Generic Enterprise Linux is now days too important. We believe it's used by too many people (and large organisations) for the release cycles, the future and the engagement of the community to be beholden to one project.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a real community driven Enterprise Linux (EL) project? One that was accountable to it's user-base, and could engage the Enterprise Linux community (and commercial users) in new ways?

What about an Enterprise Linux project that was able to reduce the duplication of effort in debranding our favourite upstream distro? Leading to benefits for ...

— Andrew

The recent high profile hack of Distribute.IT has been generating quite a lot of noise over the last few days amongst the Australian Internet industry. And we've received a few emails from our dedicated hosting customers wanting to know more about the details of the hack and how it could affect them.

The truth is, most of the details surrounding the "hack" are sketchy. But we do know:

• Four of Distribute.IT's shared hosting servers were involved,
• Comprising over 4,800 sites involved
• Offline, or otherwise logically separated backups were not available
• and all data, websites and ...

— Andrew

We are huge fans of OpenVZ container level virtualisation. Although we're quite puzzled as to why it is not more popular.

What is OpenVZ you ask?

OpenVZ is operating system-level virtualization based on a modified Linux kernel that allows a physical server to run multiple isolated instances known as containers, virtual private servers (VPS), or virtual environments (VE). The preferred term these days is container. Containers are sometimes compared to chroot or jail type environments but containers are really much better in terms of isolation, security, functionality, and resource management.

Why we use OpenVZ

In a nutshell: Because a ...

— Andrew

Here is a quick run down of some major features and updates that we'll soon see in CentOS 6. (When it's finally released).

Filesystem & Storage:

• ext4 is now the default filesystem,
• LVM finally supports mergable snapshots - finally we can implement safe (transacted) file level replication using rsync.

Network:

• iSCSI support for root and /boot partitions

Kernel:

• Updated 'tickless' kernel - save power,
• Cgroups support for resource allocation amongst process group.

Web and applications:

• Apache 2.2
• MySQL 5.1.47
• PostgreSQL 8.4.4
• Memcached 1.4.4
• Ruby 1.8.7
• PHP 5.3.2
• Tomcat 6 / OpenJDK ...

— Andrew

Update 20100-07-11: Out the gates...

CentOS 6 is now released!

Update 2011-07-04: Asking the wrong question...

You should be asking "When will AscendOS be released" ;)

Update 2011-07-04: Crystal ball gazing...

I'm putting money on CentOS 6 being out the gates by the end of this week...

Update 2011-06-06: Release date has slipped...

Looks like it's a case of CentOS 6 will be "done when it's done". The release date is now estimated to be 13th June 2011. But who really knows, Karanbir previously said "if you need something to plan against - think 4 to 6 weeks" (11 ...

— Andrew

The big open source news in 2010 is that open source became essentially invisible.

It's taken a while, but now it seems main stream media have realised that OSS (Open Source Software) is not the secret sauce for technology startups and online juggernauts: it is an unavoidable necessity.

in 2010 we saw open source pervade every area of software, and it became particularly evident in the strategies of web giants like Facebook and Google. For such companies, open source wasn't a business model, per se. Instead, it became an essential element of a great variety of business models ...

— Andrew

Here's a quick post showing how to configure and setup an Eaton Ellipse ASR 1500 UPS with CentOS 5 using NUT in about 5 minutes flat!

Firstly install NUT. To do that we'll need to install Fedora EPEL.

# rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Then we install NUT.

# yum install nut
# chkconfig ups on

Add the following to /etc/ups/ups.conf.

[eaton]
    driver = usbhid-ups
    port = auto
    desc = "Eaton Ellipse ASR 1500"

Add a UPS user to /etc/ups/upsd.users. Please change your password to something sensible.

    [upsmon]
            password ...

— Andrew

A long time coming. Since upstream vendor Red Hat released their 5.4 back in September. Well worth the wait:

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5.4 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.

• http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2009-October/016195.html

— Andrew