Vint Cerf Warns Humanity: Can Our Data Survive Longer Than A Century?

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October 10, 2016

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) co-author Vint Cerf is hailed as “the father of the internet,” but now he’s worried about an even larger communications protocol, on a scale of thousands of years. How will our civilization communicate with people in the future? When it comes to generations yet to come, how will we preserve the glory that is present-day, 21st-century society?

Yes, we’ve got storage media — but for long-lasting durability, does it really compare with centuries past? “We’re going backward,” Cerf argued in his column published inCommunications of the ACM looking fondly back at the history of humankind — and the way bygone eras preserved glimpses of their lives to echo down through the ages. It’s like a tour of humanity’s mediums over the last 17 millennia, offering the breath-taking perspective of a tumble through time.

An Open Source Font System for Everyone

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Google Open Source Blog

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October 10, 2016

A big challenge in sharing digital information around the world is “tofu”—the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website isn’t able to display text: ⯐. Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience.

Five years ago we set out to address this problem via the Noto—aka “No more tofu”—font project. Today, Google’s open source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters.

No SDN Kubernetes

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Justin Garrison

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October 10, 2016

Kubernetes networking has a few requirements. They are:

Pods are routable on a flat network
Pods should see their own routable IP address
Nodes can communicate with all containers

How these requirements are implemented is up to the operator. In many cases this means using a software defined network “SDN” also called an overlay network (e.g. flannel, weave, calico) or underlay network (MACvlan, IPvlan). The SDNs all accomplish the same three goals but usually with different implementation and often unique features.

The Power of Open Source Is Customer Freedom

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OpenSource.com

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October 10, 2016

The open source community is a diverse and fractious collection of individuals and organizations. In its infancy, in many ways it could be compared to the hippie movements of the ’60s: a lot of passion, a lot of fun, a lot of weirdness, and not a lot of organization. Over the last decade or so, it has evolved into a respected software development force that relies on the support of its members.

As it’s grown and diversified over the last decade, it has gotten more mainstream in the sense that there are now many different players that are making quite a bit of money based on open source principles. It has more prestige and a lot more respectability. As they say, money changes everything.

How to Take Screenshots on Ubuntu 16.04 with ScreenCloud

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Falko Timme

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October 10, 2016

Screenshots come in handy in many situations. For example, while making tutorials, discussing problems, or sharing information. What I mean to say is that it’s a very common activity, so much so that there’s a dedicated keyboard button to take screenshots. However still, there are many screenshot taking applications available in the market, and their selling point is the list of useful features they offer, including the ability to store captured images on cloud in some cases. If you are looking for such an application, look no further, as in this tutorial we’ll be discussing a useful screenshot taking app dubbed ScreenCloud.

Read complete article

Legends of Linux Part 4: Jim Zemlin

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The Inquirer

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October 10, 2016

LINUXCON IS over for another year, but while we were there we got some time with friend of the INQ Jim Zemlin, head honcho of the Linux Foundation, and took the opportunity to ask him our Legends of Linux questions to celebrate 25 years of the operating system.

What’s your first memory of Linux?

My memory is going to be funny because I worked at a hosted software company before I worked in open source. I was working at a company called Acorio. We were hosting enterprise software and we were dragged into an office and asked what our Linux strategy was.

At the time everything was running on Solaris and such and the ironic thing was that at the time everyone laughed and asked: ‘Who on Earth ran anything worthwhile on Linux?’. And that is actually my first memory of Linux in any kind of business context.

RDO Newton Overcloud HA Deployment via instack-virt-setup on CentOS 7.2 VIRTHOST

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Boris Derzhavets

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October 9, 2016

Draft below may be considered as POC awaiting release of TripleoO QuickStart
along with flexible templates managed by ansible and KSM patching.
Follow http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/234586/index.html setting up instack VM and configuring “centos7-newton/current-passed-ci” based delorean repos on VIRTHOST and INSTACK . After log into “instack VM” (undercloud VM) create 4GB swap file and restart “instack VM”

Complete text may be seen here http://dbaxps.blogspot.com/2016/10/rdo-newton-overcloud-ha-deployment-via.html

Ansible: Getting Started

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Swapnil Jain

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October 8, 2016

What is Ansible?

Ansible was originally written by Michael DeHaan in Python with its first release on February 20, 2012. It was later acquired by Red Hat. Ansible is an open source configuration management and orchestration utility. It helps to automate deployment or softwares and configurations of multiple remote hosts. Instead of writing custom, unmanaged, long and individual bash scripts, system administrators can write playbooks in Ansible. Ansible is also supported by DevOps tools, such as Vagrant and Jenkins.

Playbook is a YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) file which consists a list of Plays.
A Play in a playbook is a list of Tasks.
A Task in a play contains Modules and its arguments.
Where as Module are the ones that do the actual work in ansible.

How Ansible Works?

The greatest benefit of Ansible that I see is, unlike Puppet it is agent less. The only requirement on remote host (know as Managed Host) is Python 2.4 or later. If you are running less than Python 2.5 on the remotes, you will also need python-simplejson. Ansible is installed on a central host (know as Control Host) where Playbooks are created. Playbooks are pushed to Managed Host thru SSH as a Python code and executed locally on Managed Host.

Learn More….

ShellCheck: Code Check For Shell Scripts

By

Denny Zhang

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October 8, 2016

Shell scripting is a must-have skill for DevOps. I used to be very very confident at Shell. But when I first tried ShellCheck , I realized that I’m just too proud and arrogant.
ShellCheck is a powerful code analysis tool for shell scripts. Like Pylint for Python or Rubocop for Ruby. Give it a try! You’ll get surprised.

Permanent Link: http://dennyzhang.com/shellcheck

ShellCheck helps to identify a lot of potential issues in your shell scripts. For example, here is one common mistake which ShellCheck reminds me. Mostly original code will work. However if we feed $dir with value like “Denny Documents”, it hurts. Sometime the bad code may incur very severe damage!

# Before:
rm -rf $dir

# After:
rm -rf "$dir"

More Bad Code Examples:

ShellCheck is very easy to install and use. It is built and packaged using Cabal. We can install by apt-get/yum. Or use cabal-install directly like below.

# Install ShellCheck
sudo apt-get install -y cabal-install
sudo cabal update
sudo cabal install shellcheck
ln -s /root/.cabal/bin/shellcheck /usr/sbin/shellcheck

# Example: Run check for Shell scripts
sudo shellcheck my_script.sh

By default, ShellCheck enforces hundreds of rules. Each rule has a dedicated wiki page, which explains the purpose and improvement suggestion clearly. For example, wiki for Rule SC1000: https://github…shellcheck/wiki/SC1000. I’m sure you can easily guess the wiki link of other rules.

Skip some ShellCheck rules, which don’t fit your projects. For your reference, here are rules I used to skip.

# Run test excluding certain rules
EXCLUDE_CODE_LIST="SC1090,SC1091,SC2154,SC2001,SC2002"
sudo shellcheck -e $EXCLUDE_CODE_LIST $file

# Run test against all scripts under a folder
EXCLUDE_CODE_LIST="SC1090,SC1091,SC2154,SC2001,SC2002"
find . -name "*.sh" | xargs sudo 
    shellcheck -e $EXCLUDE_CODE_LIST $file

Enforce Daily Shell Code Check by Jenkins. Enforce code quality check in your daily CI definitely helps.

More Reading: Avoid Blind Wait In DevOps Code

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This Week in Open Source News: 4 out of 5 Banks to Use Blockchain by 2017, Linus Torvalds Reflects on Past 25 Years, & More

By

The Linux Foundation

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October 7, 2016

This week in Linux and open source news, the popularity of blockchain amongst banks will continue to surge through 2017, Linus Torvalds refelcts on the anniversary of Linux at LinuxCon Europe, and more! Read on and stay in the know!

A new report from The Linux Foundation & Dice finds that Europeans working in open source are well situated in the global job market.

1) Four out of 5 banks will be using blockchain tech by next year, according to the World Economic Forum.

Why J.P. Morgan Chase Is Building a Blockchain on Ethereum– Fortune

2) Linus Torvalds shares thoughts on the past 25 years of Linux at LinuxCon Europe. Legends of Linux Part 1: Linus Torvalds– The Inquirer

3) A new jobs report from The Linux Foundation & Dice shows that open source employees in Europe have it even better than the rest of the world.

It’s Good to Be an Open Source Pro in Europe– ITProPortal

4) With just a mere 48 characters of code, Linux admin and SSLMate founder Andrew Ayer has figured out how to crash major Linux distributions by locally exploiting a flaw in systemd.

Hack Crashes Linux Distros With 48 Characters of Code– ThreatPost

5) Google’s 2D & 3D library for mapping movement in space goes open source.

Google Open-Sources Cartographer 3D Mapping Library– VentureBeat