Posts Tagged ‘linux’

Microsoft Embraces GPL?

Satan better invest in a parka and that theoretical pig better invest in a parachute in case its flight is short-lived. Microsoft today released a Linux driver for its Hyper-V virtualization layer under (here’s where it gets interesting) the GNU GPLv2. Yes, the same Microsoft who at one time told us that the GPL was “anti-American”.

By releasing the drivers under the GPL, they’ve not only validated Linux as a value-add to run on top of Hyper-V, but they’ve also validated free software as a whole by contributing the code to the community the way any other open source vendor would. Ironically, Microsoft is actually ahead of several other companies in releasing their drivers under the open source GPL license. The driver is no doubt a move to help boost its Hyper-V market share, but it’s a critical move that Microsoft needs to get customers who would have otherwise chosen a product like VMware, KVM, or Xen. Greg Kroah-Hartman from Novell says that Microsoft will be maintaining and adding new features to the code as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jul 21st, 2009

SSH (and tunnel) In One Click of a Mouse

I can’t believe I haven’t seen this tool before. Worse yet, I can’t believe how much time I must have wasted SSH’ing to hosts. Tonight I discovered SSHMenu for Gnome.

I’m a systems administrator on a mostly Linux network (but with a few Windows hosts). Given that, I rely on SSH a lot. A lot, as in you probably wouldn’t catch me not SSH’d into something at any moment during my work day.

SSHMenu

SSHMenu

I do find that I tend to SSH into the same machines over and over again as well as have a few ports that I forward through the firewall that are not exposed to the outside of our DMZ. With SSHMenu, I can not only save a set of the machines that I log into often, but I can also pass options like port forwarding and others.

To get SSHMenu, you’re just a sudo apt-get install away:
sudo apt-get install sshmenu-gnome

To enable it, you’ll need to add it to your Gnome panel by right clicking on the panel and going to the “Add to panel..” window.

Add to panel window

Add to panel window

You can then begin adding hosts in the SSHMenu preferences. The program passes the options you include in the hostname field into the SSH utilitiy so you can insert things like usernames and options as you please. For me, I setup my tunnels so I don’t have to type them in all the time. The one that I saved went a little something like this (with hostnames modified to protect the innocent):
user@host.domain.com -L 8888:windowshost.domain.com:3389

With a couple of clicks of a button I can be not only SSH’d in, but have a tunnel setup to connect via my RDP client (for my example).

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (4) : Jul 15th, 2009

Running Commands as Another User in a Script

There’s plenty of situations where you need to to open a shell to run something as a different user within a script. Scripts like the Zimbra start-stop scripts can’t be run using sudo (Honestly, I don’t know why and haven’t questioned it). For my script, the root user doesn’t have the zmcontrol utility in its path, so it had to actually spawn a shell as the zimbra user to run. Since it wasn’t terribly obvious after a few minutes of googling, I decided to post how I did it. My example uses the zmcontrol utility which has to be run as the zimbra user:

su -l -c "zmcontrol start" zimbra

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 2nd, 2009

Constant Disk Activity from MythTV

Last night I was playing with my MythTV box setting up a frontend on my MacBook and I noticed after I was done playing that the MythTV backend server’s disk was constantly making noise. When I stopped the MythTV backend services, the noise stopped. Then once I started it back up the activity continue the way it was before. After doing a little Googling, I found out that others had had this problem on Ubuntu 8.04 shortly after installing MythTV. Later in the bug report someone discovered that on their machine, the constant disk activity was MythTV logging that it couldn’t connect to the MySQL server. Turns out they were exactly right. In my /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log file, it was constantly writing:
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-06-26 23:50:02.359 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
QSqlQuery::prepare: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-06-26 23:50:02.412 DB Error (SimpleDBStorage::load()):
Query was:
SELECT station FROM record WHERE recordid = :WHERERECORDID
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
2009-06-26 23:50:02.413 Unable to connect to database!
2009-06-26 23:50:02.414 Driver error was [1/1045]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to connect
Database error was:
Access denied for user 'mythtv'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Turns out, I had been messing with the MySQL permissions to get my MythTV frontend machine to work and hadn’t noticed that I broke the backend. If you install MythTV and notice that you get constant disk access after it starts, this is likely the culprit.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jun 27th, 2009

Linux Distros Have Had ‘App Stores’ For Years

It appear that the next company to join the ‘App Store’ bandwagon will be Novell. According to PCPro, they’re considering launching an App Store for netbooks, much like vendors have been doing in Apple’s footsteps for the mobile phone market. The App Store would be in the openSUSE version of Moblin and would essentially allow users to install open source applications with a few clicks on their netbooks. One of the things that they’re depending upon to attract users to the platform and store is the fact that its applications are available for free.

What I find completely ridiculous about this whole thing is that it just might work. Linux users (including openSUSE users) have had repository after repository open for them to use for years. openSUSE (or Ubuntu, Red Hat, take your pick..) have had the ability to have these few-click installs for their users this whole time but most people don’t know what a repository is.

Novell VP of Business Development Holger Dyroff told us that “it’s also a method of educating people about the benefits of open source”. I don’t think this will work for educating people about open source, however. People will learn that “open source app store” means free as in price and not care about free as in freedom. Good or bad, this idea of an app store does seem to have brought this idea of repositories of software to be installed to the masses.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 9th, 2009

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