Pythian Group

Is it Friday already? Where does the time go? Lots of stuff going on this week–here’s a few of the things that I found interesting.

Operating Systems

Russia Today-TV announced the existence of “Red Star”, the new OS developed in North Korea and based on Linux. I found this by way of Slashdot of course, citing the source as The Korea herald. According to the article it looks very much like the Windows UI, and features a “My Country” icon that allows connection to Korea’s closed internet-like network and the Woori office application. Slightly more information can be found there in the article N. Korea develops own OS.

The upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) has had the third alpha version released. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of the usually, mostly, kind of weekly news for System Administrators. I was on a much needed holiday for the last couple of weeks. Many thanks to Tim for filling in on the last one. What with clients’ priorities and February being a short month, we did not have the cycles to get a blog out last week, and this one will be short because, frankly, the IT news world has been a bit slow of late. With that I shall cease my preface and move on to . . . 

Operating Systems

The Phoronix media site is reporting that the end may be near for Open Solaris since the purchase of Sun by Oracle. Oracle has been quiet on its plans for the free/open source version of its Solaris operating system, and the Service Life Status for OpenSolaris Operating System Releases does show the GA (General Availability) phase support as “TBD“. See a little more info in Oracle Still To Make OpenSolaris Changes. This one will be worth watching and I’ll update the blog when more is available. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good morning and welcome to a new Blogrotate. We missed last week’s edition because last week was insanely busy. We take customer service very seriously here at Pythian, so when there is a conflict between client issue and a blog, the client always wins out. ‘Nuff said.

It’s been another busy week here and shows no sign of slowing, but here’s a few of the things we found interesting this week.

Operating Systems

The H Online is reporting that Linus Torvalds named one of the 100 most influential inventors by “The Britannica Guide to the World’s Most Influential People”. More info can be found there, as well as a link to some free sample pages from the book. Of course, Bill Gates was also on the list.

Could it be that Microsoft ranks third in Linux sales? Read the rest of this entry . . .

Happy Friday and welcome once again for news from the whacky world of IT. Big Thanks to Tim for pushing out last week’s edition. I was busy banging my head against a particularly nasty wall. If you think my head looks bad, you should see the wall.

I was at the Ottawa VMWare Mini Conference yesterday. It was quite interesting. There were some good keynotes by some good speakers. I especially enjoyed the breakout speaker from Cisco about their direction in the years to come, and I think I drooled a little when he was talking about the Nexus 5000 switch (578 ports ought to be enough for anyone). Also news to me was the Nexus 1000v virtual switch which is a plugin replacement for the standard vSphere 4.0 virtual switch and includes a full Cisco IOS for management. I also really enjoyed the breakout with the Ottawa Senators IT team describing their progression from physical to virtual servers, their challenges, business needs, and lessons learned. There was a lot more, including an enjoyable one by the EMC rep. I’m trying to get my slides and notes together and will likely post more on the mini-con at a later time. I won a door prize! Go me!
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Happy New Year! Welcome to the first edition of 2010 (the year we make contact). There’s been a lot of news since I posted last 3 present and party filled weeks ago so I cannot hope to cover it all. Here’s a few that I thought were worth noting.

Has anyone been following the keynote speakers from the Consumer Electronics Show currently going on in Las Vegas? The CES web site has them transcribed for you if you want to have a look. See the Keynotes page for all the goodies. CNet also has lots of space devoted to CES reports, and you can see them on their Live@CES page.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good morning. Welcome to the last issue of Blogrotate for 2009! I expect the world of IT will move on without us for the next couple of weeks , but slowly, as everyone will be out on holidays. On to the show.

Operating Systems

Mark Shuttleworth is stepping down as the CEO of Canonical. He’ll be replaced by Jane Silber, formerly the COO. Read the full release on Mark’s blog My new focus at Canonical and some information from Jane in her blog Management changes at Canonical.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Happy Friday everyone! I’m back and can see! The laser surgery was not anywhere near as bad as my mind had made it out to be, and I would recommend it to anyone. The results are worth it. For some reason the heat and x-ray vision have not kicked in yet…

Anyways enough about me, let’s look at some news.

Operating Systems

This one might better be suited to a storage section but slashdot has a post about FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux. The popular and free NAS server has an active discussion about this on the sourceforge forum. While it seems that generally the community is OK with this, many fear the loss of ZFS support which is currently not available in the standard linux kernel due to licensing incompatibilities between the GPL and Sun’s CDDL.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Here we are again, another Friday. Only it’s actually Thursday for me. I’m writing this early because I am planning to willingly allow someone to shoot lasers into my eyes in an attempt to rid myself of these wretched glasses. Here’s hoping! On to the news so far.

Internet

Big news today as Google introduces the Google Public DNS. The service is not a DNS host or TLD, it’s a replacement for your ISP’s DNS server. Google boasts that there is no parking or search page when DNS lookups fail as many ISPs do (and as Verisign failed to do for the entire net), but I feel the looming “yet” in that statement. Get more info in Google expands plan to run own internet by Cade Metz. Iljitsch van Beijnum has more in Google Public DNS service not ideal for everyone.

In a related story, ICANN to prohibit nonexistent-domain redirect for new TLDs gives some details of a draft memorandum to prevent owners of the next batch of new TLDs from hijacking requests for non-existent domains.

Operating Systems

There’s been tremendous buzz this week about the so called “Black Screen of Death”. It appears, however, that it was much ado about nothing. Microsoft has released a statement about it Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good morning and happy Friday to all. Happy Thanksgiving to all of our friends, family, acquaintances, and well-wishers in the US. Enjoy the turkey and the football. As always, there’s not shortage of news stories, though the week seemed a bit slow because of the holiday. Here are some things we thought were interesting this week.

Operating Systems

Lately it seems like every week a new OS comes out. Windows 7 led the pack, then Ubuntu, then Red Hat. This week’s release? FreeBSD 8.0. There are a lot of changes in this release, so check out the FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE Announcement.

KDE (The “K” Desktop Environment) is Repositioning the KDE Brand. This does not change the functionality, it’s a change to make a distinction between the community and the desktop itself. This probably will not interest most, but since I use KDE and write this blog I get to tell you about it anyway.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Is it Friday already? Where has the week gone? Whatever, we’ve got lots of good news tidbits for you this week, including several follow-ups to previous stories. Enough jaw-jacking, let’s get to the news.

Operating Systems

This week we got an early alpha of Google Chrome OS, which is slated for full release sometime in Q4 of 2010. ZDNet blogs and Ars technica have three good first looks at Chrome. First up is Adrian Kingsley-Hughes article Chrome OS – The good, the bad and the ugly, and how it fits in with Windows, Mac and Linux.

For a more security related view, Ryan Naraine has an early look into Chrome OS security with Inside the Google Chrome OS security model.

Lastly, Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has his own first look with screenshots in Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet.
Read the rest of this entry . . .