The Pledge of the Network Admin
This is my network.
It is mine
or technically my employer's,
it is my responsibility
and I care for it with all my heart
there are many other networks
a lot like mine,
but none are just like it.
I solemnly swear
that I will not mindlessly paste
from HOWTOs.The Aperi project announces the first release of the Storage Network Simulator. The simulator is a tool that enables you to simulate a storage area network (SAN) through software. You can create a SAN configuration, add devices to the SAN, create arbitrary connections between devices, and remove connections between devices. Using this tool to create a simulated SAN environment can help when you:Welcome to the Aperi Blog
- Have limited or no access to hardware and software when developing and testing SRM applications
- Have "off-line"' access to SAN devices without impacting the performance of the real network (such as the SNIA lab or any SAN in the world).
The SAN Simulator provides an increase in productivity and efficiency for Aperi development and testing by removing the dependence on device availability.
- Need to perform "what-if" analysis before you plan to extend or reconfigure your SAN
Stage 5. FOSS DominationThe Care and Feeding of FOSS: The Lifecycle of Software Technology
With the slow pace of innovation of the Maturity phase, the FOSS community begins to slowly but inexorably erode the technical lead held by the commercial offerings. FOSS versions of the technology may have been present all along, but the pace of innovation during the Expansion phase often left them in the dust. But now, with the technology mature and the pace of innovation slow, FOSS becomes the proverbial turtle, plugging along toward the finish line, slow but unstoppable. Feature by feature, the FOSS developers eat away at the commercial products.The commercial suppliers are doubly cornered.
First, the product is no longer cutting edge, so staffing is reduced and management interest is low. Since there's little innovation, R&D costs are low, which means profits are high. Developers who want to innovate are discouraged, because there's little potential return on investment.
Second, the technology has expanded to the logical boundaries, and additional features are less and less relevant to the core technology. These two factors slow innovation dramatically in the commercial sector.
Sooner or later, the FOSS product not only matches the commercial products feature-for-feature, but the nature of open-source software makes the FOSS product more reliable, higher performance and (where security is a concern) more trusted.
During this "end game", there is often a series of attacks on the FOSS software by commercial suppliers.These vary but may include legitimate competitive attacks such as feature or performance comparisons and support issues. There may be a spurt of new R&D. Sometimes legalistic tricks are used to block FOSS acceptance, such as certification requirements that are incompatible with FOSS itself, or getting standards bodies to accept patented technology as a "standard". As FOSS continues to erode the commercial market share, the attacks often turn turn somewhat shady or desperate, such as unfounded claims of security problems, copyright or patent attacks, hints that FOSS is written by "foreigners" with unsavory motives, and other "mud slinging" tactics.
-----------------------------------------------------------The Error of Hard-Core FOSS Advocates
There is a group of FOSS idealists who, for lack of a better term, I will call "hard core" FOSS advocates. I mean no disrespect by the term, in fact, I admire most groups who have strong ideals and work to achieve them. As folk-singer Arlo Guthrie says, "I'd rather have friends who care than friends who agree with me."
The hard-core FOSS advocates would like to go directly from Stage 1 (Innovation) to Stage 6 (The FOSS Era) and skip the whole commercial part. They argue that proprietary software ownership is undesirable at best, and immoral or unethical at the worst.
But ignores capitalism and human nature, and the economic forces that help fund and drive the creative process in Western society. In spite of fundamental differences between software and brick-and-mortar industries, software follows the same first four phases of the lifecycle.
Capitalism has a way of getting things done, of bringing resources and energy to a problem quickly and efficiently. When there's money to be made, capitalism can be a powerful, positive force. Investors pay handsomely, and innovators flourish in their pay. Capitalism fosters the basic competitive instincts of human nature
Capitalism also encourages an odd sort of "collaboration": Secrecy abounds, but innovation, once commercialized, spreads rapidly through the industry, sparking new levels of creativity and innovation. In addition, the profit motive encourages companies to "steal" one another's key personnel, further fostering this strange collaboration.
At the same time, capitalism stifles software innovation. Each company wants to get the edge, the latest feature, the one innovation that everyone will need and only they can provide. To achieve this, commercial vendors are secretive, and go to great lengths to protect their ideas and innovations. More importantly, once they invent something useful, they often will attempt to block others from the new technology. They'll use anything and everything to develop and keep a monopolistic position, including patents (sometimes absurd ones), highly-restrictive licensing agreements, lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement, employment contracts that turn employees into virtual indentured servants, and anything else they can think of to "protect their turf."
It is this behavior that bothers FOSS advocates. Capitalism is a double-edged sword for software. It both fosters and stifles innovation and collaboration.
Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water ThemSlashdot | Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water Them
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Had you asked me in on that day in 1998 how far I thought this phenomenon would go, I would not have come close to predicting the success that exists today. As we enter decade one, Free Software / Open Source is mainstream. Indeed, we are the leader in many business computing categories.
There been a phenomenon of wealth creation by Open Source companies, starting with Red Hat's IPO and leading most recently to the purchase of MySQL for 1.1 Billion dollars seven years after the company's creation. But I would warn those of you who consider Open Source by its companies: you're missing the biggest part of the phenomenon. Most Open Source today is software being produced by its users, for its users. The largest part of the payment for Open Source development today comes from cost-center budgets of IT users, be they companies, institutions, or individuals, rather than profit-centers based on Open Source like that of MySQL. By participating in Open Source development, users distribute the cost and risk of the development of enabling technology and infrastructure for their businesses. Their profit centers are not tied to software sales, but to some other business. To find them, look to the communities rather than the companies.
We have actually changed the way that innovation happens. Innovation has gone public. Many companies, institutions, and individuals share innovation on a daily basis, entirely in the open, through Free Software development communities. The products they produce are the leaders in their field. Public innovation eliminates the high transaction costs of lawyers, lawsuits and licensing. It focuses on building a fertile community across the market for idea creation and utilization rather than dividing the market for the direct monetization of ideas as property. This is the economically most efficient approach for most companies.
JMRI's developer countersued the throttle manufacturer for violating his license. The developer's use of the Artistic license with its rather shaky legal language, and an odd court ruling on that license, weakened his countersuit. The case remains in court. The JMRI developer has since switched to LGPL. His plight should be a warning to other developers: you need a license with the strongest legal language that you can get to make it effective, and to protect you from software patent holders, lest unsavory businesses pull the same trick on you. Ask your attorney, but my surmise is that LGPLv3 and GPLv3 are about as strong as you can get, having been reviewed by the attorneys of dozens of major corporations, the eminent Mr. Moglen, and his attorneys at the Software Freedom Law Center.
One necessary tactic will be decoupling the case of software patenting from the system of patenting desired by the pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies literally have the best government they can buy. We don't want them in the argument.
After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they've agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download the book for free here, or above.
This means all four of my books are now CC licensed. Code (v1) was licensed under a BY-SA license; so too, Code (v2). And Free Culture and now The Future of Ideas are licensed under BY-NC licenses.
I am particularly glad that The Future of Ideas is now freely licensed. That book hit the stores 2 weeks after September 11. I'm glad it now has a chance to flow a bit more freely.
Apparently, the Peruvian government is considering a bill mandating open-source software for all public bureaux. From the congressman's letter, we gather that MS had circulated a FUD communiqué calculated to frighten world + dog with images of collapsing domestic software markets, spiraling costs and systems migration nightmares. Villanueva Nuñez slices and dices with great skill to reveal the internal inconsistencies, unsupportable claims and irrational conclusions which the MS flacks trade in.
The letter provides the most thoughtful and thorough rebuttal we've ever seen to Microsoft's standard open-source terror boilerplate.
Vyatta has changed the networking world by developing the first commercially supported, open-source router, firewall, VPN solution to provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors. Vyatta delivers the features, performance, and reliability of an enterprise-class secure router with the added benefits of flexible deployment options--x86 hardware, blade servers, virtualization-- freedom to integrate applications, and the economic advantages of commodity hardware and components.
Introduce new levels of economics, choice, and control into your network:
Economics: Save 50% or more over proprietary products! Leverage industry standard x86 servers and off-the-shelf components.
Choice: Simplify network deployment by running Vyatta on: Vyatta appliances, x86 hardware, server blades, or common virtualization platforms.
Control: Source code availability and community influence allow for faster feature integration and the freedom to build your own custom solutions.
As the latest release of theThe sheer number of changes coming every two to three months from Linus Torvalds' "code tree" is a sign of accelerating kernel development.Linux kernel emerged this month, it reflected a dizzying number of changes. Kernel 2.6.23, coming just three months after the last update, incorporated business-friendly features, including better virtualization support and an update to the all-important scheduler, as well as the usual new device drivers and bug fixes.
Some think the kernel, clocked at 86 lines of new code per hour, is exceeding the software development speed limit. A key maintainer, Alan Cox, has warned that some device driver changes should get more testing before being incorporated into the kernel. Andrew Morton, a skilled programmer dubbed "the colonel of the kernel" after Torvalds tapped him as a general manager, has been outspoken on the problem of unfixed bugs in Linux. "I would like to see people spending more time fixing bugs and less time on new features," Morton says. "That's my personal opinion."
Howtoforge - Articles on Linux. Very well made.
The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 7.04
Ubuntu Studio is a special Linux distribution tailored to the needs of audio, video, and graphic enthusiasts or professionals. Because Ubuntu Studio is based on Ubuntu, you are not limited to this area, but can install any application that is available for Ubuntu, thus turning Ubuntu Studio in a normal desktop for everyday use. This tutorial shows how you can turn Ubuntu Studio 7.04 into a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.
Convert Physical Windows Systems Into Virtual Machines To Be Run On A Linux Desktop
Also, rootprompt.org, Nothing But Unix.
Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies.
Django is a great framework for building custom web apps -- but I am not sure it is the most sensible solution for your needs. If what you want is standard ERP functionality, delivered over the web, there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Quite a few existing open source projects may meet your needs; check out OpenBravo, Compiere, ERP5, webERP, etc.
DocMGR is a complete, web-based Document Management System (DMS). It allows for the storage of any file type, and supports full-text indexing of the most popular document formats. It is available in many different languages and is easy to translate into new languages. DocMGR runs on PHP, the Apache webserver, and Postgresql. It optionally uses tsearch2 for full-text indexing which provides for faster search results and result ranking. DocMGR supports LDAP authentication, the ability to easily add and remove "objects" for storage in the system, document workflow, object subscriptions, WebDAV access, and an ever-growing set of features revolving around content storage.
What Sun's actually done, and what almost no company before them has done, is to bend over backwards to do this right. They've resisted the siren-song of corporate counsel who feel the need to FUD their employer into paying them to invent entirely new legalise, which doesn't interoperate with anyone else's legalise. (My own failure to convince Zawinski that a GPL dual-license was a good thing for Mozilla still smarts; it meant that for the first couple of years of the Mozilla project (until dual-licensing took place, after Zawinski quit), Gnome developers were shut out completely. This experience has perhaps biased me, but to see a major corporate source drop done right is fantastic.)
Further, note that Sun hasn't merely pinned the tail on a politically-correct GPLv2 donkey, they've gone through this in excruciating detail to get it just right. Instead of taking the "obvious" LGPLv2.1 option for the libraries, they've taken note of the existing practice by other open-source Java projects and adopted GPLv2 with "the classpath exception". With respect to the transition period for their own libraries (they hold outright copyrights in the compiler and VM, but the libraries contain encumberances which will take time to remove, so they've not made a library release yet), they've worked with the Software Freedom Law Center to craft a specific exemption that avoids trapping applications atop the standard APIs becoming GPLv2 encumbered when shiped _with_ the open-source Sun VM under GPLv2 and closed Sun libraries.
The legal groundwork that they've done is exemplary; it's really, really impressive. Someone inside Sun has asked some open-source/free-software advocates how it _should_ be done, and then listened very closely to the answer(s).
AppFuse is an application for "kickstarting" webapp development. Download, extract and execute ant new to instantly be up and running with a kick-ass Java webapp running on Tomcat/MySQL. Uses Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, jMock, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts (Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF are also options). To learn more about AppFuse, its history, goals and future, checkout AppFuse: Start Your J2EE Web Apps on java.net. You can also watch this video, which shows you how to create a project with AppFuse - as well as gives you a tour of its out-of-the-box features.
XGlue is an application framework centered on bean driven development. It will start by providing a glue between Webwork/XWork and Hibernate to allow CRUD database driven applications to be created extremely quickly without code generation. However, it is designed to allow any ORM or custom database solution to be plugged in. It does this by creating default actions for basic CRUD actions such as load, save, update, find and default DAOs to do the work of 70% of most web application code. Then, the rest of the application can be built either by subclassing these actions or simply using the frameworks XGlue is built upon. Future directions are to add pluggable search and workflow capabilities.
J-RAD is a powerful code generation tool that allows developers to start developing at a higher abstraction level "if development required", reducing the complexity of the J2EE platform from the start. Also J-RAD ensures reuse of definitions, portability and reliability. The J-RAD application is generated by J-RAD itself.
Google(™) meets the Matrix. Red Piranha combines Lucene (Searching Ability), XML-RDF (ability to learn), Tomcat (for P2P Power) and Spring (Ease of use) to not only let you find anything, anywhere, but to actually understand what you are looking for.
