I had the privilege of giving not one but two talks at the Red Hat Summit–both about open source systems management topics. A good deal of this content was also shared with a different audience at FudCON–the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. This was a great trip to Boston, and a fantastic chance to talk with users, administrators, and developers of all types.
The first talk I had a part in was Func, which I co-presented with Adrian Likins. Func, as mentioned before in Red Hat Magazine, is an API for controlling lots of nodes for arbitrary systems management tasks. It is ideally suited for replacing legacy SSH infrastructure as well as building new network applications that require secure network communications infrastructure.
We gave an overview for folks that hadn’t heard of Func before, and showed off several examples of things you can do with the Python API. Interest in Func is growing, and lots of folks are using it in ways we hadn’t originally intended (which is, of course, the idea). » Read more
Product: Red Hat Directory Server
Version: 8.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 5
Creating new directory server instances can be done from the command line, with the script setup-ds-admin.pl as described in the Installation Guide, 6.2.1. Creating a New Directory Server Instance
If you are unable to register a new Red Hat Directory Server 8.0 instance with the script setup-ds-admin.pl to a remote configuration server, build
Red Hat-Directory/8.0.0 B2007.353.1757 » Read more
This article is a follow-up to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 utilizes nested paging on AMD Barcelona Processor to improve performance of virtualized guests.
With new hardware releases, customers are faced with situations in which they want to take advantage of increased speeds but are forced to stay on older hardware because their operating environments are not supported on the newer hardware. Virtualizing their operating environment helps them get past this issue. Virtualization also helps them:
RHEL 5 virtualization lets customers virtualize their existing systems and take advantage of the benefits mentioned above. » Read more
Last month, I wrote about confining the user with SELinux. I explained that–as of Fedora 9–SELinux supports the concept of the confined user and comes with 5 confined user types defined.
These confined users are a great starting point, but what if you want to create a confined user with different privileges? » Read more
By default, gnome-terminal does not spawn a login shell. To use a login shell for all gnome-terminal windows for a particular user in gnome-terminal, you can use gnome-terminal preferences dialog:
"Edit" -> "Current Profile" -> "Title and Command" and select "Run command as a login shell"
Alternatively, using the command line tool "gconftool-2" will achieve the same result:
# gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/login_shell true
To set this as a default option for all users, use gconftool-2 to set the default value of the key "login_shell" to "true" in the GConf database. As root, run the following command:
# gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --type boolean --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/login_shell true
Users will still be able to change that default value on a per user basis using the preference dialog in gnome-terminal. » Read more
Hot off the presses, Summit slide decks:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kernel Performance Optimization [PDF] - John Shakshober and Larry Woodman
Why Computers Are Getting Slower (And What We Can Do About It) [PDF] - Rik Van Riel
The Virtualization Toolbox. Open Source Solutions for Managing Virtual Environments [PDF 1] [PDF 2] - Dan Berrange and Richard Jones
Func - the Fedora Universal Network Connector [PDF] - Michael DeHann and Adrian Likins
Dynamic Grid Computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 [PDF] - Bryan Che
Missed the show? Catch up with our videos or check out the full list of available slide decks. We’ll be adding more of our (and your) favorites as they come in. » Read more
As promised, we have the first of the slide decks from the Summit sessions:
Cobbler: Provisioning for Bare Metal and Virtualization
[ODP] slides by Michael DeHaan from his talk given Thursday June 19, 10:15 a.m.
And we still have a few more news items and blog entries about the Summit:
Today Creative Commons launched the Case Studies Project, a large community effort to explore and document the use of Creative Commons around the world. At the same time, Creative Commons Australia is holding a conference on “Building an Australasian Commons.” There the project is being announced with the publication of a publicly available booklet featuring some of the best global case studies.
Despite having just launched, the site is already full of studies. A few you’ve heard of. Most you probably haven’t. Here are a few I thought were interesting:
- Architecture for Humanity. “Design like you give a damn.” Co-founder Cameron Sinclair won a 2006 TED prize for the project. How do they use CC? “We use the Developing Nations licence for the designs of our buildings. Once the first prototype building is completed, we can essentially give away the designs to other communities in other developing nations.”
- Blender. If you’ve done any 3D animation, you know about this successful open source project. The entire production files of two movies–Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny–are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
- The University of Southern Queensland OpenCourseWare. This project applies the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia license to ten courses. From October 2007 to March 2008, there were over 26,000 visitors to the site. The most popular class? C++.
The Case Studies Project is set up wiki-style, so it’s just waiting for your contributions.
