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Posts tagged business

Why Business Doesn’t “get” Desktop Linux

Mar23
2008 Written by devnet

I used to skateboard when I was a teenager. This was during the times when Tony Hawk was in his prime…Powell Peralta was the number one skateboard company on the planet, and Thrasher magazine was the number one choice of reading material.

Most of my friends at that time all rode Powell Peralta boards. The thing is…I was always looking for an advantage…something that could give me a competitive street skating advantage or something that just plainly worked better.

I found that advantage in H-Street equipment. I began riding a naked H-Street board with H-Street Arrow wheels. Switched from tracker trucks to independent and changed my bearings from German to Swiss. I watched Hokus Pokus and idolized Danny Way. I was ridiculed. I was told that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was told that H-Street was no Powell Peralta. A year later, everyone had a Hokus Pokus poster on their wall and were trying to get the gear and equipment I had already purchased.

I’m not saying I’m a trend setter. I’m saying I recognized quality and functionality before most did. Many businesses today are exactly like my friends. They don’t want to change. They don’t recognize quality or something that can give them a competitve advantage (at least not until its too late in most cases).

Why is this? Why is it that many corporations and small to medium businesses cannot or will not take a step back and look at the competitive advantage and cost savings Linux and Open Source software will give their business?

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ClarkConnect – Enterprise Linux for Your Home

Jul25
2006 Written by devnet

Ever wonder how you could get a solid Security Enhanced Enterprise Grade Linux Router/Server with ftp, apache, traffic shaping, pop-up blocker, content filter, intrusion detection/prevention, and other nice handy tools that every robust server should have…and here’s the kicker…installed and running in about 30 minutes in your home? I know quite a few friends of mine that went out and bought routers from brand names like Linksys, Dlink, and Netgear and then bragged about how cool their new router was (especially concerning ‘gaming routers’. Good lord that’s a con). I then showed them that their router was hackable within a few minutes because most of them didn’t change their default password. It’s interesting also that their routers didn’t do a whole heckuva lot other than route traffic…without throttling or intrusion prevention/detection. On those that were wireless…after some intense packet sniffing, I logged into their network and began surfing the web.


The bottom line is…most routers, if not configured correctly and used to full potential, are wide open and provide only a few functions. If you’re like me, this just won’t do. To combat this in the past, I used to use Red Hat 7.2 on a PI 75Mhz like an appliance to provide DHCP addresses for the LAN and a tidy firewall via ipchains and later iptables. Now there is a Linux distro that is more robust, more organized, and much more dynamic than most Linux router/server configured systems and it provides MANY functions. That distro is ClarkConnect. Today, I’m going to take a look at ClarkConnect 3.2 and show you how you can secure your network using its web interface and excellent administration tools.

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Bringing Linux to Work – Portal Part 3

May17
2006 Written by devnet

Ubuntu just doesn’t want to be chosen for me. I’ve had nothing but problems with it since I started going on it. I decided that it would be easier to use Ubuntu (1 disk install, apt-get abilities) to house the in house Intranet portal page here where I work. However, I didn’t count on Ubuntu having so many problems.

The first of many problems was mod_ntlm. This Apache module WILL NOT compile on my server. I emailed someone who actually got this to compile in Ubuntu and asked for how they got it to work, implemented their changes in the .c file, yet still couldn’t get it to compile. This reason alone is enough for me to not use it. But there are more reasons still that Ubuntu doesn’t do it for me.

The second reason is going cold. What I mean by going cold is that it almost froze up. For example, it would take over an hour to run apt-get update, about the same to run apt-get upgrade (depending on downloads) and even 20 minutes to do a standard ls -al | grep keyword command. After a reboot everything was fine. This led me to believe that some sort of power saving module was kicking in. So I removed all power saving modules, recompiled a kernel from scratch, turned off all BIOS power saving items, crossed my fingers and rebooted. Even with all of these actions, Ubuntu still went cold after a day of uptime. This is on an IBM NetVista P4 with 1 GB RAM. Ubuntu however will not be staying on any PC at my job due to the previous problems experienced.

I’ve got an exact match of this machine to provide backup for it so I’ve simulataneously been using CentOS to experiment around with it. There’s a reason that Red Hat is the leader in the server arena…because they get it done and provide a fantastically stable Linux environment. CentOS is repackaged Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it is fantastic. So from this point on, Ubuntu will not be actively developed on by myself…I’ll be using CentOS from this point on. Which leads me to the decisions I’ve been trying to come to.

I’ve been trying to find a good portal CMS that can house documents and provide news announcements for my department. No chat is needed…no forums…just a repository for docs. With all of this being said, I need to provide a flexible solution to house these documents as well because who knows what the director will come back and say. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll change his mind and want to have all documentation developed and worked on in Sharepoint and all reports to go on our intranet page. So I need flexibility if I’m going to get a CMS running on Linux and I need it to be stable so I can show tangible results to upper managment. Otherwise, they’ll continue to go with what has been working for them…and that is Windows.

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Brining Linux to Work – Portal Part 1

May08
2006 Written by devnet

Beginning this month, I’ll be attempting to infuse my place of work with Linux. I am an new Applications Analyst and resident AIX/Linux expert for a government agency that lives and breaths Microsoft. I feel that Open Source software, mainly, Linux…can be a great addition to this agency. I’ll be documenting my attempts here while I go along. If you have tips, tricks, solutions, advice or supportive comments…please respond in kind.

You’ve Got to Start Somewhere…

Recently, I’ve been investigating portal applications (CMS portals) for an intranet server at work. The portal will act as a document repository and project status report tool. It needs to plug into the framework we have in place currently…which is a Windows 2000 Active Directory environment. Instead of powering this with IIS or WinXp with Apache…I’ve elected to go with Linux and Apache. However, I didn’t really investigate much to figure out if this would be a possibility. Problems were rampant and still are. Allow me to explain.

I’ve been given the requirements that any intranet page must be single sign on, meaning that when a user visits the page, they don’t have to login…they’re simply there and logged in already. This can be done using the apache ntlm module. I can also pass this parameter using Tomcat and JOSS with php. However, the ntlm module won’t compile on Ubuntu or SuSe and hence won’t install. So, that took away my top two choices for Linux distros (not to mention, caused me to waste 2 days of time). JOSS requires that I write and plugin my own php script which is something I don’t want to do currently. So I’m back at square one. I’ve changed direction and am instaling CentOS 4 currently…we’ll see where that takes me. I’ve had more luck with CentOS as a server (my server at home has around 120 days for uptime currently and runs CentOS at its core).

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Distributed Bugs-R-Us

Apr10
2006 Written by devnet

I have a decent idea for an open source application. This could be one of the most important pieces of software to assist open source in a long time. I don’t have ideas often for software apps but when I do, normally they’re good ones.However, I don’t have the expertise to program this either. The only thing I have is an idea for bugtracker software…and it operates on the distributed journalism model of digg.

The idea was inspired by the article “10,000 bugs away from World Domination“, specifically these few words:

“My diagnosis is that the problem with Linux is that it doesn’t have anyone pushing to get the newbie bugs fixed first. At Microsoft, we had Program Managers and one of their responsibilities was to be customer advocates to prioritize the bugs for the devs to fix. In many open source groups, it sometimes appears that bugs get fixed when the dev decides to work on it, not because an important user scenario is broken. The Wi-Fi tool was broken in Gnome for any months, but the bugs just sat there languishing in the database. Microsoft or Apple would not have shipped a Wi-Fi UI that was completely broken in that way.”

The author is 100% correct. And since open source communities don’t have program managers that can focus the time needed to prioritize bug fixes, we can make the community become that program manager. Read on for specifics on how to do this.

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Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding

Dec20
2004 Written by devnet

“It’s not the big that beats the small; it’s the fast that beats the slow.” Niklas Zennstrom

There was a time early in the dawn of computers where .edu’s and .orgs co-mingled ideas and thoughts via IRC and newsgroups in a conducive and non-proprietary way. The great ideas that were born from this still thrive today in the form of RFC’s, Internet Standards, Protocols, and other surges of genius that sprung from these beginnings.

Lately however, certain things have begun to become apparent. Proprietary software vendors have locked the advancement of technology. This is to be expected. The open source movement is in full swing to counteract that. The only problem with the open source movement is in trying to counteract this huge pendulum and swing it from closed source proprietary toward a multi-source, multi-national technological advancement (for the gain of mankind and not company kind). Instead, open source has begun to push the stone uphill on it’s own without assistance from the VERY companies that take from it.

The bottom line is that companies will take from open source without any inhibitions at all. But when it comes to defending that which they take, they shrivel into the shadows and hope no one notices them. Companies are not in symbiosis with open source…oh sure, some of them might be sympathetic to open source. As we’ve seen with the Linux Core Consortium, companies will pledge their favor but not their resources. But until ALL companies that take from open source give back through REAL support (financial or otherwise)…they’ll continue to be identified as an entity that takes from another without providing anything in return. The word for that is PARASITE.

Companies that take from open source without giving back are a parasite to open source; they are killing it from within. The bad part about this is that we are helping this parasite…even applauding what it is doing. Many of us cheer when company X converts 250 computers to Novell or RedHat…but that isn’t open source anymore! They’re companies who happen to use Linux…they’re just not pure open source no matter what their beginnings are or were. The support and recognition go to Novell and Redhat…the financial gain goes to those companies and not back into open source. Sure, they provide some packages and free-for-home-use downloads and other niceties to try and counteract things…but open source still loses. It loses because there are more takers than givers.

Open source advocates shouldn’t be cheering when company X converts 250 computers it has to Novell or Redhat because they’re just cheering for the company. Even when Linux becomes THE accepted alternative for business and enterprise applications we should refrain from cheering companies such as Redhat and Novell because the money they earn doens’t go back into open source…and the name they make for themselves…does nothing for open source. No matter how hard they try, they’ll always take more than they give.

Some of you might be saying, “But the simple fact is that when Company X converts to Linux, they are embracing Linux in general…not just the company that sells it. This means that they’ll open up more to open source programs such as OpenOffice and Firefox”. Perhaps. But I’d be more willing to believe that company X won’t do ANYTHING that the vendor who provided them with Linux advised against…especially if warranty and license prevent it. So if said Linux vendor who provided them with 250 Linux desktops decided they didn’t want Company X to use OpenOffice…that company wouldn’t use it. The power of choice has been removed.

Until companies aren’t afraid to offer FULL and unadulterated support for Linux (LSB 2.0 standard or the Linux Core Consortium) and free open source software, the open source movement will not succeed.

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