As expected Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Beta. The Release Notes and Technical notes are included in the above link.

This beta update includes:

• New hardware driver support (pmcraid, ibmvfs, bfa, be2iscsi)
• Updated hardware support (too many to list)
• Kickstart improvements to logging post-install
• Run-time memory allocation for KVM guests (memory ballooning)
• PCI passthrough improvements (hotswapping PCI devices, 1:1 performance improvements)
• Detecting kernel tasks stuck in the uninterruptible sleep state (D-state)
• Improved CFQ I/O scheduler performance
• Kernel CIFS updates
• Software updates (openoffice, metacity, samba, freeradius)

svnmailer is a tool to distribute (by mail) changes to a subversion repository. It's a basic tool to allow a small team of people to track changes to documentation or tools. The configuration allows a lot of flexibility for the simple and complex cases and easily integrates with subversion as a post-commit hook.

With the latest svnmailer (1.08) I noticed that the equal sign (=) in URLs were replaced by =3D. A simple way to avoid this is to add to the defaults section:

[defaults]
mail_transfer_encoding = 8bit


I always forget this command and it takes a while to search for it, but if you ever start doing administration work on systems and you want to keep track of what you have been doing for documentation, always remember the script command.

I am referencing it here, so I will never forget !

Setting up my first environment using KVM on RHEL, I am disappointed about the lack of best practices and standardization regarding KVM on GFS clustering. First thing that should be obvious when sharing a complex and flexible piece of software online for production use, don't allow too many things without proper best practices. Otherwise people will do things differently and possibly for the wrong reasons.

Since as far as I can remember owning Nokia phones I get strange text messages from unknown numbers that look like this:


From: +79196575267
Time: 11/11/2009 14:48
1257950895 1 912.867409663487


or


From: +79198163461
Time: 23/11/2009 15:23
1258989829 1 795.947321834859


or


From: +79195518714
Time: 23/11/2009 16:52
1258995167 1 590.061261517537


Today I got two of these within 30 minutes.

I was amused by the idea to propose Linus Torvalds for a Nobel peace prize. But it does make sense to honor the Open Source community in general for the collaboration across many boundaries. Open Source levels the playing field for anyone to innovate and improve, it is an extension of what is known in the academic world applied to Information Technology on a global scale, facilitated by the Internet.

The original link lists a few projects for the common good, but to me it's not so much the individual projects that make a difference, but rather the global mindset it created among peers for the better good without discrimination. And there are many more examples to proof this than looking at specific projects. It would harm our efforts if we would only look at specific initiatives, rather than our collective collaboration.

With the opportunity to talk at the first Japan Linux Symposium came renewed interest to look at what improvements I could make to Dstat that would be worthwhile to get more people involved.

Dstat doesn't lack users, it lacks system engineers writing interesting plugins for cases they have encountered. In a desperate ploy to get more contributors, I simplified some of the internals (functions, variables and object methods). So the upcoming Dstat 0.7.0 release will ship with a (not so) different plugin API that I hope is easier.

This is marvelous !

While during the 1st Japan Linux Symposium Moblin wouldn't work on my X200s laptop, this weeks Moblin 2.1 release booted fine (unlike 2.0) and didn't freeze during initial usage (unlike the late October development releases) !

And I like what I experienced, in fact I was already convinced when I saw Greg KH use it for his presentation. A clean and concise interface, simple and convenient for those tasks that most people use computers for.

So, CentOS 5.4 has been released to mirrors and will be available soon as updates to your existing systems. This ends about 6 weeks of suspended security fixes, although some security fixes were released in the CentOS 5.3 repository before the actual 5.4 release was ready.

Most of what is new can be found from my earlier RHEL5.4 release blog post.

Enjoy!

Using GPRS on a train is not very useful for interactive use, but for reading the occasional website or downloading some (not-too-big) files it works well enough (after considerable tweaking).

When I start my link, I always run My traceroute to my ISP's DNS to see how my link is doing in real-time. Which helps to understand what is happening, here is a screenshot of a typical train-ride from Antwerp to Ghent.

I have dozens of reasons :-)

So Microsoft expects a grassroot fanbase to promote their new Windows 7 product among family and friends in every house around the world. And this will be a natural thing because everybody really wants to do this. It simply makes a lot of sense. sarcasm

I am being fed up with the state of our RPMforge infrastructure lately. The RPMrepo website is down, and the RPMforge wiki is hosted there. This is a theme recurring every XX months. I myself neglected the infrastructure (as long as the repositories work!), simply because I lack the time to maintain it.

But since it is becoming a liability and we have more people involved, I want to fix this once and for all, I am looking for a few donated managed servers that we can set up so a single glitch does not rip out some of our infrastructure.

After 5 years Apache finally committed a patch, to allow CONNECT over SSL, to trunk. This is very good news for proxytunnel users, but everyone in general. Finally progress on this topic ! Here's hoping this will end up in RHEL6 before the freeze...

Seven years is a long time. Most people won't know where they are in 7 years. I'm interested to find out how many kids will be running around the house in 2016 :-) However if you are responsible for thousands of Enterprise Linux servers, seven years may no longer be sufficient.

Let me explain what I mean. When Red Hat released RHEL2.1, seven years of support was perfect, seemed more than one would want. RHEL3 came 18 months after RHEL2.1 and after one year of testing RHEL3 and 3rd party integration new systems could be deployed, giving you 6 years of support. Your hardware would usually not outlive the operating system support.

Today Red Hat released a minor update (v5.4) of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 product line. The minor releases comprise mostly of bug-fixes and feature enhancements and the official announcement is pretty light on both, likely because Red Hat has its yearly summit right now in Chicago. (And yes, I lack the budget to go there :-/)

To get a better picture at what is in RHEL 5.4, you can read the Beta announcement and the (unusual) Beta update announcement.