undertakingyou

This year I am again helping with the Utah Open Source Conference. I am very excited as we fast approach the dates. Here is the skinny: October 8-10 at Salt Lake Community College Miller Campus. The theme is Affordability, Scalability, Reliability and we have a slew of people that submitted abstracts for presentations. To those that did submit I say thank you.

So, please register to come. I think that you will find it quite affordable. There is an early bird discount until Sept 19th. And if you are part of a local user group (such as sllug) you can get an additional 50% discount. Very cool, very cheap.

See http://2009.utosc.com for more information.

So, I was talking with Davey Larkin the other day and figured out the real difference between FOSS and proprietary software: Solution VS. Toolbox.

Really, lets take for example photos. In Apple I can use iPhoto. That is it for any kind of photo management. It is part of the Apple iTakeover. With Linux though you can used FSpot, Gthumb, flPhoto, kPhotoAlbum, digiKam, imgSeek, Desktop Flickr Organizer, or Album Shaper. Admittedly I haven’t tried all of them. But I could if I wanted to.

Again, proprietary software gives you a solution and says, this is what you use. FOSS gives you a toolbox and says, “have fun”.

So, it happened again to me. I get an email that says “please check the attached flier” and there is a Word document in docx format attached.

Any time that I tell people that Word documents are the worst possible attachment I get this puzzled look and a “Why?” After I explain that there is no guarantee that others will have Word, or the same version of Word, and that there is no Guarantee that they will have the some fonts and that in the end your preciously made flyer ends up looking like crap. I then get another puzzled look and a “What? How do I send it then?” I then tell them that PDF is the way to go and then you have to explain how to make the PDF. Thus far I have found it easier to just tell them to never send me emails again and that we are no longer friends.

So, how can I say, “Your attachment sucks” without going through the pain of becoming their new support guy?

Microsoft goes to feds looking for a handout

Ha Ha Ha! That is all.

So at work, we had an Avaya IP Office 400 series phone system. It works well enough, and allows us to transfer phones between all of our locations and companies. This last week I have been working hard at getting our upgraded unit in. We are now on an Avaya IP Office 500 series phone system. So, you would think that with an upgrade we would be able to do all that we did before and more right? No, Avaya changed their licensing between the two releases. Now we can’t transfer to our other locations unless the condition is just right. If we want to buy one of these licenses it would cost us $2700 additional dollars.

Unfortunately asterisk is not an option according to management. They feel that the price of a license and service agreement is better than the price of expertise.

But the long and the short is, with FOSS I can do whatever, whenever and however I want. Gosh I love freedom!

I have several eBooks. I don’t like eBooks for my general reading. There is something to me about the feel and smell of the paper. But at work, rather than have an entire bookshelf of reference materials it is just nice to have a digital book on the laptop. That way I can not only use the index but also do a full text search. Handy.

In my personal eBook library I have things like “MySQL in a Nutshell”, “Linux Kernel in a Nutshell” and “Apache Cookbook”. Remembering where these books are stored or what format they are in can sometimes be an interesting task for me. That is where calibre is so handy.

Calibre is a “e-book library manager” that has a slick interface. It easily gives you plenty of information about your books. It can also edit meta data, convert formats, transfer to your eBook Reader and get eBooks off of the web for you. I have mine to download the Linux Magazine but there are sources for everything from periodicals to daily newspapers. Another benefit is its easy install. It has native binaries for several distro’s but if yours isn’t one of them well, it has a really easy python install. One command and you are done.

The only thing that I have found that I don’t like is that I can’t just double-click a book name in the viewer and have it open. I have to right click and say view book. Small price to pay I guess. And as I think about it my other problem is I will have to get a reader so I can try the book transfer feature.

So, one of the features that I really really have enjoyed about banshee is the full screen mode when playing music. What is so nice about that? Well, it disables my screensaver and then shows a very nice picture of the cover art, and shows the song name, artist and album.

I have used this as background music for company. Everyone can see it and enjoy not only the music but see who it is if they are interested.

Turning on full screen mode is easy. When playing music go to the ‘Now Playing’ tab and then just click ‘Full Screen’. To close it just click ‘Leave Full Screen’. It is a cool little feature that easily turns my computer into a multimedia center.

The other day I wrote a post about Mac OS and it quietly suggesting that people install anti-virus software. I want to bring up this link shown to me by my friend JC. In short, Apple has removed the knowledge-base article suggesting Mac OS users install anti-virus software. The reason that they removed this is that “The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box.”

Joseph brought up a great question, why are Operating Systems built on a *nix kernel more secure against malicious software than Windows. I think there are some fundamental reasons why this is true. First, Unix/Linux OS are actually multi user. Yep, I would contend that even though Windows can have ‘multiple’ users, it is not actually a multi user operating system. Let me explain. Unless you actually have a SysAdmin that is going to change it, Windows by default will let anyone look at, write to, and execute any file regardless of who’s file it is (Windows files don’t actually have ‘owners’). So, who cares that it isn’t a multi user system? Well, instead of having programs that are restricted to specific services based on which user it is actually running under any program can do anything and has access to any service.

With any file having access to anything it brings up the second point. Unix style systems keep the operating system separate from the other programs. Windows does not protect itself in any way. It will let any program install and even change vital system dll’s within the Windows32 folder. Further more it will do this with no verification that this is actually being run by someone with proper authority.

Now any system could be compromised depending on what software is run. It is important to know and trust where software is coming from. Most Linux/Unix software comes from online repositories that are verified by GPG key. If someone has changed the repository the package management system will throw up a warning. Furthermore the majority of software that is not received from an online repository will give an md5 sum to verify that the package hasn’t been tampered with. By way of contrast Windows updates, and software for windows received off the internet has no verification method whatsoever.

I’m sure that more experience will lend to more reasons for greater system strength. If anyone has further thoughts on this I would love to hear it.

Linux in the enterprise may have one big hold back, a lack of qualified professionals. James, the network admin at SLCC, brought up the point that even if you do get Open Source software up and running in your enterprise the guy that actually sets it up and knows about it leaves and you don’t have an admin any more.

To some this may be a valid point, but I would disagree. Linux has built in documentation with ‘man pages’. Take that coupled with the community knowledge which is shared via forums, wiki’s, and irc channels and there is a wealth of information only a few keystrokes away. If that isn’t enough companies like Guru Labs offer training on just about anything to do with linux administration. Still want more? Specifically someone to point the finger at? Then this is the perfect place for companies such as Red Hat and Novell, which sell their admin services as well as entire enterprise solutions.

Now I have Admined smaller business systems, 50 to 100 users. And the guys I was chatting with are dealing with 60,000 users. But really, every enterprise is already using a certain amount of Open Source software. And the only excuse that anyone can’t be a linux professional is that they can’t read, type, and they’re lazy.

So, continuing the last post. Open Source Software is already tried and tested in the enterprise arena. BIND for DNS. LDAP and Kerberos are used for central authorization (these are the technologies under Microsoft’s active directory). Samba for network shares and network printing. Apache runs 50.4% of the web. MySQL database has 40% market share for developers and 33% for deployment. Then there is squid, a popular proxy server and proftpd for an ftp server.

In addition to these software pieces, many appliances run on *nix kernels and utilize various Open Source technologies. SLCC uses a Barracuda spam filter that runs on a linux kernel and uses a combination of proprietary and open source software to filter spam. Likely that this includes SpamAssassin and ClamAV. It also uses LDAP.

So with all these tried and trued open source products why is it that linux is not ready for the enterprise market?