Blogrotate #25: Weekly News for System Administrators

Posted in: Technical Track

Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.

Operating Systems

So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. My own install went well at home except for the proprietary NVidia drivers, and the fglrx (ATI) driver was an issue for a colleague in the office. Luckily we have the knowhow to get around these issues here at Pythian, but I would be concerned for new users trying to upgrade. Despite that I think it’s a bloody good package and well worth trying.

Here’s a short list of some sources of information on the new Ubuntu.

On in other news, let’s all shake our heads in disbelief at Unix copyrights: SCO want a new ruling.

Priya Ganapati at Wired writes about this weeks Palm purchase by HP. It’s long been known that HP had scrubbed the iPaq because that just could not nail the OS, but now they own WebOS so watch for the iPaq to make a comeback (minus the silly name (and resulting lawsuit from Apple) of course). But I digress, check out HP Buys Palm for $1.2 Billion.

If you are running Windows 7 you’ll want to beware of a recently discovered problem. See the Microsoft Ansrews Forum topic Windows 7 deletes all system restore points on reboot.

Virtualization/Cloud

Joel Wineland is Senior Product Developer at Rackspace Managed Hosting. He writes about things to consider when evaluating cloud services. See Creating a Successful Cloud Environment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) adds a Singapore Data Center so users can run their cloud computing infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region.

Have you considered the security risks of your impending cloud investment? Take a look at 10 Cloud Security Threats by Anil Chopra. My advice is to never trust a hosted cloud service with production, proprietary or sensitive data.

Internet

Media darling and bon vivant Steve Jobs was at it again in a tirade against the evils of Flash. You can get the short (and long) story at Engadget in Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash by Paul Miller. When you are done with that head on over to Ars Technica for a rebuttle of sorts in Pot, meet kettle: a response to Steve Jobs’ letter on Flash.

That’s all I’ll have time for this week. As always your comments and stories are welcomed.

Try Lucid Lynx. The power of blog compels you.

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About the Author

Brad is just a guy, you know? I fought my way up in the world tooth-and-nail. Starting in broadcasting and music to travel to computer support to development of mid size xBase programs. Finally I settled into the wonderful world of system administration where I have honed my skills doing many diverse tasks. I started using Solaris in the mid 80's and built my first Linux system on a 386 using 30-some floppy disks and never looked back.

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