Pythian Group

So HP Cloud is finally yielding for some beta rain since their announcement late Sep.

It started late September when I signed up for private beta testing. They sent me this when I signed up

Thanks for your interest in HP Cloud Services. We will be sure to follow up with you when access becomes available. Since we’re only accepting a limited number of customers for our private beta based on customer profiles, we cannot guarantee that every request will be accepted.

However, we will review your submission and follow-up with you directly.

Two weeks ago, I got invited to join the beta and start testing the platform. Read the rest of this entry . . .

The website for Oracle Database Cloud Services at cloud.oracle.com is now online, in conjunction with Larry Ellison’s announcement during the Oracle OpenWorld keynote going on now. It’s a hosted database service running Oracle 11gR2. The database can be accessed using a hosted Oracle application server, via JDBC across the Internet, or their own RESTful API a la Amazon. Notably lacking is Oracle’s own TNS network protocol.
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Liveblogging announcements from Sunday’s Oracle OpenWorld Keynote.

It’s 5:36 PM now – stay tuned…

@fuadar: Exadata smoothie and java juice in moscone south #oow10

5:44pm: Larry couldn’t get his boat under the Golden Bridge — next yer he needs a smaller boat or rebuild the bridge? :)

5:50pm: Oracle Partners Specialization awards… oh well, why is Pythian not on stage with our 4 Specializations? :(
Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you’re attending Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco, Sept. 19-23, 2010, be sure to stop by one of Pythian’s many sessions.

We’ll be all over the show, with experts Alex, and Marc speaking as listed below. Or, you might find Paul, Alex and others attending the bloggers meetup, participating in Oracle ACE/ACE Director activities, or at some of the User Group or OPN sessions on Sunday. Drop us a line on twitter @pythian while you’re at the show to connect with Pythian.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.

Operating Systems

It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.

Operating Systems

It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ‘silent’ patches.

Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.

Operating Systems

So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of all the news fit to reprint. Last week iPad news was the number one topic on the hearts and minds of most places I visit, let’s see if the iPad can last another week or if a new champion will be crowned. Call or text your votes to … oh wait that’s someone else. :)

Operating Systems

Starting off on a sad note that I missed last week. Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair personal computer died on April 2nd at the age of 68. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This week has been absolutely insane so it’ll be another short one I’m afraid. Luckily for me the majority of news outlets were binging on iPad related press which left only limited space for real news.

Mobile

Yes normally I do not cover mobile stuff very much, yet even after the above crack about iPads I feel obligated to at least make mention of it. I, personally, do not care about iPads. Wake me when they have those little scrolly deals from Earth: Final Conflict. For those of you who do care, here’s a quick list of places you could go.

• Ars Technica reviews the iPad
• iPad Review by SlashDot’s very own CmdrTaco.
• And last but certainly most amusing iPad jailbroken already, using leftover security flaw

And how is the competition doing? Check out BlackBerry sees iPhone shrink in rear view mirror.

Distro Watch

There was not a lot of news on the OS front this week, but here’s a short list of the few OS coming to a device near you.

• Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2 available. I’ve been using Lucid since it was pre-alpha and so far so good. Also among the hubub of Lucid, see Ubuntu 10.04 drops Yahoo search as default.
• Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 1 released. I’ve not used Mandriva since it was Mandrake, but it looks pretty nice. I’ll have to load it up someday.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 was released last week. CentOS 5.5 cannot be far behind.

Security

There’s a new exploit out against Java which has been proven to have the ability to launch apps on the desktop without authorization. Java exploit launches local Windows applications has the full story.

Here’s the list of what’s in store for the next “Patch Tuesday” release from MS. Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2010: 11 bulletins.

Data Centers

Have you ever wondered how a data center protects itself against the damaging effects of an earthquake? Check out Earthquakes and Data Centers over at Data Center Knowledge for an interesting read.

Are you looking for a PCI compliant data center? Check out PCI Compliance: Who Manages What? which gives good insight into the processes and highlights some things you should be looking for when you talk to the sales rep.

Hardware

Were you the first on your block to run out and get an Intel i7? Well now AMD throws even more cores at you. Check out New server platform and 12-core Opteron keep AMD in the game.

The clock tells me it’s time I should be going. I am sure I missed lots of good stuff this week, so feel free to add it to comments. You know you want to.

Stay tuned, the return of tOra is at hand. I’ve successfully compiled tOra on Lucid and have the instructions to prove it.

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where them birdies is. Welcome to Blogrotate. It’s Good Friday here in Ottawa, a holiday for us. For this reason it’s going to be a short one this week. That and the fact that it’s 25C and sunny here. :)

Operating Systems

Closure sweet closure. It’s been 7 years but SCO has finally lost it’s silly lawsuit against Novell. Novell smugly posted the results on their site with Decision in the SCO Group vs. Novell Jury trial. For us linux users they state for the record Read the rest of this entry . . .