January 8th, 2009 by shashi

There is an interesting article in the NY Times on  R. It’s heartening to see that free and open source tools like R are getting noticed for it’s worth. Mainly because free and open source tools do not have any PR firms pitching for them nor do they have any marketing droids peddling stories to the mainstream media.

So, something like this sort gets noticed when there is an undercurrent of adopters and influential users. This story also gives an idea to the naive about the power of open source development and its advantages. Good!

The article also has a proprietory competitor dismissing the *popularity* as saying “it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code”. She also says

“We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

Hilarious!! I was literally ROTFL when I read that.

August 16th, 2008 by shashi

In our company, we have this tradition of naming our computers (Linux desktops, servers, etc) on a particular theme. Now, our chosen theme is Captain Haddock’s choicest swear words. So, while caterpillar is our file server, typhoon our gateway, anacoluthon my laptop, rapscallion, rhizopod, jellyfish, balderdash, etc make up the other desktops.

Recently we hired a VPS for hosting some of our services. This time, we wanted to break out of the now monotonous theme and name it differently. Hence, we organised a small contest for suggesting the names and these were the names our guys came up with:

dooradabetta, ಅಗಸ್ತ್ಯ , ನಕ್ಷತ್ರ, Gogglers, Picaroons, Cyclotron, Bumblebee, Ironhide, Barricade, Optimus Prime, Prithvi -, Vismaya -, Amulya – Priceless, Arnav – ocean/ sea, Avinash – indestructible, bushbetta, Bandana, Maya – As in Illusion(Virtual), Rudra, Swastika, Varuna, Ugrana (Storage in Kannada ), Taatvika, sanctimonia (Latin), recondo, commodo, munus, muneris, lorica, officium, servitium, tutus, latrocinium, bisibelebath, kalasa, Abayan, Yuga
Vajra, Sambath, jataayu

That’s a neat variety of suggestions and lots of original thinking too. Finally, after almost a month I’ve decided upon one amongst the above.

bisibelebath

Well, not exactly! in a shortened form – bcube. So the hostname – bcube.informedia.in

Thanks to Kaladisvarane for the name. And to all others too.

July 18th, 2007 by shashi

We have a home brewn Single Sign-On implementation in our office which uses account information stored in OpenLDAP, exports home directories (NFS mounts) for clients using Automount. Our desktops run either Ubuntu Dapper or Debian Etch.

During the initial days when we deployed and provisioned the system, I faced a problem in which the desktops wouldn’t boot.

udevd[1005]: nss_ldap: reconnecting to LDAP server (sleeping 1 seconds)…
udevd[1005]: nss_ldap: could not search LDAP server – Can’t contact LDAP server
udevd[1005]: lookup_group: error resolving group ‘nvram’: Illegal seek

I originally thought since udevd starts up before networking in rc2.d, it isn’t able to seek the LDAP server and hence is causing some problem. So, I changed the priority of networking from S40 to S02 and that appeared to solve the problem. But there were those udevd messages that still persisted.

Cut, six months later when Ubuntu Feisty Fawn was released and we installed the same. We still used to get the same problem. But no amount of changing the priorities helped this time. This made me take a hard look at the logs and it was then that I observed the last line in each set of logs.

udevd[1005]: lookup_group: error resolving group ‘nvram’: Illegal seek

Now, udev is set to create the device nvram at boot time and change group ownership of the device to nvram.
But we’ve setup the NSS service to lookup LDAP (in /etc/nsswitch.conf) for passwd, group and shadow. So, everytime udev wanted the group called nvram, a search for the group nvram was done in the local /etc/groups file and not finding it there, an LDAP seek was done (wow, PAM!!!) and either it couldn’t contact the LDAP server (because network isn’t brought up yet) or when contacted (as in our Dapper case) it couldn’t find the group called nvram in LDAP.

Hence the solution would be to give udev what it seeks; The group “nvram”!

# addgroup –system nvram

Once that is done. A reboot confirmed this indeed was the solution!!! The moral of the story is that people creating udevd rules should take into account non-existant users/groups. And create them if not found. Also, a framework for the whole SSO solution is missing in the open source world, which is why Micro$oft is able to shove it’s products to corporates. Let me know if any effort exists which does try to address the situation.

June 6th, 2007 by shashi

enta (ಎಂತ) in Kannada slang translates to “whither” as in “whither are we wandering ?“.

Over the past couple of months huge strides have been made in the development and deployments of several new free operating systems. While tracking their progress and goals, I’m writing down a couple of points for myself to revisit some time later and make an assessment.

Debian GNU/Linux: The universal operating system just shed a couple of architectures so that it is now that much less universal :-p. But nevertheless, with the “etch” release, they’ve managed to stick it to the Ubuntu folks and have regained the trust of thousands of Linux enthusiasts all over the globe. In addition to the main release with over 20,000 packages spanning at least 3 DVDs, Debian also has a thriving sub-projects culture which is progressing quite steadily. These sub-projects cover specialised applications including Embedded Debian, Debian Junior, Debian Edu, Debian Lex. All these positive vibes should take Debian beyond the hard core GNU users base it currently enjoys. But, the project has to overcome issues such as the Firefox/Iceweasel, GNU Free Documentation fiasco which can irritate neutral users no end.

Overall Debian is on it’s way to nirvana and helping it’s users attain nirvana.

Ubuntu Linux: The hot favourite amongst the middle class of operating system users, Ubuntu has also taken a step ahead to ensure it reaches the masses. Ubuntu is now available as an option with Dell. This is sure great news for customers, as hardware incompatibility and other issues might not occur. Ubuntu also did great with their 6.06 LTS release. We ourselves have deployed the same at many corporates and institutions. Ubuntu comes with semi-annual releases.

Red Hat Enterprise Editions and their forks: These are interesting distributions. Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux is just that. It’s enterpricey. It’s performance, It’s Ease of Use, It’s cost. Everything is so enterpricey. Some good souls have come out to give us less privileged folks, a taste of the enterpricey experience at a very less or at no cost. These include CentOS, Whitebox Linux. But the irony of the whole linux in enteprice is that Oracle themselves do a repackaging and provide support for Red Hat EL binaries. Why do they do that ? Simple. Oracle needs a base. According to them, Oracle itself can tune the kernel, support programs they develop on oracle.

Fedora Linux: What started as Red Hat’s staging area (??) is now a full blown enterprise capable distribution. It has a huge community built around who takes care of the packaging to the bug fixes, etc. Truly Red Hat has delivered it’s word that Fedora won’t be controlled by Red Hat.

Now the above Operating Systems were purely Linux based. What makes the scene much more interesting is that there are a couple of contenders for the growing (yet again) base of Unix users. These include Sun’s OpenSolaris, the BSDs.

Sun has been doing some real marketing amongst developers out there to adopt OpenSolaris for their development purposes. They have made available cutting edge tools including DTrace, ZFS available under an open source license. There have been several instances where attempts to port these to Linux/BSD are going on furiously. But Sun isn’t satisfied. The developers still do not trust Sun to play along nicely along open source rules. So, Sun has come up with something called Project Indiana. This has Ian Murdock (The Ian in Debian, Progeny founder) at it’s helm. He looks like he has some tricks up his sleeve. Let’s see if he can turn it around.

There’s also this project called Nexenta, which is again a Debian based distribution but uses Solaris kernel at it’s heart. And tries to recreate the Solaris environment.

Bottom line:
Projects, there are some
There are people using them
At office and home

Who does rule the roost
Will not necessarily be the best
But, try certainly will be doing the most