A Look at Battle for Wesnoth’s Current Game Development Strategy

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October 2, 2015

LIFE gaming I had my first run-in with the turn-based, Linux strategy game Battle for Wesnoth a few years ago. It was not long after discovering open source software, and I was incredibly impressed that a small group of developers could create such an excellent game for free. Discovering this along with Linux and the numerous GNU packages is what really piqued my interest in the world of open source.

Recently, I visited the Battle for Wesnoth’s homepage and discovered they are need of fresh blood to keep the project rolling. Because I’m not skilled enough to contribute code, I decided to reach out to the developers, get their stories, and help spread the word about this fantastic project.

VMware vCenter and ESXi Fall Foul of Remote Code Execution Bugs

By

ZDNet

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October 2, 2015

Users of vCenter and ESXi should update their installations now to avoid the chance of remote code execution occurring on their host machines.

An insecure configuration of Java Management Extensions (JMX) within VMware’s vCenter has been pinned as the cause of an exploit that would allow code execution on host machines. One of the discoverers of the security hole, 7 Elements’ Doug Mcleod, said the vulnerability allowed for system level access to virtual machine host servers, and resulted in a full compromise of the environment.

Hortonworks Unveils Big Data Scorecard

By

IT World

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October 2, 2015

At Strata + Hadoop World here yesterday, Hadoop distribution specialist Hortonworks unveiled a new tool called the Hortonworks Big Data Scorecard designed to help organizations develop a plan for jumpstarting big data projects.

“Hortonworks has always been committed to partnering with customers to make their big data projects as successful as possible,” Herb Cunitz, president of Hortonworks, said in a statement yesterday. “We are leveraging our expertise to simplify big data and help our customers transform into data-driven enterprises. The new Hortonworks Big Data Scorecard will accelerate our customers big data vision and greatly propel business transformation.”

RaspEX Brings Debian 8 and Ubuntu 15.04 to Raspberry Pi 2, Now with SSH and Samba

By

Softpedia

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October 1, 2015

raspex Just a few moments ago, Arne Exton, the creator of numerous GNU/Linux and Android-x86 distributions, sent us an email to inform about the release of a new build for his RaspEX Ubuntu- and Debian-based distro for Raspberry Pi 2 devices.

RaspEX Build 151001 is now available for download, for free, based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) and Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating systems, as well as on the latest Linaro open-source software for ARM SoCs.

GitHub Improves Two-Factor Security With U2F

By

eWeek

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October 1, 2015

290x195itsecurity1 GitHub embraces the FIDO standard and aims to get Yubico U2F keys into as many developer hands as it can.

GitHub has emerged in recent years to become the de facto standard location for developers to launch new code projects and engage with potential contributors. With all that code in one place, GitHub is also an attractive target for attackers, with password security often being the weak link. In an effort to secure itself and its users, GitHub today is announcing its support of the FIDO (Fast Identity Online)…

Learn Linux Administration with Linux Foundation Instructor Lee Elston

By

Libby Clark

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October 1, 2015

lft experts leeelston Lee Elston began teaching for The Linux Foundation in 2014, but he says, “I’ve always been teaching something, someplace…”

Elston has been working in the computer industry since 1978 with various hardware and software. Linux became part of his daily business in the early 1990s with applications running on kernel versions as early as 0.97. Currently, he teaches The Linux Foundation’s administration-related courses and is in the process of updating the Advanced Linux System Administration and Networking (LFS230) course.

When he’s not in the Linux classroom, Elston teaches other things, including scuba diving and first aid, and can often be found in the water photographing fish. In this profile, Elston tells us more about how he learned Linux and network administration and describes his path from ham radios to IT support to teaching.

What courses do you teach at the LF?

I teach the Administration classes, Network Administration, Performance and Tuning, and Security classes.

How long have you been teaching?

I have always been teaching something, someplace — as for formal classes, that would be IBM AIX High Availability in the UK then RS600SP in the US around 1998. I started teaching Linux in 2000 (I think) for IBM UK. At the time, IBM UK was the delivery agent for Red Hat in the UK. Teaching in North America came later. I started teaching for The Linux Foundation in 2014.

How did you get started with Linux?

Well, that is an interesting story, we were working with bulletin boards interconnected with Ham Radios. The application we were using was stretching the limits of Windows memory management at the time. Constant upgrades for expensive compilers prompted the developer in Europe to switch to Linux, and we followed suit and never looked back. This is way back around the 0.96 Kernel. The really cool bit is the AX25 protocol is still alive and functioning.

How did you learn?

By jumping into the fire. I started using Linux in the office lab for network experiments it became easier to use Linux functions like tcpdump than it to requisition the data scope to monitor networks. Then we needed a DNS for the lab, then a file server and … so the little Linux box under my desk became part of the glue keeping things running. It was not the best solution, but it was fun. It sounds great, but we did have some formal training on other *ix’s as the company was looking to migrate away from the proprietary OS’s of the day.

What is your area of expertise now?

Although I’m tempted to say “I am super expert at X”, it would be far more accurate to say that my expertise is to translate all the cool technical stuff we have into language that can help others understand it. We, the Linux world, have the tools to create a credit card-sized weather stations, control televisions, keep supercomputers running, trade stocks or anything else you can imagine and we have to start someplace, the beginning, that is where you will find me. I just want people to have some fun with Linux and the rest will come.

How did you develop that? What has your career path been?

I have spent most of my IT-based career doing some type of support, helping others do “stuff” with or to computers. I started out fixing the “dots” in dot matrix printers then repairing floppy disk drives from there bigger and better hardware until I came to the realization I needed to not only fix the hardware but the software too. Fortunately I was able to expand into OS maintenance and system level support.

The 80’s were a magical time. I was slowly moved away from the “doing” to the “support and supervising”, definitely one of the hardest moves I have done, closing the tool kit for the final time, but it was time. (There is a story there too) I moved to a *ix reseller for a time and was able to immerse myself in AIX consulting. The consulting led to teaching then into course development and my own company. I woke up one day and noticed I had somehow migrated from fixing & support to instructor and course author. So to answer “how”, well it just happen when I wasn’t looking.

What projects are you involved in currently?

Currently, I’m updating the LFS230 class and building a weather station out of a Raspberry Pi.

What are the hot issues or latest trends in your area?

In the administration realm I see OpenStack, big data, and virtualization of everything continuing to be provide challenges. The choices available to administrators for implementation is becoming staggering. We are being faced with selecting the best virtualization component for the job, some assembly required, or to jump on one of the vendors pre-configured environments.

What emerging technologies and skills do you see that Linux professionals should be prepared for?

I believe the rate of change to Open Source & Linux is going to increase significantly over the next few years. My crystal ball sees the ever increasing innovation from developers and more acceptance by big corporations. How do we prepare? We need to be well grounded in the basics, we need to talk the same language, Linux, not historic *ix or a specific distribution. Education, discussion, contribution and involvement are key, we have unprecedented access to people and ideas through the Web, let’s use this responsibly and have some fun doing it.

How do you address these in the courses you teach?

I try not get too philosophical when teaching but encourage new ideas, new application of old ideas and continued education. I think everyone that comes to class does so for a reason, this subject or that topic, exam preparation or to relax and learn something new. I try to get that desire out in the open and address the area of interest as best we can within the confines of the topic of the week. Often I spend my evenings locating reference material for class participants on subjects that may not be within the confines of the class at hand.

Anything else you’d like us to know about you?

I teach other things as well as Linux: SCUBA diving, First AID, CPR, and other SCUBA-related courses. I love to dive and, if I’m not teaching someone else to dive, I probably have my camera pointed at a fish.

Learn more about Linux Foundation Training courses and certification at http://training.linuxfoundation.org/.

Meet more Linux Foundation instructors:

Learn OpenStack with Linux Foundation Instructor Tim Serewicz

Learn Cloud Administration With Linux Foundation Instructor Michael Clarkson

Learn KVM and Linux App Development with Linux Foundation Instructor Mike Day

Learn Linux Performance and Scripting with Linux Foundation Instructor Frank Edwards

How to create a data backup strategy using multi-period snapshots

By

Vinima Aggarwal

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October 1, 2015

What are Snapshots?

Snapshots are point-in-time state of a share (folder). Snapshot technology in general, and snapshot implementation of Copy-on-Write (CoW) in BTRFS filesystem (Linux) in particular, offer users simple data-backup, data-protection and data-recovery tools.

Why do Snapshots matter – what are some possible real world scenarios that could use Snapshot technology?

Imagine you are working on an important project such as : writing a book or a grant proposal, editing a video you shot during your vacation, recording a podcast, editing your photos, creating a presentation, writing code, or anything else of significance – there are a number of problems that could occur :

You create your work (say 4 paragraphs of a proposal or a video clip) and save it. Now you edit and save it again (say you remove a paragraph or remove some video footage). For some reason you want to compare your work and want to get back the paragraph you deleted or the video footage you removed. For your document, you may have maintained an in-efficient manual version control and listed down every possible change, or most likely not done it. Or you could have set-up a back-up to be saved automatically, or most likely not done it. Retrieving your video editing project could to be even more difficult.
You are working on your project and the batteries or your computer suddenly die, or your computer freezes and needs a reboot – you could suddenly lose work and in-case you forgot to save, you may have to start all over again.

And, there could be number of other problems that could cause you to lose or work resulting in wasted time, effort and frustration. So, what are your options? Storage systems such as Rockstor, offer ‘Snapshots’ technology that is designed to solve the problems like the ones described above and offer not just a solution, but also allow you to create a strategy to proactively manage these issues before they arise.

With Rockstor Snapshot feature, you have the ability to create automatic point-in-time backups of your work, irrespective of the nature of your work (it can be anything – docs, videos, music, code, presentation etc.) and also build a strategy to manage back-ups .

And, setting up snapshots and the management strategy on Rockstor storage platform is easy! Here I am assuming familiarity with Rockstor installation and set-up. Please refer to this document for instructions on Rockstor installation and set-up : http://rockstor.com/docs/quickstart.html.

For setting automatic snapshots, go to “Scheduled Tasks” under “System” (and click “Schedule a Task”) or “Snapshots” under “Storage” (and click “Schedule”) on your Rockstor Web UI – images shown below (basically these are two ways of getting to the same place). You can configure Rockstor to take snapshots every 30 minutes, an hour, day, week, month, year, or across multiple time periods. This way, you can recover whatever copy you had saved in time. This video also shows the process of setting up hourly snapshots. In a similar way, you can set-up snapshots for every 30 minutes, day, week, month, year.

Going back to our example above, if you want to retrieve the paragraph you edited and removed, and compare it to your current work, you can simply retrieve your back-up from last 30 mins or past hour.

Snapshots, therefore insure that you not just have the current version of your work, but also a trail of all prior versions saved in time.

The screenshots below show the set-up screens for snapshots

: Create Snapshots using “Scheduled Task” – Step 1

: Create Snapshots using “Scheduled Task” – Step 2.

: Create Snapshots from “Storage” menu.

How to set-up and manage your backup using snapshots?

Backups can be managed by using “multi-period” snapshots. But first, what are multi-period snapshots and why are they important?

Multi-period snapshots is a technique or strategy that allows you to schedule snapshots across multiple time periods. If you are actively working on a project for a week — let us again take our example proposal document mentioned above. You may want to back up every 30 minutes or hour of your work while you are actively working on it during that week. However, once you are done, you may want to back-up every month, and then every year for archival purpose. Multi-period snapshots helps you achieve this ‘self-thinning’ and manage your back-ups and storage space.

Here I describe one multi-period snapshot and ‘self-thinning’ backup management strategy for the proposal document. You can modify this strategy or build your own that fits your needs better.

While setting up a snapshot task, there is a field called ‘maximum count’ of snapshots where you can specify the maximum number of snapshots you want (see above images). Say you are setting up an hourly back-up, and you want to back-up every hour for 7 days of a week, then you can set the maximum count t0 168 (24 x 7) snapshots. Once the snapshot count reaches 168, the newer snapshots start over-writing the older ones. Suppose your project was a week long, and for now you are done, but may make minor edits later. So, you want to retain the 168th snapshot, and carry it forward. Say, you set-up the snapshot tasks at 10pm Monday, so the 168th snapshot will be taken at 9pm on Sunday. You can set-up a weekly snapshot task for 9pm of Sunday of that week and move-off of the daily backups. Set it up as shown in this video for the hourly snapshots and this video for weekly set-up.
You could also choose to carry forward this weekly snapshot forward to a month. And, you choose a snapshot for this particular day (Say, 9pm on 3rd Sunday of September) and delete the rest. So, now your snapshots will be taken every month. This allows you to make minor changes to your backup and then save a copy every month. See this video.
Assuming that you no more have the need for a monthly back-up, and now you want to retain one snapshot for a month in a year for archival purpose and delete the rest, you can set it up as shown in this video. Also, see Fig 1 and Fig 2, below.
This way, you can start with a lot of snapshots (started with 168 a week) when you are actively working on a project and then just save one copy of the final version for archiving.

Similarly, you could create your own strategy for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots and backups. Also, refer the how-to on Multi-period Snapshots and Scheduling a Snapshot task.

: Fig 1: Self-thinning Backups for above example

: Fig 2: Multi-period snapshots carried over time periods

Nest Opens Up Its Smart Home Technology to Other Companies

By

The Verge

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October 1, 2015

nest-weave In the still nascent world of smart home technology, Nest is already one of the dominant names. Today, it’s growing that position even stronger, as it is expanding its Works with Nest program with Nest Weave, which gives third-party hardware makers access to many of the technologies previously reserved for Nest’s own products. Specifically, Weave is a protocol that lets products communicate with each other without a Wi-Fi network or Internet connection.

Nest says that Weave offers low latency, longer ranges, better security, and less power consumption than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, all of which are important criteria when talking about devices that are scattered throughout your home.

Ghost Push Malware Evolves in Android App Infection Spree

By

ZDNet

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October 1, 2015

Over 20 new variants of the malware in the wild embedded in Android apps are able to root devices and compromise systems.

The Ghost Push malware continues to circulate in the wild and has been detected infecting Android apps to compromise user mobile devices. Researchers at Trend Micro say the new variations are more difficult to detect and are pushing the malware epidemic to another level, with earlier research suggesting Ghost Push is infecting 600,000 users per day.

Microsoft, Google Stand Down in Patent Battles

By

The Linux Foundation

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October 1, 2015

Microsoft Corp and Google Inc have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

In another sign of the winding down of the global smartphone wars, the companies said the deal puts an end to court fights involving a variety of technologies, including mobile phones, wifi, and patents used in Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles and other Windows products.