Linux-Watch.com points to an IT manager’s Journal article, Avoiding some common Linux admin mistakes, that point to IT problems that happen in all shops: failing to document, failing to plan on problems and having to react to them, failing to properly evaluate the build vs. buy, host vs. rent calculations, depending on silver bullets, too much – too fast, and not giving security its due.
Tag Archives | Linux
Off to MerriLUG
The Merrimack Valley Linux User Group, one of the five LUGs that makes up the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha’s Exchange in Nashua. Meetings commence at 7 PM, but members often gather for dinner before the meeting at 6 PM. The presenters tonight will be from WindRiver, manufacturers of VxWorks and a number of fascinating industrial products. Wind River will be presenting their build system, “which automates building the Linux kernel, and automatically generates the Linux filesystem from pristine source with needed patches applied automatically.” There ought to be good time for a Q&A as always on generally Linux topics, too. Hope to see you there.
Linux on desktops? Why not?
Over at OSNews, Thom Holwerda posts Getting serious about the Linux Desktop. “In his latest column, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Microsoft Vista is going to be so expensive that it’s going to make users think hard about switching to Linux instead. [S.J.V-N says:] “Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months,” he says. [Thom says:] My take: He forgets two important factors: Vista can run with all the flashy graphics turned off, and seven editions of Vista? How many Linux distributions are there to choose from?”
Choice is Good, not bad, Thom. Many distributions serve many different audiences. We have choice in our appliances, in our automobiles, in our TV shows.
Vaughn-Nichols cites some interesting numbers about W2K being more popular than XP, despite not being officially “supported.” I have a lot of clients who have clerical staff who would be well-served with Linux as the OS, Thunderbird for mail, FireFox for browsing and OpenOffice.org for office documents. The Microsoft Vista launch could start the “Year of the Linux Desktop.”
MSFT tries to recruit esr: hilarity follows
Linux-Watch.com reports “Microsoft offers Eric Raymond a job: world doesn’t end” First, I checked the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April first. Do read the article and follow the Armed and Dangerous link to esr’s blog. Hysterical.
Get S.M.A.R.T.
I spent yesterday afternoon recovering from a hard drive failure on my ThinkPad A31p. The internal drive, running Windows XP, got flaky in the middle of working on some documents. Explorer.exe “failed to initialize with error 0xc000006,” networked drives disappeared. I had used SpinRite 6 to repair this drive at the end of August, and suspected it was approaching end-of-life. What I didn’t realize is how much information the drive could supply.
On SourceForge, you’ll find SmartMon Tools, a set of utilities available for Windows, OS X and Linux, that communicate with the S.M.A.R.T. interfaces available on most modern hard drives. I had not appreciated the capabilities of the interface: it stores recent errors, performs short and long self-tests, and displays logs of tests. Details on using SmartMonTools are available on the SourceForge site as well as this Linux Journal article.
Running tests on the drives confirmed my worst fears. Multiple read errors were scattered over the drive. With 19k run hours, it was in pretty bad shape. Luckily, I had anticipated this. Using Norton Ghost 2002 and the Open Source equivalent g4U, I had backed up and now restored the partition images to a spare hard drive. Swapping the new hard drive to the internal slot and the bad drive to the expansion slot, I rebooted into Knoppix to read the recently changed files off the bad drive and onto a USB tab. Rebooting into Windows, I copied the files from the USB tab onto the new drive. Why two-step? I’m a bit shy of writing to an NTFS partition within anything other than Windows, as the file system format is proprietary and not completely documented. Back up and running!
Check out the SmartMonTools, though. It looks like you can set them up to run tests in the background and on a regular schedule. Catch the hard drive failures before they become real trouble.
Linux Watch Joins Microsoft Watch
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley asks “Want to Watch More Than Just Microsoft?. Microsoft Watch has a new sister site: Linux Watch.”
Five Reasons NOT to Use Linux
OSNews points to Five Reasons NOT To Use Linux. “Linuxwatch.com is running a great story called “Five Reasons NOT To Use Linux.” It includes a nice list of reasons why one might want to steer clear of Linux, along with a nice comparison to how easily these reasons are addressed in Microsoft Windows.”
I always suspected that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols was secretly a Linux-hater.
Linux Use in SMB Servers 20% and growing!
IBM’s LinuxLine free newsletter, produced by Database Trends and Applications, reports: “Linux Use Among SMB Developers Exceeds Enterprise Use“.
The use of Linux is even stronger among developers working in small and mid-sized business than those working in larger enterprises, according to a new study by Evans Data Corp. In a survey of 500 SMB developers, the market researcher found that 19 percent have Linux running on their servers the majority of the time, compared to seven percent among enterprise developers. Twenty-seven percent of the developers in the SMB community anticipate running Linux the majority of the time next year compared to 10 percent in the enterprise arena.
The numbers are higher than I would have expected, but the real kicker is the number they don’t point out: the self-predicted 30% growth year-over-year system admins are predicting in Linux adoption!
New Linux Thin Clients from HP?
I may have missed the initial announcement when these shipped, but browsing through a PC Connection catalog yesterday, I spotted the HP t5515 Thin Client Workstation on sale for a little over $300. This is a diskless PC with a Transmeta Crusoe CPU, 128 Mb RAM, Linux 2.4 burned into Flash RAM, video, audio, NIC, spare PCI slot and USB2. Looks cute, and I could see a lot of places where clients with browser-based data entry, mail and other processes could benefit from the small cost, form factor and power demands to make for a better, cheaper office. Hey, hang an external drive off the USB connection and you have a PC!
HP is a pretty open company and has been pushing Open Source solutions on many platforms. I was surprised to dig through the technical documentation to discover that the Linux image burned into Flash RAM can only be made with a proprietary toolkit from MetroWorks under a fee-based licensing scheme. This looks like a prime opportunity for someone to reverse-engineer the box and allow developers to customize the image to their own needs. The base image that ships with the HP Thin Client includes a proprietary Citrix client, Altiris image management tool, and other software that a developer could clear out, leaving room to customize the box. (The default image also ships with Mozilla, the Open Source rdesktop Windows RDP client, VNC client and VNC server.)
A local technician tells me that his past experiences with thin clients indicated that they should only be used in controlled and air-conditioned environments and that they would tend to overheat if left in a warm room. I’ll be interested to follow how these devices fare.
Update: here’s a review at OSNews.
Open Source, the kinder, gentler revolution?
OSNews posts Open Source Is a ‘Velvet’ Revolution. “There may not be fireworks. CIOs and IT directors may not be heaping their proprietary software on bonfires and dancing. Even so, the open source revolution is happening right now and will carry the day, said Bill Weinberg, open source architecture specialist and Linux evangelist for OSDL.”