[Thu Jan 30 09:24:39 CST 2014]

Do you have multiple user profiles in Firefox, and sometimes find it difficult to remember which directory holds the files for which profile? I checked everywhere in the preferences, and couldn't find any clue as to where the files are coming from. The reason is because the information is not there. It's under the Help menu, as documented on this page from the Firefox website. {link to this entry}

[Tue Jan 28 18:47:44 CST 2014]

I was just writing a short bash shell script to backup certain directories from my work laptop to a remote system running IRIX when I ran into the following rsync error:

rsync: ERROR: Illegal option -- -
usage: rsync _c_command _r_rcsdir _Rv dirname_...
EOF in read_timeout

After mucking around with the rsync options without much success, it finally occurred to me to do a web search. Lo and behold, it's documented on SGI's own release notes for the freeware rsync package. The problem is that the remote IRIX system has a different rsync command in its path (a command that, incidentally, has nothing to do with the open source tool). So, you should use the following option to work around the problem:

--rsync-path=/usr/freeware/bin/rsync

It works as documented. {link to this entry}

[Mon Jan 27 19:32:39 CST 2014]

The big news in the Linux world last week was that Red Hat and CentOS had decided to "join forces". I'm not sure how many people saw this coming, but it will definitely have a big impact out there. The way they explain the new strategy is as follows:

  • Commercial development and deployment: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, offering an extensive ecosystem of partners, a comprehensice portfolio of certified hardware and software offerings, and Red Hat's award winning support, consulting, and training services. Red Hat subscriptions deliver this value combined with access to the industry's most extensive ecosystem of partners, customers, and Linux experts to support and accelerate succes.
  • Community integration beyond the operating system: CentOS, a community-supported and produced Linux distribution that draws on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source technologies to provide a platform that's open to variation. CentOS provides a base for community adoption and integration of open source cloud, storage, network, and infrastructure technologies on a Red Hat-based platform.
  • Operating system innovation across the stack: Fedora, a communtiy-supported and produced Linux distribution that makes it easy for users to consume and contribute to leading-edge open source technologies from the kernel to the cloud. As a cutting edge development platform where every level of the stack is open to revision and improvement, Fedora will continue to serve as the upstream project on which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases are based.

In other words, a three-legged approach where, it should be obvious, Red Hat manages to eliminate the competition that CentOS posed up until now. How else could one interpret the agreement? They didn't publicly say so (yet), but it seems clear that Red Hat is doing this to eliminate the CentOS threat. Plenty of people out there were running exclusively CentOS in their shops because it offered the same reliability and compatibility (both for hardware and software) than RHEL, but it was free (as in beer). It came in handy for both smaller shops and very big ones with large deployments that make it prohibitively expensive to pay for thousands and thousands of software licenses. Well, one wonders how long it will be before the "new CentOS" introduces changes that render it incompatible with RHEL. It sure won't take long. And yes, the underlying software being open source, they can now switch to another RHEL clone, such as Scientific Linux. However, once we realize that the agreement with CentOS was clearly led by business reasons, how long do we think that Red Hat will wait before taking the legal steps to tighten things a bit on competitors like Scientific Liux or Oracle Enterprise Linux? I'd say it's just a matter of time... and most likely not a long time, actually.

Now, let's be clear about something that I have repeatedly said here: overall, Red Hat has been an honest, ethical member of the open source community. Just as in the case of Google (and, before them both, Sun Microsystems), Red Hat is contributing a lot to open source and the Linux kernel. Obviously, it is doing so for self-serving reasons. However, that doesn't change the fact that, in general, they are behaving like a good, decent neighbor. And yet, we should never lose sight of the fact that Red Hat is a publicly traded company that has a legal obligation to serve the interests of its stock-holders and, like any other institution, will do whatever it can to guarantee its survival in a cut-throat environment. That's just the way it is. Let's not fool ourselves. That's the reason why I just cannot understand people who bet the farm on CentOS or Ubuntu (another honest open source player) without second thoughts or a backup plan. So, let me set this straight. If you need the software or hardware certification that vendors like Red Hat or SUSE provide, then pony up and pay for the license. It's the honest thing to do. After all, the whole process has a cost too, and we should not expect an honesty behavior only from the major vendors in a true community. You and I should behave in a friendly way too, if we truly want this to be a community. On the other hand, if the certification (or 100% compatibility with one of those "enterprise-ready" distributions) is not something you need, why don't you switch to a true community-based distro, such as Debian? It's the best way to guarantee a future where we can all benefit from a completly free (both as in beer, and as in freedom) Linux-based OS in the context of a well established community based on the principle of equality of everyone involved. Or, to put it a different way, while perfectly legal, there is something inherently unethical in running a pure clone (such as CentOS or Scientific Linux) that truly adds nothing to the mix other than being a perfect copy of a well known brand. I'm sorry, but it reminds me of those "made in China" products that bear a well known brand and are complete fakes. There is something deeply dishonest about it, even if it's legal. {link to this entry}

[Mon Jan 13 16:10:35 CST 2014]

After I recently disabled IPv6 on my Debian Wheezy laptop, root started receiving an email notification about the following problem with exim4:

exim paniclog /var/log/exim4/paniclog on istanbul.sacredchaos.com has non-zero
+size, mail system might be broken. The last 10 lines are quoted below.

2014-01-07 08:05:01 IPv6 socket creation failed: Address family not supported by
+protocol
2014-01-08 07:49:29 IPv6 socket creation failed: Address family not supported by
+protocol
2014-01-09 07:50:58 IPv6 socket creation failed: Address family not supported by
+protocol
It's truly nothing to worry about. The exim4 daemon is configured by default to listen to IPv6 sockets too, so the configuration needs to be changed if you want to get rid of these. Just make sure you edit the file /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf as root to change the dc_local_interfaces line to look as follows:
dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1'
Notice that I deleted the additional IPv6 localhost address that was there. Then, run the following commands as root:
# rm /var/log/exim4/paniclog

# /usr/sbin/update-exim4.conf

# /etc/init.d/exim4 restart 
That should take care of it. {link to this entry}

[Sun Jan 12 11:29:40 CST 2014]

CentOS announced this week that it will be "joining forces with Red Hat. As a matter of fact, the public announcement states that they will be joining "the Red Hat family", whatever that means. From reading the announcement, it looks as if little will change, other than the fact that a few CentOS developers will be hired by Red Hat or that Red Hat will now sponsor some of the build and distributiosn systems that they CentOS folks use. If anything, it looks as if Red Hat will now have a clear majority in CentOS Governing Board, which is bound to have some consequences sooner or later. So, we'll have to wait and see how it all unfolds. For the time being, there are far many more questions than answers. Why Red Hat's sudden interest in CentOS? How will CentOS fit into Red Hat's overall strategy? Are they after the shops that currently run RHEL on a couple of systems to benefit from a support contract with them while using CentOS everywhere else? Will they perhaps offer a special deal to those shops? Like I said, there are more questions than answers right now. We'll have to wait and see. {link to this entry}

[Tue Jan 7 14:25:24 CST 2014]

It looks as if Debian Wheezy comes with IPv6 enabled by default, even though, as far as I know, very few people are using IPv6. No big deal, since it shouldn't truly break anything. Except that, for whatever reason, there were times when one of Google services somehow picked up that IP address and thought it might be an unauthorized address, therefore preventing me to access the service from one of the many text-based tools I use. So, the process to disable IPv6 on Debian is quite easy. Simply, edit the file /etc/default/grub as root, and make sure it shows the following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet ipv6.disable=1"
Then, again as root, run the update-grub command and reboot. That should be it. {link to this entry}

[Sun Jan 5 15:38:50 CST 2014]

Since the issue had already popped up in conversations with a few co-workers, I recently did a quick search to find out about Google's pricing for their entry-level business services. I must say I was sort of surprised. It sounds quite affordable, especially in the case of small businesses. Yes, I know, you already get the service for free. However, this other service, as stated on their page, includes "business controls and security", which you don't get with the free service. {link to this entry}