Scott Dowdle's blog

Opinion: Red Hat and Fedora pay to secure boot?

I've seen a few articles today railing against Red Hat for their support of Fedora buying a key from Microsoft / Verisign so that in the future, Fedora will be able to boot on hardware certified for Windows 8 without having to dig into the BIOS to turn off secure boot. Some of them were just unhappy that an executive from Red Hat spoke about the situation in a somewhat positive fashion rather than being all pissed. Others are unhappy at the very idea that somehow their freedoms have been trampled on.

The issue isn't whether or not secure booting is the silver bullet for security issues... of course it isn't. Security is a multi-layer thing... and generally speaking, the more layers, the better.

The issue isn't that the key thingies cost a fortune, they don't. If I understand correctly, it's about $99 per Fedora release. That's $198 a year.

The issue is that everyone is pissed because this involves Microsoft... and Red Hat is seen as somehow giving in to Microsoft. Red Hat isn't giving in to Microsoft any more than they gave in to Akamai Technologies Inc when they bought an SSL certificate for www.redhat.com... or when they gave in to GeoTrust when they bought an SSL cert for the fedoraproject.org website. In each case a work around is available but they are just trying to spare users and customers a little bit of hassle. That's all.

Of course I'm a Red Hat fan boi, so what do you expect from me? Any questions?


Red Hat using Containers?

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I like to do some walking on Sundays. Walking is what us older people do for exercise. When I walk, I like to listen to audiocasts. One of the programs I've been listening to with some regularity is FLOSS Weekly and the program this week was about OpenShift.

OpenShift is a Platform as a Service (Paas) product that is, as you would expect, built on top of Linux. What is PaaS? System Admins / DevOps are constantly deploying web-based applications. They all use a web server, a database, a scripting language / runtime environment, etc. PaaS automates most of the common tasks needed so you don't have to do the same thing over and over... and can concentrate more on your application.

OpenShift has been available for awhile now as a developer preview service run by Red Hat on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Supposedly the current level of service will always be free but they plan to charge for higher levels.

A few weeks ago they released OpenShift as open source project (OpenShift Origin) with an Apache license and no code contributer agreement needed.

Turns out that they have various combinations of things available such as several databases to pick from, several scripting languages, etc. Those things are called "cartridges". Some of the cartridges they have are:

Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and mogoDB
Language runtimes: Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Java / JBoss
Frameworks: CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Perl Dancer, Flask, Sinatra, Tornado

Need a libary of web-applications to pick from? OpenSift has "quick-starts" which are pre-packaged web-applications. Included are such things as WordPress, phpMyAdmin and Jenkins.

Another concept they have is a "gear". A gear is really an LXC container. Why they needed to create a new term (gear) rather than just calling it a container, I don't know. So it appears that Red Hat is using Linux native containers (LXC) in a product now... so I hope they'll get more into containers... since I'm a big container (mostly OpenVZ) fan. Dependong on how heavy a particular cartridge is, it may or may not be deployed inside its own gear. They easily fit serveral dozens to a hundred or more gears on each cloud-based virtual machine. While Red Hat runs their service on top of AWS, users are free to create their own setups on top of whatever virtualization platform they want.

OpenShift is written in Ruby but also uses some shell scripts for cartridge and gear operations. What OpenShift does could probably be mimiced with containers that use a large set of OS / Application Templates but the unique feature that makes OpenSift stand out is that it uses git for deployment.

If any of this interests you, check out either the FLOSS Weekly audio version or the video. Unfortunately, they only seem to support patent encumbered codecs.


How To: Download Children's Programs in a free format from YouTube

It seems a lot of children's educational shows have been posted to YouTube. It isn't up to me to decide if them being there is a violation of someone's trademarks or copyrights. If they are there, I can use youtube-dl to download them.

Want "Magic School Bus" season 1? Many distros provide a package named youtube-dl. I went to wikipedia and looked up the Magic School Bus episode titles for season 1 and then I searched for those on YouTube. Then I made a text file and put in the URLs like so:

youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBp68rhT_Sg'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkqSapSsLvc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeV7BtP18N8'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tCXnvTnzZc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaf59CuWFuQ'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z91RU4wBm8'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idEEIXsqPYA'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuMh0FavfE'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mIxsGlNhhc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=670eR6_UOFA'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOKB6B6ROZE'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta34lJ_G54A'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFV5Y9ljyBg'

Don't forget to chmod 755 that text file and then you can run it from the commandline. I hope you have some disk space. Each episode is about 130 MB or so. You'll get the webm flavor. Most everything on YouTube is available in several flavors including webm.

I haven't looked for all of the other episodes yet but will soon. You can also find a lot of episodes of PBS' Arthur show. My 6 year old really likes that one.

The quality of these videos is not really that great when played back on a computer monitor with high resolution or an HD TV... but playing them on my Nintendo Wii (with Homebrew's WiiMC application over a samba share) on a standard def. TV, they look just as good as anything else. We do not yet own an HD TV.

youtube-dl is a fantastic program and it can even download complete YouTube channels and/or playlists.


Review: LinuxFest Northwest 2012

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The end of April... is LinuxFest Northwest time in Bellingham, Washington. This was my 6th year attending and it was their 12th annual conference. As usual, I took my camcorder along and recorded all of the presentations I attended.

Unlike last year, where I was all by myself, this year I was lucky enough to have three other Montanans with me - Gary Bummer from the BozemanLUG, Warren Sanders and Andrew Niemantsverdreit from the BillingsLUG.

We all carpooled with Warren driving and for that I thank him.

Program Guide (PDF)

Continue reading for the complete review.

Videos: LFNW2012 ownCloud Part 2

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Michael Gapczynski's ownCloud - Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way

This was the second part of a two presentation series. I missed the first part so make of this what you will. Michael primarily talks about the PHP programming interfaces to ownCloud.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-ownCloud-Michael_Gapczynski.webm (159.5MB)

Videos: LFNW2012 Meet Fedora

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Robyn Bergeron's Fedora talk.

As you may know I'm a big Fedora fanboi and I really enjoyed meeting and listening to the new Fedora Project Leader talk. Robyn found out the projector in the room was dead but that was ok as she wasn't planning on using slides anyway. I really enjoyed the frankness of her talk and can see why she was picked to be the new FPL.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-The_Fedora_Talk-Robyn_Bergeron.webm (233.1MB)

Videos: LFNW2012 Teaching Linux and SysAdmin via Distance Ed

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David Mandel's Teaching Linux and Linux System Administration as Distance Education Classes.

I arrived right as the talk was starting and during the first minute or so I am franticly setting up the camera. Sorry about that. There is quite a bit of interaction between David and several audience members who also teach Linux in an academic setting. I teach a Linux SysAdmin class myself and enjoyed this. It was on the later track on the second day so it was allowed to run a bit long. Enjoy.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-Teaching_Linux_via_Distance_Ed-David_Mandel.webm (361.4MB)

Videos: LFNW2012 Software Patents: What You Can Do

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Deb Nicholson's Software Patents: What You Can Do.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-Software_Patents-Deb_Nicholson.webm (394.4MB)

Videos: LFNW2012 High Availability for MySQL

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Max Mether's High Availability for MySQL.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-MySQL_HA_Solutions-Max_Mether.webm (304.6MB)

Videos: LFNW2012 Linux LVM Advanced Topics

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Will Sterling's Linux Logical Volume Manager Advanced Topics.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-LVM_Advanced_Topics-Will_Sterling.webm (244.4MB)

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