To all my OpenSuse friends:
In the past, I’ve made fun of your distro while you where not around.
I’ve poked fun at your package management.
I’ve installed over OpenSuse with other distros.
I’ve blown away partitions reserved for OpenSuse.
I’ve ignored your releases.
But today, that all changes. Today, I give it a fair shake.
I’ll let you know what I think in a week.
I shortened the page load times on the Utah Open Source Planet by bringing the number of posts down from 60 to 40.
A year ago, I gave wordpress a spin and started sharing with the world some of the many things that interest me. This tends to be stuff about Open Source/Free software. The cool thing about Open Source software is that it seems to have universal appeal. This map shows typical geographic locations of my site’s visitors.
Anyway, it’s fun to think that as I sleep, there are people in Asia or Europe browsing the web server that warms the space under my stairs. :)
Two things about this site are bound to change this year. One, I’ll be writing my own blogging system (in Django). Two, I’ll be working on making the information here more helpful to those who visit. It won’t be a big deal; I’ll just be making an effort to think about what the reader may need to know, giving better links, invite questions, etc.
Here’s to a great new year!
While working on some Xen stuff, I’ve found that a drawing is about the easiest way to document some things.
I’m going to be doing some drawings of custom Xen networks, but until then, here are a few drawings of default Xen networks to serve as a point of reference.
This first one just shows how a non-Xen networking setup might look. The white box is just a label. Not much to see :)
Now, we’ll look at what starting xend does to our network. Later on, I’ll try to blog about the scripts that make this change and how they work. If you boot into your Xen kernel in and haven’t done anything with Xen yet, this is what your setup looks like (well, maybe).
If you bring up a guest OS (DomU), this is what your networking will look like. This set-up is suitable for most Xen installs.
More to come…
Update: Changed the X in vifX.Y to match the domain ID. Good eye Lamont.
You know, now that Novell has stopped developing Hula, Google should adopt it. A successful Hula would be a kick in the teeth to Microsoft and a great way to gain favor with the Open Source crowd. A few months of effort to get to Hula to a “1.0″, and Google would get all the love. Google, you know you want to.
I’ve been checking out rPath and Conary. I know rPath has ties to Red Hat, but let’s forget that for now. The technology is very, very cool. From what I can tell, it has serious advantages over rpm and yum|apt|up2date combo.
Besides local package management, it makes it easy to fork the distro. Why would anyone want that?! Well, people don’t really want to fork anything, they just want a few things that aren’t currently offered, so they take the distro they know (often RHEL or Debian) and start making changes. Usually it’s more work then they can keep up with and things fall apart. If they do “make it” the deltas get bigger and bigger until any benefit that comes from the fork is lost.
What if distros encouraged a community of hackers around their base distro? As long as they don’t steal customers, don’t burden the Upstream Providers (UP) with support and offer clean patches, wouldn’t that be welcome? Isn’t it a complement of sorts to be forked? And, what if the UP made it so easy to keep in sync that small projects could actually thrive and stick around long enough to give something back to the UP? At the very least, more and more people would learn how to run a system that’s like the UP, and those skills would port if they ever switched to the UP’s distro. I’m thinking more then just SRPMS, I’m thinking a Conary based distro and repos.
So really, we’re not talking about a “hostile fork” in the classic sense. We are talking about a “loving spoon.” It seems to me that once the sweetness that is Conary becomes more and more common place (and I believe it will), there will be great value in being the distro that people choose as the root of their distro. That sounds like a good fit for Fedora Core, or even better, RHEL or Debian. One would think that Red Hat and Debian would want to preempt each other with such a move.
As it stands, rPath is nicely positioned to lead out in this space. Currently their interests are focused on appliances, but what about general purpose distros? That can’t be that far behind. I for one, will be looking at rPath to use as a base for one of my projects. Plus, the guys over at rPath are super helpful. I wish them the best (if Red Hat and Debian sit on their hands in this regard, it looks like rPath just might get it).
Anyone see where I’m going with this? Does anyone agree? Anyone think I’m nuts?
I leave you with a bit this fitting 1966 classic by the LOVIN’ SPOONFUL:
Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the cityAll around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…
The new version of Asterisk (1.4) is getting a GUI. I’ve known that for a while. I didn’t know, however, that Digium has wrapped the whole thing up as a Distro based on what looks like Fedora Core or RHEL.
From the announcement:
Asterisk® can now be easily configured with a graphical interface. The new site, AsteriskNOW.org, which is still in development, hosts AsteriskNOW™ Beta. AsteriskNOW™ Beta is a Software Appliance; a GUI implementation with the open source Asterisk distribution. AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy. You no longer have to worry about kernel versions and package dependencies. Unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance are included.
I’m usually very suspicious of GUIs used to configure servers, but if Digium is behind it, I’ll at least give it a look. A “distro” based install of Asterisk sounds like a great trouble-free approach when installing for someone that doesn’t have full-time sysadmins.
I’m still going to be using CentOS or RHEL for my personal stuff and wondering about the real question… When will the Zaptel drivers make it into the kernel?
Update: Looks like the distro is rPath Linux.
I’ve update the Utah Open Source Planet to the latest code and cleared all the caches. This will make things funky in the short term, but better in the long run. Happy blogging (and cooking?).
Things are always harder then they’re supposed to be. Plugging in a SIP client to Asterisk should be easy, right? Well, it is, if everything is just perfect. I took a few notes and a few screenshots to help others if they find this fairly typical setup is more difficult then it should be.
Here are the relevant parts (IP addresses and mailbox number changed to protect the innocent) of my sip.conf:
[general]
port => 5060
bindaddr => aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
disallow => all
allow => ulaw
allow => alaw
context => sip-users
canreinvite => no
nat => no[gabe]
username => gabe
secret => ****
mailbox => 1337
callerid => Gabe Gunderson <1337>
type => friend
host => dynamic
To to avoid NAT issues (on my side, not the server side), this communication is going over an OpenVPN connection. Make sure your tunnel is up before you start Ekiga and go to the preferences page. Set “Listen On” to tun0 and not eth0 (which is the default). The settings don’t seem to “take” until you restart Ekiga.
I like to keep things simple in the codec department. The VSP we’re using offers only G.711 (U-LAW or PCMU and A-LAW or PCMA). We’re using U-LAW since it’s the standard here in the U.S. and it costs the CPU very little to go from U-LAW < => U-LAW. It’s a little fatter in the tubes, but that’s not a big deal on this particular install.
Here’s a typical Account. I’ve chosen to use names for sip users instead of numbers. It makes the configs a little easier to read and you can always map numbers to names in the dial-plan.
If you have problems, there are a few things you can do to help figure out what’s going on.
Try the following:
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