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Softpanorama |
May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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Red Hat exists in several incarnations:
RHEL
Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Oracle supplies YAST as a management tool which is a standard administration tool in Suse.
CentoOS. A community supported distribution
Fedora -- beta version of RHEL
Red Hat has released Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization. The current version of RHEL is 5.2. Here is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Deployment Guide
Release note for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 state the following:
Feature UpdatesSome updates on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 may not appear in this version of the Release_Notes. An updated version may also be available at the following URL:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/
systemtap, the tedious and disruptive "instrument, recompile, install,
and reboot" sequence is no longer needed to collect diagnostic data.
Systemtap is now fully supported. For more information refer to http://sources.redhat.com/systemtap.
isns-utils)
is now supported. This allows you to register iSCSI and iFCP storage devices
on the network. isns-utils allows dynamic discovery
of available storage targets through storage initiators.
isns-utils provides intelligent storage discovery
and management services comparable to those found in fibre-channel networks.
This allows an IP network to function in a similar capacity to a storage area
network.
With its ability to emulate fibre-channel fabric services,
isns-utils allows for seamless integration of IP
and fibre-channel networks. In addition, isns-utils
also provides utilities for managing both iSCSI and fibre-channel devices within
the network.
For more information about isns-utils specifications,
refer to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4171.
For usage instructions, refer to /usr/share/docs/isns-utils-
and [version]/README/usr/share/docs/isns-utils-.
[version]/README.redhat.setup
rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded
syslogd daemon that supports the following (among
others):
rsyslog is compatible with the stock
sysklogd, and can be used as a replacement in most
cases. Its advanced features make it suitable for enterprise-class, encrypted
syslog relay chains; at the same time, its user-friendly
interface is designed to make setup easy for novice users.
For more information about rsyslog, refer to
http://www.rsyslog.com/.
This release of Openswan supports IKEv2 (RFC 4306, 4718) and contains an IKE2 daemon that conforms to IETF RFCs. For more information about Openswan, refer to http://www.openswan.org/.
For more information about this update, refer to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/2.0.0.0/releasenotes/.
To switch to SHA-256 or SHA-512 on an installed system, run
authconfig --passalgo=sha256 --update or
authconfig --passalgo=sha512 --update. To configure
the hashing method through a GUI, use authconfig-gtk.
Existing user accounts will not be affected until their passwords are changed.
For newly installed systems, using SHA-256 or SHA-512 can be configured only
for kickstart installations. To do so, use the --passalgo=sha256
or --passalgo=sha512 options of the kickstart command
auth; also, remove the --enablemd5
option if present.
If your installation does not use kickstart, use authconfig
as described above. After installation, change all created passwords, including
the root password.
Appropriate options were also added to libuser,
pam, and shadow-utils
to support these password hashing algorithms. authconfig
configures necessary options automatically, so it is usually not necessary to
modify them manually:
crypt_style option
and new options for both hash_rounds_min
and hash_rounds_max are now supported in
the [defaults] section of
/etc/libuser.conf. For more information,
refer to man libuser.conf. sha256,
sha512, and rounds
are now supported by the pam_unix PAM
module. For more information, refer to /usr/share/doc/pam-[pam
version]/txts/README.pam_unix. /etc/login.defs
are now supported by shadow-utils:
ENCRYPT_METHOD — Specifies
the encryption methods to be used. Valid values are
DES, MD5,
SHA256, and
SHA512. If this option is defined,
MD5_CRYPT_ENAB is ignored. SHA_CRYPT_MIN_ROUNDS and
SHA_CRYPT_MAX_ROUNDS — Specifies
the number of hashing rounds to use if
ENCRYPT_METHOD is set to SHA256
or SHA512. If neither option is
set, a default value is chosen by glibc.
If only one option is set, the encryption method specifies the
number of rounds.
If both options are used, they specify an inclusive interval from which the number of rounds is chosen randomly. The selected number of rounds is limited to the inclusive interval [1000, 999999999].
OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution
is now included in comps.xml. This group contains
components used for high-performance networking and clustering (for example,
InfiniBand and Remote Direct Memory Access).
Further, the Workstation group has been removed
from comps.xml in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5.2 Client version. This group only contained the openib
package, which is now part of the OpenFabrics Enterprise
Distribution group.
system-config-netboot is now included in this
update. This is a GUI-based tool used for enabling, configuring, and disabling
network booting. It is also useful in configuring PXE-booting for network installations
and diskless clients. gcc for specific applications that use
message passing interface (MPI), the following updates
have been applied to the openmpi and
lam packages:
/usr/lib(64)/lam
and /usr/lib(64)/openmpi/[openmpi
version]-[compiler name].
openmpi installation path, but not the
lam installation path. This enables you
to install multiple versions of openmpi,
or install the same version of openmpi
built by different compilers.
While this capability allows you to use a version of
openmpi built by another compiler, Red
Hat only supports the latest, gcc-compiled
version of openmpi.
openmpi and
lam now use mpi-selector to set
which MPI implementation to use at any given time. For more information,
refer to man mpi-selector and
man mpi-selector-menu. Note that when upgrading to this release's version of
openmpi, you should migrate any default parameters
set for lam or openmpi
to /usr/lib(64)/lam/etc/ and
/usr/lib(64)/openmpi/.
All configurations for either [openmpi
version]-[compiler name]/etc/openmpi or
lam should be set in these directories.
lvm2 will now warn if a snapshot volume is
near its maximum capacity. However, this feature is not enabled by default.
To enable this feature, uncomment the following line in
/etc/lvm/lvm.conf：
snapshot_library = "libdevmapper-event-lvm2snapshot.so"
Ensure that the dmeventd section and its delimiters
({ }) are also uncommented.
bash has been updated to version 3.2. This
version fixes a number of outstanding bugs, most notably:
bash man page: updated to reflect the
correct behavior of special built-in commands (such as
eval, exec,
and set. In addition, the
bash man page now includes an explanation
of the use of aliases in non-interactive scripts. bash did not close file descriptors with
two or more digits. bash handled certain
multi-byte strings is now fixed. Note that with this update, the output of ulimit -a
has also changed from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 version. This may cause
a problems with some automated scripts. If you have any scripts that use
ulimit -a output strings, you should revise them
accordingly.
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A lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. Time spent in finding more-efficient shortcuts is time saved later on for that ongoing project of "reading the whole of the internet", so try Juliet Kemp's 10 handy tips to make your admin life easier...
- Cache your password with ssh-agent
- Speed up logins using Kerberos
- screen: detach to avoid repeat logins
- screen: connect multiple users
- Expand Bash's tab completion
- Automate your installations
- Roll out changes to multiple systems
- Automate Debian updates
- Sanely reboot a locked-up box
- Send commands to several PCs
September 9, 2008 | http://itmanagement.earthweb.com
A few weeks ago, when I wrote that, "forced to choose, the average FOSS-based business is going to choose business interests over FOSS [free and open source software] every time," many people, including Mathew Aslett and Matt Assay, politely accused me of being too cynical. Unhappily, you only have to look at the relations between Red Hat and Fedora, the distribution Red Hat sponsors, during the recent security crisis for evidence that I might be all too accurate.
That this evidence should come from Red Hat and Fedora is particularly dismaying. Until last month, most observers would have described the Red Hat-Fedora relationship as a model of how corporate and community interests could work together for mutual benefit.
Although Fedora was initially dismissed as Red Hat's beta release when it was first founded in 2003, in the last few years, it had developed laudatory open processes and become increasingly independent of Red Hat. As Max Spevack, the former chair of the Fedora Board, said in 2006, the Red Hat-Fedora relationship seemed a "good example of how to have a project that serves the interests of a company that also is valuable and gives value to community members."
Yet it seems that, faced with a problem, Red Hat moved to protect its corporate interests at the expense of Fedora's interests and expectations as a community -- and that Fedora leaders were as surprised by the response as the general community.
Outline of a crisis
What happened last month is still unclear. My request a couple of weeks ago to discuss events with Paul W. Frields, the current Fedora Chair, was answered by a Red Hat publicist, who told me that the official statements on the crisis were all that any one at Red Hat or Fedora was prepared to say in public -- a response so stereotypically corporate in its caution that it only emphasizes the conflict of interests.
However, the Fedora announcements mailing list gave the essentials. On August 14, Frields sent out a notice that Fedora was "currently investigating an issue in the infrastructure systems." He warned that the entire Fedora site might become temporarily unavailable and warned that users should "not download or update any additional packages on your Fedora systems." As might be expected, the cryptic nature of this corporate-sounding announcement caused considerable curiosity, both within and without Fedora, with most people wanting to know more.
A day later, Frield's name was on another notice, saying that the situation was continuing, and pleading for Fedora users to be patient. A third notice followed on August 19, announcing that some Fedora services were now available, and providing the first real clue to what was happening when a new SSH fingerprint was released.
It was only on August 22 that Frields was permitted to announce that, "Last week we discovered that some Fedora servers were illegally accessed. The intrusion into the servers was quickly discovered, and the servers were taken offline . . . .One of the compromised Fedora servers was a system used for signing Fedora packages. However, based on our efforts, we have high confidence that the intruder was not able to capture the passphrase used to secure the Fedora package signing key."
Since then, plans for changing security keys have been announced. However, as of September 8, the crisis continues, with Fedora users still unable to get security updates or bug-fixes. Three weeks without these services might seem trivial to Windows users, but for Fedora users, like those of other GNU/Linux distribution, many of whom are used to daily updates to their system, the crisis amounts to a major disruption of service.
A conflict of cultures
From a corporate viewpoint, Red Hat's close-lipped reaction to the crisis is understandable. Like any company based on free and open source software, Red Hat derives its income from delivering services to customers, and obviously its ability to deliver services is handicapped (if not completely curtailed) when its servers are compromised. Under these circumstances, the company's wish to proceed cautiously and with as little publicity as possible is perfectly natural.
The problem is that, in moving to defend its own credibility, Red Hat has neglected Fedora's. While secrecy about the crisis may be second nature to Red Hat's legal counsel, the FOSS community expects openness.
In this respect, Red Hat's handling of the crisis could not contrast more strongly with the reaction of the community-based Debian distribution when a major security flaw was discovered in its openssl package last May. In keeping with Debian's policy of openness, the first public announcement followed hard on the discovery, and included an explanation of the scope, what users could do, and the sites where users could find tools and instructions for protecting themselves.
22nd August 2008Last week Red Hat detected an intrusion on certain of its computer systems and took immediate action. While the investigation into the intrusion is on-going, our initial focus was to review and test the distribution channel we use with our customers, Red Hat Network (RHN) and its associated security measures. Based on these efforts, we remain highly confident that our systems and processes prevented the intrusion from compromising RHN or the content distributed via RHN and accordingly believe that customers who keep their systems updated using Red Hat Network are not at risk. We are issuing this alert primarily for those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those of official Red Hat subscribers.
In connection with the incident, the intruder was able to get a small number of OpenSSH packages relating only to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only) signed. As a precautionary measure, we are releasing an updated version of these packages and have published a list of the tampered packages and how to detect them.
To reiterate, our processes and efforts to date indicate that packages obtained by Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers via Red Hat Network are not at risk.
We have provided a shell script which lists the affected packages and can verify that none of them are installed on a system:
The script has a detached GPG signature from the Red Hat Security Response Team (key) so you can verify its integrity:
This script can be executed either as a non-root user or as root. To execute the script after downloading it and saving it to your system, run the command:
bash ./openssh-blacklist-1.0.shIf the script output includes any lines beginning with "ALERT" then a tampered package has been installed on the system. Otherwise, if no tampered packages were found, the script should produce only a single line of output beginning with the word "PASS", as shown below:
bash ./openssh-blacklist-1.0.sh PASS: no suspect packages were found on this systemThe script can also check a set of packages by passing it a list of source or binary RPM filenames. In this mode, a "PASS" or "ALERT" line will be printed for each filename passed; for example:
bash ./openssh-blacklist-1.0.sh openssh-4.3p2-16.el5.i386.rpm PASS: signature of package "openssh-4.3p2-16.el5.i386.rpm" not on blacklistRed Hat customers who discover any tampered packages, need help with running this script, or have any questions should log into the Red Hat support website and file a support ticket, call their local support center, or contact their Technical Account Manager.
About: Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd. Among others, it offers support for on-demand disk buffering, reliable syslog over TCP, SSL, TLS, and RELP, writing to databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and many more), email alerting, fully configurable output formats (including high-precision timestamps), the ability to filter on any part of the syslog message, on-the-wire message compression, and the ability to convert text files to syslog. It is a drop-in replacement for stock syslogd and able to work with the same configuration file syntax.
Changes: IPv6 addresses could not be specified in forwarding actions, because they contain colons and the colon character was already used for some other purpose. IPv6 addresses can now be specified inside of square brackets. This is a recommended update for all v2-stable branch users.
Oracle claims that it continues to pick up users for its Linux offering and now is set to add new clustering capabilities to the mix.
So how is Oracle doing with its Oracle Unbreakable Linux? Pretty well. According to Monica Kumar, senior director Linux and open source product marketing at Oracle, there are now 2,000 customers for Oracle's Linux. Those customers will now be getting a bonus from Oracle: free clustering software.
Oracle's Clusterware software previously had only been available to Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) customers, but now will also be part of the Unbreakable Linux support offering at no additional cost.
Clusterware is the core Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) software offering that enables the grouping of individual servers together into a cluster system. Kumar explained to InternetNews.com that the full RAC offering provides additional components beyond just Clusterware that are useful for managing and deploying Oracle databases on clusters.
The new offering for Linux users, however, does not necessarily replace the need for RAC.
"We're not saying that this [Clusterware] replaces RAC," Kumar noted. "We are taking it out of RAC for other general purpose uses as well. Clusterware is general purpose software that is part of RAC but that isn't the full solution."
The Clusterware addition to the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support offering is expected by Kumar to add further impetus for users to adopt Oracle's Linux support program.
Oracle Unbreakable Linux was first announced in October 2006 and takes Red Hat's Enterprise Linux as a base. To date, Red Hat has steadfastly denied on its quarterly investor calls that Oracle's Linux offering has had any tangible impact on its customer base.
In 2007, Oracle and Red Hat both publicly traded barbs over Yahoo, which apparently is a customer of both Oracle's Unbreakable Linux as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
"We can't comment on them [Red Hat] and what they're saying," Kumar said. "I can tell you that we're seeing a large number of Oracle customers who were running on Linux before coming to Unbreakable Linux. It's difficult to say if they're moving all of their Linux servers to Oracle or not."
That said, Kumar added that Linux customers are coming to Oracle for more than just running Oracle on Linux, they're also coming with other application loads as well.
"Since there are no migration issues we do see a lot of RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] customers because it's easy for them to transition," Kumar claimed.
Ever since Oracle's Linux first appeared, Oracle has claimed that it was fully compatible with RHEL and it's a claim that Kumar reiterated.
"In the beginning, people had questions about how does compatibility work, but we have been able to address all those questions," Kumar said. "In the least 15 months, Oracle has proved that we're fully compatible and that we're not here to fork Linux but to make it stronger."
Learn how to work with RBAC in SELinux, and see how the SELinux policy, kernel, and userspace work together to enforce the RBAC and tie users to a type enforcement policy.
cgipaf is a combination of three CGI programs.
- passwd.cgi, which allow users to update their password,
- viewmailcfg.cgi, which allows users to view their current mail configuration,
- mailcfg.cgi, which updates the mail configuration.
All programs use PAM for user authentication. It is possible to run a script to update SAMBA passwords or NIS configuration when a password is changed. mailcfg.cgi creates a .procmailrc in the user's home directory. A user with too many invalid logins can be locked. The minimum and maximum UID can be set in the configuration file, so you can specify a range of UIDs that are allowed to use cgipaf.
The original sales estimates for Ubuntu computers was around 1% of the total sales, or about 20,000 systems annually. Have the expectations been met so far? Will Dell ever release sales figures for Ubuntu systems?
The program so far is meeting expectations. Customers are certainly showing their interest and buying systems preloaded with Ubuntu, but it certainly won't overtake Microsoft Windows anytime soon. Dell has a policy not to release sales numbers, so I don't expect us to make Ubuntu sales figures available publicly.
Szulik, who took over as CEO from Bob Young in 1999 just a few months after its initial public offering, said he's stepping down because of family health issues.
"For the last nine months, I've struggled with health issues in my family," and that priority couldn't be balanced with work, Szulik said in an interview. "This job requires a 7x24, 110 percent commitment."
Szulik, who remains chairman of the board, praised Whitehurst in a statement, saying he's a "hands-on guy who will be a strong cultural fit at Red Hat" and "a talented executive who has successfully led a global technology-focused organization at Delta."
On a conference call, Szulik said Whitehurst stood "head and shoulders" above other candidates interviewed in a recruiting process. He was a programmer earlier in his career and runs four versions of Linux at home, he said.
Moreover, Szulik said he wasn't satisfied with more traditional tech executives who were interviewed.
"What we encountered was in many cases was a lack of understanding of open-source software development and of our model," he said. During the interview, he added about the tech industry candidates, "When you take them out of the big buildings, without the imprimatur of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle, or HP around them, they just didn't hold up."
The surprise move was announced as the leading Linux seller announced results for its third quarter of fiscal 2008. Its revenue increased 28 percent to $135.4 million and net income went up 12 percent to $20.3 million, or 10 cents per share. The company also raised estimates for full-year results to revenue of $521 million to $523 million and earnings of about 70 cents per share.
.. In fact, Coekaerts has to say this often because Oracle is widely viewed as an opportunistic supporter of Linux, taking Red Hat's product, stripping out its trademarks, and offering it as its own. Coekaerts says what's more important is that Oracle is a contributor to Linux. It contributed the cluster file system and hasn't really generated a competing distribution.
Yet, in some cases, there is an Oracle distribution. Most customers Coekaerts deals with get their Linux from Red Hat and then ask for Oracle's technical support in connection with the Oracle database. But Oracle has been asked often enough to supply Linux with its applications or database that it makes available a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with the Red Hat logos and labels stripped out. Oracle's version of Linux has a "cute" penguin inserted and is optimized to work with Oracle database applications. It may also have a few Oracle-added "bug fixes," Coekaerts says.
The bug fixes, however, lead to confusion about Coekaert's relatively simple formulation of Oracle enterprise support, not an Oracle fork. And that confusion stems from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's attention-getting way of introducing Unbreakable Linux at the October 2006 Oracle OpenWorld.
When enterprise customers call with a problem, Oracle's technical support finds the problem and supplies a fix. If it's a change in the Linux kernel, the customer would normally have to wait for the fix to be submitted to kernel maintainers for review, get merged into the kernel, and then get included in an updated version of an enterprise edition from Red Hat or Novell. Such a process can take up to two years, observers inside and outside the kernel process say.
The pace of bug fixes "is the most serious problem facing the Linux community today," Ellison explained during an Oracle OpenWorld keynote a year ago.
When Oracle's Linux technical support team has a fix, it gives that fix to the customer without waiting for Red Hat's uptake or the kernel process itself, Ellison said.
Red Hat's Berman argues that when it comes to the size of the problem, Oracle makes too much of too little.
When Red Hat learns of bugs, it retrofits the fixes into its current and older versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That's one of Red Hat's main engineering investments in Linux, Berman said in an interview.
Coekaerts responds, "There are disagreements on what is considered critical by the distribution vendors and us or our customers."
Berman acknowledges that several judgment calls are involved. Some bugs affect only a few enterprise customers. They may apply to an old RHEL version. "Three or four times a year" a proposed fix may not be deemed important enough to undergo this retrofit, he says.
But Coekaerts told InformationWeek: "Oracle customers encounter this problem more than three or four times a year. I cannot give a number, it tends to vary. But it does happen rather frequently."
Berman counters that when Oracle changes Red Hat's tested code with its own bug fixes, it breaks the certification that Red Hat offers on its distribution, so it's no longer guaranteed to work with other software. "Oracle claims they will patch things for a customer. That's a fork," he says.
What Red Hat calls a fork is what Oracle calls a "one-off fix to customers at the time of the problem. … If the customer runs version 5 but Red Hat is at version 8, and the customer runs into a bug, does he want to go into [the next release with a fix] version 9? Likely not. He wants to minimize the amount of change. Oracle will fix the customer's problem in version 5…" Coekaerts says.
I think it's fair to characterize what Oracle does as technical support, not a fork. There's no attempt to sustain the aberration through a succession of Linux kernels offered to the general public as an alternative to the mainstream kernel.
But the Oracle/Red Hat debate defines a gray area in a fast-moving kernel development process. Bugs that affect many users get addressed through the kernel process or the Red Hat and Novell (NSDQ: NOVL) retrofits. That still may not always cover a problem for an individual user or a set of users sitting on a particular piece of aging hardware or caught in a specific hardware/software configuration.
If Oracle fixes some of these problems, I say more power to it.
But if they are problems that are isolated in nature or limited in scope, as
I suspect they are, that makes them something less than Ellison's "most serious
problem facing the Linux community today."
Ellison needed air cover to take Red Hat's product and do what he wanted with it.
In the long run, he's probably increasing the use of Linux in the enterprise and
keeping Red Hat on its toes as a support organization. That's less benefit than
claimed, but still something.
Yet Another Setup Tool. Yast helps make system administration easier by providing a single utility for configuring and maintaining Linux systems. The version of Yast available here is modified to work with all Enterprise Linux distributions including Enterprise Linux and SuSE.
Special note to Oracle Management Pack for Linux users:
- Enterprise Linux and RHEL Users: Download the Yast rpm. The em-wrapper scripts are included and do not need to be downloaded separately.
- Suse Enterprise Linux Users: Download the em-wrapper scripts rpm and an additional remote access module for Yast.
Oracle hasn't "talked about how our Linux is better than anyone else's Linux. Oracle has not forked and has no desire to fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintain its own version. We don't differentiate on the distribution because we use source code provided by Red Hat to produce Oracle Enterprise Linux and errata. We don't care whether you run Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Enterprise Linux from Oracle and we'll support you in either case because the two are fully binary- and source-compatible. Instead, we focus on the nature and the quality of our support and the way we test Linux using real-world test cases and workloads."
data=writeback While the writeback option provides lower data consistency guarantees than the journal or ordered modes, some applications show very significant speed improvement when it is used. For example, speed improvements can be seen when heavy synchronous writes are performed, or when applications create and delete large volumes of small files, such as delivering a large flow of short email messages. The results of the testing effort described in Chapter 3 illustrate this topic.
When the writeback option is used, data consistency is similar to that provided by the ext2 file system. However, file system integrity is maintained continuously during normal operation in the ext3 file system.
In the event of a power failure or system crash, the file system may not be recoverable if a significant portion of data was held only in system memory and not on permanent storage. In this case, the filesystem must be recreated from backups. Often, changes made since the file system was last backed up are inevitably lost.
Submitted by Jeremy on August 7, 2007 - 9:26am.
In a recent lkml thread, Linus Torvalds was involved in a discussion about mounting
filesystems with the noatime option for better performance,
"'noatime,data=writeback' will quite likely be *quite*
noticeable (with different effects for different loads), but almost nobody actually
runs that way."
He noted that he set O_NOATIME when writing git, "and it was an absolutely huge time-saver for the case of not having 'noatime' in the mount options. Certainly more than your estimated 10% under some loads."
The discussion then looked at using the
relatime
mount option to improve the situation, "relative atime only updates the atime
if the previous atime is older than the mtime or ctime. Like noatime, but useful
for applications like mutt that need to know when a file has been read since it
was last modified."
Ingo Molnar stressed the significance of fixing this performance issue, "I
cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice.
Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency
that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux
performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_."
He submitted some patches to improve relatime, and noted
about atime:
"It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!'"
31 Jul 2007 | www.ibm.com/developerworks
If you manage systems and networks, you need Expect.
More precisely, why would you want to be without Expect? It saves hours common tasks otherwise demand. Even if you already depend on Expect, though, you might not be aware of the capabilities described below.
Expect automates command-line interactions
You don't have to understand all of Expect to begin profiting from the tool; let's start with a concrete example of how Expect can simplify your work on AIX® or other operating systems:
Suppose you have logins on several UNIX® or UNIX-like hosts and you need to change the passwords of these accounts, but the accounts are not synchronized by Network Information Service (NIS), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), or some other mechanism that recognizes you're the same person logging in on each machine. Logging in to a specific host and running the appropriate
passwdcommand doesn't take long—probably only a minute, in most cases. And you must log in "by hand," right, because there's no way to script your password?Wrong. In fact, the standard Expect distribution (full distribution) includes a command-line tool (and a manual page describing its use!) that precisely takes over this chore.
passmass(see Resources) is a short script written in Expect that makes it as easy to change passwords on twenty machines as on one. Rather than retyping the same password over and over, you can launchpassmassonce and let your desktop computer take care of updating each individual host. You save yourself enough time to get a bit of fresh air, and multiple opportunities for the frustration of mistyping something you've already entered.This
passmassapplication is an excellent model—it illustrates many of Expect's general properties:
- It's a great return on investment: The utility is already written, freely downloadable, easy to install and use, and saves time and effort.
- Its contribution is "superficial," in some sense. If everything were "by the book"—if you had NIS or some other domain authentication or single sign-on system in place—or even if login could be scripted, there'd be no need for
passmass. The world isn't polished that way, though, and Expect is very handy for grabbing on to all sorts of sharp edges that remain. Maybe Expect will help you create enough free time to rationalize your configuration so that you no longer need Expect. In the meantime, take advantage of it.- As distributed,
passmassonly logs in by way oftelnet,rlogin, orslogin. I hope all current developerWorks readers have abandoned these protocols forssh, whichpassmasssdoes not fully support.- On the other hand, almost everything having to do with Expect is clearly written and freely available. It only takes three simple lines (at most) to enhance
passmassto respectsshand other options.You probably know enough already to begin to write or modify your own Expect tools. As it turns out, the
passmassdistribution actually includes code to log in by means ofssh, but omits the command-line parsing to reach that code. Here's one way you might modify the distribution source to putsshon the same footing astelnetand the other protocols:
Listing 1. Modified passmass fragment that accepts the -ssh argument
...
} "-rlogin" {
set login "rlogin"
continue
} "-slogin" {
set login "slogin"
continue
} "-ssh" {
set login "ssh"
continue
} "-telnet" {
set login "telnet"
continue
...
In my own code, I actually factor out more of this "boilerplate." For now, though, this cascade of tests, in the vicinity of line #100 of
passmass, gives a good idea of Expect's readability. There's no deep programming here—no need for object-orientation, monadic application, co-routines, or other subtleties. You just ask the computer to take over typing you usually do for yourself. As it happens, this small step represents many minutes or hours of human effort saved.
This is will not affect the current Linux distributions (Suse 9, 10 and RHEL 4.x) as they forked the kernel and essentially develop it as a separate tree.
But it will affect any future Red Hat or Suse distribution (Suse 11 and RHEL 6 respectively).
How it will fair in comparison with Solaris 10 remains to be seen:
The main idea of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an "ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU" on real hardware.
Ideal multi-tasking CPU" is a (non-existent) CPU that has 100% physical power and which can run each task at precise equal speed, in parallel, each at 1/n running speed. For example: if there are 2 tasks running then it runs each at exactly 50% speed.
Of course if you go with a cloned RHEL, while you get the code goodies, you don't get Red Hat's support. Various Red Hat clone distributions, such StartCom AS-5, CentOS, and White Box Enterprise Linux, are built from Red Hat's source code, which is freely available at the Raleigh, NC company's FTP site. The "cloned" versions alter or otherwise remove non-free packages within the RHEL distribution, or non-redistributable bits such as the Red Hat logo.
StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5 is specifically positioned as a low-cost, server alternative to RHEL 5. This is typical of the RHEL clones.
These distributions, which usually don't offer support options, are meant for expert Linux users who want Red Hat's Linux distribution, but don't feel the need for Red Hat's support.
With RHEL 5, Red Hat has shuffled its SKUs around a bit—what had previously been the entry-level ES server version is now just called Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is limited to two CPU sockets, and is priced, per year, at $349 for a basic support plan, $799 for a standard support plan and $1,299 for a premium support plan.
This version comes with an allowance for running up to four guest instances of RHEL. You can run more than that, as well as other operating systems, but only four get updates from, and may be managed through, RHN (Red Hat Network). We thought it was interesting how RHN recognized the difference between guests and hosts on its own and tracked our entitlements accordingly.
What had been the higher-end, AS version of RHEL is now called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. This version lacks arbitrary hardware limitations and allows for an unlimited number of RHEL guest instances per host. RHEL's Advanced Platform edition is priced, per year, at $1,499 with a standard support plan and $2,499 with a premium plan.
There is more to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) than Xen. I, for one, think people will develop a real taste for YUM (Yellow dog Updater Modified), an automatic update and package installer/remover for RPM systems.YUM has already been used in the last few Fedora Core releases, but RHEL4 uses the up2date package manager. RHEL5 will use YUM 3.0. Up2date is used as a wrapper around YUM in RHEL5. Third-party code repositories, prepared directories or websites that contain software packages and index files, will also make use of the Anaconda-YUM combination.
... ... ...
Using YUM makes it much easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using RPM. Some of its features include:
- Multiple repositories
- Simple config file
- Correct dependency calculation
- Fast operation
- RPM-consistent behavior
- comps.xml group support, including multiple repository groups
- Simple interface
RHEL5 moves the entire stack of tools which install and update software to YUM. This includes everything from the initial install (through Anaconda) to host-based software management tools, like system-config-packages, to even the updating of your system via Red Hat Network (RHN). New functionality will include the ability to use a YUM repository to supplement the packages provided with your in-house software, as well as plugins to provide additional behavior tweaks.
YUM automatically locates and obtains the correct RPM packages from repositories. It frees you from having to manually find and install new applications or updates. You can use one single command to update all system software, or search for new software by specifying criteria.
(SeekingAlpha) Eric Savitz submits: Red Hat customers are mulling their options. But they can be bought.
That’s one of the takeaways from a fascinating report today from Pacific Crest’s Brendan Barnicle based on a survey he did of 118 enterprise operating system buyers, including 86 Red Hat support customers. The goal of the survey was to see how Linux users are responding to the new offerings from Oracle (ORCL) and the Microsoft (MSFT)/Novell (NOVL) partnership.
Reading the results of the study, you reach several conclusions. One, most customers are seriously considering the new offerings. Two, Red Hat can hold on to most of them, if they are willing to cut prices far enough. And three, customers seem a little more interested in the Microsoft/Novell offerings than those from Oracle.Here are a few details:
- Asked whether they would consider switching from their current Linux support provider to Oracle, 26% said they definitely would not; 29% said they definitely would consider it. For Microsoft/Novell, 17% would definitely not consider switching, 27% definitely would consider it.
- Asked who they would chose as a provider if they were to switch Linux support, 29% of Red Hat customers named Microsoft/Novell; 20% named Oracle.
- The survey asked, what price discount would your current provide have to offer to keep you as a customer. Among Red Hat customers, 31% said they would need a discount of 50%-74%; 37% said they want a discount of 25%-49%; 27% said they would stay for a discount of 1%-24%.
- The survey asked, how important would a discount be in order to keep you as a customer? Among Red Hat customers, 64% said “very important.” Just 3% said “not at all important.”
We have suffered from that image in the past. And some of our competitors have played up the fact that the JBoss guys are behaving like a sect. When, in fact, if you look at the composition of our community, we have an order of magnitude more committers than our direct open-source competitors.
But the perception is still there. Bull even said something about that perception. And we'd been thinking about opening up the governance. So when Bull provided us with a great study case, we decided to put the pedal to the metal. But make no mistake this is not going to be a free-for-all. We care a lot about the quality of what gets committed. We invest very heavily in all our projects. We're serious about this so we expect the same level of seriousness from our collaborators.
There is going to be a hybrid model where there is an opening up of the governance. In terms of code contributions it's always been there. But now it's been made explicit instead of implicit and open to attacks of "closedness." JBoss has always been an open community, but we've hired most of our primary committers.
Well, you seem more willing to compromise and evolve your stance on things. Like SCA [Service Component Architecture]—initially you were against it, but it seems like you've changed your mind.
Well, yeah, the specific SCA stance today is there is no reason for us to be for or against it. If it plays out in the market, we'll support it. And I think Mark Little [a JBoss core developer] said it very well that the ESB implementations usually outlive standards.
So what you're seeing from us is mostly due to Mark Little's influence. Mark has been around in the standards arena and has seen all these standards come and go. So it's not about the standards, it's about our implementation in support of all these standards. And it's not our place to be waging a standards war. It's our place to implement and let the market decide and we'll follow the market.
So where I'll agree with you is that it's less of a dogmatic position in terms of perceived competition and more focus on what we do well, which is implementations.
Another thing is JBoss four years ago was very much Marc Fleury and the competitive stance against Sun and things like that. Today I don't do anything. In fact, I actively stay out in terms of not getting in the way of my guys.
So it's both a sign of maturity and of a more diverse organization. I'm representing more than leading the technical direction these days. And that's a very good thing.
You said you approached David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, to work at JBoss. What other types of developers are you interested in hiring?
Yeah, we did approach him. There is a lot of talent around the Web framework. One of the problems is it's a very fragmented community at a personal level. You have one guy and his framework. Though, this is not the case with Ruby on Rails. But there's a lot of innovation that's going on that would benefit from unification under a bigger distribution umbrella and bigger R&D umbrella. And I think JBoss/Red Hat is in a position to offer that. So we're always talking about new guys.
One of the things I like to do is talk to the core developers and say, "Where are you in terms of recruitment?" And we're talking to scripting guys. I think scripting is the next frontier as [Ruby on Rails] has showed. We have a unique opportunity of bringing under one big branded umbrella a diverse group of folks that today are doing excellent work, be it the scripting crowd, REST, Web framework, or the Faces, or the guys integrating with Seam. All of the work we're doing is going to take more people and we're always on the lookout for the right talent and the right fit.
... The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 release contains virtualization on the i386 and x86_64 architectures as well as a technology preview for IA64.
... ... ...
Aside from Xen, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 features AutoFS and iSCSI network storage support, smart card integration, SELinux security, clustering and a cluster file system, Infiniband and RDMA support, and Kexec and Kdump, which replace the current Diskdump and Netdump. Beta 1 also incorporates improvements to the installation process, analysis and development tools SystemTap and Frysk, a new driver model and enablers for stateless Linux.
The goal of this IBM Redbook is to provide a technical planning reference for IT organizations large or small that are now considering a migration to Linux-based personal computers. For Linux, there is a tremendous amount of “how to” information available online that addresses specific and very technical operating system configuration issues, platform-specific installation methods, user interface customizations, etc. This book includes some technical “how to” as well, but the overall focus of the content in this book is to walk the reader through some of the important considerations and planning issues you could encounter during a migration project. Within the context of a pre-existing Microsoft Windows-based environment, we attempt to present a more holistic, end-to-end view of the technical challenges and methods necessary to complete a successful migration to Linux-based clients.
I recently spent some time speaking with a popular Yankee Group analyst who covers the enterprise sector in the US, focusing in on open source and where the movement may go in the next few years.
Just to be clear, I differentiate, as most industry watchers do, between Linux and open source. While Linux is open source, the primary Linux distributors have caught on to how they need to position themselves for success and are starting to run their businesses just as any proprietary software company does.
Red Hat and SUSE make prime examples, realizing the path to long term success and revenue streams resided in proving themselves enterprise worthy to larger businesses and institutions, have shifted business models or been acquired by organizations with roots in the enterprise.
Her views, while not always popular in the open source community. are right on point if open source seeks widespread adoption and a permanent seat at the table for longer term financial success.
There are a few obstacles open source proponents need to accept and move forward on:
- It will be more costly for a company to migrate away from Windows to Linux, even in light of slightly reduced ongoing maintenance and improved security and uptime. While I have not always agreed that the costs are higher, having migrated corporate systems to Linux in the past, their research showed it to be true in many cases -- especially when migrating beyond standard web hosting and email systems. The costs are higher when factoring in re-certifying drivers, application integrity and training.
- To truly become entrenched as a viable financially-rewarding option (meaning open source companies make money and create jobs), a shift toward commercial software models is necessary. This does not mean forgoing open source, however, what it does mean is developing a structure for development, distribution, patching and support that passes muster with corporate IT managers who could be investing substantial amounts of money in open source.
What it boils down to is that while open source has definitely revolutionized software, and it is found internationally in companies large and small, businesses still pick software because it provides a solution not just because it is open source.
The fact that it is cheaper or free simply means the user will save money, but this does not win the favor of those buyers who could be injecting millions into open source projects rather than proprietary software makers.
I would use Firebird as a model. In an interview with Helen Borrie, forthcoming in my July column on SitePoint, she noted that since many Fortune 500 companies are using an open source database like Firebird speaks volumes to the maturing of their project and open source at large.
The reason as I see it, is due to the treatment of Firebird like an enterprise scale proprietary software project. They have a well managed developer community and active support lists, commercial offerings for support through partnerships with several companies, and commercial development projects for corporate clients.
If more open source projects looked at Borrie's team model and discipline in development and support, we just might see more penetration that attracts longer and more profitable contracts and work for those like us in the SitePoint community.
Comments
It will be more costly for a company to migrate away from Windows to Linux, even in light of slightly reduced ongoing maintenance and improved security and uptime.You mean relative to staying with Windows? Does this include recurring costs of Windows licensing / upgrades?
The costs are higher when factoring in re-certifying drivers, application integrity and training.On the drivers front, that assumes (if we're saying Linux cf. Windows) that systems need upgrades as frequently. There's generally less need to keep upgrading Linux, when used as a server.
Re application integrity, think thats very hard to research accurately - kind of a wooly comment that needs qualification.
On the training side, it's an interesting area where it's kind of like comparing Apples with Pears.
Windows generally hides administrators from much of what's really happening, so it's probably easier to train someone to the point where they're feeling confident but given serious problems, who do you turn to?
*Nix effectively exposes administrators to everything so more time is required to reach the point where sysadmins are confident. Once they reach that point though, they're typically capable of handling anything. The result is stable systems. I'd also argue that a single *Nix sysadmin is capable of maintaining a greater number of systems (scripts / automation etc.) although no figures to back that.
Firebird is an interesting example. The flip side of Firebirds way of doing things seems to be the Open Source "community" is largely unaware of it (compared to, say, MySQL).
Posted by: HarryF from phppatterns.com Jun 24th, 2004 @ 8:03 AM MDT
Comment
Yes - on costs - Linux was actually found to be more expensive in numerous cases compared to staying with Windows. This is unfortunate as I am a proponent of finding migration paths from Windows to Linux for stability and administration automation. However, the research did show the total cost of ownership eventually balances out, it simply is much more expensive at the outset than staying on a Windows upgrade path.
This survey (partially on site with staff and others via questionnaire) - 1000 companies with 5000 or more employees - found that they did have to certify drivers at the initial migration, certify all new disk images, provide training or certification to adhere to corporate policy, buy indemnification insurance, perform migrations, test, establish support contracts and finally, pay about a 15 percent premium when bringing in certified L:inux staff.
The benefit if the company decided to take the financial hit: over an extended period they experienced the benefits of Linux - uptime, experienced admins and flexibility of the platform.
Application integrity was ambiguous in the study - however - managers cited it constantly when trying to retire commercial Unix and move apps to Linux, needing certification that an entire applications runs exactly as before.
Perhaps it is time for the open source community to begin establishing central organizational points that act as clearinghouses - like Open Source Development labs does for Linux - to certify open source applications on a major scale.
Posted by: bwarrene from practicalapplications.net Jun 24th, 2004 @ 1:12 PM MDT
Comment
I beg to differ on Harry's view about Firebird. Firebird is not as popular as MySQL because 1) it's a newer project (project, not software) and 2) MySQL support comes built into PHP; no need for additional software. Firebird requires either recompilation or loading this DLL into the extension space.
Posted by: andrecruz Jun 24th, 2004 @ 9:37 PM MDT
Comment
It was nice to read about your chat with L... DiD... (why are we keeping her name secret?).
Second, I don't understand your distinction between Linux and Open Source. Maybe I'm slow or something, but what it seems to boil down to is:
"Open Source = unprofessional Proprietary = professional (unstated) Linux = open source, but starting to become professional despite itself by acting like proprietary."
Well I'll grant you there are a lot of unprofesssional Free Software projects out there; but the same is true of proprietary. Bad proprietary programs are slightly less likely to see the light of day, but there's still a bevy of them out there.
Now, on the assertion that Linux companies are succeeding by acting like proprietary companies: there's truth and non-truth to it. On the one hand, Red Hat and SuSE have no doubt learned a lot about management, marketing, and good business practices from established companies. On the other hand, an effective open source player does not act the same as an effective proprietary player: there are all kinds of issues with dealing with the developer community that are not an issue in the proprietary world: they bring plusses and minuses, but have to be dealt with rather than ignored.
And I will note that Red Hat, the most successful Linux distributor, is a pure-play Open Source vendor: they do not ship proprietary code. In fact, they devote a lot of developer time to a community distribution that they make no direct money on (but do get free testing from). Likewise, one of the first things Novell did after its so-far successful acquisition of SuSE was to GPL SuSE's proprietary installer. This suggests that while good management is indispensible in anythin, Open Source ventures should not be running off and trying to ape proprietary vendors blindly.
Finally, there's a big difference between the way mass-market shrinkwrapped proprietary software and the way big-iron stuff is. With big-iron stuff you often have consultants in the field, lots of direct customer feedback, maybe even code sharing under NDA with the client: in short, it works a lot like an Open Source project. And that's where Open Source has shined: *nix boxes, web servers, network infrastructure, compilers, developer tools, and increasingly RDMSes. With mass shrinkwrap you have to do much more seeking out of customer needs on your own and also be prepared to tell customers to shove it and wait for the next release. On stuff like this (desktop guis and apps) Open Source has been less successful.
At least one high-profile OSS desktop project (Mozilla) was a legendary quagmire for a long time and is only beginning to claw its way back. Many of the mistakes came from not being open to community input ("dammit, we don't need a whole platform, just a good browser") as any good project of any kind should be. Thing is, no one has a clear idea of how to be usefully open to community input on a mass-market OSS project yet: the twin dangers of adding every requested feature or my-way-or-the-highway-ism have been so far hard to avoid.
Personally, I think the question of the Open Source desktop is given too much importance. Windows server shipments still account for 60% of the market, so it's not like that area is all sewn up. A company that wants to avoid vendor lock-in would do best to migrate its server infrastructure first - that's gonna be least painful and probably highest long-term benefit. Then maybe desktop apps, the maybe desktop operating system.
On MySQL vs. Firebird: yes, MySQL is more widespread, but they're used for entirely different things.
Posted by: jmcginty Jun 25th, 2004 @ 12:34 PM MDT
Comment
I'm a bit confused to why you want to differentiate between Linux (eg. Red Hat) and Open Source.
Red Hat releases source packages and contributes largely to Open Source projects, both in resources as in code. Improvements by Red Hat are included in SuSE and vice versa. Everybody wins.
This ensures that Red Hat will have to be the best on its own merits. Competition will always be lurking around the corner to take over. Despite that, Red Hat is doing a good job.
You cannot compare this to proprietary vendors were your money goes into the big company bucket being used for the next version that you have to pay for again.
If I can choose I'd rather pay for services, if it guarantees that the money is used for Open Source development. If my Open Source vendor goes belly-up, its work is still available for anyone to use.
Paying for Open Source just guarantees you that you have freedom and are never tight to any vendor. Red Hat is just one example to show that the money is used for the good of the public.
And if you don't have deep pockets, there's still Fedora, CentOS, TaoLinux or Whitebox. Plenty of competition in the same vendor segment. Hard to beat IMO.
Posted by: Dag Wieers from dag.wieers.com Jun 26th, 2004 @ 3:57 AM MDT
Comment
One thing I notice that is never mentioned when talking about Windows vs. Linux TCO is virus & worm costs. Both the cost of AV s/w and clean-up after an infection sneaks into the corporate LAN. That *huge* expense will never be borne by a Linux shop.
Posted by: Ron Johnson Jun 26th, 2004 @ 7:56 AM MDT
HP Throws Weight Behind MySQL, JBoss
By Clint BoultonHP (Quote, Chart) stepped up its commitment to open source software Monday by pledging to offer and support the MySQL database server and JBoss application server software in its servers.
The Palo Alto, Calif. systems vendor said it has inked agreements with those open source purveyors to certify and support MySQL and JBoss software on its servers.
Jeffrey Wade, manager of Linux Marketing Communications at HP, said the certifications factor in the company's Linux reference architecture is a software stack that covers everything from the hardware to the operating system, drivers and management agents.
Deployed on HP ProLiant servers, the open source Linux Reference Architectures are based on software from MySQL, JBoss, Apache, and OpenLDAP. The company's commercial Linux Reference Architectures are based on product from Oracle, BEA and SAP.
Both MySQL and JBoss will join the HP Partner Program and receive joint testing and engineering support on HP's hardware systems.
Wade told internetnews.com the added layer of MySQL and JBoss support addresses one of the largest concerns customers have today in opting to pick open source technology over mainstay proprietary products such as Microsoft (Quote, Chart)Windows, Sun Microsystems' (Quote, Chart) Solaris or UNIX.
"We can provide support for that entire solution stack and we're also now giving our customers flexibility in choice and the types of solutions they want to deploy whether that's a commercial or open source application," Wade said.
Bob Bickel, vice president of strategy and corporate development at JBoss, said commercial use remains somewhat constrained because a CIO doesn't know whom they can turn to for support.
"They don't know who they can turn to for indemnification," Bickel told internetnews.com. "Yeah, it works great and it's cheap but what happens in the middle of their big selling season if something goes down. Who do they turn to and get it from. What HP's doing is taking an all encompassing view of this with certification and testing."
Testing keeps customers from guessing what version of a Java virtual machine, operating system, MySQL or JBoss product can all work together in a guaranteed way, Bickel explained.
MySQL Vice President of Marketing Zack Urlocker said companies such as Sabre are using an open source stack for business applications. Partnering with HP, then, provides great validation for MySQL and JBoss software.
"A couple of years ago the big knock on open source was that it might be good on the periphery or Web applications, but was not quite ready for business critical applications," Urlocker told internetnews.com. "Now, the No. 1 issues have been support. People who have had a lot of success with Linux are now looking at how to use a whole open source stack."
The deal is truly symbiotic. While MySQL and JBoss get backing from a technology driver such as HP, HP gets the added credibility of being cozy with open source, a label many enterprises and HP rivals, such as IBM (Quote, Chart) and Dell (Quote, Chart), are working toward.
Linux sales are trending tall regardless; according to recent hardware server and database software studies from high-tech research outfit Gartner.
Despite legal threats from SCO Group and competition from Microsoft, Gartner said Linux continued to be the growth powerhouse in the operating systems server market, with a revenue increase of 57.3 percent in the first quarter of 2004.
Gartner also found that Linux siphoned market share from UNIX in the relational database management system (RDBMS) market, a niche that grew 158 percent from $116 million in new license revenue in 2002 to nearly $300 million in 2003.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Documentation
| Document | Published | PDF Download |
|---|---|---|
| Software Package Manifest | May 21, 2008 | |
| Deployment Guide | May 21, 2008 | |
| Installation Guide | May 21, 2008 | |
| Virtualization Guide | May 21, 2008 | |
| Cluster Suite Overview | May 21, 2008 | |
| Cluster Administration | May 21, 2008 | |
| LVM Administrator's Guide | May 21, 2008 | |
| Global File System | May 21, 2008 | |
| Using GNBD with GFS | May 21, 2008 | |
| Linux Virtual Server Administration | May 21, 2008 | |
| Using Device-Mapper Multipath | May 21, 2008 | |
| Tuning and Optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle 9i and 10g Databases | Nov PDF |
Differences with Solaris
Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base
RedHat Solaris to Linux porting guide
Solaris to Linux porting guide: Intel perspective
[PDF] Migrating from Solaris to the Linux Standard Base
Oracle Migration from Solaris to Linux
Solaris to Linux migration guide
Redbook - Solaris to Linux Migration: A Guide for System Administrators
Guide to porting from Solaris to Linux on POWER
Guide to porting from Solaris to Linux on x86
Migration toolkits
binaryScan: The Solaris-to-Linux
binaryScan utility is used during the planning phase of the
transition. binaryScan scans any dynamically linked executables
on the Solaris operating system and produces a report that highlights the
number and nature of compatibility issues with Linux. The database included
in binaryScan for the Solaris-to-Linux transition covers more
than 90 libraries and 14,000 APIs. libc, libsocket, libthread, and
libpthread.make utility on Linux.
Note: The use of the Solaris-to-Linux transition tools is restricted to transitions to Linux on HP platforms. For information on how to obtain these tools, contact your HP representatives and ask them to send us a feedback form, using the "Solaris-to-Linux" qualifyer in the subject line.
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Last modified: November 08, 2008