coUnix

My buddy popped his internet Cherry!

My buddy Vincent is over at wowandisayitlouder.com. Check it out.

Test Post from Textmate

Test blog post from Textmate.

Everyone else is doing it…

mark@bendlinux:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s \n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
115   ls
63   sudo
63   cd
34   ping
22   httperf
20   vim
17   lynx
17   clear
11   ps
8   autobench

Enjoy!

What is my ISP doing?

We have all heard of various ISP’s capping bandwidth usage, but most of them have been rather large (Comcast, Time Warner). I never assumed that my local cable company would implement bandwidth caps. But starting in July, Bend Broadband (BBB) will be Doubling speeds… but at the same times putting caps in place, rather small ones at that. The “overage” charge is set at $1.50/Gb.

The internet is used more every day by people that are discovering the tools and sites out there. How can they expect to drive internet adoption by turning it into a pay-per-byte action. They say that a majority of their users use less than 10Gb/Month. When I think of someone that uses less than 10Gb I assume that its very easy for that person to go over 10Gb, what if they start a netflix subscription, or their kids get an xbox 360 or ps3. BBB is pushing away a core set of customers, including me, that have been rather happy and willing to suggest their service to clients, friends and family. But I cant do that now, knowing that each of those people will risks having wildly varying bills each month just for using the internet more.

There is a pretty good conversation about this over at UtterlyBoring.com check is out: http://utterlyboring.com/archives/2008/03/21/bendbroadband_i.php

As of today I am scheduled for another local ISP to be out here on the 14th, to hook me up. At which point I will no longer be a BBB internet subscriber.

Book Review: Network Warrior

I just finished up a pretty thorough read of Network Warrior, published by O’Reilly Media, Inc.  I have to say that it was one of the best network engineering books that I have read in quite some time. The book is  packed full of nuggets of knowledge that I have not seen together in one book. Gary A. Donahue, the author, has done a great job of going over material in that CCNA’s need to know, but where it really shines is the discussion of things that the current CCNA folks are not forced to learn… one big example is CatOS. CatOS is still in use in a multitude of  devices out there and its nice to find a book that still acknowledges that.

The book is very Cisco centric (But what network guy isnt), still the topics usually apply to other vendors quite well. I especially loved part 8 of the book, titled “Designing Networks”. He does a GREAT job of walking through the network design process… including selling it to management. I also felt that part 6, “Server Load Balancing” is a must read for anyone with services that need to scale, once again the discussion is Cisco focused.. but there are some gems in there that work no matter what techniques you choose are.

This book is one of the few that should always be near so its there to grab when you need it. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone that manages a network.

RailsConf 2008

Everyone that knows me knows that I love ruby and ruby on rails. I have just registered for RailsConf 2008…

Anyone else going? Did you sign up for the tutorial days?

Mark & Jeran Diagram: Our relationship

This has nothing to do with Unix/Linux but I actually laughed out loud when I saw this, so I had to post it.

Thanks to xkcd for the GREAT venn diagram.

VirtualBox Purchased by Sun

It seems that Sun is on an OSS buying rampage. They have purchased Innotek (office space anyone …. lol), the developers of VirtualBox. You can read the press release here: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080212.1.xml

I wonder who else may be on their plate soon???

Kernel 2.6.23 – 2.6.24 Local Root Exploit

For those of you out there running 2.6.23….. http://milw0rm.com/exploits/5093

Open Source Business

I feel like writing a series of posts talking about various pieces of software that are great replacements for many of the classical closed/costly software packages that companies tend to purchase. Over the past year I have been able take a close look at a few great open source solutions out there. During my experimenting, testing, breaking and re-building I grew fond of quite a bit of software out there and I want to make sure that businesses know they have choices.

I plan on writing about some new services(IM) that businesses are starting to rely on, as well as the old classics(Email). It will be a discussion of the various pieces of technology that I have used and how they work well within a company, so if I don’t talk about something it probably because I have not used it. But please do comment if you have ideas. I will also talk about the Operating Systems that I prefer to run

I plan on hitting the following topics:

• Communication
  • Corporate IM
  • Email/Groupware
  • Wiki’s
  • Document Management/Collaboration
  • Telephony
  • Issue/Request/Ticket Tracking
• Business Intelligence
  • Reporting
  • Analysis
• Network Management
  • Security
  • Monitoring
  • VPNs/Firewalls

Stay tuned… they are coming soon.