It’s that time of year again–the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are fast approaching, and with them, Red Hat’s annual awards ceremonies. But first, we need nominations. And for that we appeal to our customers, readers, partners, and friends. That’s you.

Nominate that innovative business you worked with, or the admin who always has the right answers. Winners will receive free admission to Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, participation in exclusive events, and the admiration and accolades of their peers. Here’s the details:

2009 Innovation Awards – Nominations Open

Nominations are now open for the 2009 Innovation Awards, to be presented at this year’s co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World on September 1-4, 2009 in Chicago.

Innovation Awards were created to recognize technological achievements that demonstrate creative thinking and determined problem solving. The program includes the Extensive Ecosystem category which was created to recognize customers who are working with Red Hat and JBoss partners to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions. Please submit nominations by the deadline of May 31, 2009.

Questions? Contact the Red Hat Customer Reference Team at communications@redhat.com.

Innovation Award Categories: Five categories will each recognize two winning projects, one from Red Hat and one from JBoss. The Outstanding Open Source Architecture category will recognize one winner who is deploying both Red Hat and JBoss solutions. From these category winners, a Red Hat Innovator of the Year
and a JBoss Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting and announced at the awards ceremony.

Managed Excellence

Recognition of the impressive use of management tools, including Red Hat Network® and JBoss Operations Network®, to drive down total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase the return on investment (ROI).

Optimized Systems

Recognition of striking performance, scalability, and/or usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions.

Superior Alternatives

Recognition of the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.

Extensive Ecosystem

Recognition of the use of the growing Red Hat and JBoss partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.

Carved Out Costs

Recognition of customers who have leveraged open source solutions to significantly cut costs and extract added value from existing systems.

Outstanding Open Source Architecture

Recognition of the use of Red Hat, JBoss, and partner offerings to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.

>> Nominate an innovator now.

2009 RHCE of the Year

Red Hat Certified Engineer of the Year contest is a celebration of the hard work, expertise, and ingenuity of some of the world’s premier IT professionals.

If you are an RHCE®, now is your chance to wow us with why you should be selected as an 2009 RHCE of the Year. Maybe you’re administering 100 different boxes. Maybe you’ve solved an insurmountable problem. No doubt, you’ve got talent. Now is the time to prove it.

The five winners will get a free trip to the 2009 Summit in Chicago, September 1-4, 2009. The award includes three nights of accommodations, round-trip coach airfare, conference registration cost, and Chicago-style entertainment each night. The winners will also receive a 2009 RHCE of the Year plaque and will be honored at the RHCE Summit Reception.

>> Enter the RHCE of the Year contest

The deadline for entries is July 13, 2009. See terms and conditions for complete contest details.

Want to read essays from past winners? Check out our RHCE Success Stories.

Not current? In celebration of 10 years of RHCE, see our special promotion for RHCEs to help you update your skills.

More Red Hat Summit and JBoss World information

• Find more info on both awards at the official awards website.
• The official event websites: Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.
• Keep up with Summit news. Follow us on twitter: redhatsummit
• Past Innovation Award winners
• Past RHCE of the Year success stories

Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 LIVE online
(on-demand February 16th – May 11th, 2009)

Find out more or register now.

Join our executives, key developers, and your business peers. Attend keynote sessions for executive insight into the future of open source and the middleware roadmap for 2009 and beyond. Visit the Exhibit Hall and chat live with booth representatives. Come to the Networking Cafe for in-depth technical and business discussions, birds-of-a-feather chats, and live Q&A with our speakers.

Whether you’re a developer, enterprise architect, or senior IT manager, this one-day event will show you how JBoss can help you build, integrate, deploy, and manage mission-critical applications and services while lowering your costs without sacrificing performance, security, or functionality.

For updates, follow us on Twitter.

Here’s a few more details:

Keynotes with live Q&A:

• Business keynote by Jim Whitehurst (live event only) and Craig Muzilla
• technical keynote by Rob Cardwell and Sacha Labourey

Sessions with live Q&A:

• business, technical and government
• 2 panel discussions: Customer viewpoint and Developer panel

Exhibit Hall:
Red Hat booths, including:

• JBoss Enterprise Middleware
• JBoss Operations Network
• JBoss.org
• Customer Reference
• MRG (Messaging, Realtime, and Grid)
• Cloud Computing

Partner booths include:

• Alfresco
• Carahsoft
• CityTech
• Consilium1
• DLT
• Dell
• EnterpriseDB
• Exadel
• Freedom OSS
• Ingres
• Jaspersoft
• USolutions
• Vizuri

Media sponsor:

• DZone

Networking cafe:

• Birds-of-a-Feather sessions with JBoss Rock Stars

Find out more or register now.

co-authored with Grig Gheorghiu

Background

The dd command is one of those ancient UNIX tools that is extremely powerful, yet at the same time, the syntax can make it feel slightly archaic. A lot of seasoned sysadmins and developers still remember the first time they saw the dd command used by a bearded wizard. He might have used it to test the disk I/O, capture a disk image, or restore it.

In some ways, dd can seem like Old Spice–only the guys over 60 use it. But the younger generation should know that dd still has some tricks up its sleeve. In this article, we’re going to put a new twist on this old favorite and show how grandpappy really does know best sometimes. The new twist is to mix dd with Python and the Google Chart API to make a UNIX 2.0 mashup tool. (“UNIX 2.0″ is a play on words for what happens when you change the original behavior of a tool like dd to make it do something a bit different.)

Setup

For this article, we assume you’re running Fedora Core 8. We’re actually just renting some time from Amazon in all of these examples. To do that we allocated a 1 GB Elastic Block Storage volume from Amazon and attached it as the device /dev/sdd to an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) running Fedora Core 8. Learn more about using Amazon Cloud Computing with Red Hat.

Using dd for disk benchmarking with Google Charts API and Python

We benchmarked the throughput of the disk by running the dd command with various block sizes from 128 KB to 1 MB. (Note: If you want to run the script on your own machine, make sure that the volume you use doesn’t contain any valuable data, because the data will be erased by the dd command. Remember, data loss makes grandpappy mad!)

For the benchmark, we wrote a Python script that uses the commands module to run and capture the output of the dd command. The script also uses the csv module to generate a comma-separated values file so that we can graph the results later. For this example, we chose to graph the results using the Google Chart API.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import commands
import re
import csv

Next we define the main function, which takes a device name and a block size as parameters, and returns the throughput measured with dd and the unit of measure (e.g. MB/s). We use the regular expression module (re) to isolate the throughput value and unit of measure from the output of the dd command.

Editor’s note: In the code below, unit = "" has been added since the article was posted.

def get_disk_throughput(device, blocksize):

    blocksize = str(blocksize) + 'k'

    cmd = "dd if=/dev/zero of=%s bs=%s" % (device, blocksize)

    output = commands.getoutput(cmd)

    throughput = 0

    unit = ""

    for line in output.split('\n'):

        s = re.search(' copied,.*, (\S+) (\S+)$', line)

        if s:

            throughput = s.group(1)

            unit = s.group(2)

            break

    return (throughput, unit)

Here is the portion of the script that is executed when it’s run from the command line. We open a csv file and associate it with a csv writer. We then use the writerow method of the writer to append the header and each data row. We iterate over the list of block sizes and call the get_disk_throughput function for each block size.

We also compose the Google Chart URL by filling in the exact data values, represented by the throughput numbers that we obtain from the get_disk_throughput function. Then we print the URL to stdout. If you check the URL, you’ll see the chart generated with our data.

For details on the Google Chart API and what each parameter to the URL represents, see the Developer’s Guide.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of the code that originally appeared with this article. It has command-line argument processing, and it composes the Google Chart URL in a better, more self-explanatory fashion. See the end of the article for the original.

f = open('disk_throughput.csv', 'w')
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        writer.writerow( ('Block size (KB)', 'Throughput') )
        blocksizes = [128, 256, 512, 1024]
        gchart_url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?"
        gchart_type = "cht=bvs"
        gchart_title = "&chtt=Disk%20throughput"
        gchart_size = "&chs=400x250"
        gchart_axis_labels = "&chxt=x,y"
        gchart_data = "&chd=t:"
        gchart_labels = "&chl="
        max_t = 0.0
        for blocksize in blocksizes:
            (t, u) = get_disk_throughput(device, blocksize)
            if float(t) > max_t:
                max_t = float(t)
            writer.writerow( (blocksize, t) )
            print 'Block Size: %sk Throughput: %s %s' % (blocksize, t, u)
            gchart_data += t + ","
            gchart_labels += str(blocksize) + "k" + "|"
        gchart_data = gchart_data.rstrip(',')
        gchart_labels = gchart_labels.rstrip('|')
        gchart_axis_range = "&chxr=1,0," + str(max_t+10.0)
        gchart_scaling = "&chds=0," + str(max_t+10.0)
        gchart_url += gchart_type + gchart_title + gchart_size + gchart_data + gchart_labels
        gchart_url += gchart_axis_labels + gchart_axis_range + gchart_scaling
        print "Google Chart URL (just paste in a browser):", gchart_url
    finally:
        f.close()

Here is the output of the script in one of our runs:

Block Size: 128 Throughput: 62.8 MB/s

Block Size: 256 Throughput: 61.8 MB/s

Block Size: 512 Throughput: 57.1 MB/s

Block Size: 1024 Throughput: 56.5 MB/s

Now here is the actual image that gets created:

Full script

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import commands
import re
import csv
from optparse import OptionParser

def get_disk_throughput(device, blocksize):
    blocksize = str(blocksize) + 'k'
    cmd = "dd if=/dev/zero of=%s bs=%s" % (device, blocksize)
    output = commands.getoutput(cmd)
    throughput = 0
    unit = ""
    for line in output.split('\n'):
        s = re.search(' copied,.*, (\S+) (\S+)$', line)
        if s:
            throughput = s.group(1)
            unit = s.group(2)
            break
    return (throughput, unit)

if __name__ == "__main__":

    usage = "usage: %prog options"
    parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
    parser.add_option("-d", "--device", dest="device",
            help="Disk device to operate on (NOTE: any data on that device will be lost)")
    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
    device = options.device
    if not device:
        parser.print_help()
        sys.exit(1)

    try:
        f = open('disk_throughput.csv', 'w')
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        writer.writerow( ('Block size (KB)', 'Throughput') )
        blocksizes = [128, 256, 512, 1024]
        gchart_url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?"
        gchart_type = "cht=bvs"
        gchart_title = "&chtt=Disk%20throughput"
        gchart_size = "&chs=400x250"
        gchart_axis_labels = "&chxt=x,y"
        gchart_data = "&chd=t:"
        gchart_labels = "&chl="
        max_t = 0.0
        for blocksize in blocksizes:
            (t, u) = get_disk_throughput(device, blocksize)
            if float(t) > max_t:
                max_t = float(t)
            writer.writerow( (blocksize, t) )
            print 'Block Size: %sk Throughput: %s %s' % (blocksize, t, u)
            gchart_data += t + ","
            gchart_labels += str(blocksize) + "k" + "|"
        gchart_data = gchart_data.rstrip(',')
        gchart_labels = gchart_labels.rstrip('|')
        gchart_axis_range = "&chxr=1,0," + str(max_t+10.0)
        gchart_scaling = "&chds=0," + str(max_t+10.0)
        gchart_url += gchart_type + gchart_title + gchart_size + gchart_data + gchart_labels
        gchart_url += gchart_axis_labels + gchart_axis_range + gchart_scaling
        print "Google Chart URL (just paste in a browser):", gchart_url
    finally:
        f.close()

Summary

In this article we shattered the myth that you must be 60, have a massive grey beard, and have worked at Bell Labs to use the dd command. Even for a newer generation, dd can be used in some inventive ways. We combined Python, the Google Chart API, and Red Hat on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure to create a novel way to measure and chart disk I/O and performance. Go celebrate by buying yourself a bottle of Old Spice.

References

Python: http://www.python.org/
dd example scripts: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/extmisc.html
Google Chart API: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Original code

if __name__ == "__main__":

    try:

        f = open('disk_throughput.csv', 'w')

        writer = csv.writer(f)

        writer.writerow( ('Block size (KB)', 'Throughput') )

        device = '/dev/sdd'

        blocksizes = [128, 256, 512, 1024]

        google_chart_url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chd=t:"

        google_chart_data = ""

        google_chart_labels = ""

        max_t = 0.0

        for blocksize in blocksizes:

            (t, u) = get_disk_throughput(device, blocksize)

            if float(t) > max_t:

                max_t = float(t)

            writer.writerow( (blocksize, t) )

            print 'Block Size: %s Throughput: %s %s' % (blocksize, t, u)

            google_chart_data += t + ","

            google_chart_labels += str(blocksize) + "k" + "|"

        google_chart_data = google_chart_data.rstrip(',')

        google_chart_labels = google_chart_labels.rstrip('|')

        google_chart_url += google_chart_data +"&chl=" + google_chart_labels

        google_chart_url += "&chtt=Disk%20throughput" +"&chs=400x250&chxt=x,y"

        google_chart_url += "&chxr=1,0,%s&chds=0,%s" % (str(max_t+10.0), str(max_t+10.0))

        print google_chart_url

    finally:

        f.close()

Authors

Noah Gift is the co-author of Python For Unix and Linux by O’Reilly, and Google App Engine in Action by Manning. He is an author, speaker, consultant, and community leader, writing for publications such as IBM Developerworks, Red Hat Magazine, O’Reilly, Manning, and MacTech. He has a master’s degree in CIS from Cal State Los Angeles, a B.S. in nutritional science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and is an Apple and LPI certified sys admin. He’s worked at companies that include Caltech, Disney Feature Animation, Sony Imageworks, Turner Studios, and most recently, WetaDigital.

Grig Gheorghiu is the director of technology for RIS Technology, a web hosting company based in Los Angeles. Grig has 15 years industry experience, during which time he has worked as a programmer, research lab manager, system/network/security architect, IT consultant, and lead test engineer.

Grig is an active member of the Python and agile testing communities. He maintains a blog dedicated to agile testing, Python programming, and automated testing tools and techniques. Grig is the founder of the Southern California Python Interest Group, aka “the SoCal Piggies”. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

For Satellite:
If the Satellite server is “connected”, then it will initiate outbound connections to ports 80 and 443 on the Red Hat Network (RHN) hosted service (rhn.redhat.com / satellite.rhn.redhat.com). Access to these hosts and ports should not be restricted to ensure correct functioning of the satellite system. If required, an HTTP(S) proxy may be used, by passing the “--http-proxy” option to the “satellite-sync” command.

If using a proxy server, Satellite will initiate connections to port 5222 on each proxy server connected. This is used for communications relating to the “OSA” service (also known as “Push to Client“). If using the OSA service, access to this port should not be restricted.

A Satellite service will also connect to individual client systems on port 4545 if the monitoring service be enabled on these specific systems. This port needs to be unrestricted if the RHN Monitoring service is being used.

For Proxy:

The RHN proxy server will connect to ports 80 and 443 on the “upstream” system, either RHN Hosted or an internal Satellite server.

If the Monitoring Scout is enabled on a proxy server, then the proxy will initiate connections to port 4545 on Monitoring-enabled client systems.

For Client Systems:

Client systems will initiate connections to ports 80 and 443 of their upstream RHN server (Satellite, Proxy or RHN Hosted).

If OSA is being used, then the client systems will also connect to the Jabber service running on the Satellite or Proxy server, on port 5269.

Red Hat’s customer service and support teams receive technical support questions from users all over the world. Red Hat technicians add the questions and answers to Red Hat Knowledgebase on a daily basis. Access to Red Hat Knowledgebase is free. Red Hat Magazine offers a preview into the Red Hat Knowledgebase by highlighting some of the most recent entries. The information provided in this article is for your information only. The origin of this information may be internal or external to Red Hat. While Red Hat attempts to verify the validity of this information before it is posted, Red Hat makes no express or implied claims to its validity.

We’ve had some URLs of interest just sitting around the editorial desk. Now it’s Friday and time to share with you:

• World’s fastest computer runs on Linux
• Rolling Stone has become quite the tech reporter of late. Check out this article on the founding of Facebook. Geeks, code, intrigue… perhaps even betrayal. It’s like a bedtime adventure story for little nerds.
• Is this your job? If so–consider this as an alternative to [career] suicide?
• Short story to read: The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow
• Got a little time on your hands this weekend? Perhaps lure your friends in a Paper, Rock, Scissors battle. Wired has a tutorial on winning this game for all ages. (For those wanting something a little more substantial, check out the sneak peek of this year’s DefCon badge.

Are you sick of your ISP’s DHCP and want more control? Maybe you have a crusty Windows DHCP server that is about to blow up from the latest virus of the month or a series of “magic” GUI clicks gone horribly wrong.

Do a little spring cleaning, and solve your network problems with open source software. Setting up a DHCP server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Fedora is a piece of cake. In this article we’ll go over the basics of setting up DHCP, doing basic troubleshooting, and finally setting up static mapping DHCP.

1. Install DHCP.

yum install dhcp

2. Turn on the service at boot.

chkconfig dhcpd on

3. Start the the service.

service dhcp start

Whoops–you’ll get a message like this:

[root@mothership etc]# service dhcpd start
Starting dhcpd:                                            [FAILED]

That’s because the dhcpd.conf file in the /etc directory is empty. If you take a look at it, you’ll see a hint:

#
# DHCP Server Configuration file.
#   see /usr/share/doc/dhcp*/dhcpd.conf.sample
#

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 you should see something like the following in /usr/share/doc/dhcp-3.0.5/dhcpd.conf.sample:

ddns-update-style interim;
ignore client-updates;

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

# --- default gateway
        option routers                  192.168.0.1;
        option subnet-mask              255.255.255.0;

        option nis-domain               "domain.org";
        option domain-name              "domain.org";
        option domain-name-servers      192.168.1.1;

        option time-offset              -18000; # Eastern Standard Time
#       option ntp-servers              192.168.1.1;
#       option netbios-name-servers     192.168.1.1;
# --- Selects point-to-point node (default is hybrid). Don't change this unless
# -- you understand Netbios very well
#       option netbios-node-type 2;

        range dynamic-bootp 192.168.0.128 192.168.0.254;
        default-lease-time 21600;
        max-lease-time 43200;

        # we want the nameserver to appear at a fixed address
        host ns {
                next-server marvin.redhat.com;
                hardware ethernet 12:34:56:78:AB:CD;
                fixed-address 207.175.42.254;
        }
}

This is a lot to digest, but we can break it down. I’m a big fan of doing the absolute minimum to get something started. For most users, you probably want to have a few static mapped IP addresses based on a MAC address, and then everyone else will get IP addresses from a range. To do this, copy from this file, and then paste the sample into /etc/dhcpd.conf.

Minimal DHCP config

authoritative;
ddns-update-style interim;
default-lease-time 21600;
max-lease-time 43200;

        option routers                  192.168.1.254;
        option broadcast-address        192.168.1.255;
        option subnet-mask              255.255.255.0;
        option domain-name-servers      192.168.1.10;

        subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
                range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.120;
}

If you are a vim user, you should do this to paste it in:

:set paste

Then insert using “i”, and paste it in. This ensures a cut and paste that preserves formatting–a nice trick to know about in vim.

Minimal DHCP config explained line by line

You can man dhcpd.conf for a more thorough explanation, but here are some simple
explanations of the minimal DHCP configuration:

• authoritative;

  Makes the DHCP server authoritative for requests. This is not set by default, but it needs to be configured to distribute IP addresses. This is to ensure that “rogue” DHCP servers are not set up willy-nilly by people who don’t understand how they work.

• ddns-update-style interim;

  This line must be in the config for dhcpd to run. For more information, read the man page for dhcpd.conf.

• default-lease-time 21600;
  max-lease-time 43200;

  These two lines set maximum and minimum times for a client to hold onto an IP address lease obtained from the dhcp server.

• option routers 192.168.1.254;
  option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;
  option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
  option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.10;

These four lines are basic network configuration parameters that you would normally set if you had to manually configure an IP address. This is, in fact, one of the main points of DHCP. Note that the line that says domain-name-servers–this is where you tell the clients to grab information from DNS servers. If you set up your own caching DNS server to speed up name server lookups, then this would be the place to tell the DHCP clients about it.

• subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.120;
  }

  This final section is where subnet declarations go. In this declaration, we are saying that any client on the subnet 192.168.1.0 will get an IP address with the information we defined above, but they will only get an IP address in the .100 to .120 range. So you can’t get 192.168.1.121 or 192.168.1.99, but you can get any IP address in between.

Now you’re ready to alter your configuration to match your network, and then restart or start for the first time dhcp:

service dhcp start

Simple troubleshooting steps and tips For DHCP

If things didn’t go as you excepted–for example, the dhcp server didn’t start–you should do a bit of troubleshooting. DHCP can be very frustrating to fix. Here are a few things to check:

1. Configure DHCP to only listen on a specific interface. Being explicit is always a safe bet, so you can edit /etc/sysconfig/dhcpd and define the interface to listen on. For eth0, this would look like:

# Command line options here
DHCPDARGS=eth0

2. Start the dhcp server in foreground mode:

dhcpd -f

This is handy because it will show you more verbose errors than you would normally get from /var/log/messages.

3. Watch the semi-colons. One of the most common mistakes in a DHCP config is to forget a semi-colon. You can usually see the line number with the problem if you start dhcpd in foreground mode.

4. Restart the server, or reload the config file to see changes.

It’s very common to make changes and then wonder why they aren’t working. You need to either reload or restart the dhcpd service. Just remember that if you do restart and you have a semi-colon missing, then you will stop the dhcpd service. Doing a reload is safer, as it will not reload a broken config.

5. Use version control to keep track of every change to /etc/dhcpd.conf

Using version control to manage your /etc/dhcpd.conf file is a huge win. As long as you keep the file updated with changes, you can revert in milliseconds back to a known good configuration.

Getting fancy with static mapping

One of the cooler things that DHCP does is mix dynamically distributed addresses from a pool, and assign static addresses based on a hardware address, or MAC address. This last feature is called static mapping DHCP, and it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Why is static mapping DHCP so cool? It allows you to automatically configure a machine’s network configuration, even if the operating system is rebuilt from scratch, as DHCP assigns it a specific address based on the ethernet hardware. This means if you set it up in the DNS, you will always know the hostname and IP address of the machine.

For a network administrator, that’s great news. To make things even better, you can mix and match part of your subnet with static mapping and part of it with regular DHCP. This is what that would look like based on our previous configuration.

authoritative;
ddns-update-style interim;
default-lease-time 21600;
max-lease-time 43200;

        option routers                  192.168.1.254;
        option broadcast-address        192.168.1.255;
        option subnet-mask              255.255.255.0;
        option domain-name-servers      192.168.1.10;

        subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
                range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.120;

        host noah {
        hardware ethernet 00:11:00:11:00:11;
        fixed-address 192.168.1.121;
        }
}

If you look at this “mapping” configuration, you’ll see tell it’s really simple. The normal pool of addresses is set to give out addresses between 100-120, and we gave our “static” address to 121, but only if it matches a specific MAC address. You can create hundreds of these stanzas and control a whole network this way.

Summary

In this article, we went over how simple it is to set up sophisticated DHCP configurations in Fedora and Red Hat. There are other items that we did not cover in this article that you may want to research on your own. The first is ddns-update, which allows DHCP to update DNS on the fly. It’s a great tool to have in the DHCP toolkit. Second, we didn’t cover DHCP relay agents, which allow a DHCP server to relay requests to DHCP servers on other subnets.

Linux DHCP is a low-cost alternative to proprietary network servers that depend on the user doing a series of GUI clicks. On the surface it may seem convenient to have a “wizard” setup your network for you. But it’s often better to tap into the power of an explicit operating system like Linux. It doesn’t get any more explicit than a few lines in a dhcpd.conf config file. DHCP on Linux is elegant, simple, and powerful. Sure, the lure of the “dark side GUI click” is strong, but true mastery of networking lies with another path.

About the author

Noah Gift is the co-author of Python For Unix and Linux by O’Reilly and the upcoming Google App Engine in Action by Manning. He is an author, speaker, consultant, and community leader, writing for publications such as IBM developerWorks, Red Hat Magazine, O’Reilly, and MacTech. His consulting company’s website is www.giftcs.com, and his personal website is www.noahgift.com. Noah is also the current organizer for www.pyatl.org, which is the Python User Group for Atlanta, GA. He has a master’s degree in CIS from Cal State Los Angeles, a B.S. in nutritional science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is an Apple and LPI certified SysAdmin, and has worked at companies such as Caltech, Disney Feature Animation, Sony Imageworks, and Turner Studios. In his free time he enjoys spending time with his wife Leah and their son Liam, playing the piano, and exercising religiously.

Missed JavaOne, but wish you could have seen the presentations? They’re now available online.

• Emmanuel Bernard – JSR 303: From a World of Constraints to Constrain the World
• Burr Sutter and Max Katz (Exadel) – Open Source Development Tools for the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE Platform), Web 2.0, and SOA
• Kevin Conner, Mark Little and Keith Babo (Sun Microsystems, Inc)– Developing Service-Oriented Architecture Applications with OSGi

Presentations from the JBoss Booth at JavaOne 2008

Building converged applications with Mobicents
Mobicents Communication Platform
Metamatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform
Using JBoss Richfaces with JBoss Developer Studio
JBoss AS 5.0 Clustering
JBoss Application Server 5.0

In this installment of our co-published Fedora Interviews, Jeremy Katz, David Cantrell, and Chris Lumens talk about the improvements to Anaconda in Fedora 9.

What motivated you work on Anaconda for Fedora 9?

Jeremy Katz: Well, it’s part of most of our jobs We’re full-time employees with Red Hat and have the installer as one of areas that we tend to work on.

David Cantrell: Anaconda is the first program that people will use when they use Fedora for the first time. We are the first impression of the OS, and we are always trying to improve that experience and make Anaconda do what people are wanting.

Chris Lumens: It’s my job to work on Anaconda, so that was all the motivation I needed. Actually it was pretty nice to work on F9 Anaconda, as it was a chance to step away from the bug-fixing grind and work on some new stuff.

Could you explain more about new features in Anaconda? What’ll be the first impression for users?

Jeremy Katz: There’s a fair bit of new stuff this time around. The most obvious thing will probably be that some of the steps have been moved around with partitioning being later. There’s also support for partition resizing, encrypted partitions, and a whole lot more.

David Cantrell: Improved yum repository handling during installation.

Chris Lumens: As Jeremy said, the first impression will probably be that the steps have moved around. Partitioning now happens before package selection, which should surprise a fair number of people. I’m working on a brief presentation about what we’ve done in F9 and our reasoning behind it, but most of it’s aimed at developers and regular users won’t ever encounter those changes.

What’s important about the change from boot.iso to netinst.iso?

Jeremy Katz: The main benefit is that it lets us move more of the “hard” stuff into the second stage of the installer, as we can guarantee it’s available more often. This opens the door for better support of retrying downloads, editing repositories, proxies, mirror lists and more. It also helps with the (mistaken) impression that we don’t have an easy way to start off a network installation.

Chris Lumens: Jeremy’s exactly right here. From the developer point of view, it also got rid of a ton of code, simplifying the maintainence and development burden. This should translate into fewer bugs in the future.

Why did the work to support resizing NTFS partitions happen?

Jeremy Katz: It’s been a long-standing feature request. We’ve been waiting on support to land in some of the libraries we use for a long time, but we finally decided to bite the bullet and just do the implementation in Anaconda-land. We hope it will make the transition for someone who is new to Fedora easier and not require them to run Partition Magic or some other third-party utility to set up for installation. I posted a pretty good movie showing the resize UI in action.

David Cantrell: NTFS won’t be enough; someone will ask for HFS+ resizing from within Anaconda.

Chris Lumens: I like to look at this as a sort of impulse sale. If you get the live CD into a potential new user’s hands, and they can boot it up, play around with it, and like what they see, they may have the desire to install it right that second and get to using Fedora. Before having NTFS partition resizing support, they would have to reboot, redo their partitioning, and then install Fedora. That’s a pretty high hurdle, and I think we lose a lot of people there. Now they can just resize right from within the live CD and be running Fedora a lot faster.

What does allowing the user to set the second stage source actually mean?

Jeremy Katz: Realistically, this isn’t something we expect an end-user to care about, but it helps enabling other things, such as preupgrade and some of the netinst.iso benefits mentioned above.

Chris Lumens: For the user, it really only means better support for recovering from errors. So if your HTTP repository disappears before installing packages or a package download is corrupt, we can handle these cases better. Most users won’t ever really know that they’re specifying the stage2 location, nor will they care.

What are the benefits of udev and HAL hardware probing and detection instead of kudzu?

Jeremy Katz: We’re now using the same stack as the rest of the OS. This has its ups and its downs, as kudzu was tailored to Anaconda’s needs. But it should let us have more consistent information about what a device is named, etc throughout the user experience.

Chris Lumens: Right. The biggest benefit for users is that we (Anaconda developers) will be spending less time chasing down bugs in device detection code and more time chasing down bugs in Anaconda itself. Using the same stuff as the rest of the system frees up a lot of our time to work on more interesting problems.

What does native EFI support buy us?

David Cantrell: Booting on Intel Macs without needing the MBR shim.

How’s the work going on getting this ready to be easily available for Fedora 9?

Jeremy Katz: We’re making a lot of progress. There’s still a lot of testing and bug fixing to go so that we can have as solid of a release as we can. Any testing that can be provided through the betas, the snapshots and the preview release goes a long way.

David Cantrell: Trying to get users other than ourselves to test out the nightly trees or betas is really difficult. We’ve got some things in place now to make that easier, but still actually getting people to test the installation is difficult.

Chris Lumens: The hard stuff is done, but I’m sure there are plenty of bugs still around. There are always bugs hiding in the corner cases, especially with the amount of stuff we have changed for F9. More testing and testing earlier on will be a big help in making sure no serious problems make it into the release.

And to finish, you could tell us a little bit about yourselves? What got you interested in free software originally? What do you like to do with your spare time when you’re not working with computers?

Jeremy Katz: I’ve been involved in free software and distro development for many years now… originally it was to learn and it’s grown a bit from there. As far as spare time, I have that? I’m actually a pretty avid cyclist and am also currently attending a graduate program at MIT while continuing to work at Red Hat on all things Fedora.

David Cantrell: Free software development was interesting to me, and it was similar to the platforms I was using at school (mostly SunOS). I’ve been doing some form of FOSS work for a long time.

Chris Lumens: I’ve been working with Linux for quite a while now, originally just to play around with and make the computer do something more interesting. I think the original reason was to play Doom via TCP/IP. Something like that. Eventually it turned into a broader interest in computers and programming, then into a way to make a living. It’s a pretty good way to spend your work day.

In my spare time I am an active hiker (White Mountains, mostly) and homebrewer. Sometimes I read really dense books.

We learned a lot in 2007, and we hope you did too! Here’s a list of the top 10 most popular articles of the year.

10. I am Fedora, and so can you!

Fresh, free, and featherweight: the all-new Fedora 8 on a USB key.

I am writing this article on a Windows laptop borrowed from a friend. But fear not, dear reader, for I have not abandoned my free software principles. For while the hard disk of this laptop contains the Windows operating system, I have used a USB key as the boot device, and the laptop is currently running Fedora 8, codenamed “Werewolf.”

9. Inside One Laptop Per Child: Episode One

This is the story of the little green laptop that could. Meet the faces behind the One Laptop per Child initiative and see what they do every day in the Cambridge, MA office. Sit in on a brainstorming session. And find out what you can do to help.

8. The open palette: How to use Inkscape’s new blur filter

When I was an undergraduate student a few years ago, I was a member of a Linux Users’ Group (LUG) at my college. At this particular college, laptops were a requirement, and most students purchased their laptops directly from the college. At the beginning of each semester, new students would pick up their laptops at designated spots around campus.

7. Disk encryption in Fedora: Past, present, and future

These days, data is mobile. Every day, sensitive corporate data leaves a company’s headquarters on a flash drive or an employee’s laptop. Regardless of where it is going, mobile data can be an I.T. department’s worst nightmare.

6. Using GRUB to overcome boot problems

Troubleshooting boot problems can be a very frustrating and challenging process. Sometimes their repair requires the Linux rescue environment, but what can be done if rescue media is not handy? If the system gets past BIOS and loads the GRUB boot loader, often there is much that can be done to get it up and running again.

5. Remixing Fedora 7

Fedora™ 7 hits the streets on May 31st. One of the most exciting features of the Fedora 7 release is the fact that users can remix the Fedora code in any variety of ways. Tools are provided that allow the user to build either a customized LiveCD or installable ISO, and to reach out to any 3rd-party RPM repositories and pull in packages from them at compose time.

4. Advanced SSH configuration and tunneling: We don’t need no stinking VPN software

In a recent Red Hat Magazine article, Paul Frields gave some examples of how SSH port forwarding can be used to remotely gain access to resources, or ports, from a remote location. This article will show a pragmatic implementation of SSH port forwarding by demonstrating how to use configuration files and conditional statements to create permanent, yet dynamic, SSH configurations for your home, office, and any virtual machines you may have on your systems.

3. Spread the word, share this ODF artwork.

Red Hat graphic designers are no strangers to the pains of proprietary formats. Over the years, many have lost photographs, archived projects, and important portfolio work when formats have been changed. They’ve been forced to upgrade before they’re ready, too.

2. GIMP 2.4 preview

Fedora 8 test releases have a surprise for all users interested in graphics: a release candidate for the new GIMP 2.4, meaning the final version will get the stable GIMP 2.41. This is exciting news, as the previous major release, GIMP 2.2, is several years old, and a lot of new features were added in the meantime.

1. Tour of GNOME online desktop

Here’s a tour of the pre-alpha demo release of GNOME Online Desktop included in Fedora 8. Learn more about what it does and how you can get involved in the project.

The Fedora Status Report is an edited version of recent issues of Fedora Weekly News at fedoranews.org. The fedoranews site is edited by Thomas Chung and accepts contributions from anyone in the Fedora community. Articles are reprinted here with their permission. New contributors are always welcome.

In this issue:

• Max Spevack: Fedora on Slashdot
• Jesse Keating: Fedora Legacy Answers
• Rahul Sundaram: Red Hat and Intellectual Property Reform
• Luke Macken: Teaching an old pup some new tricks
• Tom Tromey: Fedora Core 6 Test 2
• XenSource CTO Talks Up Xen Virtualization
• OLPC laptops to debut with Thai kids
• Where’s Red Hat? Peek Under Fedora
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-08-14
• Join Fedora @ LinuxWorld SF 2006
• Announcing Fedora Core 6 Test 2
• Fedora Core 4 Transferred to Fedora Legacy
• Fedora Core 4 Support and Yum Config
• Fedora usability was born!
• Review: Fedora Core 6 – First Impressions
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-08-07
• fedoraproject.org wiki down
• Updated Fedora Core 6 Schedule
• Red Hat Survey for Fedora Community
• No country orders for OLPC laptops
• What Is Fedora’s Prime Directive?
• Fedora wants to draw in women
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-31
• Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates
• Contributing to Fedora Weekly News
• Editor’s Blog

Max Spevack: Fedora on Slashdot

Max Spevack points out in his blog:

The results of the interview that I did with Slashdot went up today. I’m pleased with how it turned out. Judging from what I’ve seen in the comments so far, it’s a good day for Fedora. Thanks to everyone who read the rough draft and helped with suggestions, etc.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/17/177220

Jesse Keating: Fedora Legacy Answers

JesseKeating points out in his blog:

Well, the obvious answer is I’ve started to move into Extras space (: Work is ongoing to integrate Legacy into the Extras build systems, CVS space, and in some way publish space. My goal is to be integrated shortly after FC6 launches and well before FC 5 goes into maintenance mode (when Legacy takes care of it). We already have a CVS system, the cvslegacy group in Fedora accounts, and soon we’ll have plague /mock configs to use with in the Extras space. This should make it much easier for folks to contribute not just to Extras but to Legacy as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legacy

Rahul Sundaram: Red Hat and Intellectual Property Reform

Rahul Sundaram points out in his blog:

The developers have a strong commitment towards Free and open source software that should be clear to involve involved in http://fedoraproject.org but it’s far from a smooth ride. There are internal challenges for example to make sure that trademarks as a form of intellectual property is not lost yet compatible with the needs of the Free software community and external continous changes in other fields with the rise of other forms of open content like music http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Music_Model or the site I have used to define it – Wikipedia are all signs of a continous change that we need to understand better.

http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2006/100806-india-ip.html

Luke Macken: Teaching an old pup some new tricks

Luke Macken points out in his blog:

Thanks to the previously mentioned core update metadata enhancements that I’ve been working on lately, we are now able to do some pretty neat stuff with our package updating tools. So last week I cranked out a bunch of code for Fedora’s package updater (pup) and it’s notification applet (puplet) to utilize this new enhanced metadata and actually provide the user with some useful information.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumApplet

Tom Tromey: Fedora Core 6 Test 2

Tom Tromey points out in his blog:

FC6 is shipping a new Eclipse–3.2. This works pretty well; I found a bug or two and reported them, but nothing too serious. So far I haven’t explored many of the new features, but I did notice that I can now background ‘cvs diff’ operations. I’ve been wanting that for a while…Overall FC6T2 looks quite good to me. I’m constantly amazed that this whole process (not Fedora, but the entire free software setup) produces good results–and yet it does, year after year.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC6ReleaseSummary

XenSource CTO Talks Up Xen Virtualization

According to recent article published at E-Commerce News:

Watch for product from Red Hat — Fedora Core 6 is almost ready, with the latest Xen bits. This will evolve into RHEL 5. Powerful new SMP (symmetric multi-processing) scheduling support, enhanced support for VT and AMD V processors, a new shadow page table implementation and impressive performance gains for HVM (hardware virtual machine) guests. There is a lot of testing to do, and the community is working very hard to increase the scope of guest support and feature set coverage as Xen goes to market. 2006 is all about Xen going to market.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/Xen

OLPC laptops to debut with Thai kids

According to recnet article published at CNN:

The One Laptop Per Child program, which began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and now is a separate nonprofit organization, hopes to deploy 5 million to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina in 2007. Thailand’s government is expected to buy 1 million in the first year.

According to Christopher Blizzard:

Yeah, and this is the first olpc news that I’ve seen in a long time that’s actually backed by some facts!

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OLPC

Where’s Red Hat? Peek Under Fedora

According to recent article published at InternetNews:

Fedora Core 6 is slated for release on October 9th, and is expected to include a laundry list of visible and under the hood improvements to Red Hat’s community distro. FC 6 is also expected to take advantage of the AIGLX framework for improved 3D graphics.Compiz will complement the existing Metacity window manager.Testing the Linux desktop is also expected to get a boost in FC6 with the Dogtail application, which is a graphical test and automation framework. Java integration improvements are also on deck in FC 6 by way of the GCJ Web plugin, which is designed to enable Java applets to run by default in Mozilla Firefox. FC 6 also takes a stab at internationalization support. FC 6 will also sport a management tool for Xen Virtualization, which was introduced in the current Fedora Core 5 build.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC6ReleaseSummary

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-08-14

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/WeeklyReports/2006-08-14

Join Fedora @ LinuxWorld SF 2006

Jack Aboutboul announces in fedora-announce-list:

Fedora welcomes all community members and anyone interested in learning about attaining freedom through software. Don’t know what Linux or Fedora is? Interested in learning more about Linux, Fedora and how they can benefit you? Stop by the booth and ask your questions and get free stuff!

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LinuxWorld/LinuxWorldSanFrancisco2006

Announcing Fedora Core 6 Test 2

JesseKeating announces in fedora-announce-list:

The Fedora Project announces the second release of the Fedora Core 6 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and ppc/ppc64 architectures, including Intel based Macintosh computers. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for the technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule

Fedora Core 4 Transferred to Fedora Legacy

BillNottingham announces in fedora-announce-list:

With the release of Fedora Core 6 Test 2, the Fedora Core Steering Committee would like to announce the transfer of Fedora Core 4 to the Fedora Legacy Project. For more information on the Fedora Legacy Project, or if you wish to join the team, please see http://fedoralegacy.org/

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legacy

Fedora Core 4 Support and Yum Config

JesseKeating announces in fedora-legacy-announce:

With the release of Fedora Core 6 Test 2, Fedora Core 4 enters maintenance mode, where Fedora Legacy will be responsible for security and major bugfix updates. At this time we also announce the end of life for Fedora Core 1 and 2. No new bugreports will be accepted, existing reports will be closed out as best as we can.

http://fedoralegacy.org/

He also announces in fedora-legacy-announce:

The Fedora Legacy project has released yum configs for Fedora Core 4. Currently there are no Fedora Legacy updates for 4, however the latest updates as released by the Fedora Project are available.

http://download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/4/

Fedora usability was born!

DamienDurand announces in fedora-announce-list:

The Fedora Usability project aims to provide coherence, accessibility and intuivity for all people using Fedora Core and its associated resources. Fedora must be easy and making things simple and coherent for a pleasant use is my objectif with this project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Usability

Review: Fedora Core 6 – First Impressions

According to recent reivew published in O’Reilly Network:

The step from FC5 to FC6 is smaller and more evolutionary than FC4 to FC5…Overall, FC6 looks and feels like a more solid, polished version of FC5 rather than a wholesale revamp. I look forward to the finished product this fall.

Fedora Core 6 Test 2 Screenshot Tour

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-08-07

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/WeeklyReports/2006-08-07

fedoraproject.org wiki down

On August 3rd, fedoraproject.org wiki site was not available for a couple of hours. According to Patrick Barnes’s announcement in fedora-announces-list:

A hardware failure was the cause of the problem. We have restored the site from a recent backup and services should now be returning to normal. Since we were forced to use a backup, some of the most recent changes may have been lost. If you made any changes over the last 24-48 hours, you may need to repeat those changes. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience.

Updated Fedora Core 6 Schedule

Jeremy Katz announces in fedora-announce-list:

Later than expected, we have now gotten to where Xen is working with current kernels and are ready to actually freeze and release test2. We are currently working with the already frozen bits to get a tree ready and plan to release to the world on Monday, 7 August 2006. The relevant changes to the rest of the schedule have been made to the official schedule page at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule Thanks for being patient as we’ve worked through some of this!

Red Hat Survey for Fedora Community

Tom ‘Spot’ Callaway points out in his blog:

Red Hat wants to know what you think of Red Hat. Why? Because we want you to like us, and we want to make sure we know about the things that you don’t like. So, if you use Linux either personally or professionally, please take a few minutes and fill out our little survey: http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/116476/16e8/

No country orders for OLPC laptops

Christopher Blizzard points out in his blog:

I keep seeing this meme reported over and over again: that One Laptop per Child has gotten commitments from countries that add up to 4 million laptops. This is not true. I want to make this very clear. I work in the One Laptop office every day and I’m generally aware of what’s going on with the various countries. I have talked with the stakeholders inside of the One Laptop organization and can confirm that nothing has been signed, and no country has yet been asked to sign.

What Is Fedora’s Prime Directive?

According to eWeek’s recent article:

By the metric of innovation, Fedora’s been a smashing success. However, for the volunteers out there who build packages for Fedora and who file bugs for Fedora and who cover news in the Fedora community, it’s perhaps time to examine whether to shift their efforts to a distribution for which Job One is being a supported, user-focused operating system, rather than being a proving ground for a separate product that’s focused on the needs of others.

Fedora wants to draw in women

According to ZDNet’s recent article:

Open-source project Fedora has launched Fedora Women, a forum and mailing list, in an effort to encourage more female developers to participate in its community…Fedora Women aims to support the existing community of female coders through a dedicated discussion arena and mailing list for women involved in the project.

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-31

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/WeeklyReports/2006-07-31

Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates

During the week of July 31 – August 06, Fedora Project released 03 Fedora Core 4 Updates including 02 Security Advisory.

During the week of July 31 – August 06, Fedora Project released 18 Fedora Core 5 Updates including 02 Security Advisory.

Contributing to Fedora Weekly News

Would you like to contribute your article to Fedora Weekly News?

Editor’s Blog

Let’s see anything interesting happened in Editor’s Blog besides Fedora Weekly News