Most notably, this package will safely run on PostgreSQL 9.1 from squeeze-backports and contains many performance improvements.  It should be a drop in upgrade for the distro package.

Get it here:
http://kev009.com/files/zabbix-1.8.9-squeeze.tar.gz

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The main problem is that n-th order tweakability is preferred over convention.  It’s just stupid.  There are a core set of things that just about everybody needs to do.  Those should be dead simple.  Ready to uncomment and run.  The set operating systems used in the enterprise is fairly small:  RHEL5, RHEL6, Debian 6, Ubuntu LTS.  A configuration system should be opinionated and have complete out of the box support for these platforms.  Simple rulesets for the basics that nearly everyone uses should be ready to go..  package management, process initialization, file management, ssh, sudo, DNS, Apache, PAM, PostgreSQL, MySQL, OpenLDAP, etc.  Keep it simple.  Keep it simple.  Keep it simple.  Resist all urges to add complexity.

That’s not the case.

You’d think after 30 years of Unix, BSD and Linux network deployments this would be pretty well trodden ground.  Wrong.  It’s a complete crapshoot and everybody does things differently.  Pick your poisons and reinvent the stack ad infinitum.

This is one of the few areas I’m green with envy of the Microsoft side of the fence.  Between Active Directory, Group Policy,  and maybe a third party tool or two for cloning and installs and such, Microsoft environments can easily be set up and managed well by complete morons (and often are).

Puppet

Puppet seems to have potential.  Of course, out of the box you’re pissing in the wind with a blank slate and most books and sites will have you following tutorials to rewrite rulesets that thousands of other people before you have similarly cobbled poorly together.  As a Ruby project, it unsurprisingly has vocal hipster fanboys.  Unfortunately, they forgot to parrot their DRY principle to each other.

It centers around a domain specific convention which isn’t so bad..  but in no time flat you’ll start seeing full blown Ruby programs intermingled.  Ugh.  But it’s not so bad if you stick to the basics.

If you look around you can find reasonably complete module sets, i.e. http://www.example42.com/.  It’s not all gravy as these are heavily interdependent and kludgy.  If you want a clean, simple solution you’re back to rolling your own with some healthy copy and paste.

Since it’s a Ruby project, aside from the annoying fanboys, you’re also going to run into scalability problems past a few hundred nodes.  There are mitigation strategies, but it’s a joke compared to something like Cfengine.

Due to hype, you’ll find decent versions in the Debian and Ubuntu backports repos.  RHEL 5 and 6 are covered by a Puppet Labs repo.  2.6 and 2.7 are therefore readily available and as long as your master is running the later version you shouldn’t have interop problems.

All things considered, Puppet is probably the best choice at the moment.  It sucks, but it’s got a lot of momentum behind it.  There are mountains of docs, books, and tutorials to get you going and nothing is too foreign or hard to grasp.

Cfengine 3

I really want to like Cfengine.  It’s incredibly light weight and hardcore ROFLscale.  It’s got serious theory behind it and older versions have been used in massive deployments.  But it’s not just a blank slate.  It’s even lower level and incomplete compared to the others.

You really need to add a promise library to get features that should be included by default.  These are all stagnate though, and still leave much to be desired.

There’s a company behind it doing something or another, but the open source version is raw.  If you have more than one Linux distribution, I’ll pretty much guarantee the packages are incompatible.

The repo choices aren’t great either.  Uncle Bob’s PPA on Ubuntu, out of luck on Debian.  RPMs in the EL repos look out of date.  You can of course get source and binaries from the Cfengine company, but it’s not my preferred way to install things and makes bootstrapping harder than it needs to be.

I haven’t tried the latest release, but quickly gave this one up when I found severe incompatibilities between point releases.  Madness.  You’d think people inventing something like promise theory could handle something as simple as version stability.

Ping me when a corporation backs Cfengine with a good promise library, some standard tasks, and repos for the common operating systems.

Bcfg2

Bcfg2 made the most sense to me out of the box.  XML is yucky and out of fashion these days, but Bcfg2 manages to use it acceptably.  Consequently, most things are declarative, easily read, and overall easy to mimic.  Beyond that, you can tap into some Python template and generator stuff.  But yes, these guys finally didn’t put n-th order above the common cases!  Installing packages and ensuring services are on is a snap.

They’ve got their own repos for many distros so installation isn’t bad.

The client and server are Python so you’ll have similar scaling problems to Puppet in large environments.

My biggest grievance with Bcfg2 is that the server needs intimate knowledge of each operating system version’s package repos.  You’ll fumble around writing a good bit of XML definitions for this in a heterogeneous environment.

The main thing Bcfg2 is lacking right now is community momentum.  Including repo definitions by default and some  more doc work.. I think this would be a great system for small to medium deployments.

Conclusions

The lot of this stuff is really terrible.  End to end system management under *nix is a major pain point.  On top of this, you’ll need a fairly free form monitoring framework (these also all suck) and directory service.  Mix and match an impossible array of projects and eventually you’ll find your own recipe that sort of works.  Except everyone does it differently so you’ll constantly be learning and redoing the same things over and over anyway.

It’s not fun.  What we need is end to end integrated thinking.  This area is still ripe for picking.  Oh RedHat, where art thou?

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Some people accuse him of “selling out” in some moral sense; this is not the case.  As a technologist, I can imagine liquidity is a liberating experience as you can pass on the reigns and ultimate financial responsibility of your company and get back to the tech.  He built and sold MySQL AB for $1 billion dollars.  Needless to say, he and his shareholders were well compensated — probably far more than the actual “worth” of the company.  It is his fault that he did not architect a sale in such a way where he’d remain supreme commander if that was his true desire.  In retrospect, what he did by selling, quickly leaving SUN, and starting a fork of the code is a pretty deviant thing to do.  But again, if the acquisitions agreement didn’t forbid this, there is no foul play on either side.

Sun and now Oracle have done nothing overt to prevent MySQL advancement.   What’s “killing”[1] MySQL is failure to innovate.  Don’t get me wrong, MySQL is a great tool and meshes beautifully to the needs of many web workloads.  It powers everything from this humble blog to many enormous web properties.  It’s always been the “good enough” DB and for a long while lacked rather fundamental features that big corporate systems had.  Although most of these problems are shored up (and allowed reciprocal growth in 4.x and 5.0), nothing exciting has come along since 5.0.  Creating work-a-like storage engines just because Oracle owns InnoDB was silly in retrospect and potentially fatal in the long-term.  Sorry Monty, MySQL has never really broken out of the niche that made it so popular back in the version 3.23 days and if you spent your energy and money since innovating instead of dragging your feet this would not be the case.

I’ve been using the PostgreSQL 9 betas, and let me tell you, it meets or exceeds all my RDBMS needs.  If you need a traditional database that has a rock solid history and has stepped up on the innovation front recently, take it for a spin.  There are some interesting non-traditional developments as well, especially CouchDB.  All in all, if Oracle does fumble[2] MySQL, the only really damage is to Monty’s ego as we have excellent alternatives.

[1] MySQL isn’t going to go away.  It has simply saturated the target market and the growth curve has since flattened.

[2] I see no reason they will do any better or worse than MySQL AB, Sun, or Monty Program AB.  Expect more of the same.

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The situation in many ways paralleled the AT&T UNIX lawsuit of the ’90s. It is every bit as ironic considering, for instance, that BSD folks were largely responsible for the success of UNIX. In SCO’s case, their OS (SVr4 UNIX) is based largely on the work of Research UNIX, BSD, and even includes a wide selection of GNU tools in userland.

Except this time, no offending code was ever demonstrated, just a straw-man argument and utter defeat.

Still, I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over the whole affair. Santa Cruz Operation and System V UNIX were respectable in their time. My guess is that SCO along with UnixWare (the natural evolution of System V) will fade into oblivion along side the countless other dead UNIX implementations. Linux zealots often take jabs at other implementations, but I think UnixWare could have held a viable, if niche, place in the enterprise had been under proper stewardship.

As time goes on, the UNIX diaspora seems to be waning. We are left with, essentially:

• Linux, with a mostly GNU userland as the heavyweight contender
• The BSDs, perhaps equal or greater in architectural quality but relatively unknown giants. We can however lump Mac OS X in here which is the most widely used.
• Solaris, which might be considered an open source System V fork. An interesting OS that has a a great lineage and potential, but lacks in trust and certainty for contributors at the moment.
• AIX, a System V and BSD hybrid with plenty of IBM thrown in for good measure. Perhaps the gold bar and only remaining competitive mid-iron standard due to IBM’s silicon prowess.
• HP-UX, an older System V linage perhaps on a slow deathbed due to reliance on the vapid Itanium

History has been unforgiving to those companies that try to unfairly weasel programmers and users in this market. The lesson is to work with and encourage your development community and not bite the hand that feeds. My eyes are on Oracle for the time being. Sun had a hard enough time nurturing the Solaris community despite being a favorable company, and Oracle can just as easily kill this operating system through boneheaded maneuvers if it is not careful.

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There is a New Year’s SNAFU in which any dates 2010+ are marked “grossly in the future”.  That is a problem since it is now 2010.

Run sa-update and restart SpamAssassin ASAP, or install the following rule to local.cf:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

Thanks to LWN for pointing this out to me before too much damage was done.

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Ultra 27 Front View

The Ultra 27 is a single socket system but packs a powerful quad core punch. With the Nehalem Xeon (similar to the consumer Core i7), markets that used to demand dual socket systems can now comfortably look to cheaper single socket alternatives. With the return of HyperThreading, the chip handles 8 hardware threads and unlike its previous guise in the Pentium 4, HT contributes noticeably and favorably to performance.  Due to the extreme performance and number of execution threads, I think the Nehalem Xeon represents a paradigm shift where most high end systems will no longer carry two discrete CPUs.

The Ultra 27 competes in the same league as the Lenovo ThinkStation S20, HP Z400, Mac Pro Quad and various other boutique workstation manufacturers. Through channel vendors, all but the Mac can be comfortably configured for around $2000.

The price of this system is attractive and affordable to anybody who makes their livelihood off of professional computing. The components on a workstation like this are well engineered and thoroughly tested together. 3rd party vendors will also commonly certify software and hardware against popular workstation offerings. The Ultra 27 is comfortably expandable and can be equipped with Intel’s best CPUs on the market, plenty of disk, and high end graphics. With two PCIe2 16-lane slots and ample cooling and power, the Ultra 27 has a lot to offer anyone in digital content creation, CAD, CAM, CAE or other visualization activities. With the speedy Nehalem chip and 4 disk bays programmers doing large builds or staging large applications should be more than content.

Ultra 27 Rear View

The Ultra 27 comes in a robust light gray case.  The Spartan design is free of all the unsightly plastic that usually adorns HP machines and looks more substantial than either the Lenovo or HP competition.  The interior isn’t quite as beautiful as the Mac Pro’s, but there is plenty of room and the internal drive bay keeps any need for user cable management to a minimum.

Ultra 27 Inside Overview

My configuration is as follows:

• Intel Xeon w3570 Quad Core at 3.20GHz (has intel Turbo Boost to 3.46GHz)
• 6GB RAM ECC DDR3-1333
• nVIDIA Quadro FX 380 graphics
• 500GB 7200 RPM SATA hard disk

Ultra 27 Drive Bay

I am upgrading from a previous IBM IntelliStation A Pro which had two physical single core AMD Opteron CPUs.  The increase in performance is remarkable.

It is noteworthy that this system is much quieter than my previous.  Indeed, the large fan is seldom audible even under heavy load.   The heat output is negligible and the components have never been more than warm to the touch even after hours of maximal CPU usage.

Ultra 27 Main Board

The case is for the most part toolless and very clean and spacious inside.  Every aspect of the system can be easily upgraded so the Ultra 27 should be a good investment and grow with time and requirements.

Ultra 27 Case Diagram

With well engineered hardware and plenty of power, the Ultra 27 is awesome as a general UNIX-class workstation.  I am happily running Gentoo and even the largest builds are a cakewalk for this box.  I push my computer harder than most people.  Commonly running several browser instances loaded with tabs, several terminals, email, music, the Eclipse IDE, and more, interactivity has not diminished even when running parallel compiles.

I’ll conclude that anyone looking at the Mac Pro should consider the alternative in machines like the Sun Ultra 27.  This computer represents a latest in a powerful linage of Sun workstations and is ideal for just about any demanding workload you can throw at it.

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This is primarily useful in high availability setups.  By synchronously mirroring storage across two systems, you can run an active-passive cluster where the backup machine will take over if the primary fails.  Using a more advanced clustering file system such as GFS2 or OCFS, you can even do active-active setups although there are certain considerations there.

This is exciting because it alleviates the need for specialized hardware like SAN storage.  Standard Linux servers with direct attached storage may be used and indeed even give appreciable performance.  In practice, redundancy will be even greater than all but the highest end SAN equipment due to the lack of single point of failure.

DRBD also allows for asynchronous mirroring, that is, writes to the primary do not wait on completion to the secondary.  This is useful for cold site backups and perhaps meeting legal compliance in certain industries as well.

Take a look at the DRBD site for more information and use cases.

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If you are doing link bonding and bridging in accordance with my previous post “Xen 3.3 in RHEL/CentOS 5 and more Link Aggregation Fun“, you no longer need to patch the network scripts as RedHat fixed the initscripts package in RHEL 5.4.

Upgrade procedure for CentOS 5.3 to 5.4:

yum clean all
yum update glibc\*
yum update yum\* rpm\* python\*
yum clean all
yum upgrade
reboot

Updated Xen Install Guide From My Previous Article:

Head over to http://www.gitco.de/repo/ and grab the repo for your arch.  (Most likely wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/CentOS5-GITCO_x86_64.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ for the uninitiated).

If you already have Xen installed, you may need to remove and readd it.

yum groupremove Virtualization
yum groupinstall Virtualization

You’ll also get some updated tools like Virtual Machine Monitor 0.7.0 that make it easier to install newer guests such as Fedora 11 or Ubuntu.  Sweet!

Double check /etc/sysconfig/kernel.  It should be set to kernel-xen.  Likewise, check /boot/grub.conf and make sure that the Xen kernel is the default if the aforementioned was not done beforehand.

Reboot!

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I aim to do the same by showing “Java: The Good Parts” here at a high level.

When I was younger, I used to despise Java for political reasons and bad memories of early applets and applications.  I suspect many users and developers (especially Libre software devs!) are on the same boat.  By the end of this article, I hope I swayed your opinion or at least caused you to reevaluate your bias.  I also wish to encourage further discussion about these points and ways we can improve any deficiencies.

Rough and Tumble Upbringing

When Java first started gaining popularity, it was loudly hyped as the end all language.  It was expected that Java would take the “rich client” by storm, and applets would be the go to solution for enhancing web pages.  What happened was a bit different.  Java floundered and struggled to find a niche.  On the client side, AWT apps looked horrendous despite using native widgets.  Then Swing came about and despite easing development, it looked equally bad on all platforms (by default).  Applets were basically a stillbirth.  The ugly gray box, loadtime sometime measuring in minutes, and no coordination with the DOM and web browser made the average user hate Java.

One area Java was able to develop and secure a foundation, however, was the back end of large web applications.  The Virtual Machine approach provided a marked advantage over the CGI and interpreted scripts of the day.  Java’s rich networking libraries, clean Object Oriented design, and safety made this the language de jour for large web applications.

Open Source Matters

In my opinion, the open sourcing of Java during its early infancy would have had little impact on most of the teething issues.  The Virtual Machine, JIT, and Garbage Collection required many years of tuning to get acceptable performance and Sun did an acceptable job keeping it under wing.  The relatively limited CPU and RAM of the mid ’90s also made these concepts a bit ahead of their time.  Somewhere in the 1999-2002 time frame, though, Sun really dropped the ball.  An Open Source Java would have led to ubiquity on the booming Linux platform and a chance for all sorts of cross-platform software.

Open Source matters, and not just for the source code.  Open Source projects naturally bring about very pragmatic and intelligent developers.  These are the folks that thoroughly enjoy their hobby, work, and tools.  The marketing guys and pointed haired bosses have much less pull here.  On one hand, a vibrant community built itself with the many Apache Software Foundation projects.  However, most of these were squarely focused on web applications or low level things such as build tools, testing frameworks, and message buses.

Due to the void, interpreted languages such as Python rose to the challenge while C and C++ remained the mainstay for applications programming.  Microsoft started dominating Windows development with their .NET CLR languages.  The glib/Gtk+ and Qt toolkits brought about a renaissance in cross-platform development with C and C++ respectively [though not limited].

It wasn’t until the open-sourcing of SWT that GUI development in Java became attractive.  The obvious killer apps here were the Eclipse IDE and the Azureus (now Vuze) bittorrent client.

Sun’s closed grip of Java really stagnated any chance of abundant expansion in these middle years (2001-2006).  Microsoft leveraged this weakness to create the excellent .NET platform and associated languages to maintain their closed platform and market dominance.  The counterbalance that would have been Java was thus left playing catchup.

We are just beginning to see the fruits of this labor from 2006 through today.  The OpenJDK project is now distributed with popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora.  We finally have decent browser plugins and Java Web Start applications across 32 and 64-bit machines.  The Java deployment problem will slowly fade from memory.

Application Development

SWT made Java apps beautiful.  OpenJDK should make them ubiquitous.  We finally have an Open Source platform that is widely deployed.  The strong built in standard library and clean OO design patterns of Java make it a very pleasant host for developing rich client apps.  Obvious areas for improvement here include better layout/form design tools and closer integration with upstream Linux distributors.

Somewhere along the line, Trolltech/QT Software (now owned by Nokia) released Jambi — the complete Qt bindings, GUI framework, and incredibly rich library — for Java.  Oddly, this bombshell received little of the community and fanfare I thought it would or deserves.  Indeed, QT Software demoted Jambi from their teir-1 platforms and hopes the community will pick it up.  I hope this project isn’t allowed to stagnate as there is a lot of potential here.

Web Apps

Along the “Enterprise Web Application” lineage of Java, we wound up with some disgustingly overcomplicated and bloated frameworks for building web apps.  Ruby on Rails and Python Django came about and put a new spin on the development of rapid and robust web apps.  The learning curve of these frameworks is much less than Java EE and I will go as far as saying they are more capable because of it.

By using Java, JSP, and Servlets directly on top of a light Model-View-Controller, I believe Java is just as compelling as some of the more popular scripting languages.  Developers need to know they can trim the fat and that there are many advantages to developing in Java, namely because of the next topic…

Dynamic Languages, its all about the VM

It’s all about the JVM stupid!  One of the best features of Java and .NET are the underlying Virtual Machines.  By using JIT compiled VMs, Java code has a distinct advantage over the common interpreted languages such as Perl, Python, and PHP.  In the case of Java, the resultant is even naturally crossplatform.

The really interesting developments here focus on extending the JVM to syntax and paradigms other than the statically typed C++ lookalike.  Clojure and Scala deliver innovative new techniques while Jython and JRuby bring these excellent languages to the Java software platform and virtual machine.

In short, Java provides everyone with a counter to Microsoft’s .NET CLR.  The Java VM has been around the block and tuned by giants such as Sun, IBM, Oracle, SAP and more.

I call on the community to discuss how we can encourage use of the JVM for languages other than Java and build this into a defacto runtime.  Continued tuning and integration with Windows, Mac OS X, and Gnome/KDE *NIX systems is paramount.  Research for easy multi-core development is also worthwhile.  Meanwhile, distributions need to continue packaging the JRE and make it a default.  Individual developers need to be made aware of “Java: The Good Parts” and myths debunked.

Applets, Rich Media, Native Code!?

With the release of Java FX, widespread deployment of the JRE, and better browser integration, Java has set the stage for a comeback to its roots.

During the late ’90s and 2000s, Adobe Flash became the tool of choice for web animation and interactive pages.  It really exploded with the advent of Youtube and other internet streaming sites making use of the Flash video format.  Unfortunately, Flash player is notoriously insecure, resource intensive, and crash-prone.  It is also not widely available for the millions of smartphones that have become more accessible than computers.

Luckily, there seems to be a shift back to the browser with new developments in AJAX, JavaScript, and HTML.  The <video> tag will hopefully make video as easy and portable as graphics are today in the browser.  Clean JavaScript libraries and fast JIT JS engines make it practical to use this paradigm for many domains.

Yet one must acknowledge that somewhere along the line, manipulating a DOM/markup language with a scripting language isn’t the most effective development platform for everything.  Google even thinks it poignant to run x86 machine code in a sandboxed environment in your browser.  I personally fail to see the logic behind this.  Java provides a well evolved, cross-platform solution.   Java can run on your ARM powered Android.  Requiring an x86 CPU just seems like the wrong track in this modern age.  Hopefully JavaFX will pick up the slack and return Java to its roots.  I would love to see the demise of the terrible Flash plugin.

Future and Conclusion

It’s time we considered Java for The Good Parts.

I hope some of my points caused you to reevaluate any bad preconceptions or past experiences you may have had with Java.  Java has undergone great change since its birth and I think it is capable of becoming the premier development platform for applications programming of all types.  Particularly interesting are some of the new languages such as Scala and Clojure.  Java has long been a staple in web development, but has traditionally scared away amateur coders.  If you cut the fat, Servlets and JSP are not much harder to set up than common place scripting languages.  Frameworks such as Grails bring it to parity with Rails or Django.

Java underwent a sea change in 2006 with the releasing of the source code and opening of the development process.  Java and the JVM should be championed by Libre software developers and users alike!

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an I.T. WTF Odyssey

I had the displeasure of working at an erecycler several years ago. Even watching stuff come off the trucks, it was very hard to get anything before it was utterly destroyed by the yard goons. Inserting a forklift blade into a 19″ rack cabinet was common practice and I witnessed on numerous occasions the dropping of them in this fashion. Once, they even rolled a forklift off the ramp. These events were always followed by a flurry of Spanish profanity and I usually had to check my pants for continence afterward from laughing so hard. It is a miracle nobody has ever been seriously maimed there to the best of my knowledge.

The highlight of this job experience was when the greedy goons resold a defective Siemens blood handling instrument of some sort that was sent specifically to them to be destroyed (as was EVERYTHING, in theory). The serial number was traced back to them and there was an all out shitstorm. A team of inspectors was flown out from Germany. The goons put on a particularly hilarious show buying hardhats, safety vests, warning signs, identification badges, and more. Somehow, they kept the contract (it was probably just “check you ass” on Siemen’s part — dumping obsolete X-Ray, MRI machines, medical waste, etc for free must be hard to pass up) and all of this change disappeared within a couple days.

What is remarkable is that the above business got multi-millions of dollars of inventory for FREE every year. I really can’t think of any other business model like it. The owner is completely incompetent and morally bankrupt. Very little was put back into the company’s facilities, employees (except maybe a couple at the top), or development. None of the employees had an IQ above room temperature, and everybody seemed content to keep it that way.

There is a happy ending though. A skid of IBM RS/6000 7012 systems from Intel came in at one time. Among the 20-30 machines was a lone -397 that I snagged. This is my favorite collectors box to date (it is the same POWER2 CPU type used in the famous Deep Blue super computer).

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