Tag Archives: geek

Anything IT related (which is most things I say) :-)

CentOS, RHEL and future possibilities?

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Those who know me will know that I’m a long term CentOS user – this actually started from my love of RHEL,  back in my early Linux using days when I was running Red Hat 8.0.

Whilst it made financial sense for Red Hat to switch to making their product only available in binary form for their customers, at the same time I can’t help but feel this has damaged the appeal of Red Hat for geeks like myself – I’m no longer able to setup friends, family or customers without the funds for RHEL with a quality, enterprise-grade free (as in beer + freedom) distribution.

I do wonder if this contributes to reduced market awareness in the small business space and also whether it reduces the likeliness of geeks like myself promoting the software – after all, if I can’t run RHEL myself, I’m likely to look at other distributions and options and end up promoting those.

With the lack of a free Red Hat enterprise-grade distribution, there are only a couple options for wanting a Red Hat-style experience:

  1. Fedora – the community developed distribution that forms the future base of RHEL, a fantastic distribution in it’s own right, but with only 12 months support per release, not suitable for server deployments.
  2. CentOS – the community free re-spin of RHEL with their trademarks removed to make it legally redistributable.

I’ve been using CentOS heavily on my servers and Fedora on my workstations, however there are a number of security delays that are concerning me about CentOS which have been recently highlighted in an LWN article.

Essentially, the core problem is that the latest version of CentOS is still only 5.5, whilst Red Hat have had 5.6 out for some time, with numerous security updates in it that have yet to be released for CentOS…..

Having systems vulnerable to known exploits with no upstream patches is always a pretty serious concern to any system administrator…. this is leading me to re-think my usage of CentOS and to consider whether I should consider other platforms.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Debian in the past, but I’m considering giving it a more detailed look and try – Debian has the advantages of a strong community (like Fedora has) but without the limitation of a short support life – although then again, Debian’s releases and support spans are a little less rigid than Red Hat, which is somewhat annoying.

There’s a few server platforms that come to mind – Ubuntu LTS, Mint Linux, Debian, Open/SuSe or of course, Fedora.

The other option is that I could spin my own distribution – based on the number of custom RPMs I already build, rebuilding Red Hat’s update packages for my own needs wouldn’t be too hard, but I really don’t want to get caught up in distribution maintenance for the next 5 years plus it’s not suitable for customer deployments – so even if I decide that a custom built system is best for me, it still doesn’t solve the “what do I install for others?” question.

Maybe I need Fedora LTS – long term support for specific versions of Fedora – 3 or 5 years would be wonderful and meet the needs of server administrators.

This was tried once before, with the Fedora Legacy project, but it didn’t last long – possibly the goal of supporting *all* the releases was too much to reasonably handle, so an approach of selection even/odd number releases only might make it more feasible – I know that I’d certain be willing to contribute.

Anyway, this is a late night concerned system administrator brain dump about the problem, interested in thoughts and comments from others here about distributions they use/would consider in the server environment.

Auckland Visits

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I’m heading up to Auckland on business a couple times in the next few months.

  • 22nd & 23rd February
  • 7th, 8th & 9th of March

I’m expecting to be too busy to do anything on the evening of the 22nd, however I’m keen to try and meet up with some Aucklanders of the evening of the 7th or 8th – most likely the 8th, somewhere in the CBD.
Planning to meet up at the Northern Steamship (Macs Pub) at 19:00, as per a suggestion by @pikelet.

I’ve created a twtvite here for those of you using twitter to RSVP to – nice to know if people actually care enough to come along ;-)

Freebies: DDR RAM

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More freebies! This time a pile of DDR RAM sticks I have.

You can either collect for free from me at my office (Lambton Quay) or home, or you can pay $10 for my time and postage and I’ll ship it to anywhere in NZ.

  • 512MB DDR-400 CL 3 (Infineon)
  • 512MB DDR-400 CL 2.5 (A-Data)
  • 512MB DDR-333 CL 2.5 (SimpleTech)
  • 256MB DDR-333 CL 2.5 (SimpleTech)
  • 256MB DDR-266 CL ?? (Legend)

As far as I’m aware, all these sticks work fine as I pulled them from running systems.

Melbourne: Day 02

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For my final day in Melbourne, @MissNickiBee had organised the greatest tour of all time – a visit to CISRAC at Melbourne Museum and then to Monash University’s computer museum.

After starting the day with coffee, we headed off the Melbourne Museum on foot through the mean streets of Melbourne suburbs.

Melbourne architects seem to love sticking turrets on their brick buildings.

Exhibition hall thingy

It took a bit of effort to find CSIRAC since Melbourne Museum had moved it out of the main area to a separate public area.

CSIRAC! :-D

Lots and lots of wring in this thing

Diagram of the components of CSIRAC in horribly bad photography by yours truly

Sadly the Cray Supercomputer and Mainframe mentioned on their website are not available for public display :-( So I spent a couple hours looking around their general exhibits at the museum, which are quite interesting.

There’s a very large geology section with just about every imaginable rock type, if you’re a geology geek you’d probably have a lot of fun.

The pyscology and Melbourne history sections are also very interesting and it would be easy to spend a lot of time there.

After the museum, we headed off to the Monash University’s Museum of Computing History, a very impressive range of machines from early prototype era through to mainframes and through to the early microprocesser generation.

I took a lot of photos, here’s a few specific ones, but there’s a lot more to the collection:

Early digital calculator

Early IBM System 360 mainframe (this is just the console, actual thing would be about a room full of refigerator sized units)

VT100 console! We still refer to terminals as being "VT100 compatible" even now in the UNIX world.

Early microprocessors - recognise any famous models? :-)

Large early generation machine - memory bank visible

Delay Line Memory (I belive these are Nickel Relays)

A VAX, one of the early machines that UNIX was written on. Much fanboy squeee ensured.

Paper tapes. Yes, this did actually exist, it's not a tale to scare young geeks.

That’s some of the pics, I’ll upload others when I have more time one day – huge thank you to Monash university for putting this display together so professionally and making it open to the public, really made my day. :-)

Kind of a shame that the Melbourne Museum’s publicly assessable “Technology Collection” only consisted of CSIRAC, when there is so much more amazing technology they have in their collection.

After Monash, I headed back into the city for coffee before heading out to the airport on the skybus for my return to Wellington NZ – had a great time in Melbourne and many thanks to @MissNickiBee for the personal tour. :-)

Hobart: Day 00.1

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Some additional pictures from yesterday’s excursion into the wilds of Tasmania by @chrisjrn:

Photographic proof that yes indeed, I can sometimes go outside.

Hehehe, I got a dirty txt! ;-)

I'm going to twitpic these rocks!

I have conqured nature!

These bars can't restrain my awesome!

hmmm maybe they can actually.....

Come maul me babe..... ;-)

I was a little tooo naughty so had to go spend some time there.....

That’s all the dodgy pictures for now – come back soon for more blog posts as I tour AU :-)

Hobart: Day 00

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Whilst I did technically land in Hobart yesterday, I only started looking around Hobart and Tasmania in general with the native @chrisjrn today.

We started the trip by going up Mt Wellington, but sadly were impacted by a lot of low-lying cloud making the views difficult.

Here’s a view from about half way up the mountain down onto Hobart:

With all the cloud instead of the amazing views I had been promised, I just had lots and lots of white, which whilst kind of charming in it’s own way, is clearly false advertising ;-)

After visiting Mt Wellington Fog, we headed onto the road around to Port Arthur with detours to interesting places along the way.

Always an excuse to stop for random self-camwhoring.

Chris took me to some really interesting natural rock formations at a cove, the geological activity forces the rocks to break in straight lines, they look like man cut blocks!

Check out those rocks!

@chrisjrn checking out the rocks

Following mystical rock cove (maybe not not real name) we decided to go checkout a blowhole.

Sadly it turned out to be a natural geological formation rather than some dodgy deviant makeout facility.

Natural tunnel formation - watch the water coming in before it splashes up

Splash! It's pretty hard to capture on camera really :-(

Of course the best part about the blowhole action was the salty salty deliciousness:

Fresh from the deep fryer, all chrispy and nommmmm

After refuelling at the blowhole, we headed to Port Arthur, where Tasmania had it’s convict colony to look at all the historical buildings:

Main prison block in the foreground

I can never say no to exploring a dungeon....

There’s some more dodgy pictures involving bars and chains that I’ll have to wait for Chris to upload at a later stage.

Meanwhile, here’s Chris looking dodgy and being reminded why long hair may be cool to look at whilst being very annoying to actually have:

Also, we went on a boat:

Boat View!

Captain Jethro!

After the boat trip, we headed back home – although did get interrupted by an (amazing for me) sight of a bridge being swung to allow a sailing boat to pass through the bridge.

Note the mast!! O_o

Also, today’s WTF moments:

Um, historical laptop anyone? To be fair, that model is probably about 10 years old...

Oh what the fuck, is that comic sans ms?!!?

And on that note, I’m off to bed for more adventures tomorrow. :-)

LCA2011: Day 07

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OK, technically there is no LCA day 07, but seeing as it was the last day in Brisbane I figured I could get away with it, without needing to create a separate heading. ;-)

Firstly, I found an awesome pic of me by Andrew McMillian aka Karora on Flickr which clearly demonstrates my need for a haircut:

Me at the Professional Delegates Networking Session (pic by karora)

I spent the morning catching up on sleep and then after packing, I headed into Brisbane Times Square to attend a Fedora meeting at the library.

After that, I headed back to Urbanest by walking from the library, across a bridge and then along southbank back to the accommodation.

Hai Gais! (pic by @chrisjrn on a very awesome high quality lens)

Photoshop the bottle & caption if you dare ;-) (pic via @chrisjrn)

I then caught the AirTrain with @chrisjrn and another guy to the Brisbane Airport – I have to say, I love the AirTrain – it’s fast, easy, comfortable and cheap to get to/from the airport or any station along the gold coast.

I'm on a train!!! (pic by @chrisjrn)

Fast train is fast!

Travelling in style!

Brisbane Airport is pretty decent, didn’t take long to get through security, although I got explosive tested *again* which I find somewhat amusing, since they test for explosives far more often than drugs and I’d bet good money as to which one 20-something European males typically carry….

Flight was delayed a little, but made it to Melbourne with 30mins to spare to connect to the Melbourne-Hobart flight.

One oddity from arriving in Hobart was the way they advertise their seal touristy things:

Baggage seal watches you get security scanned!

LCA2011: Day 05

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OMG how did the conference go so fast?!! :'(

It's meeeeee! (pic: @chrisjrn)

Tridge and Linux-powered coffee roaster. Fuck yes.

For some reason we got given rubber duckies at the conference.... que hordes of geeks squeezing them to make sounds

I know too many people.... mention dinner and this what I end up with... too many people to fit onto the screen

Nom nom nom nom

LCA2011: Day 04

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As usual, I’ve had no time to update my blog and so I’ll post more technical stuff later. Meanwhile, here are the pics from day 04 of the conference.

As can be expected of LCA, the day starts like any other – sleep deprived ;-)

Please tell me there's coffee *dying* (pic: @chrisjrn)

And of course, the early morning email reading/hacking session whilst waiting for the keynote:

I'm deep in thought whilst optimising corporate synergy (pic: @chrisjrn)

All the cool kids. (pic: @chrisjrn)

Tasty tasty breakfast from some hole-in-the-wall cafe off Grey St – kind of a weird way of serving scrambled eggs….. but was very tasty. :-)

Delicious, yet interesting method of serving breakfast. (at a random hole-in-the-wall cafe on Gray St)

Some dodgy twitter person. Think maybe @chrisjrn

Went along to lunch with a bunch of like-minded geeks:

Ewwwwww giant steak next to me! #militantvegetarian

Resturant is putting @LGnome on a diet or something.

Mmmmmm delicious vegetarian pizza.

Ended up catching public transport back to Urbanest to take a shower before the penguin dinner:

Wow! If only Wellington busses were this good!

And of course, the penguin dinner – although I didn’t stay as late as I would have normally, on account of me being insanely tired and needing to do washing or having to go commando the next day:

Conference dinner - note the vegetarian option isn't listed

Dinner buddies!

More LCA dinner buddies!

Nommy curry thingy

mmmmmmmm desert :-)

And of course, washing:

Finished the day with washing. Much excite!

As an amusing side story, I discovered one of the vending machines at Urbanest will convert change coins (eg 10c, 20c, 50c) into $1 coins by using the coin reject function. LIFE HACK WINS! ;-)

Till tomorrow’s post! :-)