Planet TriLUG

Alan Porter: House Guests

alan — 2010-07-31T22:20:37+00:00

This summer, my sister-in-law, Kim, and her six-year-old daughter, Emily, came to visit us from Hong Kong. Emily’s school is out for the entire summer, and our girls are tracked out for all of July, so they spent three weeks with us!

Their stay here ended up being divided into three week-long chapters: life at home in Cary, the NC mountains, and the NC beach.

AT HOME IN CARY

During the first week, Kim and Emily tagged along with our girls to their normal events: swim meets, a sailing class, visits to our local museums and downtown, and more. I went to work in the daytime, leaving them to their activities.

THE NC MOUNTAINS

The second week, we spent in the NC Mountains. We rented a cabin in the town of Bat Cave, and we ventured out into the surrounding area. My parents joined us for a couple of days.

On Sunday, we drove to Bat Cave, which is really not much more than a post office and a sign post, with signs saying “Bat Cave, NC” on both sides of the post. We took our time in getting there, arriving the late afternoon. We drove into the town of Chimney Rock to get our bearings (to pee), and we were surprised to find that the entire town was without electricity. So we snaked our way up the mountain to the cabin, which was a good 1000 feet higher in elevation than the town. Eventually, the power came back on, and my parents showed up, too. We settled in, which for some, means unpacking. For me, it means I set up my Linksys wifi router and started scanning for neighboring networks. I had high hopes, because although there was only one other home that could be seen from our cabin, it was another rental unit, and they had advertised internet. Contrast that to our rustic accommodations, with satellite TV and a hot tub, but no internet.

On Monday, we drove a little bit father down the valley into Lake Lure. We took a boat tour of the lake, whose highlights included the site where Dirty Dancing was filmed in 1987, and some nice summer homes (note to self, buy more lottery tickets). We ate a picnic lunch on the shore. A bit further downstream, we found the Broad River Gems & Mining Co., a curious little operation whose proprietors inadvertently taught us as much about the dangers of smoking as it did about geology. For a hefty $25/bucket, city-slickers like us can rinse away the NC mud to reveal stones that have been imported from around the globe (the mine we visited last year had cheaper buckets with fewer stones, and so it felt a little more like mining, whereas this one seemed more like a muddy piñata than anything else). On the way back to the cabin, we stopped by the side of the road to wade in the cool water of the Broad River.

On Tuesday, Mimi and Pops left, and we headed to Chimney Rock State Park. It was hot and humid, but we were not deterred — we made the brief hike up the outcroppings trail to the Chimney Rock, where we caught our breath and took pictures of the valley. We cooled off and had lunch at the Sky Lounge Deli, waited out a small rain storm in the Sky Lounge Gift Shop, and then rode the elevator back down into the cool rocky tunnel. With the rain, the humidity was now well into the 90% range, and we sweated as we hiked along the Hickory Nut Falls trail, which rewards the persistent hiker with a cool 404-foot waterfall.

Wednesday was another steamy day with scattered showers, which we spent at the Biltmore House and Gardens in Asheville. The house tour is bigger than I remember it (or my memory is smaller than the tour), and we even chatted our way into a ride on the old elevator. But in the end, I still have to take solace in the fact that my modest house has many more amenities than old George Vanderbilt’s did, and it costs much less to maintain.

On Thursday, we managed to drag our four-hour drive home into some sort of eight-hour marathon, with frequent bathroom breaks, in-flight movies, snack breaks, and a poorly-timed stop at the NC Transportation Museum in Spencer NC (we arrived there ten minutes before closing time, 5:00pm). I can promise that we’ll return to the NC Transportation Museum some day… that place could easily fill a Saturday!

We spent Friday and Saturday at home, doing laundry and generally recovering from our trip to the mountains.

THE NC BEACH

On Sunday, we packed up and headed out to Atlantic Beach. The drive down was uneventful, and we enjoyed watching videos in the van (I jury-rigged a portable DVD player onto a make-shift shelf in between the front seats). We got to the beach just in time to see the orange moon rising into the dark blue evening sky in the east… awesome.

On previous trips to the beach, we had usually gone out to the ocean in mid-morning, and then worked our way back to the pool by around lunch time… a recipe for sunburn. So this week, we tried a new tactic, staying indoors during the peak hours of 10am – 3pm. So on Monday morning, we woke up and went for a quick walk on the beach in the morning, where we spotted a loggerhead turtle’s nest! That afternoon, we went to Fort Macon — we were completely stunned to find that it now has a brand new visitors center. One of the volunteers was wearing a turtle shirt, so we asked him about the nest, and he said that it should hatch any day now! We left the fort and headed to the Beaufort waterfront, where we ate at Finz and then toured the NC Maritime Museum. Our last stop of the day was at Beaufort’s Michael J. Smith Airport, my attempt at showing Emily that real people can fly small planes in America (there were no planes to see that day… bummer). We returned to the condo for a swim in ocean and then in the pool. Later that night, I went out to check on the turtle nest… there was a small crowd gathered around, hoping to see them hatch.

On Tuesday, we repeated our successful sun-aversion formula, with a walk on the beach in the morning and mid-day at the NC Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores. We explored the marsh area, saw crabs and snakes and sharks, and then attacked the gift shop. On the way out, we found a quick geocache nearby, and then headed off to Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf and Raceway (we did both, golf and racing). We finally topped it off with dinner at the Crab Shack, and a walk on the Pine Knoll Shores beach, where we found two more (less mature) turtle nests. Once again, after we got home, I checked on our turtles.

Wednesday was unusual for a beach day… we did NOTHING until mid-afternoon. The girls played games, and the adults read books and we all talked. Then we finally returned to Fort Macon beach to walk along shore at the easternmost tip of the island. We found hermit crabs and olive snails in the large tide pools, we climbed on the rock jetty, we collected smooth stones on the sand, and we watched an old fisherman catch and release a stingray. We came home and swam in the pool again. And again, we checked on our turtles at bedtime.

On Thursday, we woke up and packed to go home. It was starting to rain anyway, so we did not feel so bad about leaving the beach. We took the Cherry Branch / Minnesott Beach ferry across the Neuse River, and drive on up to Aurora to see the Fossil Museum. We spent just a little time inside before the kids were about to bust, so we went out to the dirt pile to dig for a while. As luck would have it, the rain finally caught up with us, so we filled a 5 gallon bucket with that prehistoric dirt and we loaded up the van to head back home.

GOODBYE

What a trip. Three weeks in North Carolina, and we did the mountains and beach and all points in between. We learned about gems, turtles, fossils, trains, sharks, the Civil War, rip currents, airplanes, and 19th century aristocracy. And we also ate at Waffle House! I’d call that an educational summer!

Mark Turner: 99% of people can’t watch this video more than 25 seconds

Mark Turner — 2010-07-31T19:48:42+00:00

There’s a Facebook scam going around that tricks users into installing Javascript on their browser. This then opens them up to all kinds of malicious activity, the first of which is to propagate the scam by automatically updating your Facebook status with a pointer to the scam page. Yes, it takes control of your Facebook account without your permission!

If you see a status update from your Facebook friends that says “99% of people can’t watch this video more than 25 seconds,” do not click on the link!

For those of you who are curious, the video mentioned is said to be a YouTube video of a macabre scene from a seriously-disturbing horror movie called Hostel 2. Not only is this Not Safe For Work, it’s not safe for anything!

Here are some technical details about the scam from Roger Thompson at AVG. Essentially, you’ll be asked to fill out a survey before you’re asked to put the Javascript on your browser. Thus, this is a phishing scam, in addition to whatever might get done to your Facebook account.

Just save yourself the trouble and don’t click on the page.

Tarus Balog: 2010 Dev-Jam – Day Six

tarus — 2010-07-31T13:07:23+00:00

The last day of Dev-Jam is always about commitment – well, commits to git anyway. After a solid week doing all things OpenNMS, parting is always bittersweet.

We took our group picture late, so we’re missing Bill and Matt R. The camera is Alex’s but the photo credit goes to Jen, one of the dorm advisor’s that Alex convinced to take our picture. I was stylin’ in my Doktor Kaboom t-shirt.

After we cleaned up the Club Room, 19 of us headed over to Town Hall Brewery for our last meal together this year. I think most people felt this was the best Dev-Jam ever: great facilities, awesome bandwidth and wonderful weather.

On Saturday the shuttle picks half of us up at 9am, while the rest will leave over the course of the day (well, except for Ronny who has decided to stay another week in the US). It will be nice to be home, but I’m not looking forward to a return to the hot and humid weather I’ve managed to avoid for the last two weeks.

We should be publishing a Dev-Jam wrap up in the next week or so, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

Mark Hinkle: Open Source Toolchains for Sysadmins

Mark — 2010-07-30T18:00:39+00:00

In celebration of System Administrator Appreciation Day I published a story at Linux.com called Open Source Toolchains for Systems Administrators, here is an excerpt:

“Software developers are very familiar with toolchains, series of programs where the output of one program forms the input for the next. A free software example would be using the GNU Emacs editor, the GNU bin-utils and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to write a program. Software developers frequently create programs and subroutines that are used in other programs rather than recoding the same process over and over again.

Just as software developers have different task-specific tools to make up software tool chains (e.g. editors, compilers, build scripts), systems administrators can use tool chains made up of tools used to automate management functions and maintenance of Linux servers.”

I think it’s a good description of how to automate Linux server administration, read it and let me know.

Linux.com: Open Source Toolchains for Systems Administrators

Technorati Tags: automation, Cfengine, Chef, Linux, Monitoring, opensource, Opscode, provisioning, Puppet, Systems Management, Zabbix, Zenoss

Tarus Balog: 2010 Dev-Jam – Day Five

tarus — 2010-07-30T15:56:49+00:00

Things are starting to blur together now, so I can’t really remember all I worked on Thursday. I know I played around more with RT, and in the early afternoon, Ethan came over and we did a podcast with John Willis and Michael Coté.

I’ll post a link when Coté puts it up, but I think it was one of my favorite podcasts of all time. Willis got to gloat when I said that I liked “the cloud” and I got to talk about some of the scalability features of OpenNMS, such as the ability to discover and manage devices with 32,000 interfaces each (virtual, of course) and a test we ran for the Department of Energy where OpenNMS was handling 125,000 syslog message a minute – more than the Netcool/Omnibus syslog probe could handle.

Oh, and OpenNMS did it for 8 straight hours before we stopped the test.

Ethan got to talk about Nagios XI and we had a friendly debate on the open source services model and the commercial software model. If you are in to that sort of thing, it will be worth a listen.

For dinner that night we ate leftovers, and then went to Big 10 for the weekly pub quiz. We started to play but got distracted by a game that Ben introduced to us called Mafia.

There is a moderator, who removes all of the aces and face cards from a standard deck, except for two aces, a king and a jack. They then add enough “plain” cards so that everyone playing gets one, and they are dealt out.

The people with the two aces are “mafia”. The person with the king is the “inspector” and the person with the jack is the “doctor”. All of the rest are villagers. The moderator then launches into a story about night falling on a village and every goes to sleep. Everyone playing shuts their eyes.

He then instructs the “mafia” to open their eyes, and then silently decide which person in the game they wish to kill. Once a decision is made, the moderator has them shut their eyes.

He then asks the “inspector” to open their eyes. The inspector can then indicate a person at the table and ask the moderator if that person is mafia. The moderator will then indicate “yes” or “no” and the inspector closes their eyes again.

Finally, the “doctor” opens his eyes and the moderator asks them to indicate if there is a person at the table they want to save, and then they close their eyes.

The moderator starts their story again, stating that dawn has come to the village, and tragically someone has died. The game is then opened up for discussion and the villagers must decide on someone to lynch. That player “dies” and the game repeats until either all of the mafia are dead or all of the villagers are dead.

If the mafia targets the person the doctor chooses to save, no one dies in the night.

It’s actually a pretty fun game. Even if the inspector knows who a mafia member is, it is doubtful that they would flatly state they were the inspector since the remaining mafia member would obviously target them next. It is also doubtful that the doctor would save anyone but themselves in the beginning (although if the inspector identified himself the doctor might protect them in the next round).

In our game the mafia targeted me in the second round, but the doctor saved me so I didn’t die (you don’t learn this during the game but I was told afterward). The villagers were victorious but it had nothing to do with me, since the final mafia member was Antonio and I kept arguing that it was stereotypical to blame the only Italian at the table.

I was wrong. (grin)

Greg DeKoenigsberg: It’s not about tribalism, Mark.

Greg DeKoenigsberg — 2010-07-30T14:22:48+00:00

It’s about accepting responsibility for your place in the world. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

With the dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of engineers in Canonical’s employ now, why do none of them do any of the heavy lifting in GNOME, or in any other upstream project, for that matter?

There’s a difference between Ubuntu and Canonical. The Ubuntu community has obviously done ridiculous amounts of good work in the open source world for multiple years, and will continue to do so. Ubuntu community members are great evangelists for open source. The Ubuntu brand machine is Canonical’s greatest strength, and a world-class model for others to follow. The existence of Ubuntu has grown the pie for open source in general.

But Canonical the company doesn’t get to hide behind the Ubuntu community forever — and you can wrap yourself in that flag all you like, but in doing so, you completely miss the point.

Canonical is supposed to be in a leadership position in the open source world, and leadership demands that you put your money where your mouth is.

It’s that simple.

You want to claim the high ground now, and paint me as a bitter old coot, and imply that my “tribalism” is subtly more dangerous than racism or sexism? I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but okay. I get it. Fine.

But maybe in your next blog post, you could attempt to answer the legitimate question at the center of this debate. Why is Canonical so relatively invisible in the upstream projects upon which Canonical completely relies?

And why is it that, whenever this question comes up, the answer is always some variation on the theme HATERS GONNA HATE instead of actual reflection?

Tarus Balog: American Airlines iPhone App

tarus — 2010-07-30T13:27:06+00:00

Just a heads up to everyone who has missed it – American Airlines has a sweet new iPhone app.

Eric Christensen: This Week in Fedora featuring... me?

Eric — 2010-07-30T04:36:00+00:00

Tonight I was interviewed for This Week in Fedora. We talked about the Fedora Docs Project, the use of Linux in my professional life, and Linux security. I was mostly pleased with the topics we covered but I just hope that I didn't sound like an idiot.

I guess I'll know when it comes out (tomorrow?) and I get to listen to it. Having no notes in front of me everything I was saying came completely out of my head so I'm sure I'll think of something else I would have wanted to talk about or say afterwards.

Anyway, I hope I conveyed how great the importance of community is and why I love Linux. I guess we'll find out. I wonder if there is a do over... :)

Sparks' Fedora Project Journal by Eric H Christensen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Mark Turner: Sobering look at end-of-life decisions

Mark Turner — 2010-07-30T01:50:36+00:00

The New Yorker has a thoughtful article asking if end-of-life procedures for terminally-ill patients are only masking the inevitable, giving these patients false hope when medicine could instead be helping them make the most of their last days. It’s worth thinking about.

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying.

via Hospice medical care for dying patients : The New Yorker.

Tarus Balog: GPGMail 1.3.0 – Open Source In Action

tarus — 2010-07-29T22:11:25+00:00

Yes, I use a Mac. Yes, I hate freedom. Yes, I use Mail.app.

And I am a bit of a security nut.

One of the most useful pieces of software I’ve used over the years is a plug-in for Mail.app called GPGMail. It was originally written by Stéphane Corthésy and released under an open source license, and it allows one to easily decrypt, encrypt and sign GPG messages right from Mail.app.

The problem is that Apple doesn’t really have an API to make such an integration easy, so with every new release of Mail.app it would usually break the plug-in, and Stéphane was responsible to fix it.

Well, after awhile Stéphane wanted to move on to other things, and with the advent of Snow Leopard GPGMail was broken – seemingly for good.

Stéphane writes:

I’ve just read the latest emails on the list, without participating. Actually I haven’t participated to the project since a very long time, for personal reasons. Situation will not change in the future, I guess.

It’s been now 10 years since I started GPGMail. At that time we were working on Rhapsody, the ancestor of Mac OS X, the link between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. gpg had just gone 1.0. I started the project because it might have been a critical piece of code for us at Sen:te in the near future, and it was really fun to develop

Plugin was then made public, and received some interest in the Mac community, though it was still for geeks. Interest in PGP became bigger, the MacGPG project was born a year later, thanks to Gordon Worley. This encouraged me to go on with GPGMail development, and also MacGPG sub-projects. I spent many week-ends and nights coding for those, and have been very happy to see interest growing more and more.

Then time passed, it became hard to find people able to help on MacGPG development, and very few people were able to spend time to understand the underpinnings of (GPG)Mail, except me, unfortunately. By making the project open-source I had expected that people would come in and make the project go further. I was rather deceived by this, I must admit. There was no real momentum.

On my side, I wanted to explore also other projects, and became tired of working on GPGMail. I wanted something new. It was getting boring, I had less time to reply to user requests, and code had got very messy. GPGMail development quite stalled from that time, I spent time on it only after major system updates. I was still hoping some people would enter and help on the project in the long-term, not only for a single patch. Thus I opened up the project by putting it on SF, with a real OpenSource license that would’t prevent people from working on GPGMail.

To be honest, I waited a rather long time to upgrade to Snow Leopard specifically because GPGMail support was important to me. When Stéphane backed out of the project, the list was abuzz with people wondering about its future. Luckily, a number of people stepped up to take it over. The project launched a new website, the code and bug tracker was moved to github, and various patched versions started to come out.

Stéphane continues:

When Snow Leopard arrived, I was already spending no time on coding during spare time, and was not really willing to. Finally people entered into the dance and started coding, not only whining. And I must admit I’ve been really surprised by the results they obtained (congrats Lukas and others!). I kept telling myself I would update the project, and make a public release, when I’ll find time to, but the fact is that I cannot, for several reasons.

For so many years I’ve been hoping to find people helping me on the project in the long-term, without finding any, but now that time has come, project can fly without me. I hope there will always be enough people to take care of it. Till now, project was organized by only one person, and depended only on me. I took care of every details. It’s time to change that model and let the project be managed more flexibly. The bazaar model, as I would say.

So please, move the project out of SF, leave it opened to developers, designers, writers, aficionados of all kind. It’s no longer dependent on me, it will depend on all of you. I will close the SF project (and mailing list), and redirect the Sen:te web pages to the new site, once you completed the migration, then I’ll have a glance at the project, from time to time, probably to complain . My baby’s no longer a baby; it no longer needs me.

Thanks all for your support, and now take great care of GPGMail.

Today the team released version 1.3.0 of GPGMail, the first real release under the new model. It installed for me without incident, and I am happy that this project will live on. Thank you Stéphane and thanks to the whole GPGMail team for making this happen. Plus, none of this would have been possible if GPG itself wasn’t open source and packaged by a number of groups. Score one for the open source ecosystem.

Had GPGMail been commercial software, I would have been out of luck, but because it was open source, and that there were many who found it valuable, it lives on and propers.

Awesome.

Tarus Balog: 2010 Dev Jam – Day Four

tarus — 2010-07-29T15:05:10+00:00

This was an incredibly long and busy day.

In a normal week I think about OpenNMS a lot, but during Dev-Jam there is so much energy that I think about it more (if that is possible) and it makes it hard to sleep. I stayed up late the night before working on the new opennms.org website and I woke up around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep for all of the new ideas swimming around my head.

So I got up, did a bunch of .com work (including payroll – it’s that time of the month once again) and wrote what may be my last post on open core (probably not, but we can always hope). I then went downstairs to join the rest of the team.

It was distracting. Mike Huot brought in his smoker and was cooking what would become our dinner and it smelled amazing. They had to start on it the night before and, to jump ahead, the results were delicious.

There was a lot of work going on, and on a whim Bill decided to discover the network we were using. Here is a screenshot of the unfiltered nodes:

I worked with Alex on RT for most of the day, and managed to take a short nap just before Ethan Galstad and Mary Starr showed up.

Ethan has been a visitor to Dev-Jam before (he lives nearby) and Mary is his business partner at Nagios Enterprises. Nagios Enterprises is Ethan’s commercial software company that builds on the open source Nagios platform to deliver an extended and supported commercial version. That differs greatly from the OpenNMS business model, so we had a lively debate about it.

First, even though Nagios is open source, Nagios XI is presented as commercial software. Just like my Hyperic example yesterday, go to nagios.com and search on “open source”. No matches. Ethan is 100% transparent about the commercial nature of his product. Nagios XI is not open core.

Second, I have often said that I see software taking two paths: either becoming a commodity or becoming open source. Ethan has structured his business around commoditizing the Nagios platform and it is priced accordingly.

Finally, people have been building proprietary software add-ons on top of Nagios for nearly a decade, and Ethan quite simply wants a part of it. As the main person responsible for the project, he has built a brand of considerable value. Just now a Google search on “Nagios” returns “About 9,470,000 results” (OpenNMS is only around 123K hits). That’s an impressive number.

It does illustrate a difference between the communities around Nagios and OpenNMS. From the moment I took over the administration of the project, I have relied heavily on the community to keep it going and make up for my considerable shortcomings. In contrast, Ethan has been the primary author of most of the Nagios core code.

He asked me point blank why we didn’t produce a commercial version of OpenNMS. I pointed out that our market was squarely aimed at “open source network management” and that we didn’t have any expertise in selling commercial software, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t feel the same ownership over OpenNMS that Ethan has toward Nagios. While The OpenNMS Group does hold 100% of the copyright, it would just seem wrong to me to build on that work and not give it back to the community, in any fashion.

If you have never met Ethan, please understand that he is one of the nicest guys I’ve met in this business, and his business partner Mary seems very competent and brings a strong business background to the company. Note that what I have written here our my thoughts on our conversation and Ethan may have a different take on some or all of them.

So we stuffed ourselves with barbecue and talked business for several hours, then Ethan and Mary left and many of the rest of the gang went off to an outdoor showing of Sherlock Holmes.

It had been a long day. I went to bed.

Mark Turner: Cheap thoughts: Contador and Armstrong

Mark Turner — 2010-07-29T12:47:01+00:00

Alberto Contador is to Mike Tyson what Lance Armstrong is to Muhammad Ali.

Mark Turner: Cheap thoughts: hitting the restroom

Mark Turner — 2010-07-29T11:18:03+00:00

Why do some men feel the need to hit the restroom? Why not use it instead?

I hear this all the time in the office: “hey, I’ll catch up with you. I’m going to hit the restroom.”

Greg DeKoenigsberg: Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1%.

Greg DeKoenigsberg — 2010-07-29T05:23:47+00:00

In case you missed it: $SUBJECT is the percentage of contribution to the GNOME codebase. Thanks, Dave Neary.

An upside of not working for Red Hat anymore: I can speak frankly about this kind of issue, since no one really cares what I think anymore. I’m just another cranky dude with a blog.

If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization, then you’re either an unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you’re not paying attention.

One of the most irritating things about working at Red Hat was watching Canonical take credit for code that Red Hat engineers wrote. Of course, Red Hat engineers, being the upstanding sort of chaps that they are, never said a word about it, because they’ve always been too busy carrying the load — and it’s really never made sense for Red Hatters to complain much about it anyway, because it’s not the sort of discussion that ever benefits the complaining party. “You’re just mad because Ubuntu’s cooler than you,” the masses would say, and to be fair, there’s always been something to that.

But this figure is absolutely egregious.

I mean, I always knew that Red Hat put in a lot of work into GNOME, because I saw it every day — but until now, I thought that Canonical *also* put a lot of work into GNOME. They’ve certainly given the impression, over the last several years, of having put a lot of work into GNOME. They’ve been very successful at positioning themselves as the Eternal Champion of the Linux Desktop, and positioning Red Hat as the boring old has-beens who long ago abandoned the Desktop fight, and just do backroom server work that Real Linux People don’t care about.

So let’s call it plain. Canonical has been riding on Red Hat’s coattails for years — not just down in kernel land, but also, we now learn, all the way up to the tippy tippy top of user space. Not only that, but they then have the gall to suggest that Red Hat should change its release schedules to make it even easier for them to ride the gravy train (while at the same time making the spectacularly outrageous claim that Red Hat is actually a proprietary software company — LOLWUT???)

They’ve done an exceptionally good job with this sleight of hand, but the facts are the facts, aren’t they?

In the ONE area where Canonical claims to have the MOST customer focus and the MOST engineering expertise, Red Hat still outproduces them ***16 TO 1***.

OMFG, SRSLY? SIXTEEN TO ONE!!11!!11!!one!!!!!

If anyone at Canonical even bothers to respond to this analysis (which I doubt they will), I’m sure it’ll be the same old song-and-dance about how everyone collaborates, and everyone competes, and everyone wins, and the strength of the open source model, and not a fair comparison because Red Hat is so much bigger, and distro wars are bad, and can’t we all be friends, and yadda yadda yadda.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Spare me. The world is full of talkers and doers, and in the long haul, people are usually smart enough to figure out which is which. Which probably explains why Red Hat has a billion dollars of cash in the bank, while Canonical is still continually reinventing itself to make any profits at all.

Eric Christensen: Looking for input on the SELinux Sandbox

Eric — 2010-07-28T19:03:00+00:00

I hope to start working on a new chapter for the Fedora Security Guide here in the next couple of weeks. The topic will be the SELinux Sandbox. If you currently use Sandbox I'd like to hear from you. I'm looking for use cases.

Sparks' Fedora Project Journal by Eric H Christensen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Mark Turner: Evil lair to become B&B

Mark Turner — 2010-07-28T18:47:01+00:00

Remember the evil MT.Net lair I diabolically schemed to purchase? The winning bidder, Richard Neal of Mint Hill, intends to turn the former Frying Pan Shoals lighthouse into a bed and breakfast. Curses!

A Mint Hill man hopes to turn an abandoned tower standing 60 feet above the white-capped waves of the Atlantic into one of North Carolina’s most distinctive vacation getaways.

The tower’s 5,000 square feet of living space includes seven bedrooms, a kitchen and a rec room. Guests would come by boat or helicopter. They could expect fabulous views of sunrises, sunsets, sea turtles and even migrating whales.

While I am intrigued with the idea of spending time on this rusty outpost just for the fun of it, I find the best thing about beds and breakfasts is the neighborhood around them. When you get to Frying Pan Shoals B&B, what are you going to do? Can’t go for a walk. Can’t shop at the quaint stores nearby because nearby is 25 miles away. However, if you like to fish you’ve got a great place to do it. Also, I think it would make a great recording studio. Or pirate radio station!

Or … an evil lair. Sigh.

Update 29 July: You can follow Richard’s progress (and book a reservation) here.

Tarus Balog: Open Core is Dead

tarus — 2010-07-28T18:14:37+00:00

I was wanting to take a break from Dev-Jam to put down some thoughts I’ve been having during this recent renaissance of the “open core” debate when I realized something:

Open core is dead.

At least as a business model. While I don’t expect it to go away overnight, I do expect to see very few new companies using the model and those commercial software companies that tout themselves as open source reframing their marketing to de-emphasize it.

I base this on observations of my own market. Even though searching on “open source network management” in Google returns OpenNMS as the first hit, for years the industry press omitted us from articles on open source management to focus on three VC-backed firms: Groundwork Open Source, Hyperic and Zenoss. All of these companies are what I would classify as “open core” and it is interesting to see where they are now.

Groundwork Open Source (GWOS)

This was one of the first open core companies to try and commercialize open source projects. When it started in 2004, GWOS sold commercial software “wrappers” around a number of open source projects without releasing any open source code on their own. In 2006 they started to distribute the “Groundwork Monitor Community Edition“. After four rounds of funding, they have raised $29 million (A: $3MM, B: $8.5MM, C: $12.5MM, D: $5MM) but they still come across as a company looking for a business plan. Once known for selling software licenses in excess of six figures, they now sell a “quickstart” version for $59.

Since I am pretty much known for running my mouth, people tend to contact me with their experiences with companies in this space. I received one such e-mail a few weeks ago:

Hey, I was just told that GWOS is no longer putting out a community (free) edition. I was told this by one of their support guys, was told that was the reason why they are now releasing version 6.2 while the 6.0 CE version hasn’t been updated since December. He said they were just going to quietly “let it go to the community” … Also interesting is that the $59 “quickstart” is just that, not really meant to be production, no upgrades or updates come with that, and no guarantee that you can even purchase the upgrades later

I thought this was interesting, so I did some poking around. I found an entry on their forums (which doesn’t seem to be policed for spam anymore):

Interesting, seems like all traces of the free/community version are gone from their site. Still available on sourceforge, I’d grab the latest version while it’s still there.

Not one to just publish hearsay, I sent a note to Tara Spalding, their Chief Marketing Officer, asking if the rumors of GWOS dropping support for their community edition was true, and she replied:

Thanks for reaching out. That is untrue, and the rumor mill is pretty lame.

I replied to ask her when we could expect the next community edition, but I haven’t heard back. The latest enterprise edition is 6.2, but the last community edition is 6.0. That’s pretty high number for a VC-backed firm – most have an exit between versions 3 and 4. (grin)

I was reminded of this exchange this week when I saw a GWOS ad in the Wall Street Journal (click to embiggen):

It was about 1/6th of a page, which runs around US$40K, so it must have been important to them. Note that the term “open source” does not appear at all in the ad.

So it seems, at least on the surface, that GWOS is trying to distance itself from the term “open source”. It will be interesting to see how they deal with their name. Perhaps after all that money and all that time they will find success marketing themselves as a commercial company.

Hyperic

Another open core firm that used to be referenced a lot was Hyperic. I would often use them as an example of the problems with the “feature wall” inherent in open core solutions. The difference between Hyperic and the other VC-backed companies is in the quality of the VCs. Benchmark and Accel seem to know what they are doing. Hyperic was rolled into SpringSource just before the latter company was sold to VMWare. Thus the VCs got an exit and I assume the five founders of Hyperic did okay financially.

What’s funny is that, although Hyperic products are owned and sold by a very commercial software company now, the interest we receive on the OpenNMS and Hyperic integration has actually gone up. It seems that framing the Hyperic products in the context of commercial software has actually made the buying decision easier, and the term “open source” does not appear anywhere on their home page.

Think about that – being honest and representing Hyperic software as commercial software with an open source component (versus open source software with a commercial component) has actually increased interest.

Zenoss

Zenoss has a very popular “core” product that they publish under an open source license, coupled with a variety of “enterprise” software offerings that they price per device per year. Their enterprise “silver” package is listed at $100/managed resource. Note that this is the subscription price – that is $100/resource/year. So if we take an average OpenNMS install of 2000 devices, that would run $200,000 a year, or $1,000,000 over five years.

It is really hard to argue that a Zenoss enterprise solution is any less expensive than, say, a solution using HP OpenView. In addition, most software from HP and IBM is licensed in perpetuity: i.e. once you’ve bought it you get the right to use that version forever. It would be hard for an enterprise of any size to base its management solution on something that must be renewed year after year, with no guarantee that the price will remain the same.

Now, this is a post proclaiming that open core is dead, so I’m not here to pick on the way Zenoss prices their software. What I want to examine is the usefulness of their business model. As a VC-backed firm that has raised around $25 million, I assume the desired exit would be an acquisition. But how would one evaluate them? A number of past Zenoss commercial clients have talked to us as an option to Zenoss, simply because their revenue structure is not sustainable. In addition, as part of the OpenNMS project we are targeting those enterprise features users of Zenoss find most valuable, and we plan to offer them for free. Heck, $200,000 can go a long way toward funding a lot of custom development, so a Zenoss user could spend that money once and get what they need under a truly free and open source license. Thus the value of the Zenoss commercial software has a very short shelf life, and since they have no revenue model based on their open source software, so does the value of the company.

I think investors are wising up to this. In their latest funding round the target was $5.2MM but they only raised $4.83MM. Thus it would appear that at least one of the investors pulled out of the deal at the last minute. That was a smart move.

[Note: our goal at OpenNMS is to produce the de facto network management platform, so I'm not targeting Zenoss specifically but all commercial software vendors in this space. Our free software will continue to erode the value of their commercial software. This is also not meant to be taken as an attack on anyone who uses any of the products listed here - if it works for you, great. This is more an examination of the business of open source.]

With the backlash hitting SugarCRM and NASA spurning Eucalyptus in favor of OpenStack, it seems that the market is wising up to open core and demanding more from companies that call themselves open source. With examples like Hyperic above, it seems to be in a commercial software company’s best interest to avoid referring to their offerings as open source. It looks like Groundwork is moving down that path and Hyperic is already there.

Open core is dead.

Tarus Balog: 2010 Dev-Jam – Day Three

tarus — 2010-07-28T03:25:32+00:00

I am happy to announce that I was finally able to get the new www.opennms.org website to a point where it could go live. We started this process nearly a year ago and managed to get the www.opennms.com site finished early in the year, but for a variety of reasons we just couldn’t finish the other one.

Outside of cosmetic changes, not much has changed. At the heart of the site is still a wiki, but we wrapped a few information pages in front of it to help introduce people to the project.

There is also a tighter coupling between the .org and the .com sites, but we will strive to keep the commercial content on .com and the project content on .org. I do hope that this will end the occasional question we get on the mailing lists about whether or not one can get commercial support for OpenNMS, however.

I’ve been pretty heads down on the site, so I’m not sure what everyone else has been working on, but there is a scratchpad page that is tracking some of it.

Dinner was catered by Brasa and most agree that it was in the top five Dev-Jam meals of all time.

Tarus Balog: 2010 Dev-Jam – Day Two

tarus — 2010-07-27T17:37:16+00:00

I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll be able to do this week, since it is way more fun to hang out with the gang, but I thought I needed to post at least one picture.

Thanks to Chris Rodman and Papa Johns sponsoring dinner, we were inundated with pizza and wings yesterday and it was nice to be able to eat without interrupting work.

Mark Turner: Winner vs. champion

Mark Turner — 2010-07-26T16:26:07+00:00

Photo by Haggisnl

I like the distinction made in this Christian Science Monitor story on this year’s Tour De France (emphasis mine):

The 97th Tour de France was filled with action after a lackluster 2009 edition.

A new rivalry was cemented – winner Alberto Contador of Spain barely defeated Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck on the penultimate day – as the race bid adieu to seven-time champion Lance Armstrong, riding in his final Tour amidst a developing federal doping investigation.

See? Contador is a winner but Armstrong is a champion. As long as Contador disrespects cycling tradition he will never be a champion.

via Tour de France 2010 delivers drama – without the doping – CSMonitor.com.

Mark Turner: Cheap thoughts: tomorrow

Mark Turner — 2010-07-26T14:57:16+00:00

Today is a dress-rehearsal for tomorrow. Want to be something tomorrow? Start today.

Kevin Sonney: The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and something with the Tooth

Kevin Sonney — 2010-07-26T14:50:51+00:00

So I’m coming out of a fog from the last several days, due mostly to a cocktail of painkillers. Why would I be in a fog of painkillers, you might ask?

Tuesday I woke up to a pain in my jaw. I figured something had gotten caught between my teeth, and irritated the gum, causing swelling. A little flossing, some brushing, and some rinsing, and I managed to dislodge what I figured was causing it, and everyone would be happy.

Not so much. The swelling was back on Wednesday. So some more cleaning, a little Aleve, and it felt right as rain. That’ll take care of it, right? Right up until the Aleve wore off. By Thursday night a blister on my gum said to me “not so much” and “abscess.” So Friday morning I’m hitting the Aleve WAY outside the recommended dosage, and calling around town to see what dentist happened to be open[1]. I managed to get an early afternoon appointment with a new dentist in town, who actually has Friday Hours.

The short story at this point is, yes, I had an abscess, and oh YEAH, that tooth came out with a whole bunch of woobly junk that was identified as the infection itself, and I got the GOOD painkillers for the rest of the weekend. And wow, even with the hole in my mouth and OTC painkillers, I feel a WHOLE lot better than I did last week.

The COOL (and longer) part of the story is that I have found the most awesome dentist ever.[2] She is, to be blunt, one of us. Smartphone using, social networking, Holy Grail quoting, former Ren geek, makes her own corsets AND fairy wings, plus she swore right back at me when I dropped a “motherfucker” during a particularly difficult part of the procedure *grin*. As per my superpower[3], I got a chunk of her life story, and quite frankly, she’s not only a fantastic dentist, but a very cool person who busted her ASS to get where she is.

All that and she managed to yank out a molar on short notice on Friday, with a great attitude to the point where I actually had FUN during the extraction.

I have a new dentist. And I can’t wait for my next appointment. Ain’t that wild?

[1] Why dentists in Pittsboro close Fridays is beyond me.

[2] She’s actually buying out a dentist who’s retiring, and I hope the bank approves it ASAP.

[3] The one where I get anyone’s life story within minutes – nay seconds – of meeting them.

Russell Harrison: Classics in LEGO

Russell Harrison — 2010-07-26T13:50:16+00:00

A lego reconstruction of the famous 1932 photograph "Lunch atop a skyscraper" taken by Charles Ebbets.

Mike Stimpson has clearly put a great deal of thought into how some of the most famous photographs were shot. So much that he’s recreated them using LEGOs! He even included links to how he setup each shot which is a fun way to learn a little about lighting as well. Just plain fun!

A Lego recreation of Robert Capa's 1944 photograph taken during the D-Day landings on Omaha beach during World War II.

See more and the Originals on flickr, via A Photo Editor

Filed under: Pictures Tagged: art, artwork, flickr, fun, lego, photography, photos

Tarus Balog: 2010 Dev-Jam – Day One

tarus — 2010-07-26T04:33:48+00:00

Well, while not really the official start of Dev-Jam, that’s tomorrow, today was when most people showed up. Despite some travel delays due to weather, as I write this most people have arrived. Craig’s plane should be in soon and Johan should be arriving by motorcycle from Denver any minute now.

Plus, today, people actually got to see a little surprise I planned. While in Portland I got a hair cut:

Like it? It actually took about three hours, since they had to bleach my hair first for the green “swoosh” of the logo. If you want your very own OpenNMS logo, head to Bishops Barbershop on Columbia and be sure to ask for Jake. He’s the only one who would even attempt it, and I think he did a great job.

Today Mike took me to an unusual place for lunch called Brasa. It was really good, and I plan to have them cater at least one meal while we are here. Then we went to Sam’s Club and stocked up on “supplies” for the week.

Then there was a bit of downtime while we waited for others to arrive. After moving into the Yudof Hall Club Room (where we will spend most of our time) we all went out to dinner at Sally’s.

Now, time for bed.

ScrewPile (Phillip Rhodes' Open Source Project): ScrewPile update for 07-25-2010

Fogbeam Phil — 2010-07-26T03:36:00+00:00

So, what's new since last time? Well, not everything one might have hoped for, but a few Neddick bugs have been fixed at least, and progress continues on. We still hope to have Neddick TPR2 out by the end of August, and maybe a solid start on Heceta.

Specifically regarding Neddick, since last time, the bugs that have been resolved are:

~~Bug #12 - Make "tag" box work when pressing ENTER]~~ - FIXED

~~Bug #8 - Get arrows for up/down vote links~~ - FIXED

~~Bug #25 - Create scheduler mechanism for asynchronous updates~~ - FIXED

~~Bug #35 - Need scheduled job to rebuild entrycache on some periodic basis~~ - FIXED

The scheduled task stuff turned out to be pretty simple, thanks for the excellent Quartz Plugin for Grails. Now the EntryCache gets refreshed once a minute. Additionally, even though it wasn't in the bug list as a discrete bug, a problem with recalculating the score of an entry - after an upvote was removed - has been fixed.

As to what's coming next... mainly work on the next Neddick TPR, so see the Roadmap for details. The bugs on the roadmap page are now sorted (more or less) by the order in which we intend to attack them, so it should be pretty easy to tell where things are going.

And that's a wrap, for this week.

Mark Turner: How Skype gets around firewalls

Mark Turner — 2010-07-26T01:39:37+00:00

Here’s a fascinating description of how the Skype VoIP application can poke holes through firewalls – bypassing your network security. What’s even more eye-opening is that there is little that can be done to block it.

Anyone who has used the popular Internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the Internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.

Naturally every firewall must also let packets through into the local network – after all the user wants to view websites, read e-mails, etc. The firewall must therefore forward the relevant data packets from outside, to the workstation computer on the LAN. However it only does so, when it is convinced that a packet represents the response to an outgoing data packet. A NAT router therefore keeps tables of which internal computer has communicated with which external computer and which ports the two have used.

The trick used by VoIP software consists of persuading the firewall that a connection has been established, to which it should allocate subsequent incoming data packets. The fact that audio data for VoIP is sent using the connectionless UDP protocol acts to Skype’s advantage. In contrast to TCP, which includes additional connection information in each packet, with UDP, a firewall sees only the addresses and ports of the source and destination systems. If, for an incoming UDP packet, these match an NAT table entry, it will pass the packet on to an internal computer with a clear conscience.

via How Skype & Co. get round firewalls – The H Security: News and Features.

Jesse Morgan: Revisited: Epson Perfection v350 on Ubuntu

morgajel — 2010-07-25T20:48:11+00:00

Jackie wanted me to reconfigure her scanner (since she hasn’t used it since I reloaded her system a while back) and I remembered what a pain it was to configure. A quick google search turned up the article I wrote three years ago, so I thought I’d do follow-up article to see what’s changed.

Get the Drivers

Since my last installation, things have changed. a bit. Many different distros are now supported, so we don’t have to shoehorn the RPMs onto the system with Alien. Here are the packages I grabbed off their site:
iscan-data_1.0.1-1_all.deb iscan_2.25.0-1.ltdl7_i386.deb iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.1.0-3_i386.deb

Once you have them, you can install them along with sane and sane utils:
sudo dpkg -i iscan_2.25.0-1.ltdl7_i386.deb iscan-data_1.0.1-1_all.deb iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.1.0-3_i386.deb sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils

Edit the Configs

Edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, adding epkowa to the list.

Create /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libsane.rules, adding the following:
# Epson Perfection v350 SYSFS{idVendor}=="04b8", SYSFS{idProduct}=="012f", MODE="664", GROUP="scanner"
I use the group “scanner” above; You could go the easy route and use a group that you’re already part of, such as “users” or “admin”, otherwise you’ll have to create the scanner group, add yourself to it, then log out and log back in.

Finishing Up

Afterwards, connect your scanner and run the following command:
scanimage -L

The scanner should fire up now, which means you can use your newly installed iscan app to scan pictures.

Mark Turner: Alberto Contador has no class

Mark Turner — 2010-07-25T19:35:34+00:00

Here’s a good writeup explaining why the Spaniard Alberto Contador might be the winner of this year’s Tour De France, but he will never be the champion.

Alberto Contador was being dropped again by Andy Schleck just as the mechanical happened. There is no doubt that Contador is strong and perhaps would have closed the gap to Schleck had the mechanical not happened, but to see the Spaniard rise out of the saddle and accelerate just as Schleck was experienceing his equipment malfunction was hard to watch . . . and it cheapens Contador’s lead in the race. Should the Spaniard win this year’s race by less than a minute, those who watched will remember that he is not truly the winner of the 2010 Tour.

Read the rest here.

Mark Turner: Metal Method with Sledge

Mark Turner — 2010-07-25T16:17:01+00:00

Back in the 1990s this show, “Metal Method with Sledge,” was the rage on Raleigh’s public access channel. Fortunately it lives on thanks to YouTube. Rock on!

Tarus Balog: 2010 OSCON to Dev-Jam

tarus — 2010-07-25T15:07:53+00:00

Okay, I really wasn’t going to blog about this part of the trip, but it did turn into something of an adventure, so why not?

I got a notice Friday night that, due to weather in Chicago, there would be a crew delay for flights out of PDX the next morning. Since that put me on a pretty tight connection time through DFW, I called and got myself on an earlier flight. That one, too, was delayed, but it was then scheduled to leave about the time of my original flight (if it had left on time) so everything was cool.

I took the MAX to the airport, checked my bag, got put on the waiting list for an upgrade and I went to the gate.

I’m sitting there reading when I look up and there is Jesse Vincent staring at the upgrade list. I said “hi” and he looked at me, then back at the list and then said that it was rare that he wasn’t number one for upgrades. It turns out that his name was second, behind mine. Then Kevin Falcone shows up (also from Best Practical) and his is the third name on the list.

Never seen something like that before.

Anyway, so I didn’t know that another thing Jesse and I had in common was an interest in collecting frequent flyer miles and air travel in general. He’s way more of a geek at it than me – in fact he has an active Sabre account so that he has access to the same information as travel agents.

While we are sitting there, Amber Graner shows up (it was like a little OSCON). She was on her way to DFW and then Charlotte, but then had to stay one more night in a hotel since her husband’s flight from Europe was delayed until Sunday (they were to meet up and drive home together).

First Class checked in full so none up us got upgraded. I went to my seat at 21F, Jesse went to his seat at 21D and Kevin to his seat at 21C.

I had pity on the person who was to sit in 21E, since I figured Jesse and I would be talking across them the whole way, but we behaved (I got caught up on Burn Notice and watched two episodes of Dollhouse).

When we made it to Dallas, Kevin and Jesse’s original flight to Boston was backing out of the gate, so they had some time until the next one. We hit the Admiral’s Club and had some lunch, and then they took off. My own flight to Minneapolis was still an hour or so away, so I made some calls and caught up on e-mail.

As I was leaving, I noticed a couple sitting nearby traveling with two small dogs. I like dogs so I couldn’t stop myself from talking to them (yeah, yeah – I know). It turns out that they were originally from West Virginia (I spent some time in WV back in 1986) but now lived in Los Angeles, and that they traveled about as much as I do. There names were Scott and Kristan, and they had met while in WV, gotten married and now were both working in television. Since Kristan had “model” good looks I asked her if she was someone famous that I should know.

They both laughed and said, well, maybe. Kristan had worked with Rachel Ray for several years and she is a host of the HGTV show “Design on a Dime“. Since I only have “over the air” television (no cable or satellite) I could plead ignorance at least, but I must say that they were both incredibly easy to talk to, so much so that I had to run to catch my plane.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I watched two more episodes of Dollhouse (three more to go) and while the plane was a little late as they had to route around some thunderstorms, both myself and Alex landed pretty much at the same time. Mike Huot met us at the airport and we headed toward UMN and Dev-Jam.

Mark Turner: The Libya Investment Firm and the release of the Lockerbie bomber

Mark Turner — 2010-07-25T12:29:15+00:00

The Telegraph has more dirt on the Libya-BP terrorist-for-oil deal. There’s certainly lots of smoke here. Could fire be far behind?

The name reads Dalia Advisory Limited, a company established by Libyan businessmen just a week after the country’s officials were told the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was being considered for release on compassionate grounds.
Dalia Advisory is in fact a “front” for the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a sovereign wealth fund with £80 billion, to invest in Britain and beyond. The Georgian town house, bought for £6 million, is, ironically, only a few yards from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Senior business sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that had Megrahi died in a British jail, the LIA would have taken its vast sums elsewhere. “If Megrahi had perished in Scotland, we would have become a pariah state as far as the Libyans were concerned,” said one source.

via Special report: the Libya investment firm and the release of the Lockerbie bomber – Telegraph.

Cristobal Palmer: Caktus and ubuntu-vm-builder

tarheelcoxn — 2010-07-24T22:41:21+00:00

I’m happy to report that I’m working with the fine folks over at Caktus Consulting. Among other things, I’m helping them set up VM infrastructure, and I was surprised to find that the ubuntu-vm-builder script wasn’t more intuitive. I’d like any and all help making it friendly, and to that end I’ve whipped up a working proof of concept: interactive-vmbuilder. This is simply a wrapper script in bash. Drop it in your /usr/local/bin and take it for a spin. Note that you’ll need to have set up a /virtual-machies directory, the script needs to be called as root, and obviously you’ll need ubuntu-vm-builder and all its dependencies. I’ve been testing this on Lucid.

An ideal future ubuntu-vm-builder would have an ‘interactive’ flag that would behave something like this script. The idea is for the sysadmin to be able to set up some reasonable parameters for the environment (in a conf file, not in the script itself as I have done), and then the developers can call the interactive script when they’re building a new VM for testing.

Now, I realize that I should be able to call ubuntu-vm-builder with a -c and give it a config file to use, but there are oddities with things like ‘dest’ that convinced me that I would be asking for people to shoot themselves in the foot if I told people to go down that road. I’d much rather give the developers a small handful of options that will allow them to get going quickly and get on with the real work they’d set out to do.

You might also ask why I don’t have the developers use virt-manager on their own laptops. My approach has several advantages, including that it does not make the developers install anything local to them which might conflict (eg. one developer uses virtualbox), and that my little bash script is far more responsive if I’m connecting from my low-bandwidth home connection.

Enjoy the script, and please let me know if you’d like to help rewrite it as a python plugin to ubuntu-vm-builder.

Mark Turner: This tough cop knows how to reach tough kids

Mark Turner — 2010-07-24T22:22:22+00:00

After I wondered where the good guys are who might have steered Reggie Gemeille to the right path, I read about James Johnson. Thank goodness there are men out there like him:

Retired police officer James Johnson spent 20 years dealing with gangs in New York City and is now sharing his wisdom with Raleigh children at the J.T. Locke Resource Center’s summer camp.

Johnson uses the same speeches he gave to members of New York’s Crips and Bloods gangs, urging youths ages 9 to 17 to cultivate their talents to better society and to value themselves over fitting in.

The talks have proven successful; Johnson says the youth program he participated in helped reduce gang violence 62 percent in New York City.

“Every child is reachable,” Johnson said. “Children’s strength is in their motivation for life.”

via This tough cop knows how to reach tough kids – Local/State – NewsObserver.com.

Mark Turner: N.C. Wanted interview

Mark Turner — 2010-07-24T22:15:10+00:00

N.C. Wanted

Thursday, I was interviewed by the WRAL show, N.C. Wanted. I’d gotten the referral from the Raleigh Police Department when N.C. Wanted called them seeking to speak with people involved with community watches. I told the producer that I’d be at a morning meeting with neighborhood stakeholders and they were welcome to tag along. They thought it was a great idea.

I arrived at the meeting and met the N.C. Wanted crew: Bill, Bridget, and Jay. They miked me and our Community Officer, James Kryskowiak, and filmed most of the meeting. Then I excused myself and went with them to areas around the East CAC to talk about the successes we’ve had in cleaning up the crime problems. I took them to the area where I witnessed a suspect leaving a breaking and entering, showed them the local shopping center that is far safer than it was just a year ago, and talked about the troubled apartment complex that has really cleaned up its act. Bill apparently is a retired police officer and could attest that the neighborhood was markedly different when he was on duty.

Unlike the other interviews that I’ve done that covered breaking news, this interview isn’t time-sensitive. Thus, there’s no telling when it will actually air. I hope I don’t seem like too much of an idiot when it airs!

Mark Turner: Shirley Sherrod, Thrown to the Wolves

Mark Turner — 2010-07-24T20:47:37+00:00

Bob Herbert of the New York Times sums up the Shirley Sherrod episode. The Obama Administration is far too focused on perception and playing it safe. Where’s the bold leadership, Mr. Obama?

Why didn’t President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden or Rahm call me Rahmbo Emanuel, or somebody somewhere in the upper echelon say, “Hey, what the heck are you doing? You can’t fire a person without hearing her side of the story. This is not the Kremlin. Are you nuts?”

via Op-Ed Columnist – Shirley Sherrod, Thrown to the Wolves – NYTimes.com.

Mark Turner: TestDisk for undeleting files

Mark Turner — 2010-07-24T12:07:44+00:00

My son Travis accidentally deleted a digital movie he took with his camera. He was so disappointed, so I took up the task of trying to undelete the file. If his camera’s SD card was formatted with Linux’s ext3 filesystem his file would be impossible to retrieve.

Fortunately, all digital camera cards are formatted with the tried-and-true MS-DOS vfat filesystem, which makes undeleting files trivial. I even found a Linux tool called TestDisk that can easily retrieve deleted files. In seconds, I had fetched Travis’s deleted file.

If you are a Linux-head like me and need to bring a file back from the dead, try TestDisk!

Mark Turner: Slipping through the cracks

Mark Turner — 2010-07-24T02:40:50+00:00

Reggie Gemeille, then and now

I scanned the news stories at lunch the other day when I found one about a beating death of Pier Munoz-Chinos. Police arrested a kid named Wedjunald “Reggie” Gemeille who is 18 years old. He looks pretty “hard” in his booking photo, doesn’t he?

Occasionally I like to see what I can find out about suspects, so I did a quick Internet search on Reggie. As he has a pretty uncommon name it turns out it wasn’t difficult to track him down. Soon I found his MySpace page and his Facebook page, including photos and his self-provided bio.

The photos on these pages show a very different Reggie Gemeille than the one depicted in his booking photo. Here I see a kid trying to figure out who he is. In some, he’s dressing up and posing for the camera. In others, he’s clowning around with his younger cousins. He doesn’t look like a bad kid at all. He looks like any other kid with big dreams.

Then I scroll further down his MySpace page. Reggie went to Millbrook High School but apparently didn’t graduate. I think about the spate of arrests he’s had. Crime stats show that dropping out of school often leads to a life of crime. In the span of five short months, Reggie was arrested for assault and battery, shoplifting and larceny, larceny, and now first-degree murder. Before February, he had apparently stayed out of trouble for two full years after a few simple assault charges in late 2007 and early 2008. This was a kid who made some mistakes but looked destined to stay on the right path. Then for some reason he changed and apparently threw his lot in with a bad crowd. Reggie’s brother Mario is spending his time in college while Reggie might soon be spending his time in prison.

What can we do for kids like Reggie Gemeille? Why didn’t Reggie stay in school? What might have made the difference for Reggie? Who might have made the difference for Reggie? Where were his parents, his coaches, and his mentors?

Reggie is of course innocent until proven guilty but there’s no doubt that he’s been charged with a very serious crime: a charge that would never have happened had he not been at wrong place at the wrong time.

It troubles me to see kids give up.

Mark Turner: Making sense of a dog and scents

Mark Turner — 2010-07-23T17:29:37+00:00

Speaking of brain activity and addictions, my morning walks with my dog never cease to fascinate me. My Labrador, Rocket, goes berserk when he catches a whiff of something on the ground along the way. These smells are like crack to my dog. He is totally focused on inhaling these smells, and if you know Labradors you know that focusing is typically not their strong suit!

I would love to know what goes on in his doggy brain while he’s lost in this scent-induced rapture. What are those scents telling him? What parts of his brain are active? How do dogs really use these scents, and is there much more to this than simply marking territory?

All I can find online about doggy brain activity is an episode of NOVA that looks good, an interesting post about how dog’s dream, and a hilarious YouTube video of Bizkit, the sleepwalking dog, running into a wall. I would hope there would be more research on this. Anyone have anything else?

Mark Turner: Consuming and delivering

Mark Turner — 2010-07-23T16:41:07+00:00

I cringe every time I hear someone say “consumer” when one could say “citizen” or “customer” instead. It irks me when the FCC issues a press release about how something they did was good for “consumers.” I hate being treated like I’m simply one side of a business transaction, especially when a government agency thinks I am. How about “the public?” I’d even settle for “the taxpayers,” though I am quite considerably more than simply someone who forks over my money to the government, too.

My online buddy Doc Searls takes on the label of consumer, and also touches on “content” and “delivering information” themes, too. Reading it, I realized that information never really gets delivered, it gets shared. When you share something, both of you are better for it or are changed by it. That’s quite different from delivering information, which is more of a one-way transaction.

When you meet your neighbor for an impromptu chat, you may mention something you heard or learned. Your neighbor will likely comment on it, and instantly your neighbor’s thoughts will change the information you provided into something slightly (or radically) different.

information isn’t delivered, in the sense that it made the journey from A to B completely intact. Information is always affected by those who perceive it. It can only be shared, not delivered.

Tarus Balog: 2010 OSCON – Day Four

tarus — 2010-07-23T16:40:05+00:00

The last full day of the conference started off kind of busy for me. I had a number of work things to do (the business doesn’t stop just ’cause I’m at a conference) and I didn’t make it to the convention center until 10am. I ran in order to catch r0ml’s talk where he was going to propose that all software should be in the public domain and that licenses (even OSI approved licenses) indicated failure.

Turns out that session wasn’t until 10:40am, so I decided to wander around the show floor until then. I ran into a couple of people I knew and told them I’d missed the keynotes, to which the reply was “no, you didn’t” so I guess they didn’t go over all that well.

As I was wandering, I met Brian Reale who had come to my talk the day before. He manages ProcessMaker, an open source business process management and workflow tool. We were chatting about running a services company around open source when I realized it was right at 10:40 and I had to run to the session.

As I got close to the room I met Karen and Bradley coming the other way. Apparently the room was so packed that they had to stop letting people in due to fire safety regulations. Grrrr. So r0ml, if you are reading this, you are wrong.

(grin)

[Note: we watched one geek walk up, be told by the dude at the door that the session was full, and he just shouldered passed him to go in anyway. The door dude just stood there, and we realized why when the geek found the door to be locked. Classic]

We ended up talking awhile in the hallway, and Tom “Spot” Callaway joined us. I haven’t been involved in TriLUG for awhile and so I had not seen him, or even realized he had moved to Boston, so it was nice to catch up. I then wandered back to the Expo.

I was able to finally meet Adam Monsen, who showed up in a blue OpenNMS polo. He also had a nice little gift for me for talking with him a few weeks ago.

I’ve learned if you ever need a conversation starter at a geek show, walk around with a bottle of single malt under your arm. You’ll meet a lot of people.

Adam and I continued our discussion over lunch, and they he had to get back to work promoting Mifos. Eric and I decided to walk around some more when I bumped into Brian Aker.

I follow Brian’s blog, and for the last several months I’ve seen him working on this large monorail project. Since he just tends to post pictures, I never understood what it was for, so I got to ask him. It turns out that he is building a 500 foot long monorail to be deployed at the Burning Man festival next year. I’ve never been (for years I’ve been spending Labor Day up in the North Carolina mountains) but some friends of mine haven’t missed it for over a decade and so from their stories I’ve always wanted to go. It would be cool to see it in action.

I also got to meet Aaron Williamson of the SFLC. He is the resident free software on Android guru, and we chatted about free software (free as in freedom) as well as the fact that Android isn’t 100% free (he told me there are three pieces of proprietary driver code on his G1).

Continuing that theme, I did actually make it to a session when I went to see Jesse Vincent’s K-9 e-mail client talk. Everyone I asked about FOSS on the Android mentioned his mail program, so it was cool to listen to its history and to learn how Android has evolved to be a lot more open to the open source development style over the years.

After that I went back to the hotel room to drop off some things before heading out to dinner. OpenNMS is heavily used in Oregon, from OSU to Clackamas County, the state of Oregon and even the City of Portland. My friend Stan, who I met at an OpenNMS training session earlier this year, came with his wife Jane to take me out to dinner.

In continuing the McMenamins theme started on Monday, we drove out to Edgefield.

Edgefield was once a “poor farm“. From Wikipedia:

Poor farms were county or town-run residences where paupers (mainly elderly and disabled people) were supported at public expense. They were common in the United States beginning in the middle of the 19th century and declined in use after the Social Security Act took effect in 1935 with most disappearing completely by about 1950.

Most were working farms that produced at least some of the produce, grain, and livestock they consumed. Residents were expected to provide labor to the extent that their health would allow, both in the fields and in providing housekeeping and care for other residents. Rules were strict and accommodations minimal.

It is now a complex that includes restaurants, bars, a hotel, a spa and a golf course, among other things. We shared a nice meal (where I sampled their artisan made gin) and then walked around the grounds for a bit. In the background you could hear a bluegrass band that was playing a free concert to a rather large crowd in one of the side fields.

They then drove me back into Portland and dropped me a Club Barracuda, where Rackspace, Linux Fund, iX Systems and MindTouch were hosting a party. It started off a little slow but then began to fill up. I ran into Eric again (Rackspace hosted a hiring “meet and greet” beforehand and I believe he was required to attend) as well as Stephen Walli, but I also got to spend some time with Ilan Rabinovich and Amber Graner (Amber is a fellow North Carolinian). While we were talking, a man named Roger came up to chat and it turns out he works with Stan at the City. Talk about a small world.

A little after 11pm we decided to head back. While waiting for the train I looked over an saw a man in a MariaDB shirt. I thought it might be Monty Widenius, so I looked up his picture on Google and sure enough, it was him. I walked over and introduced myself.

While we were talking I met Jeff Mitchell of KDE. He knew our very own Ben Reed and as we walked back to the hotel he was hoping Ben could find the time to update his Mac packages for Amarok. Ben ported KDE natively to the Mac when TrollTech opened up Qt awhile back, so Ben, if you are reading this, Jeff says “hi”.

There is still a half day of show left (I doubt I’ll make it there on Friday) but overall I had a good time. I was surprised that Sourceforge didn’t do its Community Choice Awards this year (not that OpenNMS would win anyway) but other than that I enjoyed it.

It was really nice to see (at least among my biased, self-filtered list of contacts) the growing backlash against open core calling itself open source or at least a much larger group of people who cared about the difference.

Next stop: Dev-Jam!

Mark Turner: Highway patrol not getting ‘er done?

Mark Turner — 2010-07-23T13:00:00+00:00

Photo by Ildar Sagdejev

After seeing this white utility van sitting the shoulder of NC540 near the Highway 55 exit for a week, I finally decided to call it in. Wednesday morning I made the call to the North Carolina State Highway Patrol (*47), tangling a bit with the dispatcher in an effort to make sure she knew where the van was. Now it’s true that earlier that morning there was an accident on I-40W near Wade that tied up traffic considerably, but that accident was almost cleared when I called and the van wasn’t going anywhere. And let’s face it: all the HP needs to do with an abandoned car is look it over and put a sticker on it for it to be towed. Takes 10 minutes at most, right?

This morning I rode by the van and it was still there, only now I noticed the driver’s side window was gone. It’s been two days and no one has taken the 10 minutes it takes to tag it and move on.

I called again this morning and spoke with a dispatcher who didn’t know NC540 had a mile marker 66.8. “What county is it in?” she asked me. While it’s true this is close to the Wake/Durham border, that information really shouldn’t have been necessary.

The patrol needs to get its act together. The leadership vacuum at the top is clearly affecting the whole organization and the cracks are beginning to show. Governor Perdue needs to show some leadership and step up efforts to stabilize this once-vaunted organization.

Mark Turner: The peculiar siren song of coffee

Mark Turner — 2010-07-23T02:50:12+00:00

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with coffee. During my Navy days I would drink multiple cups a day, which usually led to my being agitated. I often point to my coffee-drinking friends’ near-homicidal behavior during Hurricane Fran as reason enough to give up coffee.

I’ve mostly given up drinking caffeinated coffee. I’ve speculated to myself that the years of drinking coffee have carved canyons through my brain which can only be filled by the next cup of Joe. As with any addiction, each cup never seems to reach the level the prior one did.

And yet, I consider what the my heroes the Wright Brothers accomplished. Orville and Wilbur were avid coffee drinkers, and among the possessions they chose to drag across the sands to their Kitty Hawk shack was coffee. Those two brothers never suffered in the brains department, did they?

This week I read an enlightening article on lifehacker about this mysterious drug called coffee. The lifehacker article was based on a book by Stephen Braun called Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine. Entertainment Weekly describes Braun’s book this way:

Award-winning science writer Stephen Braun, in this zippy little tome, mixes concise explanations of how everybody’s favorite mind-altering substances work with a stimulating dash of related cultural tidbits

I’m seventh on the Wake County Public Library’s waiting list for this book and I can hardly wait to read it. If you’re like me and can’t wait, read the lifehacker article above and also see this interview with Braun about the book.

Tarus Balog: 2010 OSCON – Day Three

tarus — 2010-07-22T16:22:39+00:00

Today was the official start of the conference, and time for keynotes and sessions.

The morning keynote was interesting in that it involved a number of presenters, each of whom had about 10 minutes to talk, versus one long presentation. Tim O’Reilly started it off. I usually run hot and cold with Tim, but today’s talk I’d rate at “lukewarm”.

He did start off his presentation with a quote from Harlan Ellison. I collaborated with Harlan on a short story that can be found in his collection Slippage (Jane Doe #112).

Well, “collaborated” is probably too strong a term. Harlan has this gig where he’ll show up at a bookstore and write a short story in a day. If you spend a certain amount in the store you get a free copy of the manuscript. He was doing this in New Orleans at a Bookstar when I just happened to walk past, and he was surprisingly approachable.

He was talking with George Alec Effinger about some plot points, and me, being the shy and withdrawn person I am, jumped into the conversation. Anyway, he used some of my ideas in the short story, and although I have never talked to him since then, I did strike up an actual mail (not e-mail) correspondence with Effinger that spanned a couple of years (until his untimely death in 2002).

Anyway, where was I.

Oh, the keynote.

The last time I was at OSCON, Tim was all about “Web 2.0″. This year it is “Government 2.0″, and the first few speakers after him focused on how open source and the open source way could be applied to making government better. This included talks by Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America and Bryan Sivak from the government of DC. Both were interesting, but when Jennifer was speaking I thought if I heard the term “millennials” one more time I was going to hurl.

Stormy Peters gave the best presentation, going over the reasons why you should care about the security and freedom of your personal data (thoughts, pictures, etc.) that are published on-line (the “picking up the dog poo” analogy she used was priceless). She also gave several examples of free and open source options for many popular social networking sites (Identica vs. Twitter for example).

The last speaker was Martin Mikos, who tried to gloss over the fact that his latest endeavor, Eucalyptus, is a open core/fauxpen source commercial software company that is trying to gain mindshare by touting itself as open source. I found it hard not to heckle.

When you have, right on your slide, that your business plan is to generate revenue by selling “enterprise” closed-source software – you are a commercial software company.

He pointed out that the MySQL sale put millions of dollars into the pockets of developers, which is true, but it also put the MySQL project, one of the most successful open source projects ever made (well, truly open source at least until about 2006) into a tailspin when it landed at Oracle. Yes, certain MySQL people got wealthy, but it was at the expense of the open source community.

Getting wealthy at the expense of your community is wrong and antithetical to open source. Sorry.

Others seem to agree with me. Even though the open source side of Eucalyptus is part of Ubuntu’s private cloud strategy, NASA went with Rackspace to form OpenStack mainly because the commercial side of Eucalyptus was at odds with NASA’s desire for everything to be open source.

Luckily, he didn’t speak too long.

After the keynotes, the sessions started. The first one I went to was called “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: The Joys of Engineering Leadership“.

This was run by a couple of Googlers who gave some real common sense advice about management in technical fields. I once wrote a guide for the management of one company I worked for called “Geeks: Care and Feeding” to try to cover some of this, but luckily I don’t really have to use it at OpenNMS. We tend to hire straight out of the community, and if people are willing to do something for free they tend to make awesome employees when you pay them.

One thing I had not heard of was “The Compliment Sandwich“. It’s when timid managers criticize an employee, but sandwich it between two compliments. It makes the manager feel better but more often than not the employee only remembers the compliments.

The second session was a panel discussion on motivating members of an open source community with financial rewards. I have to say that I didn’t pay too much attention, and I should have been warned by the fact that is was a panel discussion and as Chris Dibona says “all panel discussions stink.” One main criticism I have for panel discussions is that rarely is the audience included, but there was a lot of give and take in this one, I just couldn’t get into the subject matter.

By now it was lunch time, and the buffet sponsored by Google was really good (surprisingly so for a conference). As I was leaving I ran into Stephen Walli and Cat Allman, and I finally got to tell Stephen how much I enjoyed his post on how open source companies should not focus on selling to their community, and it was great to see Cat as always.

As we were talking, Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz joined us. Now, I had never heard of r0ml before but he is quite the character, and I decided to attend his session “Collaboration vs. Competition: Who Wins and Who Loses?”

The thesis of his talk was that “collaboration == good” and “competition == bad”. Some of his arguments were quite persuasive but a few toward the end were a little flat. For example, he argued that in cooperative situations there tends to be an even mix of men and women, but since open source tends to be mainly male it must be competitive. I believe this is the Fallacy of “Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc“, as the ratio of men to women in technology fields is due more to societal gender roles than competition, but I often get my informal fallacies mixed up (which is odd since the Internet gives me so many opportunities to practice identifying them).

He made me think, however, and I like that.

On Thursday he is proposing that we do away with licensing and publish everything in the public domain. I heartily disagree with that, so it should be interesting.

I skipped the next session to wander the Expo Hall and to get ready for my own talk. It was supposed to be a 40 minute version of my “So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business?” talk but I read it wrong and thought it was 50 minutes. Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler were presenting after me and I hope my delay in shutting up wasn’t too rude.

At the moment the talk has 3 ratings all of “5 stars” so I think it went well.

I then ran to see “From ‘Titanic’ to ‘Awesome’ – Open Source Continuity In Practice” by Simon Phipps. Simon was responsible for a lot of the open source movement within Sun, and I always wanted to meet him.

He gave a talk on how true open source communities can survive when their main sponsor (i.e. Sun/Oracle) goes away, and to my delight demonstrated how open core/fauxpen source companies quite often don’t have such communities.

Even OpenNMS didn’t score 100% on his criteria, getting dinged on the fact that the copyright and trademark are held by a single organization, but we did pass with high marks on the rest.

Simon’s session was the last for the day, and I had about an hour to relax before going to the “Android: Hands On” session that night. This was a three hour introduction to writing Android apps, sponsored by Google.

While part of me thought it might happen, it was still delightful to walk into the room and get handed my very own Nexus One. Now that I actually had an Android phone, I would be in a position to rethink my reasons for getting an iPhone.

But I’m still frustrated. I went to the marketplace to look for free (as in freedom) apps but was deluged with free (as in crap) apps. I bought up Wikipedia to search for open source apps for Android, and was extremely disappointed in the rather small number of them.

[On a side note, the guy next to me asked what I thought of the new Wikipedia redesign. I mentioned that it looked nice but I was still not used to having the search box on the right side. It turns out he was Trevor Parscal, the guy who designed it. Gotta love OSCON]

If I move from the iPhone I want to run as many free apps as possible. I also don’t want to have to sync via Google. As much as I love them as a company, I don’t want my e-mail, my contacts and my calendar on their servers. Where is the sync for Thunderbird or Evolution? Where is the sync for Lightning? One would think the open source community would be itching to create FOSS apps for Android. Perhaps it is due to Android running a Java VM, who knows.

One thing I really, really want them to do is to add a FOSS category to the marketplace. That would go a long way to both getting FOSS apps adopted and promoted.

But for now it looks like if I want to sync my address book I’ll need Missing Sync. If I want to sync my music I’ll need Salling Media Sync. So here I am, once again locking myself into commercial software with respect to my phone.

I did tear my eyes away from the phone long enough to listen to the REST discussion during the seminar. OpenNMS 1.8 has a robust RESTful interface, and the iPhone app is based on it. Now that there are a couple of Android phones in the office (Jeff bought one after returning his iPhone 4) I am hoping an Android version of the OpenNMS mobile app isn’t too far away. It will be nice to have one more FOSS app for the platform.

By the time the session was over it was past 10pm, so Eric and I grabbed a late dinner at Denny’s (right next to the La Quinta, of course) and called it a night.

Mark Hinkle: Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing

Mark — 2010-07-21T22:13:03+00:00

Here are my slides from today’s talk at today’s OSCON, Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing presented with John Willis (VP of Services at Opscode) and Alex Honor (Founder of DTO Solutions and Leader of the Control Tier Project). The idea we hoped to convey is that integration between open source tools can help automate and make your infrastructure more fault tolerant.

After talking to some attendees it became apparent that perhaps a paper that supports the talk would be helpful. I’ll try to work on that over the upcoming weeks.

OSCON 2010: Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, control tier, Open Source, Opscode, Zenoss

Tarus Balog: 2010 OSCON – Day Two

tarus — 2010-07-21T14:58:10+00:00

For the second day of the conference, I had two tutorials lined up. Both, I’m happy to say, were really good.

The first one was on Puppet. While I’ve known about Puppet for some time, I had no experience with it, so I thought I’d be cool to check out. The tutorial was organized well and while I believe I’ve only scratched the surface of using the tool, the ability to easily add users via the command line on OS X is worth it alone (I kid, but I attempted to add a user to a Mac remotely this week and I ended up just changing my password and having a guy there log in and do it through the GUI). Since I just brought two new servers online, I’m thinking about deploying Puppet to keep them in sync. Of course, the idea of an integration between Puppet and OpenNMS obviously suggests itself, so I’ll be looking for ideas when I play with it.

The second tutorial was on Request Tracker (RT). The course was taught by Jesse Vincent, who started the project. We’ve used RT for years and we’re getting ready to do a new deployment, so I was hoping to pick up some new tricks.

One that I’m excited about is that it looks like we’ll be able to put together a single sign-on solution between OpenNMS and RT. We already have a tight integration, but we have a client who is interested in making it even tighter, and that was a requirement.

What I enjoyed most about the talk was learning more about Best Practical and talking with Jesse. Best Practical is a true open source company like OpenNMS, and it was fun to swap stories and poke fun at the VC-backed fauxpen source crowd.

It was a full day, and I was happy to unwind with an old friend of mine who took me out to Miyamoto Sushi. The place seats 9, the food was extremely fresh and the portions huge. Being old, I called it an early night. I went back to the hotel to catch up on some work and to get ready for the first day of the main conference.

Mark Turner: Those people

Mark Turner — 2010-07-21T12:34:34+00:00

Overheard among four GOP women waiting in line before yesterday’s school board meeting:

“If those people would just get jobs, they wouldn’t have to worry about living in a bad neighborhood.”

Clueless. Shockingly, unbelievably clueless.

Mark Turner: Dealing in blood and oil

Mark Turner — 2010-07-21T01:24:21+00:00

A Pan Am Boeing 747

There has been speculation in the British press that last year’s release of the convicted bomber of Pan Am Flight 103 (the “Lockerbie Bombing”), Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was done so to allow BP to sign an oil contract worth billions with Libya. The UK prime minister, David Cameron, got grilled today at the White House by the press (or should I say the British press. What passes for the American press was too busy mindlessly covering the two leaders’ favorite beer. I wish I was joking.)

According to the Times of London:

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

Al Megrahi was released by Scottish authorities last year on “humanitarian grounds,” when he was said to only have three months left to live. Almost twelve months later, Al Megrahi is has almost fully recovered from his alleged prostate cancer and doctors say he could live for another 20 years.

I will always remember Pan Am Flight 103 because my brother Allen was on his way home from Germany for Christmas leave around that time and the thought that he might have been on that fateful flight really scared me. To hear that the UK may have coughed up this convicted killer of 270 people just to win an oil deal for BP truly makes me sick.

Tarus Balog: 2010 OSCON – Day One

tarus — 2010-07-20T17:17:30+00:00

My trip to OSCON was pretty uneventful, with the exception of getting hassled at airport security. Well, hassled is too strong a word – the TSA folks were friendly and professional – but I did hit a snag with my new contact lens solution.

I am extremely nearsighted (about -7 for those keeping score at home), but I manage by wearing contacts. However, as I have gotten older I’ve run into problems wearing them, so my doctor has me on some strange no preservative contact solutions which includes a cleaning product called “One Step” by Sauflon.

First off, One Step only comes in large bottles (you use about a half ounce a night so the TSA approved size won’t last a week) and second, it contains hydrogen peroxide.

Of course, the highly diluted hydrogen peroxide solution for my contacts is perfect bomb making material (sarcasm mine) so there is no way I could take it on the plane. I ended up having to work my way back out of security to check my bag. It made it to Portland with no issue (it was the third bag off the plane) so no harm, no foul.

Plus, it is delightfully cool and unusually dry in Portland which is a welcome change from the 100F+ days back home.

Note: While I haven’t used Twitter in a long time, I do ‘dent occasionally if you are in to that sort of thing.

Monday morning I set off for the Convention Center. Along the way I saw a guy who just struck me as a computer geek: jeans, dark t-shirt and walking with a backpack, and then I realized it was Eric Evans (OGP), an old friend from Rackspace. He is giving a tutorial on Tuesday on Cassandra, and it was nice to see him again.

My morning tutorial was on git. Considering that OpenNMS has a large number of developers spread out around the world, managing all of the code and merging it into a common repo can be difficult. We used to use subversion but switched to git last year, and I have to be honest that it is still a little bit like black magic to me.

At the tutorial I ran into Ken Eshelby, a long time OpenNMS user who manages about 100,000 interfaces with the application. It turns out that of the four tutorials I am attending, he is in three of them.

I wish I could say I got a lot out of the tutorial, but while it was obvious that Scott Chacon knew his stuff, he went through it so fast that it was almost impossible for me to keep up.

For example, I remember at one time he asked if people knew what “rebasing” was, and he followed it up by asking how many people used it. He then laughed and said more people used it than knew what it was, but the fact was that we couldn’t get our hands up fast enough in response to his first question before he asked the second.

The second tutorial, at least for me, was better. Josh Berkus gave a talk on keeping databases healthy (with a focus on PostgreSQL). I know Josh from SCaLE and he, too, really knows his stuff. Since OpenNMS currently runs only on Postgres, we often have to maintain our client’s database instances to insure that OpenNMS is optimally responsive. We are moving toward database independence by using Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) in the form of Hibernate, and of course Josh was against this from a performance standpoint, but I argued that since OpenNMS is a network management application platform versus a plain application we want to offer as many options to our users as possible, including choice of database. This allows for them to leverage in-house expertise to build truly custom solutions, and that flexibility is worth the performance trade off.

That evening Ken took Eric and me to a place called the Kennedy School. This is an old schoolhouse that has been turned into a rather unique collection of bars, a restaurant and a movie theatre (among other things). We sampled some of the local brew and then saw Iron Man 2, which was okay for $3 (not being familiar with the “Avengers” mythology I have the same neutral feeling about both it and the first movie) and my only complaint was I wanted more screen time for Scarlett Johansson.

It was cool that part of the movie took place in Monaco, where I managed to visit back in May.

If you’re at OSCON and want to meet up, let me know.

Mark Hinkle: Is OpenStack Cloud Computing Rocket Science?

Mark — 2010-07-19T19:52:48+00:00

There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be? I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.

Today Rackspace has thrown their hat in the ring with their new OpenStack initiative in collaboration with NASA — as in rocket scientists, smartest guys in the world. Unlike Amazon’s EC2 which preaches open APIs, Rackspace is working to develop an open source platform that compliments their hosted cloud offering. They also have a strong open source partner in NASA who has been working on their own cloud computing platform, NASA Nebula. NASA Nebula will now become the cornerstone for the OpenStack initiative.

The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. The project boasts both a compute and storage component. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers and is available as a developer’s preview with a release target of October. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Also available as a developer preview the OpenStack Storage project expects to release a production ready version in mid-September.

Adding the Rackspace hosting model to a strong open source project makes this approach to cloud computing especially interesting. Giving private cloud users a logical migration path to public cloud use. The question effect will this initiative have to truly drive open cloud computing standards.

OpenStack, A Foundation for Hybrid Clouds?

This initiative while founded on open source is not necessarily the cure for lock-in but it does go much farther than anyone else offering a fully accessible reference architecture available as open source. The closest comparison I see is Eucalyptus that is mimicks the Amazon EC2 cloud compute architecture (though not Amazon S3), though Amazon and Eucalyptus don’t seem to share a commonly agreed upon road map but rather a leader-follower relationship.

OpenStack’s formula is more coordinated and with a respectable user to champion it, NASA. The U.S space agency has one of the most compelling publicly documented private cloud computing stories. NASA has gone so far as to package their solution in small footprint shipping containers to distribute among NASA research centers. These portable data centers are a model that many organizations looking to build private clouds are watching with interest.

I like that private clouds built on the OpenStack reference architecture should be fully compatible with Rackspace hosting services. Giving users the choice to run their own cloud or host or adopt a hybrid model. It’s not unlike open source adoption models were users download a free software version that has compatibility with a commercially supported version. Plus this is not Rackspace’s only foray into open source distributed computing as they support the Apache-hosted Cassandra project, a highly scalable distributed database, and have been showing their support at numerous cloud and open source events.

The OpenStack Web Interface

The strong message accompanying the launch is one of open standards and prevention of cloud lock-in. Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace states this clearly that OpenStack wants to prevent vendor lock-in:

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies.”

This is not unlike VMware who echoed that sentiment with an announcement this spring to collaborate with Google AppEngine. VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod stated that they too were committed to open standards and preventing login:

“Our shared vision is to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. The rich applications should be able to run in an enterprise’s private cloud, on Google’s AppEngine, or on other public clouds committed to similar openness.”

So with all this openness and commitment to open standards is the ability to move from cloud to cloud seamlessly just around the corner? This remains to be seen it but the initiatives all seem to be well-intentioned and moving in the right direction.

Does Open Source Prevent Cloud Lock-in?

I don’t know whether Rackspace’s OpenStack will truly prevent cloud lock-in but it does seem to be well-intentioned. Though I believe the following things need to happen to insure cloud lock-in doesn’t become a rampant problem:

Virtualization Portability – At a very simple level users need to be able to move from virtualization technologies including those hosted in the cloud need to be able to migrate seamlessly, that includes VMs running in VMware , Xen, HyperV and KVM. Then once in the cloud they need to be able to move across clouds both public and private unencumbered — Amazon, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and others. Adoption of a widespread virtualization standard like Open Virtualization Format (OVF) could help (OpenStack does seem to already support OVF, a good sign).
Data Portability – Just as compute environments move so should data, but not only move but be accessible across network and cloud infrastructures with high fidelity. Security of that data goes without saying but adds another layer of complexity.
Cross Environment Tools – Finally, the tools to managing these environments need to manage both cloud and legacy architectures to insure that the management of these new computing paradigms don’t make things even more complicated.

I hope OpenStack helps drive this vision. However to deliver on the true vision of true portability across cloud platforms other cloud providers and vendors other than Rackspace will have to participate.

Rackspace’s Open Stack Makes Cloud Storage Personalized (fastcompany.com)
NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility (zdnet.com)
RackSpace’s OpenStack Targets Cloud Lock-in (pcworld.com)
Rackspace Launches OpenStack – Open Source Cloud Computing Software (openstack.org)
Robert Scoble: Rackspace ends cloud lock-in (scobleizer.com)
OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem (readwriteweb.com)
OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud Project Emerges (gigaom.com)
OpenStack – an open source cloud platform (redmonk.com)
Rackspace Launches OpenStack To Open Source The Cloud (laughingsquid.com)
Rackspace, NASA launch OpenStack: Can it prevent cloud lock-in? (zdnet.com)
Rackspace and The OpenStack Project (thetechscoop.net)
NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer (go.theregister.com)
Announcing Open Stack – Open Cloud Computing Standards (blog.zenoss.com)
Opening the Rackspace Cloud (rackspacecloud.com)

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, data, lockin, NASA, nebula, Open Source, OpenStack Compute, OpenStack Storage, ovf, platform, portability, Rackspace, VMware

Mark Turner: Top-secret America

Mark Turner — 2010-07-19T12:50:08+00:00

Here’s a fascinating look at the ballooning American intelligence world, which has gone on a growth binge following the 9/11 attacks with no limit in sight.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

via Top-secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control – The Denver Post.