Oracle VS Redhat?

A little bit of fuss has been made of Oracle abandoning Redhat. One of the reasons to pay the extortionistic costs of a RHEL license was to run Oracle. Linux-Watch
has an article about the change. I personally am glad to see this. Red Hat needs to change. I would run Redhat on every server in the data center if the price was right. I am not saying it needs to be free. But 800 a year is

ridiculous

400 servers * 800 dollars a year. Give me a break. I will run fedora on pretty much everything except my Oracle servers. And now Oracle has there own linux. Well Redhat, LEARN. LEARN. LEARN. You have priced yourself out of the market. Othrs have raised thier prices because you did. Novell has already learned from this news, thier price is now about half of Redhat. The lesson is simple. Cut your prices by more than Half....~ Jerry

Democracy Player

Ok so I am hooked, I read about this cool little player in Marcel Gagne's colum in this months linux journal. I recommend everyone down load it. Then go to wwitv.com and find some content. also singingfish. go to singing fish and click on Im bored. It takes you to a random site. Then you can subscribe to it through Democracy player. I installed Democracy on FC6 test 3 last night. It was a little complicated, but it works. I had to go through dependency hell. It gets more complicated when the packages you need don't exist so you have to install an older package with the --force option. I would recommend waiting until FC6 goes stable before installing on it.

PGP
Various services in our SOA require the ability to encrypt / decrypt infomation to and from users. Curently multiple machines have Multiple keyrings on them. I have been looking for a centralized solution. We have tried shared key rings to now avail.
http://forums.pgpsupport.com/viewtopic.php?t=5077&sid=88bb438b0e892fde5f037d4cb693f93e
I need a key repository were public keys for users can be stored and requested, and where access to those keys can be controlled.

Coffee and Podcasts

Its saturday, I was only woken up once last night by the cell phone. I had a drive die in a raid 0 set. It can wait till monday. So here I am listening to the Scoble show and drinking good coffee. I subscribe to 21 differrent podcasts, I think I may have a problem. I look at podcasts as a way to get ahead of my peers without doing any work. I hear about new technologies, trends and sometime listen to informative discussions. (Gilmore Gang)
Well I just got paged, there is an issue with QFS fileserver , time to give up some of my saturday.

Sudoers

I have found it makes since to put the admins in the wheel group and create groups for different permissions levels. Similar to roles. It gets complicated even with Nis+ or AD.
Centralized account management is the only way to go. A product I really like is Quest VAS.

Raidtools vs Mdadm

Ok, I don't know which setup is better. I know mdadm is the future but. One of the reasons for mdadm was to simplify setup, and to allow you to do all the work from the command line. I end up building a config file for mdadm so it behaves similar to mkraid. I have tried using the command line interface. But when its a production system and you need to rebuild the raid array with a quickness, its nice to script the whole recovery process. I can use either in a script, but when using mdadm from the command line I tend to go overboard. Here is an example.
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=raid0 --raid-devices=14 `ls /dev/sd* |grep -v a`

Linux VS Solaris
I support Linux and multiple flavors of Unix. The Unix I have the most experience with as of late is Solaris. Although they are familiar they have key differences. I like how most Linux's have standardized on the /etc/sysconfig directories. Having one repository to edit in order to change the network config on a machine is nice. In Linux you edit /etc/sysconfig/network to change the hostname and default gateway. You edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth? to edit your IP configuration. Also to stay true to the Unix platform you edit /etc/hosts on Solaris you edit /etc/hosts, /etc/nodename, /etc/hostname.bg? (interface), /etc/inet/ipnodes and /etc/defaultrouter. It is not difficult to change the network config on either setup, but I think Linux has improved on this from Unix.

Hardware
There are several peices of hardware I love and several I hate. Here are a few I highly recommend for use with Linux. IBM 326m, upto dual core dual opteron with 8G of mem and an Lsi Scsi card. Dell 1950, If you buy it with a perc 5i and a MD1000 drive array. HP DL385 Also an opteron Box, works flawlessly. But the best opteron machine hands down is made by Sun. the x4100 or x4200, Fast, small, great web management interface. I love these boxes.
Now machines I hate. Dell 2900, Decent machine but dell should package drivers and not force you to use their installer disk. IBM 346, Worst IBM ever made. The adaptec scsi doesn't work right. No matter what you do. adaptec should open source thier proprietary dirver and let the community fix it. It doesn't work, if you load a qlogic dirver into the box the a320raid.o core's. I like the ability to pull a hot swap drive and have it start to remirror when I stick a new drive in. Adaptec does not do this properly.