Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 20, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Cisco makes peace with Free Software Foundation

Last December, the Free Software Foundation sued Cisco for copyright infringement. Some people saw this battle being like a moth tackling a light-bulb-a total no win situation for the moth. But, a few months later, what do we find? Cisco is making friends with the free software instead of burning it to a crisp.

According to today’s Free Software Foundation’s press release, “Cisco has agreed to appoint a Free Software Director for Linksys, a subsidiary of Cisco, to supervise Linksys’ compliance with the requirements of free software licenses such as the GPL (the GNU General Public License). The Free Software Director will report periodically to the FSF regarding Linksys’ compliance efforts”

In addition, “Cisco has further agreed to take certain steps to notify previous recipients of Linksys products containing FSF programs of their rights under the GPL and other applicable licenses, to publish a licensing notice on the Linksys website, and to provide additional notices in a separate publication. … Cisco will continue to make the complete and corresponding source code for versions of FSF programs used with current Linksys products freely available on its website. Cisco will also make a monetary contribution to the FSF.”

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May 19, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Burying the truth? Boycott Novell hit by Denial of Service attack

Boycott Novell is one opinionated site. If you think I’m pro-Linux and hard on Microsoft, you haven’t been reading Roy Schestowitz, who makes me look as mild as a May day. Boycott Novell, which was founded in 2006 in reaction to Novell’s partnership with Microsoft, is very popular with about a million hits per month, but it’s also made enemies. Enemies who seem to have had enough of Boycott Novell recently launched a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which has almost knocked the site out.

In an e-mail interview with Schestowitz, he wrote that he’s trying to make the best of a bad situation, “I guess the most reassuring way to look at it is as a sign of success. If they try to shut us up so miserably by resorting to crime, then it means our writings have great impact.”

As for the DDoS attack, Schestowitz wrote, the site “has been under DDoS attack for 3 days now. We’re still struggling to just stay online while hosts investigate where the attacks come from.” In the meantime, he has spoken to the British police about the matter.

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May 18, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Managing Ubuntu Linux on the cloud

It’s actually pretty darn easy to run a virtual operating system on a server or on the cloud. The real trick is managing them. That’s why I’m excited that Canonical, Ubuntu’s Linux commercial backer, recently released Canonical Landscape 1.3, an Ubuntu network systems management and monitoring service that will let you control your Ubuntu servers no matter whether they’re on your desktop or a few thousand miles away on the Amazon EC2 (Amazon Compute Cloud).

You can get Landscape as either part of the Ubuntu commercial support package or as a standalone service. With it, you can manage multiple instances of Ubuntu on servers, desktops, or the cloud from a single Web interface. If you’re new to EC2, you can also use it to pick out a pre-configured Ubuntu server image and get it up and running in less time then it took me to write this blog posting.

In an e-mail interview, Ken Drachnik, Canonical’s Landscape business manager said “Landscape simplifies system management tasks for users who run Ubuntu on physical or virtual servers in-house or some or all of their Ubuntu servers on the Amazon EC2 cloud. It enables users to manage all instances from the same application.”

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May 15, 2009
by sjvn01
7 Comments

Microsoft to users: Don’t switch to Vista

It’s official. Bill Veghte, Microsoft’s senior VP for Windows business, told an audience of the Microsoft faithful at TechEd that Windows users should not switch to Vista. Veghte said, “If you’re just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] Release Candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the [Windows 7] Release Candidate, and use that going forward.”

In short, Microsoft is finally telling you what I’ve been telling you all along: Vista is junk.

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May 15, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Look out IE, Firefox, Chrome is getting much better

I love Google Chrome. It’s faster than fast and I really like the clean, but still helpful, interface. But, since it only runs on Windows and it didn’t support extensions, I usually recommend Firefox. Google is making big changes to Chrome though and by the end of summer I may need to rethink my position.

First, while Google has been slow to support Mac OS X and Linux, they are finally getting up to speed. In particular, while the Mac version of Chrome is in no way, shape, or form ready for prime time, hardily a day goes by that Google’s not releasing a new test build on the Chromium Mac site. Chrome for Mac isn’t there yet, but it you follow it closely you can see it getting better day by day.

Chrome on Linux is also moving forward at a good clip now. I’m running the latest builds on my Ubuntu 9.04 system. In my opinion, it’s getting close to beta status, which is to say it mostly works, but you can’t trust it for regular work. To my mind, this puts it ahead of the Mac port. Keep your eyes open. I won’t be surprised to see a real beta of Chrome on Linux out by the end of May.

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May 14, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

After Googlefail, will you trust online apps?

Well, that was different. It turns out that Google wasn’t the victim of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack by others; Google managed to knock-out its own network.

Wow.

With network engineers like this, who needs crackers?

Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior VP of operations explained, that Google had sent some of its traffic through Asia. Hoelzle wrote, “Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today.”

Besides search, all, and I mean all, of Google’s applications were knocked out. Which leads me to the question, “Do we really want to rely on Google or any of SaaS (Software as a Service) for our programs?”

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