JDPFu.com 2025

Lucid locked up on me today. The external disk array was really busy running multiple transcoding jobs at the time – love the quad core CPUs!. Those jobs filled up /raid, not any important file systems and locked up X/Windows. HOME is on a different FS too, BTW.

You can download the Free PDF version of the Ubuntu Pocket Guide

Last week, my main laptop died taking my main xUbuntu installation with it. Ok, it really didn’t take it, since I have backups and the hard disk was fine. Further, because I run it in a VirtualBox VM, picking it up and moving it to a different physical machine was fairly simple, once I had a machine ready for VirtualBox.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last week building a new machine, migrating Linux servers around, rebuilding a Windows7 Media Center machine, fighting with a bad power supply, poor connections in DVDs and network cables. Finally, everything is starting to work as expected. I was feeling lucky, so I decided to update the main xUbuntu desktop VM from 8.04 LTS to 9.10. Yes, I said update, not do a fresh install. BTW the 8.04 install was an upgrade from 6.06 originally.

xubuntu 8.04 —> 9.10

Overview of LinuxFest Atlanta 2009

I attended LinuxFest Atlanta 2009 with
700 like-minded people. Lots of good information for the price –
basically free.

There were about 42 sessions organized
for all levels from beginngers (I didn’t count them) from Fixing
Audio in Ubuntu/Linux to
multiple Kernel Hacker sessions (Debugging the Kernel,
4 Driver Writing Sessions,
etc.). There were more sessions offered than I could hope to attend.
Due to many late sign ups (about 300 extra), many of the sessions
were standing room only and overflowed into the hallway. I was able
to get a seat by going directly from session to session quickly.

We
need to thank IBM http://www.ibm.com

for providing facilities to this conference. There wasn’t any IBM
advertising that I saw. A
BIG THANK YOU, IBM, from
me. There were other supporters too with tables in the common areas.
Linux Journal, SuSE, LinuxPro and Cononacal are a few from memory.
Many companies hosted extremely informative sessions.

My session attendence:

• What Community Has to Offer – OpenSuSE

  
  

• Linux, Hadoop, and Amazon Web Services: Crunching the Big Data in the Cloud

• Free Software Development with Clouds

• Securing Your Network wth Open Source Technologies

• Running and Open Source Business

• The Weather Ahead: Clouds

There were other
sessions I would have liked to attend, but the conflicts prevented
it.

What Community Has to
Offer – OpenSuSE

Presenter: Chuck Paynehttp://opensuseterrorpup.blogspot.com/

Slides:http://www.magidesign.com/download/alf.odp

The presenter is an OpenSuSE
evangelists and works at the Travel Channel IT in Atlanta as a
sysadmin. He provided a survey of the different tools and
distributions that OpenSuSE provides.

OpenSuSE Studio:

Using the OpenSuSE Studio tool, you can
build a specialized distribution for your team, clients, family,
school. A concrete example was that you could build a server and
desktop distributions for students to perform homework with identical
software available to all from a Live CD boot.

See the
“slides”:http://www.magidesign.com/download/alf.odp for much
more.

Linux, Hadoop, and
Amazon Web Services: Crunching the Big Data in the Cloud

Presenter: John Willis
http://www.johnmwillis.com/

Slides: not available.

Basically, this talk was a list
of companies, FOSS tools, and techniques around dealing with huge
data sets in parallel on cloud infrastructure. It started with the
NIST definition of Cloud Computing and
ended with how to monitor and merge data from hundreds of individual
systems for an overview. My notes are just a list of tools that I
found interesting during the talk.

Libvirt, OpenNebula, OpenQRM,
Cobbler

RightScale.com

Nanite, Capistrano, ControlTier

Eucalyptus, Enomaly, Nimbus

OpenVPN, CloudNet

Splank

Chef from Opscode, Puppet,
Cfengine

CollectD, jCollectD

Big Data Frameworks: Pig, Hive,
Cascading

It’s 2 days laters and I’ve
checked out RightScale and collectD. We use SysUsage

for monitoring our small group of systems. I must have missed the
main points of this talk. Lots of data, but nothing that made me want
to change jobs.

Free Software
Development with Clouds

Presenter: Deryck Hodge
(Canonical) http://www.devurandom.org/

https://launchpad.net/

is a Canonical-backed software collaboration website. The goal is to
provide everything except compilers for software development
projects. Here’s a bullet list:

• Blue Prints – architecture
  diagrams

  
  

• Version Control via Bazaar
  with branching and merging

  
  

• Bug Tracking

  
  

• Threaded discussions

• Release Management

• Collaborative Translations –
  language files

• Karma system

• Code Reviews can be
  mandatory – PQM-based

• Open Source, but getting it
  running inside your company isn’t easy and they won’t help you. They
  said it would require 15+ servers. Get the source here:
  https://dev.launchpad.net/

While the website has things for
project management, it is tailored to software development projects.
A comment from the croud that tracking server deployment with it was
very possible. Free accounts let anyone have access to view your
project details. Paid versions provide project privacy, if you like.

Securing Your Network
wth Open Source Technologies

Presenter: Nick Owen
http://www.wikidsystems.com/ Lots of how-to guides.

Lots of detailed information, a
little too fast for me, about securing your network, applications,
and users. Here’s a link to the presentation. Basically, use RADIUS and 2-factor authentication.
RADIUS is supported by every vendor and standards were created before
anyone wanted a niche. RADIUS works with Apache, PAM, Microsoft, and
many routers.

Admins are happiest when there are
no users.

Tell all your passwords to go to
hell.

I need to check on

• RADIUS support in pound (a
  load balancer)

• Remote Desktops support
  RADIUS

• Using RADIUS in OpenVPN

• Apache front ends – don’t
  allow anyone to our apache services until they network authenticate
  via RADIUS

• One Time Passwords –
  WikID, Opie, FreeToken, OTP Auth

• FreeRADIUS – AIS
  (Microsoft)

This session provded the greatest
value for me.

Running and Open
Source Business

Presenter: Tarus Balog
http://www.opennms.com/

Basically, this was a talk on how
to start a business with a slant on FOSS. Get a laywer, CPA,
insurance and all the other things you need for a business. Give the
software away and encourage a community to form that provides patches
and modules back to you. He only knows how to make money selling
services for tools, not applications. How much are you willing to pay
for OpenOffice support and installation? $0. OTOH, how much are you
willing to pay to monitor your servers with a great tool that is
complex to install, but easy to run? $10,000/yr?

Main tips:

• Don’t quit your day job

• GET A TRADEMARK and copyright everything -

  $300
  and a year of your life

  
  

• Build an awesome app or tool

  
  

• Start a foundation and get a
  company to fund it. IBM funds lots of foundations that Microsoft
  hates.

• If you use GPL for your
  license, anyone that steals your code must release their code too.
  If you use BSD or Apache or other do-what-you-like licenses, they
  can be secret.

• Copyrights

• Owner can change the license
  at any time

• Defend the code from license
  abuse

• Sun started theee Dual
  Copyright

• Have a Contributions Agreement

  that gives you and the contributer both copyright ownership. This
  lets you change the license in the future without asking permission
  from everyone that contributed 15 years ago. Clone the Sun
  agreement.

  
  

• Get ramen
  profitable
  – earn the amount of money to life.

  
  

• Spend less than you earn

  
  

• There’s
  a diagram in the book – Crossing the Chasm -
  

  The difficulty is in getting
  enough customers to be #1 or #2 in your market and becoming an Early
  Majority solution.

  
  

• Release
  code early and often – The Practice Effect

  
  

• Create
  products that are easy to buy – not things that are easy to sell

  
  

• Create
  a website

  
  

• Separate
  work from life.

• Create
  a blog http://www.adventuresinoss.com/

• Be
  results driven, not effort driven – my addition

• Build
  CRM, Trouble Ticketing, and bug tracking BEFORE you need them

• Create
  a mailing list and/or forums to let your community chat

• Participate
  in the community – go to conferences and give talks

• Twitter,
  facebook, whatever for marketing

• Get
  Paid:

• Easy
  pricing – “bundle of knowledge consulting”

• Get
  customers – don’t do free stuff

• Net-30
  – offer a discound, 2%, for paying early

• Statements
  of Work – SoW or do time and materials, T&M

• Annual
  Renewals include consultations, upgrades, etc. If you charge
  $15k/annual support and have 100 customers, you have a business.

• Value
  your employees – 401(k), Health Insurance, Payroll Service; People
  are your company

  
  

• Use
  the Bowling Pin model; after you sell 1 pin, discover 9 other things
  each customer needs and offer it.

• Grow
  or die

• Fire
  a bad customer – life is too short for work you really hate to do.

• How
  to get out?

• IPO

• Make
  a great lifestyle company

• Sell
  to a big company – If someone offers $30M, do you take it?

  Obviously
  from my notes, I liked this talk.

The Weather Ahead:
Clouds

Presenter: John

Ubuntu Jaunty includes a cloud API identical to Amazon S3 and EC2
serivces. This means you can build and test internally, then deploy
with binary compatibility to Amazon or other compatible cloud
providers.

Today, cloud computing is like electricity; turn it on when you need
it. Turn if off when you are done.

No capitol costs.

Ubuntu1 – storage

Landscape – SaaS – stats, hw, sw, trending, patches

AMI – Amazon Machine Image

I need to research switching from Xen to KVM for our internal VM
systems. Managing a cloud is less like managing a group of VMs.

Always migrate forward, never go back. If you have an issue, grab
the next machine, migrate and get it working. Later, you can go back
to the non-working version and figure out what happened or destroy
the VM.