Pythian Group

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 . . .

Good evening and welcome to the late night edition of Blogrotate. It’s been hectic around here but I did not want to skip a week so I am burning the midnight oil. There was a lot of action in the world of IT this week, here’s a few tidbits we took notice of.

Operating Systems

The Var Guy is reporting that Novell has rejected a bid by Elliott Associates to take over the company for a reported 1.8 billion dollars. Novell Rejects Takeover Bid… But Welcomes Other Bidders has the full story with some links to the back story as well.

The arguments are done and the deliberation begins in SCO vs Novell. The world yawns in anticipation. No Verdict Today, the Final Day, in SCO v. Novell – Deliberations Begin Again Tuesday – Updated at GrokLaw has the details. “Fine lawyering” indeed.

Internet

Tom Krazit at C-Net news reports that DNS registrar GoDaddy may be following in Google’s footsteps, steps that lead out of China. More details and source material links are in GoDaddy to stop registering domains in China

Security

The CanSecWest conference started this week in Vancouver BC, Canada. With it came the 4th annual Pwn2Own contest wherein hackers ply their exploits against various targets. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good morning and welcome once again to the (usually) weekly round-up of news that matters to Sys Admins. We missed last week for reasons previously stated, client work always comes first. This week was yet another fast and furious week so let’s get started.

Operating Systems

In case anyone was wondering about SCO vs. Linux it is still going on. If anyone has a lot of free time on their hands and is interested in lost causes, check out SCO vs. Linux: The story so far at The H Online. Even more details can be found at the prolific GrokLaw in Summary of SCO v IBM.

If you are running Max OSX you may be vulnerable to at least 20 major security flaws in you system. Read the rest of this entry . . .

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.
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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 . . .