Time For Ubuntu to Fork Evolution

No one can deny the current face of Linux to the masses is Ubuntu. It’s massively more popular than any other distro which makes it the flagship for breaking existing market strangleholds.

Take the Enterprise server OS market for instance, a traditionally strong area for Linux anyway, Canonical (the controlling company of Ubuntu) have rightly seen where they need to position themselves to gain the advantage with Server OS’s and have gone down the Cloud route with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Also - beefing up the support options and the packaging to at least align themselves with the normal market leaders Suse and Red Hat helps to gain further server adoption by to using the momentum of all the other Ubuntu areas and user allegiances.

The personal desktop / netbook area is the next to be tackled. Obviously Ubuntu has been trundling along as the best choice for the tiny personal Linux desktop market for a while but it has needed to really stand-out to do battle with Windows and the latest player (rising on the back of the i[Pod|Phone] wave) Mac OS. Again Canonical have pulled the rabbit out of the hat and pointed Ubuntu desktop in exactly the right direction – Social Networking. With Ubuntu Lucid having fully integrated Social Networking and chat they’ve shown they know how people actually use their computers. 9 times out of 10 someone is turning their computer on to participate in Facebook or make Tweets on Twitter, or for the Old-Skoolers chat on MSN. To make the desktop OS actually part of this is exactly the best way to position it and ensures it’s already ahead of the opposition when they realise they need to do the same thing.

Finally, there’s an area that Ubuntu is very weak on and it’s where efforts need to be concentrated next - The Enterprise Desktop.
Novell have previously tried to leverage that market but did it all wrong. They didn’t understand that there is just one killer feature (just as with integrated desktop social networking) that needs to be in there which is Exchange support. Outlook and to a lesser extent Office keeps Windows XP / 7 firmly planted on the Enterprise desktop purely because of its ability to work perfectly with Exchange. Businesses now (rightly or wrongly) revolve around shared mail, contacts, calendaring and scheduling, and Exchange shows no signs of being supplanted yet as the default choice for this functionaility.

With all this in mind I present my recommendation for Ubuntu: Fork Evolution.

Evolution has some good MAPI functionality but for every step forward, it takes 2 steps back. The functionality is very buggy but at the same time is almost there and some real concerted structured development would see it work very nicely and be a drop in replacement for Outlook.
Also, Evolution needs all of this Social Networking goodness that is present in the me menu in Lucid to be integrated into Evolution too. One place for all messaging/contacts/calendaring with Social Networking in there too and we’re getting very close to a framework that supports the multitude of communication mediums we use today.

So in my mind, Ubuntu and Canonical can move one major step forward by leveraging Evolution. Make it fit the new Ubuntu desktop ethos better and make it work properly with Exchange. Once you do that, world domination for FOSS will follow.

The Future of Web Services / The Plight of the Infrastructure Techie

The landscape for Internet Infrastructure is changing, and it may be quite scary for techies..

Currently, we have quite a supply-chain in web service hosting. We do everything ourselves and that means lots of skill-sets in various places such as:

Linux/Windows SysAdmin
Networking SysAdmin
HA/Load-Balancing Specialists
DBAs
Developers
Management

Typically, management instruct developers to do something and this something needs to be consulted on from conception to delivery. The developer needs to make it in such a way that the DBA and SysAdmins are happy that it will scale and perform. If it’s business critical the HA people get involved and ensure development is geared around being resilient too. The whole thing creates an infrastructure ecosystem of staff because it’s all very DIY so lots of diverse skills are required.

What happens when all of that is someone elses problem, without the disadvantage of outsourcing costs?

Using Cloud Computing you can build web applications to be self-aware. All of the nasty stuff that you used to have to worry about is gone:

Scaling – Amazon Elastic Compute lets you boot loads of instances of your pre-configured application OS images (read-only) manually or automatically. Because the booting of extra instances is web service controlled your app can decide if it needs more power or not.

Load-balancing – Single IP endpoints now control this. No more multiple servers with non-ARPing interfaces and virtual IPs. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing distributes load depending on instance issues, load metrics etc. OR you can plug it into Amazon Cloudwatch which monitors certain metrics and load-balance depending on that.

Hardware – It’s all virtual innit? It’s no longer our problem.

Database Scaling and Capacity – Apps just abstract DB API’s these days anyway. All apps ever do is ask the connector to pull data out into an object or insert data in, or do stuff with the data that’s there. If all you ever see is an interface into a limitless space of data then all you have to worry about is what you do with the data. Amazon SimpleDB does this for you.

Shared data storage – Amazon Elastic Block Storage behave like a SAN where you can have data sat on a filesystem to be accessed by apps on multiple instances. Again, any problems with this are someone else’s. All I care about is accessing my data.

Data mining – If you have lots of data to interrogate you can use Amazon MapReduce to process it.

There are lots of other ways you can use elastic cloud computing to remove a LOT of current infrastructure costs and concerns, eventually leading you to just have to worry about the application. Once you get to that stage you can just concentrate on making it work and doing it right. For a business, it’s a non-decision – or at least it should be. Without all the associated costs of infrastructure and infrastructure people a business can save obscene amounts of money and be a lot more efficient to boot. So why aren’t they?

Well, businesses are just scared of anything new. Elastic computing has to continue to innovate and provide something all-in-one and pre-packaged that it makes a lot more sense (not just a bit more sense) to migrate. Also business don’t like the idea of their data being somewhere they can’t control. That mindset just has to change, and it will as more and more large enterprises get on the cloud application bandwagon and start using tools such as Google Calendar / Mail / Contacts for company business. SLA’s give some peace of mind to directors but not quite yet enough.

But once the scales start tipping, the only people safe are developers.

Printing, And How It's Like Cars

Printers are like the car industry. Stay with me. I'll explain.

Back in the day, printers were tough as old boots. They supported either Postscript or PCL. That was fine, there were 2 standards and most printers supported either.

Then, along came Microsoft with WDM and the ability to use drivers to offload the printers processing into software. Suddenly people like Epson could build cheap mass-produced shit like the Stylus C20 USB printers etc. that didn't have a hope of supporting a standard like PCL or PS. 1-0 to Microsoft, as with their WDM drivers for modems, they played their market advantage to ensure that only people running Windows could use software printers (winprinters).

HP were caught a little on the hop. They suddenly had to play catchup and started doing this winprinter rubbish too. They did, but at the expense of their quality and their reputation in the marketplace. Eventually HP came back around to supporting PCL and Postscript in almost all of their printers and now they're back on top.

Compare to the car industry in the UK - Ford and Vauxhall have always been the mainstream cheap brands, they got good at shaving costs without compromising too much in reliability. Suddenly people like VAG, BMW etc. had to lower prices to compete but they weren't used to doing things on the cheap so the stuff they produced was often poor quality in the late 90's / early 2000's and the Ford and Vauxhall stuff was actually more reliable. It's only today that the higher marques have been able to compete on price and also quality with the cheaper stuff.

'til next time.

Apple are scared of Linux

It's the only explanation I can think of when trying to work out why, after many years of Linux gaining ordinary user popularity, Apple continue to refuse to allow Linux users to use iPods.

I'm a Linux user. I can't afford a Mac (and TBH don't really see the need, it's Linux with all the disadvantages but none of the advantages) and I don't want Windows. I use Kubuntu on my work laptop, Kubuntu on my home desktop and Ubuntu on my old home laptop. If I got given an iPod, or I had an iPhone I couldn't register it. Sure I could take it somewhere with a Windows PC and plug it in to register it but that's not the easiest task for me these days. I don't really have access to any Windows PCs where I can use the Internet and plug random things into them.

After that how do I sync my music? You have to use iTunes and there's no Linux version, even though Mac OS X is based on Unix and Apple obviously had to spend a lot of time and money on making a Windows version. Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to make a Linux version of iTunes?

The answer to all this is simple - Apple see Linux and probably more specifically Ubuntu as a direct competitor to the traction Mac OS X is getting against Windows. Windows is dropping market share and currently Apple is using all the marketing it can to ensure it picks up the slack. With Ubuntu available for free on standard PC hardware and with arguably more power Apple should be worried. But while Apple continue to take this stance against Linux I'm afraid I can't use any of their products. They exclude me. Android doesn't...

I'm KDE 4, and Windows 7 Was My Idea...

27 October 2007, KDE 4.0 is released:

22 October 2009, Windows 7 is released:

Microsoft: Innovation in action.

Linux HA Pt 2: Explained and Examples

It's probably right that at this time we look at a little bit of history of Linux-HA. Development of Linux-HA had been going along well based around the old Linux-HA web site primarily focussed on a package called heartbeat. Heartbeat was responsible for ensuring a cluster of servers (referred to from here as nodes) had quorum. It would then operate services such as Apache, MySQL etc. depending on the state of the cluster. The old format of the configuration for making something like Apache highly-available would be like this:

/etc/ha.d/ha.cf:
node ha1 ha2 # Refers to the hosts required to be in the cluster
bcast eth0 # The type of network communication chosen


/etc/ha.d/haresources:
ha1 192.168.1.100 httpd # ha1 is the preferred node, using a virtual (floating) IP address of 192.168.1.100 and control the httpd service.


This is where we must introduce the concept of OCF scripts. These are enhanced startup scripts much like standard Linux init scripts. They are used to start, stop and give status of a resource (cluster term for a service). Heartbeat would try to use OCF scripts first and if it couldn't find them it would try to use the init script of the specified name.

These were the bad old days, it was all rather limited but it did what it said. Now we have Pacemaker.

Fast forward to now and Heartbeat has been pushed aside by OpenAIS and Pacemaker. 2 separate pieces of software work together to give you a cluster with lots more features than before. OpenAIS does the low-level cluster messaging layer and provides Pacemaker with information on the state of the cluster. Pacemaker is a replacement for the later Cluster Resource Manager of Heartbeat and does everything else required - start and stop resources, decide on policy and make decisions of where and how to run resources, fence off misbehaving nodes etc.

The configuration format of Pacemaker has evolved to the following:

# crm configure show

node ha1
node ha2
primitive MySQL ocf:heartbeat:mysql \
        params user="root" binary="/usr/bin/mysqld_safe" pid="/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid" socket="/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock" \
        op monitor interval="1m" timeout="20s" \
primitive Virtual-IP ocf:heartbeat:IPaddr2 \
        params ip="192.168.1.100" broadcast="192.168.1.255" cidr_netmask="24" \
        op monitor interval="1m" timeout="10s" \

 The node entries at the top aren't really required. They are dynamically set by the cluster from what OpenAIS will tell it. The primitive MySQL refers to a standard resource called MySQL (arbitrary name), then it's of type OCF (another valid entry here is LSB, which refers to a standard init script), provided by heartbeat (most of the OCF resource agents are originally taken from Heartbeat) and it's called mysql. You can see how this relates to the filesystem like so:

root@ha1:~# ls /usr/lib64/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/mysql*

/usr/lib64/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/mysql  /usr/lib64/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/mysql-proxy

So in the OCF RA's provided by Heartbeat related to MySQL we have mysql and mysql-proxy.

Next we have another primitive resource named Virtual-IP. This is another OCF RA provided by Heartbeat named IPaddr2. IPaddr2 will add and remove IP addresses and move them around the cluster as you specify. It's just a shell script that does quite a lot. Have a look at how it works if you feel so inclined:

root@ha1:~# vi /usr/lib64/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/IPaddr2

The parameters we pass to it are fairly easy to understand. The next line which is op monitor is telling the cluster to add a monitor operation which asks the resource agent every 1 minute if the IP address is functioning correctly and will wait 10 seconds before giving up and flagging a failure.

With the features Pacemaker now provides it's very easy to set up clusters with many nodes limited only by your imagination. By default a resource can run on any node but only on 1 node. We can tell the cluster to run the resource anywhere and then take advantage of Linux Virtual Server load-balancing. I'll post how to do that next time.

Linux HA: About to Explode?

HA or High-Availability is a term used to refer to making your services more available than they currently are. If you have a web site on a server you can reasonably expect 99% uptime, making it highly available means upgrading that uptime from 99% to 99.9%. Linux-HA is now easier than ever to implement, I'll describe how and why here.