Fedora release 12 became available to the public November 17, 2009. New features are plentiful and many are centred around KVM virtualization.

If you are like me and still running Fedora 10 or 11 and do not wish to wait till a yum based update is pushed out you can kick off your adventure into Fedora 12 land manually. Set aside at least an hour of time where you will not be able to use the PC while the update is taking place. First thing is to review Preupgrade Wiki Page, once you feel confident that your system is ready (enough space in /boot, created backups of your data) issue (as root):

1

yum update && yum install preupgrade

Followed by:

1

preupgrade-cli "Fedora 12 (Constantine)"

After a lengthy download, reboot and update process you should be looking at Fedora 12 login prompt.

If you used ext3 filesystem in your Fedora 10/11 system you can also migrate to ext4 filesystem by following the Fedora ext4 Wiki guide.

Today the EU createded a serious road block on the road to the merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle.  Here is the timeline of events up to now.

European antitrust authorities formally objected to Oracle Corp.’s proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc., complicating a $7.4 billion deal that U.S. officials had already blessed.

The companies said Monday that the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, issued a statement of objections regarding the deal, which they said focuses on whether Oracle’s takeover of Sun’s MySQL database software would reduce competition in the database market.

Here is a quick recap of MySQL history, and how it got where it is today:

• MySQL is born in 1994.
• MySQL becomes the most used and popular database used by websites.
• Sun Microsystems buys MySQL for 1.0 Billion Dollars.
• Sun hemerages money, Oracle steps in to buy Sun/MySQL.

So where does this leave MySQL and hundreds of sites that depend on it?  Sun has predominantly been a hardware company.  Oracle recently introduced its software running on Sun hardware (You may have seen the ads comparing Oracle Running on Sun being x number of faster than same software running on IBM hardware).  Oracle maintains that MySQL will continue to stand alone as a open-source product.  However that may just be the problem that the EU has with it, saying that because it will be owned by Oracle, which already has a powerful commercial product, the merger will prevent MySQL from becoming another powerful database commercial competitor.  So, what do you think?  Will MySQL wilt in the shadow of the mighty Oracle?

This week we have Terminator - a split window terminal emulator. This tool is very helpful if you use terminal windows to connect to several servers at the same time. Usually, we have multiple separate windows or the tabs, but on this one you can have split windows or grid. Below are the features and those in bold are the features i really like.

Features: * Arrange terminals in a grid * Tabs * Drag and drop re-ordering of terminals * Lots of keyboard shortcuts * Config file to override gnome-terminal settings * Simultaneous typing to arbitrary groups of terminals

You can install it via yum install terminator or apt-get install terminator.

Screenshots from Tenshu.net:

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) to my new laptop (HP EliteBook 6930p), and first on my to-do list is to set the root password so I can do additional package installations and configurations. But this time, after I unlocked and set password for my root account, i still can’t login (via terminal) as root. I even tried to set password three times just to make sure i typed it correctly. As usual, if something is not working out of the box the next thing to do is to search for ‘known issues’ for laptop brand/model. Then I found similar report on Ubuntu Forums from they gave a link to ”Policy on log-in-as-root tutorials” with explanation on Ubuntu’s RootSudo policy. I did get a chance to look further on this as to which version it was implemented.

So if you really need to login as root you can either use the ”sudo -i” to simulate the root login (this will ask for your password and log you in as root), or enable the root account ”sudo passwd root” (this will ask for your password and will prompt you to enter new root password).

Almost two months after RHEL5.4, Centos 5.4 was released on the 21st October. This version includes various changes into the virtualization field and it includes support for KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) hypervisor and the Xen hypervisor.

Also this release features many bug fixes and security updates, and should be an easy upgrade for users running centos5.x:

1

yum update

For the full list of packages changed/added please see the centos5.4 release notes: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.4

Amazon announced a couple of cool new things this morning. Standard and High CPU Linux/UNIX EC2 instances hourly prices in the US and Europe have dropped by 15% and will go into effect November 1st. 2 new types of EC2 instance is now available called “High-Memory”. High-Memory Instances are designed to be used with memory-intensive workloads such as databases, caching, and rendering, and are optimized for low-latency, high-throughput performance.

• Double Extra Large: 34.2 GB memory, 13 ECU (4 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 850 GB storage, 64-bit platform ($1.20 per hour)
• Quadruple Extra Large: 68.4 GB memory, 26 ECU (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 1690 GB storage, 64-bit platform ($2.40 per hour)

Also Amazon entered it’s Relational Database Service into public beta. This new service makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale MySQL relational databases in the cloud via simple API calls.

• Simple to Deploy - Quickly create a new production-ready relational database with a simple API call.
• Managed - Amazon RDS handles generic, time-consuming database management tasks, such as patch management and backup.
• Compatible - All of your existing MySQL database tools, applications, and drivers will still work.
• Scalable - With a simple API call you can scale the compute and storage resources available to your database to meet your business needs and application load.
• Reliable - Amazon RDS runs on the same highly reliable infrastructure used by other Amazon Web Services. Amazon RDS also gives you additional peace of mind by providing an automated database backup facility.
• Inexpensive - You pay very low rates and only for the resources you actually consume. There are no long-term contracts or up-front commitments to use Amazon RDS.

Lately, we installed additional memory on our Debian (lenny) servers and installed ‘bigmem’ kernel for our 32-bit systems to recognize more than 3GB of ram. Bigmem kernel installations went fine on servers with Grub as their boot loader - most of them uses Grub. But on one machine with Lilo as boot loader, it didn’t boot on bigmem kernel and below was the entry on /etc/lilo.conf.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

# Boot up Linux by default.
default=Linux

image=/vmlinuz
        label=Linux
        read-only
#       restricted
#       alias=1
        initrd=/initrd.img

image=/vmlinuz.old
        label=LinuxOLD
        read-only
        optional
#       restricted
#       alias=2
        initrd=/initrd.img.old

From this config I don’t see the details of which kernel is the old one and the bigmem. I also tried to set the default to kernel with “LinuxOLD” label but it points to the same kernel (not the bigmem). I solved my problem by modifying the /etc/lilo.conf config as follows:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

# image=/vmlinuz
**image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem
initrd=/boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem**
        label=Linux
        read-only
#       restricted
#       alias=1
        #initrd=/initrd.img

NOTE: Don’t forget to test first your changes on the /etc/lilo.conf by running lilo command - this will verify your changes.

See the www.whitehouse.org story at TechPresident.com, here is the excerpt:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

Ok, we will start with this new section on our blog, the “SysAdmin Tool of the Week”, to feature cool and useful tools used by Promet systems administrators. This will include websites, software/applications, and hardware as well.

For our Sysadmin Tool of the Week it is Update Scout. This site notifies you for updates or new version of software. It contain hundreds (and increasing) of applications - linux, windows, mac, website apps and tools. Like in my case I monitor Wordpress, Drupal, Apache, MySQL, KeePass, Nagios and many other, so it’s very helpful to just wait for an email to arrive rather than thinking about them, checking manually, or sign up to each of them.

Get Started: * signup: just add your email and password * select applications you want to monitor for updates * add your own application if it’s not on the list

Site Features: * Latest Updates, Latest Additions, Most Popular and Most Active sections * Browse list of monitored applications from A-Z or using tags * MyUpdate-Scout for list of your monitored applications

Do you have similar or better tool than this? :)