Monthly Archives: February 2011

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.

Hastings Roadtrip!

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At the request of @splatdevil, I’ve headed up to Hastings for the weekend to be with her during a difficult personal time.

I always like an excuse for a roadtrip, the Wellington to Hastings drive is pretty nice and isn’t too long at only 4 hours.

Interesting statistics from the trip:

  • $30~ fuel consumption in Toyota Starlet 1.3l petrol car
  • 800ml coke consumed.
  • 1 chip in wind screen. Going to be a hassle to go and have that fixed now :-(
  • 2 wrong turns.
  • 1 fuel stop.
  • 0 toilet/snack stops.
  • >9000 angry swear words at traffic queues whilst trying to depart Wellington on a Friday afternoon.
  • 6 uses of the over taking lane
  • 4 sets of roadworks.
  • 1 police car on traffic duties.
  • 3 ambulances, only 1 active.

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. :-)

Melbourne: Day 01

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Had a bit of a sleep in on my first full day in Melbourne, eventually @MissNickiBee came and looked at me disapprovingly till I got up off the floor.

Start off with coffee and breakfast in a cafe down some side street, before wandering into the city via the streets of Melbourne.

I love all the old buildings and how much historical feel that Melbourne has – despite being an uber geek, I appreciate the older architecture and tend to find that it’s more interesting than many modern constructions.

Large brick constructions - wouldn't survive in welly with all our quakes! ;-)

More detailed look

Ideally I’d like to buy something like a 1900ish villa for myself, and renovate so it has modern ethernet, power, bathroom, kitchen, etc inside, yet still retain the classic hard wooden feel.

Of course in Wellington this wouldn’t be cheap, so clearly I need to marry rich/moonlight as cougarbait/sell hacks to dodgy types/something to boost my salary to support the half a million price tag. Or stop buying computer kit for a bit :-/

Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the cute Melbourne houses, but they look amazing with their iron trellises and cute picturesque gardens.

Of course, Melbourne has large modern towers as well :-)

Towering tower blocks of toweringness

Our first proper stop was the Melbourne Aquarium, @MissNickiBee had some discount tickets which helped.

Was an amazing visit, it’s far larger than Kelly Tartans (although they might have more penguins) and lots and lots of detail about different species.

I took a huge number of pics and videos that I’ll have to upload at some stage, for now here’s some penguins, since penguins are awesome:

squark squark! splash splash!

Aside from penguins, they had a huge number of different fish, sharks, jellyfish, stingrays and many other fishy critters – well worth the visit, kept us occupied for several hours.

After visiting the aquarium, I headed out to St Kilda with @MissNickiBee for drinks, cake and beach fun.

St Kilda

This is cake. It is most delicious.

One of the things I’ve noticed most about Melbourne is that everything is very compact – there’s a huge amount of people, traffic, trams, etc all trying to fit into tight streets – it’s not uncommon for people to be squeezing into trams, randomly joining you at your cafe table since there’s no free ones and for trams to be whizzing by closely through tight gaps.

I took a rather bad video when I was out in St Kilda of a tram going by the cake cafe where we were seated which shows just how close they sometimes get.

That’s pretty much my one complaint with Melbourne, there’s a lot less personal space and it can feel a bit dirty and chaotic at times, particularly some of the stations and streets. – especially compared to Brisbane with all it’s huge open spaces!

I guess it’s kind of the problem of trying to fit four million people into the limited space available. :-/ On the plus side, this population means there’s so much selection available for everyone.

After cake, we went wandering along the St Kilda waterfront, probably the only place I’ve seen in Melbourne that’s not squished with a million people running about – although there were certainly a few sunbathers around, even for a business day.

I turn my back on this burning sun!

I'm outside. Note my uncomfortable expression at the burning heat.

Melbourne CBD viewed from St Kilda beach.

Tour guide leading me out onto a pier, to what I suspect can only be her plan to dump my corpse off into the sea.

Boats and city!

To wrap up the St Kilda visit, we headed back into the city for dinner – sadly the vegetarian only pizza place was just closing when we arrived (around 21:45) but VegeBar (IIRC) was open and doing a roaring trade.

They managed to find us a table and much delicious vegetarian pizza was consumed – I’d have to go back, there’s a huge menu of awesome sounding vegetarian and vegan foods – they even have a menu for raw vegan diets O_o

Me attempting to photograph at night.

Melbourne: Day 00

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I arrived in Melbourne on Wednesday afternoon from Hobart – despite being full of coffee I managed to end up sleeping on the plane, but woke up in time to watch the plane fly over Melbourne on a very clear day, which is always awesome – seeing the CBD towers in the distance.

My delightful tour guide for Melbourne is MissNickiBee who meet me at Southern Cross Station and proceeded to take me back to her dungeon flat via tram.

Tour guide plotting my fate

Despite having been in Melbourne about three times before, this is the first time I’ve actually gone and caught a tram – was a pretty neat experience, they’re basically like thin trains but going down the middle of the street – much speedier and less annoying that Wellington’s buses since they don’t need to pull in and out every few minutes, they have mostly straight runs and primary right of way for all traffic.

One of the older trams, the newer ones are articulated into four sections and ride lower to the ground. If you're lucky, they have aircon and if you're very lucky, there's not too many people on it. :-)

After dropping off all my junk at her flat, we headed out for dinner at an awesome vegetarian only restaurant just block from her flat.

The thing I love most about Melbourne is it’s food – there’s a massive amount of selection, it’s like taking Cuba St and scaling it up by a factor of 20x whilst still retaining that small and cosy feel.

Whilst I was there, I must have passed about 4 different vegetarian only restaurants, including one particularly large one on the Thursday evening which was extremely popular and large enough to justify about 6 staff.

Didn’t get up to much as I was pretty worn out from Tasmania, so we had dinner, went along to a pub for a few drinks with a flatmate and then headed home to plan the next couple of days.

Looking out over part of Melbourne from a pub

Hobart: Day 02

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My third day in Hobart is more of a half day, as my flight to Melbourne was scheduled for early afternoon, which did limit what I could get up to.

Ended up spending a good 1.5 hours at The Cupping Room, a very excellent cafe and coffee roastery.

To give you some idea of how much this company loves it’s coffee, there’s a bit blackboard showing the “family tree of coffee”, how different styles have become derived from one another.

OMG coffeeeeeee

And there’s a menu for the beans you’d like today….. @chrisjrn and myself went through the menu – my favourite is undecided, they are all quite different, yet all of them delicious.

So much awesome

And of course, the tasty, tasty cup porn:

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Certainly beats the “flavoured milk” airport coffee I had at Brisbane Airport which left a terrible aftertaste and breath. :-/

Aside from coffee, spent the morning getting shown around Hobart at high speed before heading to the airport to depart to Melbourne, all in all, a great trip. :-)

Many thanks to the awesome Chris Neugebauer (@chrisjrn) for acting as my personal guide for the three days I was in Tasmania. :-)

Hobart: Day 01

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Wow, been so busy socialising and being outside I haven’t had time to blog post for the last few days… the horror! Currently sitting at Melbourne, waiting for NoFlyAirNZ to arrive 40mins late so catching up on posts….

My second day in Hobart was actually really a trip over all different parts of Tasmania – started off in Hobart, but headed up into the highlands, visited hydrodams and took a long scenic route to get to Launceston to meet my twitter friends IRL.

We started the day with a visit to the Cupping Room, a very excellent coffee roastery that I’ll blog about in more detail in tomorrow’s post. After filling up on delicious caffinated fuel, we headed off into the wilds of Tasmania.

@chrisjrn planned a route around the state that involved taking me through the hydroelectric dam areas, the highlands, many dirt roads and the reservoir lakes used by the dams.

The hydroelectric power stations themselves are actually not that large compared to the huge pipes running to them – I managed to get a picture of the pipes running down the side of a valley to one of the many stations:

My pipes are bigger than your pipes!

After seeing the dams, we headed up into the highlands where there are heaps of large lakes feeding water to the dams – I believe most of the lakes were originally around, but extended and enlarged for the needs of the dams.

It’s pretty barren up there, but a number of holiday homes/batches around, apparently there’s some decent fishing to be had.

Look upon my camera oh lakes and tremble as I convert you into pixels

Look, I'm being a posing tosser by some lakes!(pic by @chrisjrn)

I'm king of the highlands!! (pic by @chrisjrn)

We made it to Launceston in the afternoon, to meet my twitter friends @stumbeline, @kestra and @Wordy_Anansi for the first time IRL, which was awesome.

There was some time to kill, so we detoured to Cataract Gorge which seems to be a very popular swimming area – probably helped by the 30 degree sunny day :-/

It's got a bridge that's bouncy! *insane glee*

After crossing the mighty bridge of almost certain death, I headed over to meet with @Wordy_Anansi, who had made a huge amount of vege food deliciousness for us.

With the addition of wine, we had a fantastic evening and it was awesome to meet so many great tweeple IRL for the first time. :-)

@stumbeline, @kestra, @jethrocarr (duh), Mark (not on twitter) and @Wordy_Anansi

Me with @kestra