So we have been using Cobbler at TomTom for quite a while now to manage the deployment of some systems here. A whole lot of these systems are in out Continuous Test and Integration system, a home written thing but very similar to autobuild.

One of the really cool features in Cobbler that I get excited about is power management, this works for a whole bunch of stuff, out-of-band management cards, APC master switches and pretty much anything else you want to throw at it, neat huh!

The developer of the CTI system had wanted for a while to power down the systems when they are not in use to save power. However with so many different systems doing this was a pain for him. I heard about this and due to the awesomeness that is Cobbler was able to give him one small script that uses the Cobbler XMLRPC API to power off any system the CTI system uses. This is the joys of having a central system where all this information about your hosts, in this case the power management type, is recorded. This is usually called a Configuration Management Database for those who have not heard of this before. You can refer to that information store any time you need and have code switch what it is doing based on that…or write a framework (like Cobbler) so you only have to do that once.

So now we have managed to reduce our power consumption here, neat stuff but I think we have a long way to go yet before we can really be called ‘green’ lol.

So, as part of the work on getting Free Software to High Schools I have setup Melange tonight on Google App Engine. Now more on what we are going to be using this for later, this post is more about my first thoughts about using the App Engine.

Well first thing is it has so far been crazy easy to use. Now I am not sure if that is due to the excellent documentation on the Melange site on starting to use it or more to do with Google App Engine. One thing I did find surprising (but I already knew) was that they were using Django in Melange which runs on App Engine. Now from what I had first heard you could not run standard FOSS web applications on App Engine, turns out adaptation can be done and is worthwhile for some applications.  However I still see this as a major barrier to entry for using App Engine, one that will turn a lot of users away.

I don’t think this is going to seriously impact managed hosting of more traditional LAMP stacks, the worry I do have with App Engine is vendor lock in.  Now I am not laying the blame at the doorstep of Google here but what I would say is if they want this to be taken seriously by web developers they must make it just as crazy easy to move away from Google App Engine as it is to use it.  The lack of vendor lock in is one of the major reasons I love FOSS, the very same software stack that App Engine is built on.

For me, onto learning more about Melange and getting information into it to convince more people that FOSS development can benefit high school kids here in Scotland and I hope everywhere   Finally let me thank Google for open sourcing this application, making it easier for us to provide similar benefits to high school students as they have previously with GSoC and GHOP.

Take care.

Can we bring high school kids into the Free software development world…

So a little over a year ago I was at my sisters “parents evening” for her last year of high school and I decided to have a chat with my old computing teacher. I figured I would let him know that the local LUG was starting up so he could tell the kids in his class that were using Linux. I was shocked to hear that none of them had even heard about Linux, the open source development model or the founding principals of Free software. However being a geek and not a teacher I had no idea what I could really do about this.

Fast forward to FOSDEM 2009 and the closing keynote by Leslie Hawthorn of Google. She did a most amazing talk about GSOC, Melange and GHOP. Now I seeing this I knew that something could be done about the problem I could see of our high school students being locked into believing that they do not have the right to run, study, copy, modify and distribute as they wished. Yet again Google had the answer

So I pestered Leslie and got some advice about what would be the best way to solve this problem. I logged on to IRC one night and suddenly all of these good ideas were dumped in my lap about how this could work as a classroom project bringing together students from different subjects to work on the same project and how that would encourage working together and give the kids experience of what it is like to work in the ‘real world’ where we all have to work together.

From here I somehow managed to convince my good friend Shelley, who just happens to be a teacher , to come over and hear my crazy idea out. Turns out she is just as crazy as me and loved the idea, FTW! Shelley also had some excellent ideas about how open source development can fit in with the new Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland. Turns out the new curriculum has a lot of the same founding principals as Free Software so this should make things a little easier.

Then a few nights ago I got another update from Leslie with links for more people working on similar things at Teaching Open Source so at the very least we are not alone

Now here we are a teacher and a geek working together with the community, and lots of work there is too!!! So if you are reading this first of all pass the link on to anyone you think might be able to help, this includes parents, people currently in high school, teachers, open source developers and everyone else! Now if you can help directly even better because we are going to need lots of it, drop me an email at rob@lazzurs.net

Lots more exciting things happening with this but I want to get this post out finally so more to come soon.

Take care.

Well today (last night really) was the first time I have had to use 3g on my cell phone ‘in anger’ as some would say. I have to say it has been amazingly easy, as you will see below.

Now to start with I am using an Acer Aspire laptop I bought a year or two ago with some random usb bluetooth dongle I had lying about. On the laptop is Ubuntu 7.10 and the device I am connecting to is a Palm Treo 750 with Windows Mobile 6 (yes the early release from AT&T).

For this you will require the bluez-utils package. (A guide to installing packages can be found here)

1. Login to the laptop (ok, this may seem obvious, but meh, there are not too many steps)
2. Insert random usb bluetooth dongle
3. Prepare the Windows Mobile device by going to Start->Programs->Internet Sharing
4. In the “PC Connection” dropdown select “Bluetooth PAN”
5. Press connect
6. On the laptop open up a terminal
7. Run ’sudo pand – - search’

There should now be a new device bnep0 which you can find by running ‘ifconfig bnep0′ on the terminal. You should now be able to use NetworkManager to select wired network and all is well. I will however mention at this point I have my ethernet card in the laptop manually configured so NetworkManager knows nothing about it, this may change how NetworkManager displays the device.

Now the reason I decided to bother posting something this simple is I had never had to do it before and I am sure last time I checked on Google I could not find anyone else who had either. This was amazingly easy and I gives me faith that technology is heading in the right direction. While no user should have to open a terminal this was a lot easier than the last time I had to do anything like this with my last phone and laptop and I think this could easily be added to NetworkManager or some other similar tool.
Finally while the laptop is currently running Ubuntu (and I love it, great work guys) because of a new project I want to get moving it is very soon going to be Fedora or CentOS based…watch this space.

First of all before I go any further, yes I am a UNIX geek, I have a beard, I wear jeans/combats and a t-shirt to work and I stay late at night trying to figure out why I cannot get the latest cool toy to ./configure ; make ; make install. However the week before FoWA I spent my time playing with Windows 2008 (Beta 3) Core Edition….here I plan to explain why.

Now I do understand that Microsoft Windows is not free/Free but that does not mean it should be ignored. I believe it is going to take someone much smarter than my self to figure out a business model that will allow Microsoft to make Microsoft Windows free/Free without affecting their revenues with this change. On a side note however they do now let you install the OS for a few days before having to license the OS. For me this allows me to test powershell, WAIK and gain experience with other Microsoft products without having to license anything

The thing that attracted me to Core Edition was an appearance that Microsoft really have been listening to their users. With Core Edition they have removed everything that is not required to run the base operating system. Now this means everything, including the start bar, the clock and anything else that is not a cmd.exe window. Oh, sorry, notepad is there but that is about it This allows administrators to deploy Windows 2008 Server with just the applications they require. Eg if you want a Windows MySQL server you don’t have to have IIS, Media Player or Internet Explorer installed. This allows a very quick, minimal deployment that is easy to keep secure. Almost like someone at Microsoft went through a Linux install.

Now the only thing I can say to fault this version of Microsoft Windows is they do not include powershell. Now I understand why, to include powershell would require .NET, and I can understand why that is not part of Core edition, but it would be nice if it was easy to include…..oh wait it is!

As may be clear now this was an old article I had written but not really gotten around to publishing. I have quite a few of these because of the wonderful drafts feature in Wordpress, it is one of the features that made me decide on Wordpress in the first place for my new blog. I decided to publish it because while it has been a little while since I have played with it I would highly recommend having a look if you are a traditional UNIX geek who knows it is a good idea to keep an eye on the competition. Also I think I might be playing with the WAIK sometime soon, blog post coming soon.

Take care.

So over the past few days I have been at the FoWA expo supporting Flexiscale. I have to say, it is the first time I have been to a tech expo for a company I have been working for and it was an eye opening experience!

On Tuesday we all got down there to get the stand setup. We got to the airport at around 10 which was much nicer than the usual early morning starts when I am heading down south going to our data centres So all of the usual boring stuff happened, we dropped off our bags at the hotel and got to ExCeL. We then got the stand setup and I have to say I was very impressed not just with the new Flexiscale website but the stand as well, all very clean and professional (then again design is not really my thing, I don’t think I ever got past that using crayons stage ) We did have a few things missing and it turns out that DHL have decided to black list E16 (despite have a depo there) so I guess we were luck to get everything we needed….the MySQL guys were not, but more on them in a later post.

So we all went back to the hotel, Phil (COO), Tony (CEO) and Christine (Marketing, Gupta Partnership) all went to a few of the parties happening that night however Gavin and I decided to have a quiet one in the hotel bar and have an early night to be ready for the busy day ahead (well that was the intent anyhoo, I ended up until the bar closed, but that is another story). I have to say I am glad we did take it easy as we really did have no idea what was about to come next!

So we got to the expo nice and early in the morning, we had the plasma display to get up and running and I still had some video editing for the demos to do which we all got finished in plenty of time for the very sudden rush we had. It turns out that listening to your customers really does pay off, everyone really does appear to love the concept of Flexiscale and the facilities we are not able to offer them with the platform we have built. That morning we got on Techcrunch (also Techcrunch UK) and everyone has been talking about Flexiscale every since.

That night we went back to the hotel to grab some dinner and have a chat about what had happened. Everyone had been so busy up until that point that they did not notice they were on their feet all day and their feet were aching, however with my wonderful new rock boots I have to say I really did not have this problem While they might not be what everyone goes to the office in they are amazingly comfy. Then we decided to head over to the FoWA party that night and that all went really well we had some drinks chatted to some good people and I even met and existing xcalibre customer who was extremely happy with the existing service we provide and was also very excited about Flexiscale. Now I think at this point I should mention, xcalibre has been doing web hosting for 10 years now, while Flexiscale is an amazingly exciting new product for us, it is not a startup and we are not going anywhere.

So some of us made it to bed later than others (I know I had a last drink in the hotel bar) we all got up in the morning and were not sure if we would be any where near as busy as we were on the launch day. Well FoWA had quietened down a little and so did we but not by much, I was still on my feet all day, still talking to people about the product and some people even came to FoWA just to see us, it was excellent…ah yea, and I did manage to make it to a few talks over the course of things

• Day One: Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
  The Architecture Behind WordPress.com

This talk was kinda surprising because I expected it to just be about how Matt had managed to scale out the wordpress.com site, however it was so much more. Before I go any further let me say how much I liked loved his presentation style, the black slides with just one or two words in white were excellent as they were just heading for what was he talking about, all substance which was really easy to focus on. Matt talked mostly about how he managed to scale the business, things to consider when hiring people and the important things to focus on if you are doing a start up…very edcuational.

• Day Two: Simon Wardley,
  Short on Cycles, Long on Storage

Now I have to confess I really did not know much about Simon before I went to his talk, however Phil was able to fill me in (no Pun intended at all, not even close……those jokes are for the office only ). It was in total contrast to Matt’s minimalist style, all the pictures were slides were pictures from around the internet and very fast paced. However that really did carry across his point that new products quickly become commodity and it is important to focus your business on developing products on top of your existing solutions and knowledge or be left behind with no growth opportunities (which I hear is good for ducks some how).

Finally came day three, we did on day two go out to a hotel at the other side of ExCeL hoping to be able to thank the Carson Systems guys and girls for the excellent work they had done however sadly they were very tired from all of that hard work and went to have a quiet night. On the final day I did make it to two of the workshops which were both interesting, the first on securing web applications and the second on scaling the LAMP stack. On the second one I had someone ask “should you really be here, don’t you know this stuff already”. Well yes, I did know most of it however I am really not that arrogant to think I cannot learn from other people doing the same thing as I and I had met Daniel in the hotel the night before so I knew it was going to be a fascinating talk (he also knows Pi to far more places that my boss ).

Over all it was an excellent time and I was very glad I went, Carson Systems really worked hard and it paid off, I did not speak to anyone who was not having a good worthwhile time at the event. I think everyone learned something. Once again, thanks guys (and girls!).

Now on to the hard (but enjoyable) work of getting all the additional capacity added to Flexiscale and helping everyone use it to help them with there new ideas and existing businesses……speaking of which I really need to be at at data centre in about an hour.

Take care

Now before I go any further I must say that both at one of my previous employers and my current employer I have been a very happy NetApp customer.
I feel that RMS is standing over me as I write this…..

What seems like a long time ago now I went to see RMS (Richard M Stallman) talk at Glasgow Caledonian university as he was receiving an honorary degree from the university. As I imagine he always does RMS taught the key points of why information and software should be free to all people. If you wish to understand more about his views they can be found here.

I have never forgotten that speech nor what I was taught there and while it has sometimes caused me discomfort I have always tried to encourage the companies I work for to do the same, some have been more open to this than others.

Now as I am sure people are aware recently one of the major challenges we have faced is finding a storage system that can scale not only technically but in terms of cost as well. I believe we had found a solid partner in Network Appliance until very recently. As usual a few days ago I was reading /. and found this.

continue reading "NetApp vs SUN"

I had noticed that earlier on in that day he had responded to a post on uknot by someone looking for some server capacity as their web site had gotten very popular due to a comment made some where about Victoria Beckham is as interesting to watch as cheese mature! So people decided to go watch cheese maturing. The problem being the people hosting the cheese maturing website never expected it to get so popular (I can’t imagine why!).

So the boss called a few hours after work asking if we could provision some servers in a hurry for this customer, which with Flexiscale is not a problem, I pressed the buttons in the customer control panel and was able to give the customer 5 servers all with 1Gbps connections to the internet in under an hour with a LAMP stack installed. The excellent thing about this, not only did it take no effort on our part, and with the upcoming API won’t take any of our effort) but the customer was able to solve their short term resource problem quickly at a very low cost.

With luck I am hoping that this change in the cost model should totally change the business model of most web companies. For example, at Christmas here in the UK and in the USA when the stores start to get busier they start to hire in Christmas temps, however for small companies who have a web site hiring the same equivlent “website Christmas temps” is nearly impossible. However now with utility computing being pushed by the likes of Amazon, ServePath and FlexiScale it should get a lot easier.

The end result is that the customer was happy from what I understand and people got to watch cheese mature, to hear what the customer said have a look here.

Having spent some time recently on storage products and what some of current storage systems can provide below is my wish list for the future.

• Snapshots
• Thin Provisioning
• API
• FC/SAS/SATA Disk support
• FC/iSCSI/AoE SAN support
• NFS/CIFS support
• RAID-6/RAID-DP (I would prefer this to be software based, eg NetApp, ZFS, Linux)
• No limitations (beyond performance limits) on the number of LUN/Disk groups/Volumes or any other logical containers
• Easy moving or copying of the above mentioned logical containers
• Hot failover
• Hot software upgrades
• Hot hardware replacement
• Easy upgrade path
• Free moon sticks

(I am sure I have missed something….)

Now given the amount of time the industry has been spending on the long term storage of 1’s and 0’s you would have thought we would have a solution that meets all needs by now, within the physical limits of available technology of course, however as soon as I think I have found the perfect solution something goes wrong.

For now I have to say my best experience has been with NetApp, however they have some limitations mostly on their SAN side and scaling in the ISP environment that I am not perfectly happy with. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that NetApp are the best of a bad bunch because they provide an excellent service and I have not had a NetApp filer fail me in production yet, they just don’t have everything on the above list

Well off to bang my head off of more brick walls

I have been (ab)using SiteBar for a while now and for me it really has become the answer to the question of how to track all of the useful sites you visit, ever.

They have a hosted version of their software that anyone can sign-up for or you can download the software as I have done and have your own installation (My SiteBar).

By far the most useful features are the firefox plugin (or integrate with your browser here) and the ability to email bookmarks to friends…someone asks you for a site, a quick click and they have the link

The only improvement I could add to this program is automatically checking the links to see if there is a broken link in the collection and emailing you to inform you of this, but I may write some code for this if someone has not.

Take it easy