumps you on a “Web Standards” page and you can’t leave it unless you use one of the “approved” browsers.

I haven’t tried it with any handheld browsers, so if you do, please, post a comment about the results.

Anyway, sites like that are yet another reason why I love Konqueror. It took just 10 seconds to tell Konqueror to pretend to be Firefox 1.0 (on Linux, of course) whenever it connects to “hilton.com”. Presto! No trouble at all. In fact, the whole site renders perfectly.

In case you haven’t heard, Google recently made available a beta for the next version of Google Earth. The big buzz is because there is now a native Linux version.

I’ve seen people talking about the Linux version of Google Earth on the SLLUG Members mailing list. I found an entry on the Fedora SELinux mailing list titled, “Step-by-Step Guide To Creating SELinux Policy for Google Earth“. I’ve seen several other people talking about it already.

But, I was surprised to see that no one whose feed is picked up by the Utah Open Source Planet had yet posted on any of their blogs. So, here it is.

I heard about the new Linux version of Google Earth from my good friend, Evan McNabb via Jabber, yesterday. I downloaded the new Linux version and waited until later in the evening to try it out. Video was a bit scan like on my notebook, but I soon cleared it up.

I’d like to see people comment on their experiences with it, so far. I’ll write more about the things I hear later on.

I figured out how to get mailman working with my Postfix/maildrop/Dovecot setup.
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First, I have to thank Jayce^ for his recent post about Synergy. I’ve been wanting to set it up for a long time now, but could never remember what it was called.

As you might know from reading my recent post, this past week, my wife Charlotte and I have cleared out our storage unit. One of the items that I have long been wanting to get out of there and get set up is my desk. It’s a not too large, but well shaped “half-C” desk, with a very deep center area (perfect for my 20 inch Princeton Graphic systems Ultra 20 monitor, which weighs in at something like 80 pounds).

My main system these days has been my notebook computer. I almost never leave home without it. But when I am home, I spend a lot of time working with both the notebook and the other systems I have. So, I set up synergy this afternoon. I’m using the keyboard and mouse for my Dual Opteron workstation and writing this blog entry on the notebook. This is so cool.

Synergy is very easy to get setup and running. If you’re thinking of using Synergy, I would encourage you to do so.

The Fedora Extras repository has a synergy package (simply run “yum install synergy” on FC4 & FC5 systems), so installation was a snap. I created an /etc/synergy.conf file (have to do it from scratch) on the server and was up and running in under 5 minutes, that is, after fixing a semi-colon that should have been a colon.

The next thing I’m going to do with Synergy is try to get it running on my sgi Indigo 2 & Sun SPARCstation 10 workstations. If I feel like taking on a real challenge, I’ll see if I can get it working on my Apple Mac Quadra950 which is running A/UX (Apple UNIX).

To all of those who read my last post on the Utah Open Source Planet and saw a request to make a decision regarding an OpenBrainstem SSL certificate, I’m sorry.

It turns out that WordPress, the blogging software we use for OpenBrainstem Member Blogs, had a bug in it. In the piece of code that finds and converts “smiley” text to icons, it was using the wrong URL. It should have used the URL for the blog site, but instead was using the URL for the admin and authenticated users access (like login) site.

I’ve fixed the bug and will be sending a patch (it’s a one-liner) to the WordPress developers. Hopefully, it’s included in the next release.

Today, I’ve spent almost the whole day getting OpenSUSE 10.0 burned onto CDs for some students here at Guru Labs. I’ve run into one weird thing after another, all day long.

1. I burned a complete set of bad discs. It looks like the burner in that box might be bad. Retrying a couple of the discs also produced bad results. The built-into-YaST media check failed on all discs, and trying to use readcd failed. The MD5SUMS of the .iso files were all good.
2. I had Dax burn discs on his notebook (mine has no burner :( ). These (mostly) worked to complete an installation, but readcd failed at the 3rd to last sector on all three. This makes us think that SUSE may have bungled when spinning the CDs. Also, one package on CD3 could not be read (myspell-american). All other packages were good.
3. I had Dax burn another CD3. This one could not be read to install the qscintilla package, but myspell-american and all other packages were fine.
4. We burned copies of the first Dax burned CD3 (with a failing myspell-american package) and gave them to the students.

Total time for the whole process: 6.5 hours.

Ugh! There went a whole day and no time for me to get lunch, either.

Don’t get me wrong. Overall, I like SUSE distributions. Sure, there are warts, but that’s true of every distro I’ve ever used. hey, things happen; and this was just one more.

Full Disclosure: I use Fedora on my notebooks and workstations, today. I also use SUSE on my home workstation. Most of my servers are CentOS. I will be installing OpenSUSE 10.1 on my notebook and start using it heavily, but I’ll probably dual-boot that with FC5.