Archive for July, 2008

VMware ESXi Available for Free

VMware has released its ESXi hypervisor free of charge. The ESXi hypervisor is the ESX hypervisor without the Service Console which allows the hypervisor to drop to an astonishing 32MB in size. The ESX hypervisor allows guest virtual machines to access the hardware of the host at near bare-hardware speeds. ESXi can be tied into VMware Infrastructure, the same as ESX. VMware HA, a component of the Infrastructure suite allows virtual guests to be moved to different hardware hosts which moves a step closer to true ‘cloud computing’. Something no other virtualization software offers. The move most likely comes in response to the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V released with Server 2008.

More info on VMware ESXi can be found here.

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 30th, 2008

Microsoft Sponsors Apache Project

The open source community was shocked today at the announcement that Microsoft has agreed to sponsor the Apache project. The sponsorship was announced at OSCON, an open source conference sponsored by O’Reilly. The move was a surprise since Apache has long been considered the most widely-used web server, a direct competitor to Microsoft’s IIS web server. Microsoft has agreed to donate $100,000 per year to the Apache Software Foundation. Reaction from the community is sure to be mixed. Sam Ramji, leader of the seemingly contradictory Microsoft Open Source Labs quoted Jim Jagielski, the chairman of the Apache Foundation in a blog saying:

“We thank Microsoft for their generous sponsorship that goes towards supporting The Apache Software Foundation and the over 60 top level projects in use and development within the ASF,” said ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski. “The ASF Sponsorship program is an excellent way for companies and organizations to show their commitment and enthusiasm towards the ASF and The Apache Way, and helps to ensure that highly innovative, freely-available and community-based/consensus-developed software can continue to flourish and thrive within one of the most successful and respected communities in Open Source. Microsoft’s sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft ‘gets it’ regarding the ASF.”

Microsoft also recently added support for PHP, a competitor to its ASP and ASP.NET programming environment into IIS. Perhaps we’ll start to see an ASP.NET module for Apache soon?

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 29th, 2008

Ubuntu Bundle Install After OS Install

Ubuntu server offers a great bundling feature during the installation to install a DNS server, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and various other common packages for Linux servers. Often enough, administrators end up needing to either migrate a system to serve another purpose or add a service onto that server. A lot of those admins then go back to the manual “apt-get install” method of installing each of the packages in the bundle. Fortunately since Edgy, Ubuntu has included the tasksel utility to mitigate this problem. According to the Ubuntu documentation:
“Tasksel is a software installation application that is an integral part of the Debian installer. It groups some packages by tasks and offers the user an easy way to install the packages for that task. It provides the same functionality as using conventional meta-packages.”

Tasksel allows you to install the LAMP stack, DNS server, as well as the different desktop variations of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu.

To use tasksel, simply jump to a terminal on your server and run as root (or sudo): “tasksel”. It will bring up a prompt to select the packages you would like to install. You can use the arrows to scroll through the list and use the space to select a package. Packages with an “*” beside them will be or are already installed. Once you are done selecting your packages, hit tab and then enter to select “OK”. Tasksel will begin to use apt to install the packages you have selected.

You can also use “tasksel install ” to install the bundle you would like to install. Probably the most common would be: tasksel install lamp-server to install the LAMP stack onto your Ubuntu server.

Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jul 24th, 2008

DNS Vulnerability Exploit Code Released

For those who haven’t heard (not sure where you’ve been hanging out if you haven’t) there’s been a published flaw in DNS released in the last month. The flaw is a major problem since it’s a flaw in the design, rather than one specific implementation. In the last few days more details have been coming out around the flaw. Today, source code was released to exploit the vulnerability. The source code is written for Metasploit, an open source framework for creating and testing exploit code. The code can be found here.

For any system admins out there who haven’t already: patch immediately. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to poison the DNS cache on your DNS server.

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 24th, 2008