Though cloud computing has been around in different forms for a long time it became an "in thing" in the technology space recently. Last year, I was introduced to this concept by the excellent book by Nick Carr - The Big Switch. Frankly, I read the book with little interest. The arguments were compelling (ex.equating computing utilities to electric utilities). However, I had my own doubts about the whole notion of utility computing. One of the first problem was the issue of billing. How does the cloud computing providers bill their customers? How well this mechanism will work? The other issue was the huge bandwidth required to make this model work. As the time passed, I noticed the momentum around cloud computing was picking up speed and approaching break neck speeds. It seems now that there is no stopping of this phenomenon. There are big names (Amazon EC2&S3, Google's AppEngine, Microsoft Azure platform) throwing their weight behind this notion. It appears more real now than a year before.
In addition, every tech company on earth claims to be cloud compatible, be it a company that produces rackable servers, or the Gigabit switching company that garnered high profile Cisco VP as the CEO.
The idea of moving the data center from in-house to out-sourced model creates many confusing terms such as IAAS(Infrastructure As A Service), SAAS(Software As A Service), PAAS (Platform As A Service), Cloud Storage, Cloud/Utility Computing, private cloud, public cloud... the list goes on. ( I will try to instill some sanity to this insanity in subsequent posts).
Is this all hype? Is this another version of ASP model everyone was gungho about during the first internet bubble? With the latest fad, Web 2.0, companies going belly up the stark realities of a bubble is not very comforting for any one watching the tech industry.
However, this time around there are signs that cloud computing is going to stick around and provide real, tangible benefits. I'm especially hopeful of the promised benefits of cloud computing, such as energy savings, rapid ramp up of resources and pay-what-you-use (utility computing) model. On top of this, I am hoping, that the new found love for netbooks is going to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in enterprises.
The biggest challenges for wide adaption of cloud computing will come in the form of network bandwidth availability, data security(in transit and in storage) and management. Nevertheless, as time passes, hopefully, the availability of bandwidth will increase and security concerns will be a thing of the past. With the economy in doldrums and tech industry searching for the next big thing, cloud computing might be one of the saviors which might rescue the tech industry from the slump.
Well... there are signs of rain, will it be enough to reduce the impact of drought?
A handy tip for searching through source code using grep/find.
Thought this will be useful for navigating source code in any system. (from kernelnewbies.org)
"As you read through the code, you'll need many times to lookup
the declaration or definition of this or that particular data
structure, macro or function. the most basic way to do so is to use a
combination of the grep (or egrep) and find` commands;
find . -exec grep --with-filename myfunction '{}' \;
Another way is,
find . -name '*.[chS]' | xargs egrep -n "myregularexpression";
If you have GNU grep (as virtually all Linux distributions do) then you can take advantage of its "recursive" flag:
egrep -r --include "*.[chS]" "myregularexpression" .
Add "-w" to avoid catching words in which your search term is a substring.
Thissearches the current directory [and all subdirectories] for files
ending with .c, .h or .S, and runs egrep on each of them for the
pattern myregularexpression. Substitute myregularexpression with more
complex regular expressions."
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.vimrc file
This file can be used to set preferences for the vim. Following are some of
settings frequently used by me.
"syntax enable" Enables programming language syntax high lighting.
"set background=dark" Makes the background in the vim to be dark.
settings frequently used by me.
"syntax enable" Enables programming language syntax high lighting.
"set background=dark" Makes the background in the vim to be dark.
Mounting Samba shares in Linux client
Samba shares cannot be nfs mounted in the linux client. They have to be mounted using smbmount or mount -t smbfs option. To do this, check to see if the smbfs package has been installed in your system. If not, install the smbfs package by doing the following.
#apt-get install smbfs
Note: In my case I had a latest version of samba-common package that the one required by the smbfs in the apt repository. I removed the samba-common package by doing "apt-get remove samba-common". Then proceeded with the above mentioned command.
Once the installation is done, check to make sure you have "smbmount" installed in /usr/bin directory.
Issue the following command.
#smbmount //192.168.2.11/video /home/kriss/nfsvideo -o username=kriss,dmask=77,fmask=777
Note: My samba share in the server exports "/home/video" directory as "video" share. Don't provide the complete path for the share directory, just provide the share name as above. Replace "kriss" with the user name in the server.
You will be asked for the password the username you specified. Once it is successful you will see the share mounted in the local directory (/home/kriss/nfsvideo).
System Recovery in Ubuntu after a configuration file change
I modified xorg.conf file to remove synaptics driver from starting up (before modifying any file , it is a good idea to save the original as *.original file, in this case save the xorg.conf to xorg.conf.original). However, after this change the xserver wasn't starting. To fix this, I had to boot the laptop using the kbuntu cdrom and mount the harddisk. Once mounted I was able to access the /etc/ directory and copied the original xorg.conf file to replace the file I modified. Here are the steps:
1. Boot using kbuntu live cdrom.
2. Mount the hard disk: The primary ide drive is always hda1.
#mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/harddisk
3. Change to /mnt/harddisk and access the /etc/X11 directory.
4. Copy the xorg.conf.original file to xorg.conf.
5. Reboot the system.
Now the system should be up and running.
1. Boot using kbuntu live cdrom.
2. Mount the hard disk: The primary ide drive is always hda1.
#mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/harddisk
3. Change to /mnt/harddisk and access the /etc/X11 directory.
4. Copy the xorg.conf.original file to xorg.conf.
5. Reboot the system.
Now the system should be up and running.
Ubuntu In Laptop - Enabling TKIP in Linux
Ubuntu WPC54g card installation with TKIP Enabled
Finally I got the WPC54g working in my Dell c610 laptop.
My home network has the SSID broadcasting disabled and uses PSK-TKIP security. It was a big pain in the neck to use the open source ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant. This weekend I stumbled on this little company called Linuxant (hmm.. where are they located?) that provides an easy to use driver loader for a nominant price of $19(US). They allow you to try the software for upto a month. I don't mind paying that for a linux company if it really works and makes my life easier.
Did I make the right decision to go with Linuxant's driver loader. Oh yes, it is a breeze to install the driver. Honestly this is the first time I've experienced a browser based install for a linux software. Here are the steps in brief to install the software. I will add more information if anybody needs.
1. Download linuxant's excellent installation tool.
2. Run the dldrdriverloader.run, it will launch a web browser and will ask for windows driver .ini file and
3. download wpa_package from the link in linuxant's website. For more about wpa_supplicant see here.
4. build it using the dldrwpaconfig tool
5. Use KWifiManager to monitor the signal strength
6. Open /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file and add the following.
# WPA-PSK/TKIP
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="example wpa-psk network"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk="secret passphrase"
}
7. If needed do /etc/init.d/dldrdriverloader restart
8. Launch KWifiManager to see if the wireless network is connected.
9. You can either use iwconfig/ifconfig or use the network config tool to activate the wlan0 interface.
Your wireless connectivity should be up and running now.
Finally I got the WPC54g working in my Dell c610 laptop.
My home network has the SSID broadcasting disabled and uses PSK-TKIP security. It was a big pain in the neck to use the open source ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant. This weekend I stumbled on this little company called Linuxant (hmm.. where are they located?) that provides an easy to use driver loader for a nominant price of $19(US). They allow you to try the software for upto a month. I don't mind paying that for a linux company if it really works and makes my life easier.
Did I make the right decision to go with Linuxant's driver loader. Oh yes, it is a breeze to install the driver. Honestly this is the first time I've experienced a browser based install for a linux software. Here are the steps in brief to install the software. I will add more information if anybody needs.
1. Download linuxant's excellent installation tool.
2. Run the dldrdriverloader.run, it will launch a web browser and will ask for windows driver .ini file and
3. download wpa_package from the link in linuxant's website. For more about wpa_supplicant see here.
4. build it using the dldrwpaconfig tool
5. Use KWifiManager to monitor the signal strength
6. Open /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file and add the following.
# WPA-PSK/TKIP
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="example wpa-psk network"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk="secret passphrase"
}
7. If needed do /etc/init.d/dldrdriverloader restart
8. Launch KWifiManager to see if the wireless network is connected.
9. You can either use iwconfig/ifconfig or use the network config tool to activate the wlan0 interface.
Your wireless connectivity should be up and running now.
MP3 Player for Fedora
Fedora doesn't come with an MP3 player by default. By the way if u want to play mp3 files right out of the box, then Fedora is not a good option. Try the excellentSimplyMEPIS, an excellent distro based on debian. It comes with every thing required for a desktop system. For those of you with no choice other than Fedora due to various reasons the only way out to is to follow this simple instruction to install a plugin for the Rhythmbox player.
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