I am gearing up for the release of a 1.0 Tech Preview. It includes:

1. Custom kernel. 2.6.15 + AppArmor. It supports all types of server class features (LVM/Hotpluggable PCI etc)
2. Software necessary to provide exchange services (Postfix/OpenLDAP/Courier-IMAP/ClamAV/Spamassassian)
3. Supports device sync (Palm/Blackberry/PocketPC)
4. File/Print server support with Samba-TNG

The pieces are all there. They aren’t yet integrated. I need to make them all use PAM to authenticate and PAM to talk to an LDAP/Kerberos system.
Also Asterisk isn’t there. However Sphinx and Festival are.
They are configured to be integrated with Asterisk.

I am on IRC with Morphix team now. Attempting to iron out some bugs with my iso. Once those are resolved I should be good to go.

Its now 3:39 AM. The migration has gone fairly well. A couple minor issues that were easily resolved. The estimate for making a backup was off by a factor of three due to the fact that the test was mistakenly performed to local disk instead of across the network. So we are waiting for the data to be transfered now. Its not in our critical path…..yet. All in all a good migration.

Well I am at work. Its now 12:11 AM Saturday. Usually I would be at home sleeping at this time. However we are executing a move of our production system from one SAN device to another. We are also throwing in an OS and Hardware upgrade to boot. Its the culmination of a good 3 month project. I am very calm and relaxed. We have been bantering each other good naturedly throughout the call. I am going to be doing most of the steps necessary to execute the move. The execution plan is 50 pages of detailed instructions.

We have hit a small snag in setting up our backup system for production. Working it out now.

*yawns*

So while doing some research on open source clustering I came across this site: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/firewire/

Scary. Very scary. Oracle is finicky enough on local disk. With or without RAC. Throw in EMC or ISCSI and your in for lots of fun. Firewire…… don’t even get me started. RAC on firewire sends me running for cover. Even for development. Its just wrong people! Grrr. Can you tell I don’t paticularly like Oracle? It takes way to long to setup and eats up way to much of my time.

Now Oracle isn’t entirely bad. They did give us OCFS which is the first cluster fs to get into Kernel mainline. Not a trivial task. Combine that with these puppies and you could have something approaching production quality.

And the worse part about all this is….. *drum roll please*….. Microsoft has a workable solution. Yes Microsoft. I define a workable solution as one that you would actually trust your data to if a node goes away. Not even Oracle has that. Of course that doesn’t surprise me. Why don’t we have a working file sharing cluster solution thing a ma bob? Oh I don’t know. Maybe the same reason that bash reads the whole passwd file when doing tab completion. Or a gazillion other scalibility issues. Its called the worlds biggest alpha lab for a reason people!! Release early and often AND (here is the magic secret sauce. You ready? Don’t blink!!)

LISTEN TO FEEDBACK AND ACCEPT PATCHES!!!!!!!

I am fortunate in that the projects I have worked on:

1. OpenOffice
2. Gnumeric
3. Samba
4. Samba-TNG
5. Wine
6. xlhtml
7. slidedraw
8. Morphix

My feedback has been greatfully accepted and in several cases highly sought after. In fact I became maintainer of two of the packages (xlhtml and slidedraw). They have sense been superseeded by a much improved OpenOffice. You didn’t think that OpenOffice could suddenly open password protected Excel files all on its own did you? And the VBA stuff in Gnumeric….. that had to be the coolest M$ interop thing I did untilI got addicted to replacing Exchange. (I’ll let you in on a little secret…. I tried to replace AD before Exchange). Yeah…. I need to seriously consider a hobby other then staring at hex dumps for hours on end and risking the wrath of the worlds best IP lawyers. For you see I use a little tool called muddle to help me along. Its a slick little tool that sucks out DCE/RPC templates from M$ DLL’s and ExEs. And if you do it against a checked build of said files….. well that really makes life interesting.

Anyway its been a long week filled with much strangeness. I just needed to sit down and rant. Writing is my therapy. That and cuddling with my wife.

Gotta run.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1928394,00.asp

From the article…

We do not believe that offering compensation for vulnerability information is the best way [researchers] can help protect customers,” the spokesperson said in a statement sent to eWEEK

Yeah fixing your products might do the trick. But you don’t seem to want to do that.

I find the M$ response to be highly amusing.

Well I have set my mail filtering to permantely delete messages classified as spam. I think I need to do a bit of retraining as messages from my wife are being filed under auto unsure. So are messages from one of my clients. Maybe I just need to copy a whole batch of good messages into my Junk_No folder. Yes that is what I shall do.

I haven’t been feeling well today for some reason. It started this morning but went away after eating breakfast. It came back around noon and hasn’t gone away even after eating. I have been eating and drinking healthy lately (lots of green and potato salad). Drinking only water/orange juice/milk. Maybe one soda a week if that. Its been working well for me and I have had lots of energy. Oh I almost forgot I have had lots and lots of sloppy joe sandwiches. Both with and without cheese.

I don’t know what the problem is. *grumble grumble* Oh well. Only 4 1/2 hours more at work and then I can go home and get some rest. Speaking of work it is very enjoyable. Things aren’t very stressfull (well most of the time). There are occasional annoyances from some of the users but that is to be expected. I am very appreciatave of my manager. He is not pushy. He understands that things take time and he really stresses the importance of double checking and then checking again each and every step of what I do. He does get irritated with other groups and how they put a real drag on our projects with all types of issues. Mostly related to the data warehouse. But those finally appear to be ironed out. I haven’t heard from that project all week. 2 1/2 days without them in my hair!

Anyway stomach is still a bit upset. Will try to take it easy and finish my work day.

I have been thinking about OSER Platform tasks and have come up with a list. I will turn it into sourceforge tasks later. I was going to do that from the get go but SF appears to be down at the moment.

1. Packaging. I need to write scripts that will produce debian packages that include my customizations/configurations. The scripts will be run when new versions of the software is relesaed or major features are added. I want to do this for the following software packages:
• Samba TNG
• Heimdal Kerberos
• OpenLDAP
• Webmin
• FreeDCE/Dcethreads
2. Morphix kernel customization. I need to write a script that automates the customization of the morphix kernel as much as possible. I will follow the steps from this howto and modify it for a 2.6 based kernel. I did it by hand it took a good amount of time to get working. I want to automate it as much as possible.
3. Documentation. I am in the process of writing a quickstart guide. Mostly to document for myself the various steps involved in the configuration of the system. I think an early version is in CVS but I am not sure. I need the document to be converted into docbook format. So I need to have a basic understanding of DocBook and find someone who is an expert that I can leech oops I mean learn from.
4. Roadmap/project plan. I need to come up with a document that lists all the goals of the OSER Platform and establishes a timeframe for accomplishing those goals. I also need to come up with a version/feature document. I have a high level one that I will have on the website by SCALE.

A lot of these tasks can be easily handed out to various people who have offered to help the project. The various scripting tasks. Also the documentation. However I am going to write the roadmap/project plan. I fancy myself as an architect of sorts.

You see my secret evil plan is to get credit for other peoples work I will write the plan and establish the task lists. I will then get people to do the work and simply manage the workers. I have been organizing e-mail from people asking about the project and offering to help. I am building a contact list and will compose an e-mail for each category.

Well I did my first RedHat 4 deployment yesterday. Building a new log consolidation server. We will see how it goes. I don’t expect any problems. Hopefully the system will be more stable now that its running on a 2.6 kernel. I am also going to be building a replacement SFTP and WWW server. Redhat based, probably Redhat 4. Then we can retire two more gentoo systems. There is a top management buy in on moving to one Linux/UNIX platform. That being RedHat. Perhaps they can be persuaded to purchase some management software or be willing to invest some time into building an open source management infrastructure. Yea!

I have checked in the oser website and livecd code to CVS on sourceforge. I am mostly on track to release the CD tomorrow night. Hopefully I will be able to meet that goal. Please note that the livecd code is NOT THE LIVECD! Its only scripts and config files as well as basic documentation. It will get you close to a CD but not all the way. About 70%. Its mostly for GPL compliance and hard core people that have to see the source to every little piece of things. I would rather people not try and go build there own version of the CD. Hopefully they will contribute help to the project in other ways.