This week in Linux news, Software Defined Networking takes the sportlight at the Open Networking Summit, The White House will require agencies using third-party vendors to share their code, and more! Get up to speed on the latest news in Linux/open source with this weekly digest.
1) As adoption of software defined networking (SDN) increases, open source reigns supreme at ONS.
2) U.S. Source Code Policy dictates that agencies contracting with third-party vendors to create new software are now required to secure unlimited rights to the underlying custom code.
5) Microsoft should “stop forcing companies to pay for its bogus Android patents” to be trusted by the open source community, writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
The page load time gets more and more important for websites to provide a better user experience and it is important for the search engine ranking as well. Google has developed the apache module “mod_pagespeed” to optimize and streamline the content delivery of the apache web server which reduces the load times of pages, especially when they use many assets like CSS files, javascript includes and images.
We reported last year that ownCloud was in talks with WD (Western Digital) Labs to help them develop a community project that would bring a self-hosted cloud storage device in users’ homes. The idea behind the self-hosted device, which will be powered by the ownCloud Server software, was to combine a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a Western Digital disk drive into an easy-to-install and out-of-the-box container.
Well, it looks like the community’s response was more than positive, and many great proposals and ideas were received for the ownCloud Pi project. And today, they have even greater news for us, as the first images are available for download.
The newly-discovered Stagefright variant can be used to break into Samsung, LG and HTC smartphones.
Millions of Android devices are vulnerable to a new Stagefright exploit which can compromise a device in less than 20 seconds, researchers say. According to Israel-based NorthBit, the newly-disclosed Stagefright exploit, dubbed Metaphor, can be used in attacks against Nexus 5, LG G3, HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S5 mobile devices, which potentially leaves millions of devices open for exploit.
In a paper documenting their research (.PDF), the team said they created an exploit which impacts devices running on Android versions 2.2 and 4.0, while also bypassing ASLR on versions 5.0 and 5.1.
You already know the big-name open source companies, like Red Hat,Docker and Talend. But what are the up-and-coming businesses in the open source space? A new report from Black Duck offers some vital insight, with special focus on containers, collaboration and artificial intelligence.
The report, titled “2015 Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year,” highlighted open source projects launched in 2015 that, in Black Duck’s estimation, are “shaping the future of open source software.” Black Duck focuses on three main areas of open source innovation: The Docker container ecosystem, collaboration software for messaging and communication and artificial intelligence (AI).
Gordon Lyon from the Nmap project, one of the most acclaimed network and security scanner open-source software used by millions of hackers and security experts worldwide, today, March 17, 2016, announced the release of Nmap 7.10.
Nmap 7.10 comes exactly four months after the major Nmap 7.00 release, which was in development for the past three years, bringing countless new features and improvements to the free and cross-platform network mapper and security scanner originally written by Gordon Lyon a.k.a. Fyodor Vaskovich.
Greg Kroah-Hartman on Thursday submitted his pull request of the staging area changes for targeting the Linux 4.6 kernel. Greg noted in the pull request, “Lots of little things here, over 1600 patches or so. [Notable] is all of the good Lustre work happening, those developers have finally woken up and are cleaning up their code greatly. The Outreachy intern application process is also happening, which brought in another 400 or so patches. Full details are in the very long shortlog.”
So it looks like almost a quarter of the patches are from Outreachy, the group providing paid internships for women and other “underrepresented groups in tech” to work on the Linux kernel and related open-source projects.
The developer of the Robolinux project has announced the release of his latest Robolinux 8.4 LTS “Raptor” series of Debian-based operating systems, which includes numerous software updates and performance improvements.
Usually, the Robolinux developer announces only one edition at a time for a new major release of the GNU/Linux distribution, but today’s announcement includes details about the availability for download of the Robolinux 8.4 LTS Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and LXDE editions, as both 64-bit and 32-bit variants.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are slowly becoming the norm, with good reason. They are faster, and the latest iterations are more reliable than traditional drives. With no moving parts to wear out, these drives can (effectively) enjoy a longer life than standard platter-based drives.
Figure 1: The GNOME Disks main window.
Even though these drives are not prone to mechanical failure, you will still want to keep tabs on their health. After all, your data depends on the storing drives being sound and running properly. Many SSDs you purchase are shipped with software that can be used to monitor said health. However, most of that software is, as you might expect, Windows-only. Does that mean Linux users must remain in the dark as to their drive health? No. Thanks to a very handy tool called GNOME Disks, you can get a quick glimpse of your drive health and run standard tests on the drive.
With GNOME Disks, you can:
Get a quick glimpse of your drive’s health
Run standard tests against your drives
Format your drives
Create a disk image
Restore a disk image
Benchmark a disk
Power off a disk
All from a handy, user-friendly GUI tool.
Let’s install GNOME Disks and use it to test the health of your installed SSDs.
Installation
GNOME Disk is not limited to distributions running GNOME. In fact, I will demonstrate GNOME Disks from my Elementary OS Freya desktop. The installation is quite simple. If you’re using a non-Ubuntu-based distribution, the installation can be achieved by swapping out the package manager used on your system (i.e. dnf or zypper for apt-get).
The installation of GNOME Disks can be done from a single command. Here’s how:
Open up a terminal window
Issue the command sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility
Type your sudo password and hit the Enter key
Type y when prompted
Allow the installation to complete
That’s it. GNOME Disks should now be installed. Go through your desktop menu, locate the app, and click to launch.
Using GNOME Disks
The GNOME Disks main window is laid out quite well (Figure 1 above).
From here you should see all of your attached drives. The SSDs will not be labeled any differently than the standard drives (unless the manufacturer included SSD in the name (as you see with the INTEL 120 GB SSD on my system—labeled SSDSC2BW120A4). Otherwise, it’ll be up to you to know which drives are SSDs and which are Standard.
Figure 2: To run a test, select the SMART Data & Self-Tests… option.
Let’s run a test. To do so, open up GNOME Disks and select the disk you want to test. You should automatically see a quick Assessment of the drive (size, partitioning, Serial number, health, and temp). Click on the gear icon and then, from the drop-down, select SMART Data & Self-Tests… (Figure 2).
In the new window, you should see the results of the last test run (Figure 3). You should also see that the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) option is enabled (slider in the top right of the window). If SMART isn’t enabled, click the slider to enable.
To run a new test, click the Start Self-test button.
Figure 3: The most recent test results for this particular SSD came up OK.
When you click the Start Self-test button, a drop-down menu will appear, from which you can choose one of three tests:
Short—A collection of test routines that have the highest chance of detecting drive problems.
Extended—Tests complete disk surface and performs various test routines built into the drive.
Conveyance—Identify damage incurred during transporting of drive.
You will be required to enter your sudo password to continue on with the test. Once authenticated, the testing will begin. As the test runs, a progress meter will report the percentage of the test complete (as well as the Start button will change to Stop).
After the Self-Test completes, the new results will populate the window. One thing you will notice is that each SSD will return different test entries. Not all manufacturers follow the same standard. For example, I have two different SSDs installed in my System76 Leopard Extreme. The first (an Intel SSD) was installed by System76. The second, a Kingston SSD, was installed by me. If I run the SMART test on both, I see different tests appear in the results. For example, the Kingston drive doesn’t have Media_Wearout_Indicator enabled (whereas the Intel drive does). I confirmed this by using the smartmontools command:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Media_Wearout_Indicator
For the Kingston, the same command returned nothing.
If the smartctl command is missing, you can install smartmontools with the command:
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
You can get a full listing of your drive health with the command:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX
where X is the name of the drive.
However, one of the most important lines you’ll want to look for in the results, is Power-On Hours. This will tell you how many hours your drive has actually been in use. According to GNOME Disks, my Power-On Hours for both disks is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Kingston results are on top, Intel on bottom.
According to smartctl, that breaks down to:
Kingston—17868h+55m+21.280s
Intel—13833 (194 68 0)
Both of those figures are accurate.
How Many Power-On Hours Should You Expect?
How many Power-On Hours you will get depends on the make and model of your drive. Most modern SSDs should easily last 3-5 years under a heavy server load. Your best bet, however, is to check with your manufacturer. Just five short years ago, SSD manufacturers were reporting lifespans of around 10,000 Power-On Hours.
Clearly, my two drives have already exceeded that. Of course, getting a true estimate is much more complicated than this (you should factor in write-cycles, temperature, etc.) However, modern SSDs are capable of actually outliving the machine’s housing them. If you’re paranoid about data loss (and you should be), it’s good to know that getting a quick glance into the health of your SSDs is nothing more than a user-friendly GUI away.
GNOME Disks happens to be one of the best means of assessing drive health in Linux with a GUI. Give this tool a try and keep tabs on your drive health with ease.
The Maglev software-defined load balancer, which runs on commodity Linux servers, has been critical to Google Cloud Platform for eight years, company says. As it’s already done with other areas of its massive datacenter infrastructure, Google this week gave enterprises a peek at Maglev,the software-defined network load balancer the company has been using since 2008 to handle traffic to Google services.Maglev, like most of Google’s networking systems, was built internally. But unlike Jupiter, the custom network fabric connecting Google’s data centers, Maglev runs on commodity Linux servers and does not require any specialized rack deployment, Google said in a blog post describing the technology.
According to Google, Maglev uses an approach known as Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) to distribute network packets evenly to all Maglev machines in a cluster.
This week in Linux news, Software Defined Networking takes the sportlight at the Open Networking Summit, The White House will require agencies using third-party vendors to share their code, and more! Get up to speed on the latest news in Linux/open source with this weekly digest.
Gordon Lyon from the Nmap project, one of the most acclaimed network and security scanner open-source software used by millions of hackers and security experts worldwide, today, March 17, 2016, announced the release of Nmap 7.10.
The developer of the Robolinux project has announced the release of his latest Robolinux 8.4 LTS “Raptor” series of Debian-based operating systems, which includes numerous software updates and performance improvements.
