Pythian Group

While I was at the PASS Summit 2010, I’ve spent a fair amount of time at the Ask-the-Experts table on high availability, disaster recovery and virtualization. Conference attendees with different requirements on high availability and disaster recovery come to these tables and ask questions.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time doing high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) in my previous life as a data center engineer focusing on the Microsoft platform. My previous organization sold high availability and disaster recovery solutions to customers like crazy, highlighting the fact that the solutions are more than just the technology aspect. Every time I talk about HADR in my presentations, I focus on the three main ingredients to have a successful implementation – people, process and technology (PPT). Note that technology is at the end of the list as the people and the process components should come first.

What I heard at the PASS Summit gave me insights as to how people approach HADR (and I thought I only saw these on the newsgroups and forums as I answer their questions.) Most SQL Server DBAs (and maybe even a lot of IT professionals) want a technical answer to their HADR problem. They want to know if failover clustering, database mirroring, replication or log shipping is the best solution to their requirement. What’s funny is that when I ask them about what their RPO/RTO/SLAs are, they scratch their head and ask what those acronyms are. And when I start explaining these acronyms to them, they still want to hear what the best solution is for their requirement.

As I prepare for my presentation on Disaster Recovery Techniques for SQL Saturday #61 in Washington DC, I’ll be writing a series of articles about disaster recovery and what RPO/RTO/SLAs are and how they fit into the whole disaster recovery strategies. Before I dive into the “technology” part of the PPT ingredient for a successful HADR implementation, I will talk about the people and the process part first. Why? Because these two will drive the technology part of the whole strategy. And if you’re in the Washington DC area, feel free to drop by at the SQL Saturday event.

On June 17th, Pythian hosted the June of meeting of OVSAGE. This month, there was a presentation by Bill Stuart, CEO and VP Engineering , Karoly Molnar of Eseri. Eseri is a local Ottawa company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops.

Essentially, Eseri provides an “office in a cloud”. Within the organizational cloud, clients have access to a wide range of tools, like wiki, documentation management and e-mail. All of the software used is proven open source products such as Ubuntu for the operating system, Evolution as the e-mail client and Mediawiki for the wiki.

The meeting focused on the technical aspects of Eseri’s offering. Eseri uses Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as the basis for its architechture. Access is provide using NoMachine client software.

There was much discussion about security, with Eseri emphasizing that each organization is a completely separate entity, with all data being kept with the organizational cloud. Access to the cloud is protected by multiple firewalls. In addition each server/desktop has it’s own firewall enabled.

There was also a great deal of discussion about the tools Eseri applications and how these applications are upgraded. There was much interest in this area since some of the applications that Eseri provides (i.e. Drupal) have complex upgrade paths.

OVSAGE’s next meeting is scheduled for July 17th.

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 afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!

Operating Systems

Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. 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 . . .

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 . . .