I got employed by Red Hat

This is pretty cool: End of March I signed a contract with Red Hat as a senior Linux consultant. It is not just “another new job”. It is cool for (at least) two reasons: First reason is that Red Hat is not “just another company”, it is Red Hat which is not very comparable to other employers, it is THE Linux and open source company, for me as a open source guy, this is perfect. The second reason is: I’m ….Read More

Pulp, what is it about it?

Thanks to Máirín’s posting I got aware of the Pulp project. What is it? I had a brief look at it, it is a Red Hat sponsored project with a similar functionality like Spacewalk and RHN Satellite. This brings me to the question: Is Pulp is intended to be a replacement of Spacewalk? It can make sense, it is written in Python as Cobbler is. Cobbler and Spacewalk are not really playing nice together. Spacewalk used Java, Perl and Python. ….Read More

Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1

Like promised I’ll keep you updated on the RHEL6b2.1. The “official name” is not Beta2.1, it is “Beta 2 refresh”. Why not calling it Beta3? Anyway: The good news first: In contrary to the first release of Beta 2, it works fine again! The first release of Beta2 was quite crappy, it was not installable as a KVM guest. This was obviously due to severe bugs in some virtio drivers. So, what are the news? 1. The bugs in the ….Read More

A brief test of OTRS::ITSM Changemanagement and the insanity of ITIL compliant software

OTRS is known as best-of-breed in open source incident management systems. Since quite some time, OTRS made its product ITIL V3 compliant. Means: It also comes with a change management module. At work we use a complex and extremely user-unfriedly software. This brought me to the idea to test the OTRS change management module in order to propose OTRS as a replacement for the currently used software for the Change- Incident- and Problem Management. Incident- and Change Management integration I ….Read More

IUS Community RPMs for Red Hats RHEL

I was criticizing that software in RHEL is too outdated for web servers quite soon after release, see my blog post http://blog.delouw.ch/2010/05/02/rhel6-as-a-web-server/. While this is true for a system fully supported by Red Hat, I learned an alternative from a comment on the post. This alternative is the so called IUS community repository. About the IUS Community Project The project was launched in September 2009. In spite of being a young project, it has a history. At Rackspace, a large ….Read More

KVM supports live migration between CPUs with different features

The video is a bit old, it is from November 2008. But it is still quite interesting to see and discuss about it. With KVM you can upgrade your farm of servers easy, it does not matter if the new servers have CPUs with new features or not. I’m not sure if you can do this with ESX, I guess not, you probably need to migrate them shut down. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ Have fun!

An example why open source software is cool

Recently I have set up an Apache Tomcat. As a replacement for the Tomcat manager I deployed Psi-Probe for easy deployment and access to statistics. Afterwards I installed the production software which needs to add a JVM parameter user.country=CH to have the proper date and time format used in Switzerland. This had a unwanted side-effect to Psi-Probe. The Interface switched to German, no way to switch the language back to English. Since my mother tongue is German, no big deal ….Read More

RHN Inter-Satellite-Sync is kind of tricky and picky

If you try to establish an ISS (Inter Satellite Sync) between two RHN Satellites, do not fully trust the documentation. A slave Satellite must be named by a hostname (IP is not enough) and must have an A and a PTR DNS record or have an /etc/hosts entry. Check it before restarting the satellite by issuing rhn-satellite restart. The check is simply done by entering gethostip rhn.example.com and getent hosts <IP-address> on the commandline. When Quoting the documentaion at Red ….Read More