Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 speculation

January 29th 2010

There has been much speculation regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be shipped and support regarding RHEL5. Many of us speculated that RHEL6 would ship Q1 2010.

VirtualBox and licensing

January 27th 2010

I wanted to clarify something I'd said in the past about VirtualBox. VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) binaries are available via Fedora and other distributions are OSS via the GPLv2, but the binaries from virtualbox.org are Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). Sun/VirtualBox.org does not provide OSE binaries. To clarify for less-technical folks, binaries are programs in executable code format (meaning your computer knows how to run it), vs. source code needs to be compiled.

Domain Registrars, Confirmation Emails, and Wireshark packet capture filters

January 25th 2010

I really feel for folks who have bad setups for their website. In this specific case, I'm referencing a problem where Tucows/OpenSRS was used to register the domain with one of their Registration Service Providers (RSP), acmeinternet.com. I say all this to warn folks regarding how bad this is when things go wrong. Use a company that you can call up and talk to a live body and that has been around for some time.

Preserving long-term backups with minimal storage

January 22nd 2010

There are many tools and many ways to accomplish backups of systems. I find that the simpler something is, the less likely it is to fail, or if it does fail I can sort out what is broken that much easier.

There is no backup simpler at its core than a simple copy (cp in *nix or xcopy in Windows) with the right option flags. However, for many things this is too simplistic and isn't the most efficient.

Following Fedora Package releases for RHEL/CentOS admins

January 19th 2010

There comes times where you need a feature not yet in the version of a Package that RedHat has released yet for Enterprise Linux (RHEL, or just EL). BIND is a perfect example of this.

RedHat still ships BIND 9.3 (with back-ported bug-fixes for security), but for full DNSSEC support you want Fedora's BIND 9.6.

My goal: don't go totally off the beaten path and compile from source from the BIND upstream, don't become a package maintainer, don't trust a non-RedHat source, but still don't want to even have to think much about any of these non-Official Packages I'm using until updates come out. Fast and proven aren't always compatible, so at least "tested" from RedHat/Fedora will work for me.

Comcast paying out $16 per customer

January 5th 2010

If you were a Comcast and did either of the following:

• Used or attempted to use Comcast service to use the Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella P2P protocols any time from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008 and were unable to share files or have reason to believe that the speed at which files were shared was impaired; and/or
• Attempted but were unable to use Comcast service to use Lotus Notes to send emails any time from March 26, 2007 to October 3, 2007.

Then you can collect $16 by visiting