While everyone is waiting for RHEL6's general availability, the normal minor update releases for the aging RHEL5 product are still being churned out with today's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 Beta as a prelude.

Compared to earlier Beta announcements, this one is quite meager with a small list of updates:

• bind 9.7 - improved DNSsec support
• PHP 5.3 - support for namespaces
• ebtables - Ethernet layer firewall
• dropwatch - network stack packet analysis
• IPA fonts - Japan JIS X 0213:2004 support
• sssd - offline credential caching

But we dug up the RHEL 5.6 Beta Release Notes, looked under the hood and compiled our own complementary list of notable changes:

Almost exactly a year ago, I posted a blog article titled Is 7 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?. In that article I make the case that with RHEL major releases moving from 1.5 years to 3 years and virtualization reducing the importance of hardware life cycles, RHEL support should be extended beyond 7 years.

Yesterday Red Hat announced that it did just that. From today Red Hat offers RHEL Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) on top of normal subscriptions for specific versions and variants. Meaning that for RHEL3 only i686 AS/ES and for RHEL4 i686 and x86_64 AS/ES and ia64 AS are taken into consideration and are thus more expensive than regular support. No pricing information is available yet.

As a result of this the timeline of RHEL releases looks like this:

Click the picture to see it in all its glory

The backlight of my Thinkpad X200s stopped working reliably a few weeks ago and before using the warranty and shipping it back, I bought a Thinkpad X201 as a replacement. This system comes with a Qualcomm Gobi 2000 WWAN module (despite the box mentioning Ericsson F3507g) and while a driver exists, the device is something weird.

If you are an avid fan of midnight commander (like me) and you happen to inspect RPM files from time to time (like me too), you may have been irritated by a change in the RPM format.

In the past the payload of the RPM package was a simple cpio file. You could use the rpm2cpio tool to extract the cpio payload from the RPM or simply open it using midnight commander.

So a local newspaper is having a contest where people can send in their nicest summer picture. At the same time my girlfriend made a very nice picture of her godchild chasing soap bubbles. Bring those two together, and I end up asking the Internet (*you*) to kindly vote for her photo :-)

You can find the picture at:

http://www.nieuwsblad.be/ugc/photospecial/detail.aspx?id=3714c888-4403-4...

and to vote for her, you have to click STEM OP DEZE FOTO (vote for this picture). You will gain some non-refundable karma points in the process... ;-)

(And summer only just began, promising...)

After a fair share of improvements and plugins, including plugins to monitor Dstat's own performance, it was time to get another release out of the door. Last week I updated the documentation and manpage, and this week Dstat 0.7.2 saw the light.

Last weekend when reading the latest publication of the most popular (children) comic series in Flanders, De Kiekeboes, I was surprised to see Linux mentioned. And not just any Linux, the most important Linux ;-)

As many others, they spelled Red Hat incorrectly.

Still one wonders, why Windows XP ?!?

Your systems may already have picked it up, but if you haven't noticed, CentOS 5.5 has been released. You can find more information in the RHEL 5.5 release announcement.

Additionally, the CentOS community compiles its own list of interesting tidbits in the CentOS 5.5 release notes, which is an interesting read as well. The CentOS 5.5 LiveCD is released at the same time and has a its own release notes in the wiki.

Earlier than I had expected Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 beta. This release is available to everyone through the Red Hat public FTP server.

The release announcement briefly summarizes important changes, but I will blog later about the details of this release.

Exciting times ahead...

Yesterday arrived at another hotel and the wireless internet caused problems, not on Windows XP, only on my Linux system (CentOS 5.4, kernel 2.6.18-194.el5, iwlagn v1.3.27k). The behavior was that it infrequently would associate, but when it did DHCP failed. The moment it associated I could sniff other network traffic though. Being downtown San Francisco doesn't help either, I had more than 60 access points broadcasting their services...

A few people have asked me the past couple of months whether I would be going to Linux Open Administration Days in Antwerp and whether I was interested to give a presentation.

I would have loved to give a presentation on LOADays, but unfortunately I will be in San Francisco this weekend and thus enable to make it. I hope for the second edition there is room in my schedule and I wish everyone an interesting conference this weekend !

It definitely promises to be one :-)

After reading You may want to avoid hacking your open-source CMS today I was saddened, not because Drupal fell short (it didn't), not because Open Source usage is flawed (it isn't), but because it reminds me of situations I have endured in the past from the receiving end unfortunately.

Summarizing the story, The Onion forked (as in adapted to their own wishes) Drupal 4.7 apparently not realizing the costs of maintaining/syncing their own product. Wrong expectations make up a big part of a disappointment. Good expectations are part of doing your homework.

Today another update release of RHEL5 was born.

These (minor) update releases typically provide feature enhancements, bugfixes and new hardware support. And as such come as a set of new installation media (CDs and DVD). We already discussed the RHEL 5.5 Beta release not so long ago, and apart from stabilizing the product, a lot of what was known from that Beta is true for the real RHEL 5.5 release.

When I have to set up a subversion repository I like to give them special names. Especially when multiple subversion repositories are deployed inside organizations, it make sense to remove any confusion to name them something other than "subversion" or "svn".

I often prefer the name "shelf" for the repository that holds most of the technical information for a sysadmin team. This repository typically would hold directories like: docs/ rpms/ scripts/ tools/ per operating system or technology domain.

If you happen to come across a pure 64bit system that was installed the default way and includes lots of 32bit stuff. And you know for a fact all the 32bit functionality is not needed, just proceed to:

[root@system ~]# rpm -qa --qf '%{name}.%{arch}\n' | grep 'i[36]86$' | xargs rpm -e


Clean and simple...