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Archive for April, 2010

Installing Ruby 1.9 on openSUSE 11.2

April 6th, 2010 by

It’s been a while since I’ve posted or been active in the community, so I thought I’d toss an update out there.  I’ll cross post this on my personal blog and on Cool Solutions (modified for SLEx 10).  This is a pretty rudimentary post as installation from source is pretty straightforward, but perhaps it’ll be useful to someone.

The only requirements for this build that I’m aware of at this time are make, gcc, and the openssl/openssl-devel packages.

The default Ruby distribution in 11.2 is 1.8.7, contrasting the current stable release of 1.9.1.  If you already have Ruby installed via zypper, you’ll need to uninstall it (‘sudo zypper rm ruby’), otherwise the first step is to grab the latest release from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/.

Next, unpack your release (replacing 1.9.1-p376 with the build you downloaded):

tar xfvz ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz

Change to the extracted directory and run the config script:

cd ruby-1.9.1-p376 && ./configure

Build the release:  Note that you can allow jobs to run simultaneously with the -j switch, see make (1) for further details.

make

Install the release as root:

sudo make install

To verify that 1.9 is indeed installed, issue:

ruby --version

Small script to monitor service/process

April 5th, 2010 by

Small script to monitor a process and restart it if found dead, I am sure there are many more ways to do this, here is one: servicemon

News from the Zypper Revolution

April 5th, 2010 by

Maybe revolution is a bit strong, but at this hour in the night I can probably be excused for using a bit of hyperbole – besides, nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion as Hegel would have it, so I am on solid ground here.

I have been going over customer feedback from Novell’s Brainshare conference for my internal “Systems Management Zeitgeist” report, and there are a couple of points I just had to share with you all as they are plain simply inspirational.

Our update stack is, well, zippy.  Like greased lightning, according to this happy SUSE Linux Enterprise customer:

Zypper updates a Linux system across major versions in 5 minutes, full Oracle server update done in 15 minutes

We of course appreciate speed in of itself, as a technical achievement powered by enhancements like libsat and DeltaRPM, and Community users share this point of view with us.  But Enterprise users have a different and equally valid point of view: administrator time is costly, and while many management consoles exist, industry data shows that tools do help, but not nearly enough: administrators are still involved, personally, in most Systems Management tasks —  I could quote analyst data, but not at this wee hour, so just trust me on this point.

This one medium-sized customer actually took the time to calculate what the time savings meant to his business:

The faster update stack is resulting in 56,000 dollars in [operational budget] savings

It is not everyday a customer gives you a precise dollar number in describing what a technology’s impact is on his expenses — So I just had to share it with you all, it is such a nice commentary on our effort’s tangible impact.

I can hear some of you wonder why I blogged this on my Lizard’s Community account, rather than on Novell’s Corporate site, since I am talking up Enterprise distro data and as the Systems Management guy I really have either option.  Good question!  I could say it is because I was not in the mood to dig up analyst quotes, and this setting allows me to be more cavalier and just waltz over those references, but there is a more important reason, read on.

We in the Systems Management team happen to think sleep is for the weak, and have been cooking up our next scheme for improvement — but we need your help to get there.

As the keenest observers among you have long ago noticed, with the 11.2 release we declared “zypper dup” a supported migration path, and received some accolades for it already.  But we all know that live distro upgrade migration across major version changes is a big endeavor, and we would like to solicit your help in improving it: if you have the time and inclination to test zypper dup and provide a properly filed bug report of any kinks you might discover, we would be delighted to use your feedback to improve the 11.3 implementation of this process.

Just a word of caution: comments to this entry, or bugs filed without sufficient data to be analyzed, are not going to further the result we all seek.  If you report something, make sure enough data to reproduce the issue is included, and that you are able to provide additional data upon request of the developer handling your report: if we cannot reproduce a problem, we cannot fix it.

Thanks in advance to those among you joining us in this effort!

Announce: openSUSE Beego

April 1st, 2010 by

the openSUSE distribution is the perfect base for specialized projects focusing on a certain area of application. Today, I am happy to announce the start of the openSUSE Beego project and ask you to join in and help to bring it to a success, because we rely on your support and enthusiasm.

What is openSUSE Beego about? Beego is the perfect customized linux distribution for beekeepers who want to manage their bees on a by today never unreached level. With openSUSE Beego we focus on key features like KHive, the management software for the beeyard, the bluetooth based Weightwatch to monitor the hive weigt and of course GHoney, which takes its users to a new level of honey blending by the latest Computer Aided Honey Blending Technology (CAHBT). The latest release of Queen on Rails, a web based bee queen marking and scheduling software is preinstalled and -configured.

All that relies on a perfectly customized kernel to meet the tough requirements of beekeeping. With solid real time capabilities the Beego kernel is able to process all incoming bees at the hives gate for up to 25,000 bee colonies, which is an outstanding high volume no other system ever reached. Both nectar and pollen of each incoming bee are measured and stored into MyBeeSQL, a tuned MySQL variant. Moreover the kernel needed a huge sting proof patch to give it the needed robustness. We could convince a well known openSUSE kernel developer to work on it, discussions on the kernel lists are ongoing under the subject “Sting Proof Patch”.

This project has a bright future for both openSUSE and the world of beekeeping. Again I like to ask for your help and contribution. Please spread the word, join our mailinglists, test and use openSUSE Beego.

That will make the honey even sweeter this year 🙂