Adventures in F,O, X, & 0

The current "Linux Upskill Challenge" course was designed as a commercial course, and was run that way from its launch eight years ago. As outlined in my recent "Health status" post here, I've now pivoted to a not-for-profit approach running on Reddit ( r/linuxupskillchallenge ). This has been pretty successful so far, but it depends on a level of care from me that's not sustainable long term. (I get monthly visits from a palliative care nurse, have a Do Not Revive notice on my refrigerator - you get the picture!) So I need some little helpers, to fill the following roles: Posting the daily lesson If the lesson hasn't been posted by me before 12:07 am UTC, then assume I'm not able to - and someone else will need to do so. The source of the lessons is in publicly available in my  Github, so anyone can do this, and it will appear at the top on the topics when viewed in "New" order. If you're a "Moderator", you can and sh...

My health is not the best. Two and a half years ago I was diagnosed with myeloma after finding myself suddenly very breathless when doing strenuous exercise. The myeloma had in turn caused amyloidosis - which in its turn had severely affected my heart, causing heart failure. Not cool. Two years ago, after six months of prep chemo I had an autologous bone marrow transplant. Now, two years on, and I'm doing pretty well all considered. I'm not disabled in any way really - apart from not being able to easily walk more that about 500m! However, I don't have sufficient heart capacity to cope if I were to be hit by a bad flu or COVID-19... As you can imagine, I'm keeping pretty strictly to the lockdown procedures...

This has now been running for three months! Some background: Last year I had great plans to re-purpose my  Linux sysadmin beginners course as a paid product marketed to IT managers. The plan was for them to use this to train, but also evaluate, their staff. I still think the concept was sound - but it did require a full-on "funnel" process to get in a steady flow of new participants, and there was quite a bit of infrastructure needed to get it fully automated. However, late last year I got a bit of a "rude awakening" from a doctor regarding my health - and so I've "pivoted" to simply providing the course as a not-for-profit service. It has a website at:      linuxupskillchallenge.com . ...but the course is mainly run via a "subreddit" on reddit.com: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge/ That might seem a bit odd, but it has some advantages: * There are already some very active related subredits (r/linuxnoobs, /r/li...

This was a great con, really well run, and the organisers really looked after the speakers!   Had some good feedback and conversations about my talk  - and  I've now made the slides available here .  

Just a week away from the next  c ourse  - and this time the servers will be hosted with Digital Ocean . Lovely simple setup and almost unbeatable prices. Performance isn't a big factor for the course, but that looks as if should also be very good. During this week I'll be cranking up a few test servers and testing my pre-course deployment scripts - it's important that everything very closely matches the course notes. Amazon ECS was great fun last time round, and worked well, but for this sort of course where servers are running for a month with minimal load it's prohibitively expensive. The course has been $49 but I've now dropped that right down the price I used in beta testing - $25!  At that price its clearly a good deal, so I've made sure that numbers are limited to 200 learners because any more would make the new Zendesk -based forums a little chaotic.   

The experience of setting up dozens and dozens of VPS servers individually by hand (for the first "test run" course) was "interesting", and only served to encourage me to move in a direction which I'd always looked to do eventually - the cloud. Frankly the manual process works OK it's just that it's Not Fun and it doesn't scale very well. For my course case it's already clear that several hundred small servers will be needed, so automation is a must. In theory it's probably possible to automate the purchase and provisioning of traditional VPSs, but it's not an option with VolumeDrive.com, and of course there may be underlying physical limitation to just how much they can quickly setup. My feeling is that I'll retain the current class set of server at VolumeDrive, but work to be able to add in further sets via (probably) Amazon's AWS. If provisioning is done right they should all work much the same, with some simple scripts us...

Well, t he Course is being launched today - with the first lessons going out on Monday the 5th of November. Exciting stuff. If you've been following along you'll know that it's been a long gestation, with the final product being very pared back - an MVP in the jargon - but I'm pleased with the result and very happy with the tools I've chosen and used now: Blogger , Google Apps , and Squarespace . The payment side uses Paypal - which I've found easy to make work, but this would be the one thing that I may change in the future. So, now off to setup more servers for the first participants!

This month I'm looking to revive my Linux sysadmin trainging course project. First off I spent some time polishing the training material, but now I'm concentrating on getting the others bits into place, especially: website mailing list my planning wiki I'd originally though in terms of building/hosting these myself, but now want to largely, or exclusively, use services such as Mail Chimp, Google Apps etc. Many are free for the initial size/period that matter to me, and while they're somewhat restrictive they also save time - which is a big deal. So, the month is almost half gone - looks like I need to put in some more hours! 

Just doing this a few times today: VMware Tools into Ubuntu From the VMware menu in VCentre, choose VM->Install VMware Tools. This makes the tools installed appear as a CDROM drive, but this now needs to be mounted, and the installer run. On Ubuntu it's also necessary to compile the tools from source - and so we need to first install compilers etc that are not normally needed. The script below does all of this. Open an editor ( nano or vim ), to create a file called vm-tools , paste the contents in, save and then run the chmod command to make the script executable:     cd      (changes to your home directory)     nano vm-tools (paste and save)     chmod +x vm-tools and now run the script:     ./vm-tools You'll be asked for your password initially - and can safely use the defaults for all prompts. This is the script: # ## vmti - VMware Tools Installer # echo -e "\...

Hmm, a Big Important Server was restarted by a client overnight - and never came back up. Opps! These days of course, everything's virtual, so from the console I could see the problem - a "panic". Downloading a SystemRescueCd ISO and booting from that went smoothly, but sorting it fully out got me back into "chroot" - which I find fun. Less fun was the complexity of GRUB2 - seems I haven't played with grub for a while because this is a different beast than I remember. Oh, and the main disk is LVM, which caused me some headache too. Cause? Unclear, but lots of old kernels clogging up /boot was a BIG factor! Now re-thinking my automated-upgrades strategy)

I've been thinking about getting a little project underway for some time, and so there's now a b log and a minimal landing page at  - fun stuff! Postfix is fine, but I'm on a learning curve with mailman and the I nned to get some forum software setup - but the Next Big Thing is to get a decent design for the website. Looking at www.designcrowd.com but of course it would also be fun to do-it-myself. Hmmm, not sure how that would work!

Had some fun yesterday setting up a central syslog server, and getting 3 RHEL boxes to send to it. Various third parties will have «root» on those three boxes, and security is a big thing with this install so... It Seemed Appropriate. I've got logwatch on the three, but would like to setup Splunk (free) on this monitoring box. Looks pretty flash, so it might be a bit more to the liking of the suits. As much as possible I'd like to send router, SAN and ESXi logs to it too, so there should be lots of data to mine. I'm woefully ignorant on SNMP, but have set a custom community string on various boxes and pointed them to the monitoring machine. Nothing there is listening tho, so I need to do some more research...

Installed and testing.... Like twitter and facebook, I suspect that doing this from the phone Just Makes Sense...

Very nice post by Stéphane Graber got me started with LXC. Nice, this is going to be fun!

Most people browse the web using the default web browser that came with their machine. However, using this, most people will see websites cluttered with advertisements, many flashing or blinking or in garish colour. Yuk. Many of these advertisements will also be offering to “Scan your machine for viruses”, or even saying “You are infected!!” – and you, or anyone using your machine, clicks on one of these links then you are very likely to end with some type of “malware” (a virus, trojan, rootkit, keylogger or whatever). Bad, bad stuff. So, what is the answer? THE ANSWER = Adblock Plus + Firefox Here’s what you need to do: Download Firefox from http://getfirefox.com/ Install Firefox, and say YES when prompted to “Make Firefox your default browser” Import all your old settings and Favourites via File, Import. Your “favourites” become Firefox “bookmarks” Install Adblock Plus by: Tools, Add-ons, Get Add-ons and search for “Adblock”. Select “Adblock Plus” – the icon is a stop sign with “ABP...

There are a few reasons why these may make most sense for me: Leading edge, so they are interesting and challenging technically For the same reason, user are more likely to be technical, and happy to work with JustOneGuy and email rather than the typical flashy panel interfaces available everywhere Less competition I'll be hosting at a site where the only charges are for power - which should be very low for an ARM My only concern is that the focus for ARM-based servers seems to be on system where (for example) 100 5W processors are jammed in 2U. Nice density, but I don't pay for space, but I do have do come up with the capital for the initial servers, and this would be way out of my price range. Some interesting links: Calxeda Opens The Kimono.. A Sneak Peek At Calxeda’s ARM-Based Servers KVM for ARM

Hmm... fun fun fun. My current feeling is that the KVM/VPS is the way to go - slicing a single box into 10 x 50/mo = 500/mo = 6,000 pa. Needs to be comparatively cheap because there'll be no control panels, web interfaces etc. Many of the alternative ideas rely on volume - but I can see enough problems getting 10 sign-ups, let alone 100+ with some of the other things I've considered. So, having a play with a trial VPS at OpenHosting...

Well, it's been a while, but I'm posting because I have something I'm keen to explore over the next little while - something I'm calling "Project GreenBox" ... So, what is it? Well, it's based on a few facts/trends: A new local co-location site charging for electricity only - ie FREE space and bandwidth New low-power consumption servers, including Atom and ARM-based ones Power-reducing modes on servers and now HDDs when loads are light The Power Of Linux to be customised and tweaked to further reduce power costs Stuff like OpenVZ to allow very efficient sharing The pretty standard LAMP/WordPress etc stack Good open free tools for management I don't want to do Just another Web Hosting Company - its the excitement of using these trends to build something MUCH better and more cost-effective and green. The trick is to: Clarify the concepts Do the numbers ...and to do it soon - I'm giving myself to the end of March. Wish me luck!

Susanne and Andrew Ruthven co-ordinated a great event - and did so with an amazing unflappable charm. The Jeremy Allison talk was a beauty and hit Slashdot etc - great "no holds barred stuff", and interesting for a strong stand against Mono being installed by default. I'd be surprised if it doesn't get a fresh burst of attention when the video gets uploaded  in a week or so. Lots of other great talks - the two most interesting being Tridge on defending patent attacks, and the Albany Senior High School story. Through out the conf it because increasing clear to me that puppet is "the way to go" - so I was very happy to get a Spot Prize of " Pulling Strings with Puppet "!

Lots of good stuff here. The keynote yesterday was given by Benjamin Mako Hill. Good guy, and lots of good points but I was suprised that it wasn't "tighter" - and that he allowed himself to be dragged off-stream and into rambling by questions. Andrew Tridgell's talk on teaching FOSS was great, as was Don Christies on the "Public Sector Remix" - great line about IT departments' "learned helplessness"! Nice to meet and talk to Andy Fitzsimon and Brenda Wallace at lunch. Fun to see soldering irons, and frying pans (and a Vic's reprap) added to all the other geekiness at the UStay last night. Looking forward to Jeremy Allison's talk in particular today.