Linux Blimp

December is coming, which means one of my favorite holidays, Christmas, is fairly imminent. While I enjoy spending time with family to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, I’d be lying if I said I don’t like getting presents. Heck, I really enjoy giving gifts too.

Not all Christmas gifts need to be physical — sometimes a Linux distribution can be equally rewarding! Case in point, today, we learn Linux Mint 19.1 — which is named “Tessa” — will be released around Christmastime. In addition, the Mint developers have launched an official Patreon account as a new way to get funding from users. More importantly, there are some significant upcoming improvements to the Cinnamon desktop environment.

“Following the many requests we received to look into an alternative to Paypal, we’re happy to announce Linux Mint is now on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint. Our project received 33 pledges so far and we decided to use this service to help support Timeshift, a project which is very important to us and adds significant value to Linux Mint,” says Clement Lefebvre.

ALSO READ: IBM gobbles up open source and Linux darling Red Hat in $34 billion deal

Lefebvre further says, “Cinnamon 4.0 will look more modern thanks to a new panel layout. Whether you enjoy the new look or prefer the old one, we want everyone to feel at home in their operating system, so you’ll have the option to embrace the change or to click a button to make Cinnamon look just like it did before. The idea of a larger and darker panel had been in the roadmap for a while.”

To learn more about upcoming Linux Mint changes, you can read the official blog post here. Are you excited for a holiday season full of Linux Mint goodness? Please tell me your thoughts in the comments below

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Last updated October 18, 2018

A couple days ago, Lucas Holt announced the release of MidnightBSD 1.0. Let’s take a quick look at what is included in this new release.

What is MidnightBSD?

MidnightBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. Lucas created MightnightBSD to be an option for desktop users and for BSD newbies. He wanted to create something that would allow people to quickly get a desktop experience on BSD. He believed that other options had too much of a focus on the server market.

What is in MidnightBSD 1.0?

According to the release notes, most of the work in 1.0 went towards updating the base system, improving the package manager and updating tools. The new release is compatible with FreeBSD 10-Stable.

Mports (MidnightBSD’s package management system) has been upgraded to support installing multiple packages with one command. The mport upgrade command has been fixed. Mports now tracks deprecated and expired packages. A new package format was also introduced.

Other changes include:

• ZFS is now supported as a boot file system. Previously, ZFS could only be used for additional storage.
• Support for NVME SSDs
• AMD Ryzen and Radeon support have been improved.
• Intel, Broadcom, and other drivers updated.
• bhyve support has been ported from FreeBSD
• The sensors framework was removed because it was causing locking issues.
• Sudo was removed and replaced with doas from OpenBSD.
• Added support for Microsoft hyper-v

Before you upgrade…

If you are a current MidnightBSD user or are thinking of trying out the new release, it would be a good idea to wait. Lucas is currently rebuilding packages to support the new package format and tooling. He also plans to upgrade packages and ports for the desktop environment over the next couple of months. He is currently working on porting Firefox 52 ESR because it is the last release that does not require Rust. He also hopes to get a newer version of Chromium ported to MidnightBSD. I would recommend keeping an eye on the MidnightBSD Twitter feed.

What happened to 0.9?

You might notice that the previous release of MidnightBSD was 0.8.6. Now, you might be wondering “Why the jump to 1.0”? According to Lucas, he ran into several issues while developing 0.9. In fact, he restarted it several times. He ending up taking CURRENT in a different direction than the 0.9 branch and it became 1.0. Some packages also had an issue with the 0.* numbering system.

Help Needed

Currently, the MidnightBSD project is the work of pretty much one guy, Lucas Holt. This is the main reason why development has been slow. If you are interested in helping out, you can contact him on Twitter.

In the release announcement video. Lucas said that he had encountered problems with upstream projects accepting patches. They seem to think that MidnightBSD is too small. This often means that he has to port an application from scratch.

Thoughts

I have a thing for the underdog. Of all the BSDs that I have interacted with, that monicker fits MidnightBSD the most. One guy trying to create an easy desktop experience. Currently, there is only one other BSD trying to do something similar: Project Trident. I think that this is a real barrier to BSDs success. Linux succeeds because people can quickly and easily install it. Hopefully, MidnightBSD does that for BSD, but right now it has a long way to go.

Have you ever used MidnightBSD? If not, what is your favorite BSD? What other BSD topics should we cover? Let us know in the comments below.

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FreeBSD is an open source and server oriented operating system derived from BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.

Distributed as installable or Live CDs for five architectures

The project is distributed as installable only CD ISO image that support the 32-bit/x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), 64-bit/amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), IA-64 (ia64), PPC (PowerPC), and SPARC instruction set architectures.

It is also essential to mention that this operating system is not a Linux distribution, and it features several stable branches. While the 10.x branch delivers all the latest BSD technologies and it is considered the latest stable release, the 9.x and 8.x branches have been classified as legacy releases.

Boot options

The operating system provides users with a text-mode, minimal boot menu from where they can boot into the multi user or single user environments, drop to a shell prompt for system rescuing tasks, choose a stable or old kernel, as well as to reboot the machine.

Additionally, you can configure various boot options, such as support for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), safe mode, single user and verbose. After the system boots, you will be asked if want to install the distribution of use the live environment.

Bottom line

Summing up, FreeBSD is without no doubt an advanced operating system that powers some of the most modern desktop, server and embedded systems around the world. Thanks to its state-of-the-art security and advanced features, FreeBSD is used by a plethora of powerful companies to deliver modern services, as well as to respond to changing needs and demands.

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Choosing the right software-defined storage (SDS) solution for your business can’t be a snap decision—your choice will affect the way you manage data and how your organization grows for many years to come. It’s critical to ask some hard questions; namely, what is the value of undergoing a switch to this vendor’s SDS solution versus going with the other guys?

As the IT director of an enterprise company, you likely have a paramount priority in making the selection: getting the best ROI. And that objective relies on two factors: dependability of the supplier and reliability of the solution.

Our dependability drives your success

There are a lot of SDS solutions out there—but not all of them have a handle on what an enterprise needs. One option, for instance, is a free version of Ceph, today’s most popular open source distributed storage solution. It’s certainly an attractive price point at first glance, but you’ll end up spending a lot of additional time and money if you don’t have the DIY skills or highly specialized knowledge to solve all your own issues .

Your supplier should have a solid understanding of enterprise storage challenges and the ways organizations are managing the current explosion of business data. The real measure of a Ceph solution is the vendor’s capacity for enterprise support, as well as their investment in integration, certification, and management tools.

As the first supplier to bring Ceph-based (SDS) storage to virtually any operating system, SUSE is an industry leader in SDS solutions—which means we are also established, dependable and committed to enhancing SUSE Enterprise Storage as SDS technology evolves. When we first began offering SUSE Enterprise Storage, Ralf Flaxa, SUSE’s vice president of engineering at the time, said,

“SUSE’s leadership as the first to provide heterogeneous OS support is an indicator of our commitment to solving issues customers actually face. … SUSE Enterprise Storage provides the best of the Ceph project, tested and supported for enterprise customers.”[1]

Solution reliability boosts ROI, too

You look for a dependable SDS supplier because its solutions will be reliable—which also plays a big part in ROI. The more you can rely on your solution to make storage easier and more efficient, the better your overall ROI.

Our early adoption of SDS solutions means we’ve had more time to refine and improve SUSE Enterprise Storage. Powered by Ceph technology, SUSE Enterprise Storage is extensively scalable from storage appliance to cost-effective cloud solution. With each release, we’ve broadened its scope and use cases, and today it is the ideal solution for simplifying compliance and scaling the storage of archive, backup and large data file applications without limitations.

Enhanced ROI through savings of time and money

SUSE Enterprise Storage streamlines storage to reduce management and operational costs. You can realize significant CAPEX savings by using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives that are at least 30 percent less expensive than average-capacity-optimized NAS solutions and at least 50 percent less expensive than average-capacity-optimized mid-range disk arrays.[2] SUSE Enterprise Storage helps you avoid vendor lock-in so you can choose the most economic hardware and maintain flexibility to repurpose if business priorities change.

The solution also makes it easy for your enterprise to adapt to changing business and data demands by automatically optimizing, upgrading or adding storage when you need it, without disruption. And it helps reduce downtime and keep performance high with self-managing and self-healing capabilities that automatically respond to fluctuating storage demands.

With less expensive components and easier, more automatic management, SUSE’s SDS solution delivers an excellent ROI with big savings in IT time and costs of management and maintenance. With better storage for less time and money, your enterprise can free up resources toward accelerating innovation and building the business in ways to keep it competitive for a long time.

[1] “SUSE Enterprise Storage 2 First to Bring Ceph-Based Storage to Any OS,” SUSE press release, November 3, 2015.

[2] “SUSE Enterprise Storage 3,” SUSE media presentation

 

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Six New Members, including State Farm Insurance & Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Now Support Leading Enterprise Blockchain Project

SAN FRANCISCO – (October 30, 2018) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today announced six more organizations have joined the community. The newest members represent the balance of blue chip, entrepreneurial and technology-focused organizations that are at the core of Hyperleder’s diverse ecosystem.

Hyperledger is a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort that includes 10 business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. These projects are the result of the hands-on work of contributors around the world who develop and maintain the code for the frameworks and tools as well as provide governance and organizational resources. To date, the community has made thousands of code contributions, adding up to millions of lines of code. This collective development effort most recently delivered the releases of Hyperledger Fabric 1.3.

“Our growing, diverse and active community is what powers Hyperledger,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “Preparing for the first Hyperledger Global Forum has really brought the scope and scale of all this community has accomplished into focus. Everything from the advances to the core technology to the diverse use cases and the increasing success stories to community-led training and collaboration underscore Hyperledger’s growing momentum. The latest members bring even more energy and diversity to the table, helping advance enterprise blockchain adoption worldwide.”

Hyperledger enables organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases. The latest general members to join the community are: CENCON BLOCKCHAIN GROUP, State Farm Insurance and Vered Information Technology.

Hyperledger supports an open community that values contributions and participation from various entities. As such, pre-approved non-profits, open source projects and government entities can join Hyperledger at no cost as associate members. Associate members joining this month include CPqD, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and Information Technologies Institute, a member of Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH).

New member quotes:

CENCON BLOCKCHAIN GROUP

“Being a chainist and an innovator in blockchain, CENCON is honored to be a new member of Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation community, which has so many technology giants and industry leaders,” said Jacky XU, Founder and CEO of CENCON BLOCKCHAIN GROUP. “CENCON’s target customers are entity entrepreneurs with high values of brand, credit and fixed assets. With the support of Hyperledger, The Linux Foundation community and the power of blockchain technologies, CENCON is achieving its vision and mission to be greater through the ‘CENCON One Touch Blockchain System’ and the ‘CENCON New Trust Business Ecosystem.’”

State Farm

“State Farm believes the financial and insurance industries are poised for blockchain disruption. We are rapidly approaching a window of opportunity to help shape blockchain innovations,” says State Farm Innovation Executive Mike Fields. “Through strategic relationships with consortiums and other blockchain-related groups, State Farm is looking to collaborate and explore with organizations to learn and better understand what this type of technology can do for our organizations and customers.”

Vered Information Technologies

“We are pleased to join the Hyperledger community,” said Chen Heng, CEO of Bigtree Finance, a subsidiary of Vered Holdings Corporation. “Dedicated to the practice of blockchain technology, Bigtree Finance focuses on the industrialization of technology and commits itself to the in-depth integration of blockchain, big data, cloud computing and AI to provide Fintech service to supply chains all over the world. We have developed Biglock Blockchain Platform, a consortium blockchain for supply chain finance, and are applying this technology to ensure genuine trade data by verification so as to minimize the information asymmetry in transactions. Since the second half of 2017, we have successfully employed Biglock Blockchain Platform in many substantial business models and promoted it actively to many other industry segments. We look forward to dialogue and cooperation with the Hyperledger community to further promote the practice of ‘blockchain + supply chain finance’ in other sectors.”

Join industry peers in helping build and shape the ecosystem for blockchain technologies, use cases and applications. More information on joining Hyperledger as a member organization can be found here: https://www.hyperledger.org/members/join.

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

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Published: October 30, 2018

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O’Reilly conducted a recent survey[1] of operations professionals, and the results offer useful information and insights to empower your career planning.

Scripting languages are the most popular programming languages among respondents, with Bash being the most used (66% of respondents), followed by Python (63%), and JavaScript (42%).

Go is used by 20% of respondents, and those who use Go tend to have one of the higher median salaries at $102,000, similar to LISP and Swift. This could be related to the types of companies that are pushing these programming languages. Google and Apple, for example, are very large companies and, as noted, salary and company size are related.

And what about the operating system in which respondents work? Linux tops the charts at 87% usage. Windows is also used frequently (63%), often as a mix between workstations and servers, and in some cases as a front end for Linux/Unix servers.

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Posted On: Oct 25, 2018

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) now allows clusters to be created in a Amazon VPC addressed with additional IPv4 CIDR blocks in the 100.64.0.0/10 and 198.19.0.0/16 ranges. This allows customers additional flexibility in configuring the networking for their EKS clusters.

The CIDR blocks supported by Amazon VPC are here, in the table titled IPv4 CIDR Block Association Restrictions.

Previously, EKS customers could only create clusters in VPCs that were addressed with RFC 1918 private IP address ranges. This meant customers were often unable to allocate sufficient private IP address space to support the number of Kubernetes pods managed by EKS.

Now, customers can create EKS clusters in Amazon VPCs addressed with CIDR blocks in the 100.64.0.0/10 and 198.19.0.0/16 ranges. This gives customers more available IP addresses for their pods managed by Amazon EKS and more flexibility for networking architectures. Additionally, by adding secondary CIDR blocks to a VPC from the 100.64.0.0/10 and 198.19.0.0/16 ranges, in conjunction with the CNI Custom Networking feature, it is possible for pods to no longer consume any RFC 1918 IP addresses in a VPC.

For more information about Amazon EKS networking, visit the documentation.

Please visit the AWS region table to see all AWS regions where Amazon EKS is available.

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IBM today announced it would be acquiring iconic Linux firm Red Hat in a $34 billion all-cash deal.

According to a joint statement issued by both companies, IBM will pay $190 for each share of Red Hat, with Big Blue intending to absorb its latest purchase into its Hybrid Cloud division.

[NEWS] @IBM to acquire Red Hat and become the world’s leading #hybridcloud provider. https://t.co/goihRICRr3 https://t.co/G8SKS5gsVk pic.twitter.com/GJL4UmBu1B

— Red Hat, Inc. (@RedHat) October 28, 2018

This move is huge for IBM. After spending the past ten years delving into the worlds of artificial intelligence (via Watson) and blockchain with little to show for it, the company is returning to an area where it’s traditionally excelled — enterprise services.

Red Hat, although not quite a household name, is an undeniably significant company, with lots of fingers in lots of pies, especially when it comes to cloud computing and the Linux ecosystem.

The gem in its crown is arguably the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider OpenShift, which directly competes with the Salesforce-owned Heroku and Google App Engine. It also owns and develops Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is employed across several commercial settings, including workstations, servers, and supercomputers.

It’s also worth noting that this is by no means an exhaustive list. Over its 25 years, Red Hat has invested heavily in a variety of enterprise-friendly technologies — from containers and serverless computing, to storage and big data file systems. Thanks to this acquisition, IBM is getting its hands on all of them.

Beyond the two companies, this acquisition has massive implications for the Linux ecosystem.

After all, Red Hat is an enthusiastic contributor to several major Linux projects, playing a role in developing Libre Office and GNOME, as well as the Kernel itself.

For context, in 2016, Red Hat was the second most prolific contributor to the Linux Kernel, narrowly trailing silicon mega-titan Intel.

Understandably, many are wondering what this acquisition means for these projects. After all, IBM is no stranger to shifting priorities, and it isn’t afraid to scale back its efforts and workforce as the market dictates. Just ask the OS/2 team.

I’m no clairvoyant, but I don’t think there’s much to worry about here. For starters, both Red Hat and IBM has emphatically stressed that for Red Hat’s open source contributions, things will be very much business as usual. Here’s the pertinent paragraph from the press release:

“With this acquisition, IBM will remain committed to Red Hat’s open governance, open source contributions, participation in the open source community and development model, and fostering its widespread developer ecosystem. In addition, IBM and Red Hat will remain committed to the continued freedom of open source, via such efforts as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network.”

Worried Linux enthusiasts and developers can also look at IBM’s track record, which is impressive.

Big Blue has historically been a stalwart contributor to Linux and several Linux-related projects. The company first announced its support for the free operating system in 1999, back when Microsoft Windows reigned triumphant across both desktop and server, and Linux was nowhere near as mature as it is today.

By 2008, IBM employed around 600 developers working across over 100 Linux projects, including Xen, the Linux Toolchain, Apache, Eclipse, and the kernel itself.

And weirdly enough, back in 2001, it hired Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actor Avery Brooks as part of a $210 million advertising blitz, where he narrated an advertisement touting the company’s enthusiasm for Linux.

In short, Linux is in IBM’s lifeblood. It has been for an extremely long time. Over the past nineteen years, the company has spent millions — possibly billions — supporting the Linux ecosystem by donating money and developer time.

While it didn’t exactly do this from a place of pure altruism, the fact remains that IBM has had an undeniably positive impact on Linux. Moving forward, it’ll be interesting to see what the acquisition of Red Hat means for iconic tech company, as well for the broader Linux ecosystem.

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Hot Clone is the term used to describe to completely clone a Linux server using r-sync across the network. This is useful in situations which you would like to create a clone with little to no downtime that would be typical of taking the original server offline. You can use this to perhaps move a single server in to a cluster environment or certain situation in which you want to upgrade or reduce drives etc.

This guide makes a couple assumptions:

First both servers need to have the same disk configuration. Either both servers use hardware raid, software raid, or single disks. They typically need to match.

The new server should have the same major install release as the source server. So both servers would be CentOS 6.x or both need to be 7.x.

The new server has hard drive partitions in a the same format as the old server and they are either the same size or can accommodate all of the used space on the source system.

Prepare the systems:

Install needed software packages on both servers:

yum install -y rsync

On the server you want to copy from perform the following:

Create and edit /root/exclude-files.txt and add the following:

/boot
/dev
/tmp
/sys
/proc
/backup
/etc/fstab
/etc/mtab
/etc/mdadm.conf
/etc/sysconfig/network*

This excludes files which directly pertain to the source system and should not be copied to the new system.

Hot Clone the server:

Once you have saved that file you can go ahead and rsync to the server you want to copy to:

rsync -vPa -e ‘ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no’ –exclude-from=/root/exclude-files.txt / DESTINATIONIP:/

This will rsync over everything from the source system to the new system. The size of the drives and load on the servers will determine how long the copy will take. Be sure to update DESTINATIONIP with the IP address or hostname of the server you are copying to.

After the rsync has completed you can reboot the freshly copied system to have it load everything that has been copied. If you were going to replace the old system with the new system and wanted the same IP addresses, host name etc to be used, you would then remove /etc/sysconfig/network* from the exclusion file.

Once the new server is back up from the reboot. Go ahead and login using the old servers login credentials and verify everything is working as expected.

Apr 30, 2017LinuxAdmin.io

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