UNIX Administratosphere

A lot of the stuff an admin deals with day to day isn’t based on what we know, but on what we can find out. We spend our days researching problems and looking for solutions. What are the best resources?

Each operating system vendor has their own knowledge base or forums. For example, HP has the HP ITRC (IT Resource Center) which provides a one stop source for forums, documentation, technical notes, patches, and more. Other vendors have similar portals for technical support.

Another lesser-known resource is Usenet. The people in the Usenet newsgroups include some very knowledgeable people, and often can help resolve problems faster than you can alone.

There are a number of books that one can turn to as well; however, books on certification may often be overlooked. These books cover more obscure areas of an operating system and its maintenance, and can point you in the right direction when nothing else will. Many times, these tomes are also written to be on-desk references as well, and as such include the author’s experiences and knowledge beyond what is needed for certification.

When we are on-the-go professionals, and are potentially required to work from home or from other locations on the road, isn’t it good to be able to reach your data no matter where you are?

Thus is the interest in being able to “live in the cloud”, keeping data and information on Internet computers out there somewhere.  Unfortunately, it also means that instead of making our own backups, we must rely on someone else’s backups.  Suppose the company goes out of business?  This has already happened for several photo sites - and in one case, it took the customer’s photos with them.

There are many sites that can provide a safe harbour for data or for information of various kinds.  My favorites are these:

• Office Suites: GoogleDocs, ThinkOffice, Zoho Office
• ToDo Lists: Nozbe, RememberTheMilk
• Photos: Picasa
• Newsreaders: Google Reader
• Desktop: Goowy, eyeOS
• Storage: Box.net
• Bookmarks: Del.icio.us

The online desktops Goowy and eyeOS deserve special mention.  Not only do they provide a desktop, but also all the standard applications you might need.  It is possible to run within one of these desktops and save your data entirely with one of these setups.  This makes for a fantastic central location for everything - and a larger-than-normal risk.

EyeOS has one more feature that most of these do not: it is open source.  If you want to run your own version of EyeOS, there’s no problem doing so.  This is incredibly useful if you have your own server to run this on.  Then you can centralize your information and retain control at the same time.

I also find the mail clients in Goowy and eyeOS to be quite useful for sending mail from anywhere with a browser.

Tags: online, web, cloud, internet

In a Windows environment, people have gotten used to just picking up any device (whether it is a CDROM, PCMCIA card, printer, or modem) and expecting it to work. While the concept of “plug and play” is not yet here, the fact is that when installed everything should work with Windows.

And it isn’t just Windows - other large commercial vendors have access that you and I do not. Apple comes to mind - MacOS X has much better support than Linux or FreeBSD, for example.

Open source operating systems rely on hardware manufacturers to make the details of their hardware available for free or low cost - and then for someone to come and craft the software drivers needed. Usually, the latter is not a big problem; the former is.

The problem can be deeper than that as well, since the label on the product is not the same as the label on the internal devices: so it is not possible to simply look for a brand and use it. Worse, manufacturers can change hardware vendors on the same model, so that discerning which model is which can occasionally be difficult - the revision becomes the determining factor as to which hardware was used.

First thing is to determine which devices are supported. Start with the release documents for the operating system and look for supported hardware. Another place to look is the man pages (or other documentation) for the drivers. Keep the list of specific hardware handy, on another screen or printed out.

Then, look for the device (or devices) at your chosen store. Write down what you find, even if it isn’t listed (and even if it is). Then look up the device on the Internet using your desired search engine. Pay attention to mailing list threads and watch what sort of trouble people had (or didn’t have). The mailing list threads should also help you identify the hardware sources used in otherwise unidentified products, and also will keep you up to date on people’s experiences.

Once you have a product chosen, given few problems on mailing lists and a well-supported and identified hardware chip set, then buy it. However, for best results, make sure there is a good return policy in case it doesn’t work - otherwise, you are taking a chance (albeit a very small one if you’ve done your homework).

I’ve gone through this with several wireless cards under FreeBSD. The first was the Netgear MA401 (researched as given here) - worked flawlessly until it was smushed. The second I received as a bonus with my laptop purchase was a Zonet 1502 (definitely a mistake, but it came with the laptop). I’m sure the Zonet works fine under Windows (and probably OpenBSD: they reverse engineered the driver). Currently, I’ve added a TP-Link TL-WN610G (again researched as described here) - also working flawlessly.

This isn’t just good practice for wireless cards, though - networking cards, mice, video - all benefit from this research. Even laptops: when I bought my laptop, I researched the two brands that were available (for sale used at my favorite local used computer store) and found that one had lots of difficulties and the other did not. Guess which one I bought?

It appears from this article by ITWire that the Asus EeePC may be in violation of the GPL.  The GPL is the copyright that covers the Linux kernel and specifies the rights and responsibilities given to the receiver of the copyrighted product (the kernel in this case).

Turns out that Asus has utilized the kernel with some modifications but has not released any of the source code - a direct violation of the GPL.  And with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filing new lawsuits on behalf of busybox (another GPL-licensed product) after resolving the last one to the benefit of busybox, I can’t help but imagine that Asus will tread carefully and will negotiate.  We’ll see.

This recent post talks about a paper from the American Mathematical Society, arguing in favor of using more open source software in mathematics. Traditionally, academia has been open; indeed, the Internet was created (in part) - the network was created - even Usenet was created - to allow researchers to share information back and forth.

If today’s prevailing ideas of patents and making profits off of ideas had been prevalent then, none of these technologies would have been created. It was scientists (including computer scientists, mathematicians, and others) who shared their research, with researchers from one university freely exchanging with researchers at other universities.

In mathematics, we have proprietary software like MATLAB, Mathematica, S-PLUS, and others.  However, there are indeed suitable replacements for most everything: there is R (instead of S) and GNU Octave (instead of MATLAB) for example.

The author of the previously mentioned post also mentions SciLab, one I’ve not heard of before.

As a system administrator, statistical data can be gathered from various sources (uptime, disk usage, trends, etc.) and plotted with some of these tools.  I’ve seen articles about using R to do such things.

Otherwise, encouraging others to use open source is always (in my mind) a Good Thing.