Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Dell has released a statement about ubuntu 11.10 on Dell PowerEdge . Dell lists that Ubuntu should work where the previous versions also worked and is currently re-certifying most PowerEdge and PowerEdge-C servers. Check Canonical's hardware certification page for details. Also good to know is that OpenManage (OMSA) has been released for Ubuntu , although it is not officially supported.

Dell recently published a little more details about what Ubuntu Certified and Ubuntu Ready means . Even though Dell does not officially support Ubuntu, their hardware is labelled as Certified by Canonical and they can also provide with paid support for Enterprises that require it.

Dell Community notified us that you can now install Ubuntu Server Edition on its servers. While they won't factory-install it and Dell support itself will not support it, Dell has worked with Canonical for the past 2 years to support it. Canonical will be offering support for Ubuntu on Dell servers. To make support easier, Dell has built a native .deb package of OMSA 6.3 on Ubuntu 9.10.

Although I'm using Oracle's Linux in the data center at work, I still keep up with other distributions. Just to check out what's going on and keep up. Lately, I've been playing with a new MediaWiki virtual appliance (VA) at work - where we keep most rough documentation and work-in-progress before moving it over to MS Word offial reports - and I must say turnkeylinux.org builds some mean VAs using Ubuntu JeOS. A 180MB ISO file is all you need. You create a VM, mount the ISO, boot, enter some root passwords and your set. It's integrated with Webmin, so you can completely configure the VM using your browser. No need to ssh into anything. :) Kudos! Anyway, I was going to install VMwareTools into the VM and remembered VMware had opened an apt-style repository for VMwareTools for use with Debian-based Linux distributions. So I made a few changes to the VM and installed it using apt-get! Wow! I love Debian, did I mention that before. ;) Here is what I did: wget http://p...

At work I run a lot of Linux servers with Oracle Linux (OEL, Red Hat-derived) and our Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers have no problems with them. At first, OEL 4u5 had a terribly confusing issue with device enumeration where the first on-board NIC (labeled 1) would end up as eth1 and the other (labeled 2) would become eth0. That was fixed later on and I've reported on it here, 2 years ago. Lately, I've been playing with other Linux distos and seeing how well the (old) Dell servers hold up new distributions. I always used netimages where I install the OS over the network. For one, this greatly speeds up the ISO download and it also ensures I have an updated system after installation ready for testing. While Red Hat and SUSE-based distos are not a problem, Debian-based versions can be. This mainly has to do with the strict philosophy of their maintainers that non-free drivers and firmware should not be included in the image. In my case, the lack of built-in Broadcom (bnx2) drivers ca...

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...

Someone on the Dell mailing list was kind enough to point that although OMSA (OpenManage) on Ubuntu is not supported by Dell, the SARA institute in the Netherlands has a couple of OMSA Debian packages for Ubuntu ready for use. Check their site !

Cyberciti writes: "Linux desktop user generally uses small hard disk and partition, but on server you need a large partition. For example, you cannot create 4TB partition size (RAID based) using fdisk command. It will not allow you to create a partition that is greater than 2TB. To solve this problem use GNU parted command with GPT. It supports Intel EFI/GPT partition tables. [...] By default Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS comes with GPT kernel support. However, if you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux, you need to recompile the kernel." Update: Check a good post on IDoLinux about using GPT or LVM to partition file systems, and if you use hardware RAID in your system, do read about optimizing the Linux file system to maximize performance.

There was a message from Michael Brown on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list, that I thought is important enough to repeat here as many people may not know about that list. Dell has an active OpenManage infra setup for Linux to help monitor and manage their hardware. As we have their 2950s, I'm monitoring that list. "After several months of work, I am ready to announce a bèta period for the Dell Community Linux repository at http://linux.dell.com/repo/community . When complete, this repository will be the replacement for the current software repository. Please read the details on the repository homepage. I will be running a two week beta period to ensure that the repository is functioning properly. After two weeks, I will redirect software repo bootstrap so that new installs will use the community repo. And two weeks after that, I will redirect all current software repo users to the community repository. Early this year I asked the community if people would be willing to submit...

Linux is an enterprise-grade operating system and is capable of the utmost security. However, many installations fall short because the out-of-the-box setup routines have to cater for the lowest common denominator. There’s no way a generic installer can assume what it is to be used for. This has to add up to bucket loads of web servers, mail servers, ftp servers and more which are running, http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifbut aren’t needed. This is particularly true if your system has been running for some time. Modern distros, like Ubuntu, are far more defensive by default - but this doesn't help large and/or busy systems who can't afford to rebuild from scratch each time a new release is available. There are tools to tighten up and harden your server – and we’ll introduce you to Bastille – but it’s important to understand how to do it manually too. Read more at iTWire

The Register reports: "Oracle's assault on Linux looks to take the shape of a fork in the near future, according to Canonical founder and Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth. 'They must be on track to fork soon,' he told us, during an interview here at OSCON. 'They are hiring too many people just to deliver patches. My assumption is that they are on track to fork and build their own distribution.'"