Powered by Hamsters On Wheels (R)

Slackware 13 for x86_64

2009-08-28T15:02:00.001-03:00

Oh yes! Is that time again...

Slackware 13

Solaris 10 5/08 (aka Update 5)

2008-04-27T15:58:00.004-03:00

Sun has released the fifth update for Solaris 10, it comes with the cpu resource caping daemon and with support for deploying Solaris 8 and 9 inside a zone. Check it out!

Free (as in beer) OpenSolaris Starter Kit

2007-03-07T00:33:00.000-03:00

Ok, my apologies to the few worthy people out there, it's been a while and I've been in hell for the last two months. I'll tell you about it later, but in the meantime it's my duty to let you guys know about this freebie. The dudes @ OpenSolaris & Sun are mailing this starter kits for free. Get yours now!

P2P TV distribution

2007-01-04T03:40:00.000-03:00

Although I don't watch much TV, I've found through The Register this interesting project: TheVeniceProject. It's developed by the same guys that created Kazaa and Skype. It involves distributing tv signals through a p2p network. They are currently on beta and if I'm not mistaken they're going live sometime during next year. (God is it 2007 already? Is next year 2008? Time does fly...).

I think it's a very good idea and that we'll see similar (rip-offs) of this project sponsored by the MPAA (pronounced mafia) and TV networks. Companies all round the world are looking for new ways to deliver content on demand and very targeted ads (as in those viral marketing campaigns you see in youtube). High speed internet connections for consumers have been cheap (or at least not too expensive) for some time now and distributing high bandwidth content trough P2P networks has proven successful (BitTorrent anyone?). So my first point is this: how come no one ever thought of this thing before?

These guys look like they are very young and talented. They are posting their progress on their blog together with a bunch of pictures, and guess what they're using for servers and OS? Ubuntu Linux and Solaris 10 deployed on Sun Fire X2200 servers (just look at the comments, especially the last one). Which takes me to my second point: open source software works and almost all innovation comes from deploying services on OSS platforms. These people are developing what might become the next big thing in video distribution.

I didn't see any indication as to what video protocol they're using for streaming the video/audio content, but my guess is that it might be a hacked version of Ogg/Theora or Xvid, given they're implying that the quality is not as HDTV but more like normal TV (Instant prayer moment: please Lord don't let it be wmv or real or flash or quickbugs!!!). It's not a video download warez nor another file sharing app either. My other guess is that it uses the same technique to get past firewalls as Skype does, so this should be a huge hit. Too bad that the beta program is invite only cause I would have loved to test this stuff myself. If I'm not mistaken, the client runs on bugware only, but if we take into consideration that we have Skype for Linux, Mac and PDA's and this stuff is engineered by the same guys/team, we can rest assured this will be multiplatform too.

Check the Venice project colocation gallery and the blog. UPDATE: and the screenshots!

Get The REAL Facts Campaign

2006-12-15T21:57:00.000-03:00

FSF launched a campaign against M$ Vista bugware. I joyfully agree with them. It was time that someone told the truth with authority and total Independence from a single vendor. Thank you FSF!!!

Get the REAL facts about Microsoft Windows Vista.

Thanks God we run our shop with the Unix Genuine Advantage.

Solaris 10 11/06 released

2006-12-11T20:41:00.000-03:00

Seasons greetings for everyone, Santa Claus uses Unix too, you know? Okay, today there is much rejoicing among our community!!!

Solaris 10 11/06 (aka Update 3) has been released with the long awaited Trusted Extensions framework ready for production use. Did I mention the Secure By Default profile? So, how about kissing M$ pseudo-security enhanced "hasta la Vista" (sucks-a-lot & defective-by-design) from your corporate laptop goodbye..?

Do your servers & development workstations a favour and get Solaris today.

BOFHs are grateful that we can restrict our lusers even more!!! :-P

AOSUG Official Meeting

2006-11-23T00:00:00.000-03:00

The Argentina OpenSolaris Users Group (AOSUG) has scheduled our first meeting for November 30 at 19:00 hs. It will take place at Universidad Del Salvador (address: Marcelo T. de Alvear 1312 in Buenos Aires). Sun Marketing Team Argentina is also collaborating with us by providing Media Kits for the attendants.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the authorities from Unversidad del Salvador and Sun Microsystems Argentina as well as the AOSUG Community for making this meeting possible. You don't wanna miss it!!!! If you are a developer or a SysAdmin be there!!! Unix, Linux, and technology enthusiasts are welcomed!!!

Let us build a community around this wonderfull OS and share our views into the future of systems infrastructure!!! We are counting on you guys and I hope I'll see you all there.

Java is free!!!

2006-11-13T04:26:00.000-03:00

Today Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green will be announcing the availability of Java source code under the GPL Version 2!!! This means that you'll be able to compile Java in Gentoo or any of the BSD's variants!!!

This will have a tremendous impact on the world of Linux & BSD's. No more license restrictions for Java redistribution. Now it took years, but Sun is moving in the right direction. This shows they are still the technology leaders and the most innovative company in the tech world. Well done Sun!!! We love you!!! Keep the source code coming!!!

This sucks

2006-11-01T19:47:00.000-03:00

I just read at Ben Rockwood's blog that the upcoming Solaris U3 (dubbed 11/06) is not going to include the iSCSI target framework. I was looking forward to this update cause I planned moving the family business' storage to a new filer running on Solaris 10 and was looking forward to experiment on those lovely Qlogic SANblade Express iSCSI HBA cards (not the FC model tough).

Man, I was eager to deploy iSCSI on a fully supported SunOS version!!! Cmon' Sun dudes, you know we need this framework badly!!! ZFS and iSCSI on Solaris 10 was the answer to our prayers to scale the data needs forever and say goodbye to fsck!!! Linux LVM sucks and VxVM costs money!!!

We are a small business and our storage needs are not complex and our budgets are small. We mostly need reliable backup and (bulletproof) shared data with access control. In my plan, the reliable part was to come from the use of ZFS end-to-end checksums against corruptions and the bulletproof shared data was to come from the new trusted extensions + zones in Solaris 10 U3. The total cost of this deployment was to be the cost of the hardware plus "maybe" two basic Solaris support contracts (you know the cheapo' $120 one...) Shit, I even had a purchase order waiting for my approval...

Well it's back to the drawing board and see if it's feasible to build this on Nevada. Once you've tried ZFS every other VM solution seems to be oh so lame... Check what this guy has for storing his home stuff, you'll fully understand the "answered prayer"+"just the cost of the hardware" parts of this post as well as my eagerness to deploy this on production for my family business.

Mommy, buy me one like this!

2006-10-17T16:58:00.000-03:00

Ok, I'm serious: where do I get one of these? Just take a look at the specs:

A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 Sun Fire T1000 servers with the CoolThreads technology with 2000 cores and 8000 simultaneous threads.
A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores.
A single Project Blackbox could provide as much as 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage.
A single Project Blackbox could provide 7 terabytes of memory.
A single Project Blackbox could handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users.
A single Project Blackbox currently has sufficient power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment.

Amazing info here.

So how good is Slackware 11?

2006-10-15T15:01:00.000-03:00

Well, it's fast, it's tough, it's Slack!!! It's so good that I'm building my next router appliance on it cause I'm sick of dealing with IPCop annoyances. Don't get me wrong, IPCop works really well, but doesn't let you partition your disks and the latest version doesn't work as fast as it should (there's something wrong with Squid that makes it slow while serving pages from cache). And remember what I said about web-gui's?

So now I'm experimenting with some SlackBuild scripts to tune Squid and get Squid-Guard to work on Slackware. Right now it's all working pretty well on my development virtual machine inside VMWare Server. The next step is to build Snort and Oinkmaster to have an IDS on place. The caching DNS is working out of the box and the same goes for the DHCP server and packet forwarding. For this experiment to work I chose a 2.6.18 kernel with CK patches and I'm adding the l7-filter patches to throttle *mule and torrent traffic on my LAN. If I get the time I'll recompile glibc fully optimized for i686, you see, this is actually very easy on a Slack box, just take a look at the source and you'll know what I mean.

On what hardware I plan to run this? Glad you asked, I'm running it on my own version of Frankenstein, which is and old Pentium III sitting on a semi dead motherboard (the south-bridge is died 2 years ago...). For the disks I chose an Adaptec 9040 SCSI HBA with two 4Gb drives, one for the system and one for Squid's cache and the swap partition. Did I mention it only has 256Mb of RAM? It has no keyboard or monitor and of course, the console is managed from a serial port or by a ssh session.

So why don't I try this on Gentoo you may ask, let me tell you that Gentoo is an excellent distro for a workstation, a server on Slackware just works.

If I buy my Sun Ultra 20 sometime during this month, I'll switch from Slackware to Solaris 10 the router appliance cause I'll be having an extra workstation with 512Mb of RAM to play with. But that's another story, and I think Slack will be alright. Just wished it had Solaris' FireEngine IP stack and ZFS for the Squid partition...

Petition to Open Source Motif & CDE

2006-10-13T13:04:00.000-03:00

As you should know, The Open Group is the owner of the Unix trademark and holds the patents for the Motif widget and CDE (Common Desktop Environment) which is distributed in commercial Unix variants.

There's an open letter initiative to fully open source this tools here. Go and sign it. Wouldn't you love to run CDE on Slackware or FreeBSD? I know I would.

Sun Tech Days @ Buenos Aires

2006-10-12T19:15:00.000-03:00

Yes!!! Mark October 23 on your calendar.

Sun has scheduled a Tech Day gathering in Hilton Hotel Buenos Aires. There's a whole day dedicated to OpenSolaris, and you don't want to miss it.

Now stop reading and go REGISTER. Here you have the actual presentations Schedule/Agenda.

Hans Reiser arrested... WTF? FS controversy

2006-10-12T09:34:00.000-03:00

Linux dot com is reporting this shocking news. Well, if I needed another excuse to move away from ReiserFS to the joys of XFS, I've found it!

I've planned a massive migration of my servers to XFS for some time now. Almost everything I run on Linux is deployed over SGI's XFS and I'm very happy with the results. Mount & fsck times have dropped considerably, but keep in mind that power failures cause a lot of file system corruptions on XFS volumes. Remember redundancy is your friend. On the other hand, the system responds very fast while accessing large (i.e. over 700MB) files.

Side note, I'd love to see ZFS ported to Linux (I know it's just a wish for the time being but someone actually ported Dtrace to BSD so...). It's the most powerful file system developed yet. If I get the cash flow to migrate completely to AMD64 patfroms the obvious evolutionary step would be to move my services to Solaris on Raid-Z volumes.

For a comprehensive comparison of Linux file systems, you may want to look here.

SysOp suffering from "vi" stress

2006-10-11T20:38:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I had a meeting with my fellow sysadmin & wi-fi guru Agustin Rodriguez (<--Agustinux Roxxxs!!!). We were discusing some issues about pfSense's load balancing capabilities and remote administration procedures. In his bussiness, they have a massive deployment of wireless appliances with 3 software load balancers built on top of pfSense to provide a wireless ISP gateway for their customers.

Now, I'm no fan of web-gui's for controlling mission critical services and certainly I wouldn't ever deploy something like WebMin or some other fancy CGI web interface on a production server directly connected to the Net. Just make nmap probe on a random server to see what I mean. At least here in Argentina, sysadmins seem to be fond of web-gui's for daily administration tasks. Guys, don't do that!!!

"Point & Clicky" is for the MCSE morons. In Unix/Linux/BSD you'll want to use ssh over a filtered firewall port to access a shell directly and then "su" to actually do something. You should not be changing a production system's configuration through a web-gui because CGI scripts can go buggy after patching or upgrading something (i.e. shared library name went boom! or path is screwed up). The only exeption I can think of might be a CMS system or a frontend for hosting/reseller customers.

So, on with my tale: Agustin was changing the default route (man route or man routeadm for Solaris), default motd ("piss-off intruder banner"--> man motd & man issue), default hosts.allow and hosts.deny (man tcpd) on a (thanks God!) test server through a web-gui.

You guessed, it all went PUF! for no apparent reason. Of course the test server had a ssh port opened, so in goes Agustin to his admin shell to trouble-shoot the problem and fix the configs:

Agustin# which mc
server# no mc here...
Agustin# which nano
server# no nano here...
Agustin# ok then... vi /etc/hosts

"Ahrrrrrrrrg!!!" goes his screaming... He had forgotten about how to do stuff with the ONLY EDITOR AVAILABLE BY DEFAULT ON EACH AND EVERY UNIX or LINUX or BSD DISTRIBUTION THAT'S BEEN AROUND SINCE THE GOOD OL' DAYS!!! He was infected by the "Point&Clicky web-gui's virus". He was in a hurry, frustrated and with no default gateway cause no matter what key he pressed, he couldn't get vi to do what he wanted it to do...

We, the sysadmin community, forget about command line options all the time. Our job is as multiuser & multitasker as are the environments we have to manage. We're always stressed and in a hurry. That's why having good documentation can help in more ways that you may imagine.

I forget about vi command options too. My fellow admins, release the pain inflicted by web-gui's misconfiguration bugs. If you can't live without it keep a hard copy. Now go RTFM (Read The "Fine" Manual) about vi and keep a printout handy!!!

Technorati Spider Post

2006-10-10T12:17:00.000-03:00

Technorati Profile

More blogs about tomas gayoso.

How did I miss this stuff?

2006-10-10T08:56:00.000-03:00

Ok, don't know how I managed to miss this interesting slides. The guys at Joyent are using OpenSolaris + ZFS in production servers for large scale Ruby On Rails deployment. Check them out, they have some important tips regarding capacity and resource planning for web application deployments. Just wished I could afford attending to one of those 2 day courses they are offering...

Get Apache compiled with SunStudio 11 for Linux

2006-10-09T23:46:00.000-03:00

First, if you don't have your copy of SunStudio go grab the freshest Express build @ Sun's website and be sure to check the bundled documentation. Keep in mind that this is technology preview release, the SunCC 11 release is just the IDE, the Express Build is the one that has the C/C++ & Fortran compilers, that's the one you want. BTW, if you need GCC++ ABI compatibility it's no go.

Second, bunzip & utar SunStudio to a directory in /opt and then set your PATH environment accordingly. For me it's a little script in my /etc/profile.d:

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/opt/sun/sunstudiomars/bin${PATH:+:}${PATH}
MANPATH=/opt/sun/sunstudiomars/man:${MANPATH:=/usr/share/man}

Now, go and grab Apache 1.3.X source code and run:

./configure --enable-module=most --enable-shared=max / --manualdir=/var/www/htdocs/manual --enable-rule=eapi CC=cc

If that gave you no error do a "dmake" distributed make:

dmake && dmake install

If all went well you should be able to run:

/usr/local/sbin/apachectl start

Now point your browser to http://localhost and read the handy Apache documentation. Congratulations! You just built Apache with one of the best commercial compilers available yet :). Experiment with compiler options, rebuild with:

CFLAGS="-fast -xipo=2 -xarch=sse

Here you may read Roman Shaposhnic's (SunStudio Architect & the guy behind ffmpeg) tips for compiling stuff in Linux with SunStudio. He was very kind to answer my questions and also very interested in making Linux a better Linux by getting the full LAMP stack compiled with SunStudio. We salute you Roman! (don't forget to check the slides in his blog!!!)

Manifesto (or just imagine William Wallace screaming "Freedom!!!")

2006-10-09T17:45:00.000-03:00

It all began in 1969 at Bell Labs (AT&T) when the masters Ritchie, Thompson and McIlroy gave us the "Great Way of Unix" to enlighten us. It began just for fun on a PDP7, it began just for the pleasure of making something simple just work.

I think the single greatest accomplishment of Unix technologies (besides making the world go round) is that 37 years later, Unix is still a lot of fun to hack. We now have (Open)Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, the BSD's variants and, of course, my favourite toy in the world, Linux to play with.

If you find yourself with no headspace due to the fact that you are locked in a system that cannot function because it relies on certain web browser in order for the actual kernel to function properly: set yourself free.

Grab a copy of Slackware or FreeBSD or Solaris and feel the power of a true multitasking & multiuser OS. I promise you, there's no going back after that. I remember back in 1996 my first contact with Slackware: it was a mind boggling experience. I couldn't believe the power that was being neglected to me by a certain Redmond company. Suddenly, I discovered myself with the ability to do anything (and I mean anything) with a computer. For instance, I could look at the code and teach myself programming, I felt the joy of a real graphic user interface totally independent of the kernel space and I could build a server that I could run for months!!! Don't like how your system works? No problem dude, change it in any way you feel!!! Need a "driver" for that fancy piece of hardware, okay, try and hack it yourself and then share it with the rest of us.

You will actually feel control coming back to you. Go wild and experiment, it's your system and it's your vision, not someone else's lame excuse for an operating system designed by a bunch of monkeys during a marketing brunch. Behold and embrace the gift of freedom. Show respect and be grateful to those who set the path before us: The Unix Masters, The GNU Project, BDFL Linus Torvalds, BDFL Patrick Volkerding and the Open Source Community all around the world.

Use the source, have fun, learn, and share.