Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Oracle has released the Linux base install repositories to the public. This means that, when you have obtained the ISOs for OEL4 or OEL5, you can install packages freely using yum. The so-called "base channels" are available for free and without support over Internet. This applies to Oracle VM (Xen) as well. All you need is their .repo files, yum check-update, and you're set. Updates and Patches require a support license. Check Oracle Public Yum Server for details and howto.

HPC Community - Systems Management : "The Dell OpenManage Nagios Plug-in is a freely available, open source plug-in for the Nagios network monitor. By harnessing Dell OpenManage (OMSA), the plug-in provides the ability to monitor the overall health of supported Dell hardware models, all via the Nagios interface. Additionally, the Nagios notification mechanism may be used to provide alerts regarding system state based upon the information reported by the Dell OpenManage Nagios Plug-in."

TortoiseSVN 1.6.0 introduces better ways of solving merge conflicts and introduces new kinds of conflicts ( tree conflicts ) as well as easier ways to solve them. While git is gaining popularity, I personally don't think most development teams are ready for decentralized code repositories and large corporations may be totally horrified by them. So Subversion is here to stay for a while.

heise online : "A bug report posted in the bug tracker for the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4, the future standard file system for Linux, available as an option when installing Ubuntu 9.04. The report describes a crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded, resulting in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files." This may not be as relevant for a server setup but it could outline a major vulnaribility in ext4 for now. Read the article for details...

An age-old problem in mixed IT environments is that Windows servers can register themselves dynamically in a (Windows) DNS server and Unix/Linux servers can't (easily). Solaris has a way to fix this and I just discovered that Red Hat has one too. The RHEL 4 Reference Guide mentions adding the parameter DHCP_HOSTNAME in the ifcfg-eth# files. That will tell the DHCP client to specify a hostname when acquiring an IP address. Another search led to the use of nsupdate which seems to register a Linux host using Kerberos in the AD so that it can update its hostname on future reboots. I haven't tested both methods yet, but I will soon and let you know.

Xming has been updated recently. It is an X server for Windows, so you can easily use your (corporate) Windows desktop to maintain your Linux/Unix servers. It is free and uses Putty to make an SSH connection to your *nix server. With a few simple commands the X11 client on Linux can transmit its output (i.e. screen/window) to the X11 server running on Windows. By using a secure SSH session, the process is pretty secure too and can be used from home, with or without a VPN connection.