Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 19, 2009
by sjvn01
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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May 14, 2009
by sjvn01
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Google down!

Starting on the morning of May 14, at about 10:45 AM Eastern Time, Google and its related services starting to move extremely slowly. In some cases, Google services are reported to have completely stopped working.

In the States, I’ve heard from users in NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. They all report that Google searches were running at historically low speeds. I’ve heard similar reports from users Europe and Australia.

In addition, Google services like Google News and Gmail are completely failing. The Internet Storm Center is saying that it’s received multiple “reports of a total fail of Google Applications. Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps. etc.”

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