CargoBay

If you haven't run into PAM yet, you are probably running Windows. Most unix like operating systems now days use PAM. That's Solaris, OpenSolaris, all flavours of Linux, Free- and NetBSD. OpenBSD considers that PAM isn't secure enough, but have build their own "version" of PAM called BSDAuth. But that's the life of a paranoid BSD distribution, and because of that we have OpenSSH and OpenSSL. So don't call them loons just yet.

So I have been trying to get Ubuntu 9.10 working for more than a month, but it became harder and harder to keep it functional. So as of today, I no longer have any computer installed with Ubuntu they all run Fedora. And to be perfectly honest, I actually trust the work done by both Red Hat for Fedora and Novell for Suse a lot more than the work Canonical has done for Ubuntu.

Lets start our excursion into the world of Ubuntu 9.10. Yes it's a good release, for the most part. Coming from the abysmal release of 9.04 it's a step in the right direction, however not completely all the way. But lets start with the good pieces. Software that is used the most has been updated to a version closer to that of of the latest release, with Firefox reaching version 3.5 and the OpenOffice suite has been moved to version 3.1.

So, it has been a little quiet around here for the last few weeks. Mainly it's because I'm waiting for some large updates. In a few weeks no more then 1 major update and 3 minor updates are scheduled to appear.

The major one is the arrival of FreeBSD 8.0 which will be a very interesting release. Mainly because some major improvements in the network and USB stack, ZFS version 13 as stable and performance enhancers to the jail environment. So a very interesting release.

It may not be the most thrilling thing, but PXE booting is a lifesaver for me. What is PXE? Well it's a abbreviation of Pre eXecution Enviroment, which is a technology developed by Intel and most computers manufactured in the last 5 years have support for this. It's an extension to be able to boot from a network drive without any need for local storage hardware(as floppy, hard drive, optical etc).

Another post so soon after another. Well, that's what I have started to commit to. What has been evaluated so far? Not to much actually, but I have one thing to report. As I have found MPlayer a bit more functional than VLC I have started to use it more and more, but there is one drawback of MPlayer. It's that they focus primarily on the "server" part that actually does the decoding and viewing and not so much on the "client" that controls what the server does(pause, start, skip etc).

Back to business. So what has been done during the summer? More operating system has been evaluated, more specificly CentOS which is a RedHat based OS as Fedora but not directly supported by the "prominent north american vendor" as it's called in "centos-language". Also I have had a look at a new media player, as VLC has somewhat strayed from the clean and simple interface with a maximum off support for different codecs. The new one is MPlayer which has a long history good support and a clean code.

After a in my opinion the horrible release of Ubuntu 9.04 I took the leap and changed to another distribution that seems a little bit more stable than Ubuntu. With the release of Fedora 11 it is quite a competent system with up to date programs and a more stable history. As always Ubuntu isn't Fedora and Fedora isn't Ubuntu. So one may ask why I'm not committed and support one distribution, but that's the beauty of FOSS software.

A bit silent here. Not an excuse but I'm overloaded with other work. Despite the aperent lack of activity some things have been done. Most of this work has been focused on the new tutorial regarding syncing files across a network to a backup machine and between portable units. It's still a tutorial in creation, so feel free to read it but do some own research before jumping in.

A great many patches has been downloaded today for the specific task of homogenizing the servers that I use both for production and development. Upgrading FreeBSD between minor and major versions isn't the easiest thing, but I can report successful merges from FreeBSD 6.3 to 7.0 and 7.0 to 7.1. I don't know if it's the binary version of the freebsd-upgrade or the one of my servers that aren't fully up to the task but there was a need to restart the initial patch and applying process three times.