the stinkin’ blog

Thoughts on Ubuntu 8.10.

I get a big kick out of trollbait articles like this one. For starters he starts with a problem that manifests itself in only a few computers and instead of helping developers by informing them that he has the problem as well, he simply complains about the problem and points out that others have it as well.

The 2nd beef is the “hope clause”. I “hope” that a problem “gets fixed”. Hope is not help. Go to launchpad.net and enter a bug. Help fix the problem instead of complaining about it. The idea behind open source is community involvement.

You see, Microsoft has $$$billions$$ of dollars and thousands of developers that do one thing - continue to slather crap onto Windows. Ubuntu has neither of those resources. If it did, you can be assured the problems you see would not happen.

Get up, be a part of the community. Give back to what is given to you.

Mad Irish.net - Creating a Robots.txt Honeypot.

Nifty how-to on short term blacklisting of IP’s that hit a honeypot to thwart attackers.

This article. is a straightforward method for creating a envelope template in OpenOffice without trying to find the envelope wizard.

Woohoo!

I came across this article that describes a secure Nagios setup. Lot’s of good detail in a well thought out entry.

Enjoy.

I just cannot seem to get into a groove when it comes to postings. Everything is so scattered these days. Being pulled in multiple directions at work, doing more with the kids and trying to play with all the toys make for difficulty in making time to post.

I think more than “busy-ness” I am unable to find a good tool that allows me to update a little to twitter, keep a journal to wordpress and still allow flexibility for other things. Hmmm…TOO MUCH Web 2.0 in my life!!!!

I forced a brief hiatus of my server whilst I upgraded it to a new server distro. Can you guess which one? Ubuntu Server, of course. I ended up learning a lot about debian distros and am now almost 100% running again. What fun!!!

I plan on posting a few items here that need some documenting shortly.

When I moved to my new position with Canonical one of the immediately noticeable items was the lack of a collaborative system (never really had a need due to their size). I am used to using a collaboration system of some sort even if they really suck. So I needed to figure out how to bridge a few gaps and be able to use my crackberry with thunderbird and allow my fellow employees to view/share my calendar.

The solution, tie Google Calendar with Thunderbird through Lightning and the Provider for Google Calendar. My first attempt failed because I was missing a library - libstd5++. After adding gcc 3.0 to my system, I had libstd5++ installed. I then added the latest Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar add-on and I was good to go after restarting Thunderbird.

The next step was simply creating a new network-based calendar, choosing Google and adding the private XML URI (from the Google Calendar settings) to Thunderbird, entering my credentials and voila, shared calendar shows in Thunderbird!

Now I can use Google Sync on my crackberry and sync it all together very easily. May seem difficult, but in reality it just required a bit of setup and I can now enjoy the freedom of Thunderbird running on Ubuntu tapping into the wonders of Google Calendar. Need to see what I am doing today, tomorrow or next month? Just ping me and I’m happy to show you!

The Ubuntu Server team has requested the assistance of anyone using Linux as a server in their environment to fill out a survey. Canonical, Ltd. (the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu) is diligently working to understand how the enterprise is using Ubuntu as a server and what needs to be done to make the server usable in the enterprise.

The announcement can be found here.

Stop over and spend some valuable time. If Ubuntu’s desktop is a sign, the server will be well worth the effort spent.

This week I have started a new position with Canonical and am at VMWorld 2008 being held at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas. I am surprised to see that there are over 14,000 attendees to this conference this year and all of the known and unknown names in virtualization are here.

VMWare does appear to put on a good show although when I arrived in Las Vegas and went to registration Monday the lines were quite long and organization appeared to be lax at best. After a few hours the lines died down and all was good, but they did not handle the resource usage well for a virtualization company.

I have found a number of very interesting vendors here this week. The most interesting one is BlueBear. In addition to their slick titles like “Benevolent Director” and “404 User Not Found”, they have a very slick product code-named “Kodiak” that is not only a pleasant interface, but a usable pleasant interface. Built on Adobe Air, Kodiak represents your virtual network in a very usable map that allows the user to see the near real-time status of their virtual environment. The coolest part, it is going to be using a open source license. Others like Elastra are interesting in their model even if they have a bit of trouble in explaining exactly what they have to offer. I had done a bit of research on Trigence and was pleased with what I saw. They seem to be similar to Virtuozzo where they use containment virtualization to abstract the application from the OS.

Overall, VMWorld 2008 appears to be a great success for VMWare and the vendors attending. The attendees are smart, interested in what is being offered and forthcoming with information. In the coming weeks, I will try to highlight more about my trip.