Scott Dowdle's blog

Do you remember the time BI (Before Internet)? I do. I got my first computer in 1983 and my first modem shortly thereafter. In 2005 a guy by the name of Jason Scott released a documentary on 3 DVDs entitled The BBS Documentary. He released it under a creative commons license. I pre-ordered it and was one of the first couple of hundred folks to get a copy. The BBS Documentary brought back such memories. Hey, I used BBSes for about 12 years before the Internet became available to me... so on this memorial day, why not take a walk down memory lane with me. Hey, I even met my wife on a BBS.

Part 1: BAUD

Just in case you don't watch 60 Minutes every week like I do, here is a low quality version of the segment than ran last Sunday on the One Laptop Per Child Project. This is posted with the fair usage rights in mind.

If you'd like to purchase a high quality version of this segment on DVD, feel free to visit CBS' page for their segment... and of course, watch 60 Minutes every week!

Hmmm, recently YouTube could only do 10 minutes of video or less... but now it appears Google is pushing some of their larger, more interesting videos (at least to me) to YouTube even though they originate from Google.

After culling through some of the videos on Google Video, I recommend the following... and most of them are part of Google's engEDU or TechTalk series. All of them can be downloaded if desired with the exception of the OLPC video.

The State of the Linux Kernel - Andrew Morton
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1742374580386548257
1 hr 21 min 37 sec - May 1, 2007
Excellent!

The Linux kernel Roadmap - Jonathan Corbet

I found this video on Google Video very interesting and decided to share it.

The State of the Linux Kernel by Andrew Morton
Google Tech Talks - May 1, 2007

Linuxfest Northwest has been an annual event since 1999 held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham Washington which is approximately 90 miles North of Seattle. To allow for the largest participation, it is held on a weekend. Linuxfest Northwest 2007 was held on April 28-29th and was attended by approximately 900 people.

Warren Sanders, Donnie Lunder (BillingsLUG), Ken Dyke (HelenaLUG) and I (BozemanLUG) made the trip.

[Update: Added OpenVZ video!]

Package SetsIf one knows of the hype about Ubuntu, and it is almost unavoidable, one is led to believe that it is the most popular Linux distribution for desktop users. I have yet to see hard data that shows evidence of that claim so that will remain unresolved for now. One of the reasons touted for Ubuntu's popularity is that it comes on a single CD. Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based, also has fans because it too has a very light-weight install option (among other reasons) which will install the base system and allow one to install all the desired software post-install by downloading only what is needed. While Debian is huge, 27 CDs for the full distro or 3 DVDs (not counting the source CDs), virtually no one downloads all of the .iso images.

Since I'm a Red Hat fan (which includes Fedora Core and CentOS), I'm aware of the complaints people have about "having to download multiple CDs" before they can start installing. In fact, the recently released CentOS 5 is 6 CDs (i386, or 7 CDs for x86_64). To counter those complaints, I thought I'd try a single CD install of the recently released CentOS 5 "Debian style" and then add everything in post-install. Join me if you will...

Just a quick note to say that CentOS 5 has been released... 6 CDs or 1 DVD. I've downloaded all 6 CDs and am burning now. DVD is about 45% done downloading.

Woohoo!

Official announcement should happen in an hour or so.

OpenFiler iSCSII installed OpenFiler on an extra machine the other day. What's OpenFiler? According to the OpenFiler website:

Openfiler is a Storage Management Operating System. It is powered by the Linux 2.6 kernel and Open Source applications such as Apache, Samba, LVM2, ext3, Linux NFS and iSCSI Enterprise Target. Openfiler combines these ubiquitous technologies into a small, easy to manage solution fronted by a powerful web-based management interface. Openfiler allows you to build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and/or Storage Area Network (SAN) appliance, using industry-standard hardware, in less than 10 minutes of installation time.

I've never worked with iSCSI before... but now I want to. The reason I'm looking into it is because RHEL 5 and others can use iSCSI disks to install to... and hopefully it'll work well for XenVMs too. Care to follow me on this, the initial leg, of my journey?

Ten people attended the meeting last night. As always, thanks to Ken Dyke for drving in from Helena to make the meeting.

We had a lively discussion on Virtualization. Before the meeting I wrote up the various virtualization methods that were in play on the whiteboard. After the meeting had started and the ice broken... I went over my experience with XenExpress, Xen in RHEL 5, what I had learned about VMware ESX from a co-worker, and some about OpenVZ. There were quite a few questions.

[Update] Ken emailed me the link to the P2V Converter he mentioned at the meeting... Convert Physical Windows Systems Into Virtual Machines To Be Run On A Linux Desktop.