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Ubuntu Server BoF at Velocity 2010 « Ubuntu Server Blog.

So, in my role at Canonical, I’ve been asked to package some of the hotter “web 2.0″ and “cloud” server technologies for Ubuntu‘s next release, 10.10, aka “Maverick Meerkat”.

While working on this, I’ve discovered something very frustrating from a packaging point of view thats been going on with fast moving open source projects. It would seem that rather than produce stable API’s that do not change, there is a preference to dump feature after feature into libraries and software products Continue reading

“because we believe that all web applications should take security seriously. Today we’re open sourcing a piece of software, Grendel, that we think can help many sites (not just financial applications) protect users’ data from a RockYou-style mass disclosure in a simple way.”

Pretty interesting stuff.. and makes perfect sense for those websites out there playing russian roulette with their users’ data…

YouTube – RSA Animate – Drive.

• btrfs – BTRFS is pretty awesome, with filesystem level snapshotting and compression, it promises to make some waves on the server and small devices. Unfortunately, its still marked as EXPERIMENTAL by its own developers, and there are known bugs. However, you can choose to play with it in Ubuntu 10.04, which should be helpful for people finding and submitting bugs so the developers can feel better about people using it. There is a desire to have it as the default filesystem for the next Ubuntu LTS release, which is pretty exciting.
• Monitoring is too easy – Any time I see 10+ implementations of the same idea, I figure its probably something that is easy enough that people tend to write their own instead of searching for a solution. Monitoring and graphing seem to be in this category, with many solutions such as nagios, opennms, zenoss, munin, ganglia… the list goes on and on. We talked a lot about what to do in Ubuntu Server to make sure this is done well and makes sense, and basically ran out of time. The best part of the session though, was that we decided to focus on solving the data collection problem first, so each server takes responsibility for itself, and then allow centralized aggregation on another level.
• Server Community – There is some desire to have people test Ubuntu Server before a release, especially for the LTS releases. A beta program was proposed, but there is some doubt (my own included) that this will actually get people to test before the .0 release. Basically I have to think that as a server admin, people aren’t interested in even trying something in an unstable state. They’ll take the .0 and build a new server rev, but they’re not going to go around upgrading stable servers. This needs more thought and discussion definitely.

Sitting in the first session for Wednesday now listening to a session about the next 6 months of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and Eucalyptus development. Very exciting stuff!

After about 16 hours in the air and waiting on the tarmac, I arrived here in Brussels, Belgium for my first day on the job at Canonical.

I actually really love the feeling one gets when pushed to their limits of sleep deprivation. For me, my ego tends to shrink and go away after this long without sleep. I did catch a few winks on the plane, but they were mostly drunken winks, so they weren’t quite as restful as, say stretching out on a pile of broken glass. With the sun hanging in the air while my body wanted it to be under foot safely blocked out by a ball of mud, magma and water, I arrived feeling pretty much like I was in outer space.

That feeling was rather fitting, given that the first Canonical employee I met at lunch was none other than Mark Shuttleworth, who actually *has* been in outer space. Continue reading

Multiple identities in one account with Apple Mail.app : Jonathan.inspect.

Ok, I’m feeling a little silly that I never re-googled this. Apparently Mail.app can very easily do multiple email accounts.. though its completely non-obvious.

Who knew that sometimes even Apple requires you to RTFM.

I just happened upon a site that mentioned bubbl.us as a way to brainstorm. Cool tool. I played with it and decided I wanted to keep the data I had put in it to play with later, but was annoyed that I had to create yet another user id+email+password combination on yet another site that I probably won’t visit again for a long while. Plus, say I want to add it onto my facebook wall. Facebook might be able to extract the images, but they might now. How lame is that?

My current solution for the login problem is less than ideal. I use the java program Password Safe to save my accounts+passwords, which it generates randomly. The pass phrase for my password safe is pretty complex, and I change it on about an annual basis. The program re-locks the safe after 5 minutes of inactivity, so this is reasonably safe against casual compromise. Of course, keyboard shoulder surfing and a subsequent theft of my machine (or temporary control) could render it useless, but I’m willing to accept those risks and do what I can to maintain control of the laptop. If somebody steals my laptop, unless they can crack the encryption quickly, I feel pretty good that I’ll have enough time to restore from backup, change all the passwords, and set a new combination.

However, this is basically as good as our current “status quo” of online fractured identity can get. And I still don’t have anything to bring all of my online presence together.
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Ding ding ding.. in this corner, wearing black shorts and a giant schema, we have over 11 million records in MySQL with a complex set of rules governing which must be searchable and which must not be. And in that corner, we have the contender, a kid from the back streets, outweighed and out reached by all his opponents, but still victorious in the queue shootout, with just open source, and 12 patch releases.. written in C, its gearman!

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Queues seem to be all over the place right now. Maybe its like when I wanted a VW GTi VR6 a few years back. I kept seeing them pass me on the freeway and thought “crap, everybody is getting this hot new thing and I’m missing out!”.

I think everybody at one point looked at MySQL and tought.. “that would work fine as a queue system”. For low volume stuff, it *is* fine. But then somebody grabs your little transactional, relational, reliable queue system and plugs 5 million messages per hour through it, and somewhere, a man name Heikki cries.

So then you start to look around.. and for those of us who have meager budgets and tend to use open source, there aren’t a lot of choices. Continue reading