Diary of a Network Geek

Well, maybe….

According to this article on Groklaw, the recent spate of cases that Novell has brought against Micro$oft may, in fact, have far-reaching implications in the legal realm of intellectual property and anti-competition. Specifically, how these cases are handled may have some direct impact on the rest of the pending Linux infringement cases that have been SCO’s bread-and-butter. So, in short, the author (“marbux”), encourages us to pay attention to the outcome of these cases. They matter and can effect the lives of Linux geeks everywhere.

Wow, there’ve been a lot of stories about Novell in the past two days!

Let’s see, where to start…. First off, Novell whupped Micro$oft to the tune of $536 Million, according to this press release from the networking giant. Apparently, Novell and Micro$oft agreed to “settle potential antitrust litigation related to Novell’s NetWare operating system in exchange for $536 million in cash.” Hmm, not a bad deal. I wonder what that will do to their stock? What’s even more interesting to me, is that Novell also announced it will file “an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the United States District Court in Utah seeking unspecified damages in connection with alleged harm to Novell’s WordPerfect application software business in the mid-1990s.” More cash? One can only hope.

In other Novell news, my favorite Open Source company has released a “new” Linux desktop. Yes, that’s right, they’ve got a Linux desktop, with the option to purchase support. I guess there really are advantages to living way out in Orem and not having anything else to do during the winter months but think! If you follow that link, by the way, you can download a free trial. I know I will be!

Yea, Novell! You go!

I’m finally getting it!

Okay, so it only took three months and a visit from a Novell Service Engineer for me to finally get it, but I have. Here’s the big secret to making ZENWorks imaging Linux boot CDs: key information is not anywhere to be found on the web. But, of course, the Network Geek will share with his loyal readers.
Now, I’ll do this in more detail later, but here it is in a nutshell. To update the bootable CD, first, get a good image and, using the instructions for adding a driver to the ZEN Boot image, get into the initrd.gz file on a machine that has the kernel version you want to update the CD to use. Now, copy all the drivers you want to use from the patched/updated server to the mounted initrd filesystem. Unmount that and re GZIP it. Now, copy your bzImage, or whatever, to a temp directory and rename it to “kernel”. Now, copy both of these files into the ISO, or make a new one with everything else on the CD. Burn it and go.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I went too fast, I’ll do it again with more detail later. I just was excited about it and had to throw that out there. Way cool!

This is interesting.

Okay, I downloaded this little program some time ago and loaded it up at work on my experimental kernel machine. See, I foul things up so terribly that I occasionally need to reload the server. Well, rather than sitting around and doing an install all day, I thought a recovery CD, or CDs, would be a better answer. So, I tried it.
First off, mkCDrec is easy to install. Just download it, make yourself root, or root-like, and extract it. It’s that easy. Then, go to the mkcdrec directory and run “make”. That’s it! You’ll get a menu that will pop up and ask you a couple of options and you might want to change the default paths, but otherwise, that’s all there is to it.
Restoring is just a little bit more complicated, but not much. Basically, you boot off the first recovery disk and run /etc/recovery/start-restore.sh. After that, the restore script asks you a couple of questions and goes to work! When it finishes with the first disk, it prompts you for the next. My system took three CDs and less than 45 minutes to restore, which beats a fresh install any day.
Did I mention that this was free software? Oh, the author asks for donations, but for all intents and purposes, it’s free. Pretty damn cool.

Oh, I also noticed that my darling wife has taken me off her “Worthy Blogs” list. Not sure when that happened, but I’d suspect that my link went away between one and three weeks ago. I guess I’m just not worthy! Story of my life. This blog gets an average of 1300 hits per day, but I’m still not worthy. Maybe if I post the next winning lottery numbers….

Now, that’s my kind of error message!

Okay, I finally got a document that has all the details on how Novell builds their bootable ZENWorks CDs. More Linux work for me! Yea! So, this week, I’ve been building a Linux server and learning about updating/recompiling the kernel. As you can tell from the title of this entry, I haven’t been too successful. But, I’m getting there! I’m really headed into unknown waters at this point, but they’re the most fun. Never know what’s going to happen next.
I’m really becoming quite a Linux expert now, whether I like it or not. Luckily, I like it. Linux is fun, to me, even if it is a bit confusing and challenging sometimes. I’m usually pretty good at figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it, or making a work-around. It’s not exactlly rocket science, after all. Now, I just have to figure out what I did wrong that caused the kernel panic. And, now, why my “mkinitrd” is returning an error about an MPT device. But, at least I have a clue where to look, thanks to the error message, and I have a hope of solving the problem. If only my personal life were so simple and straight-forward…

Ah, well, back to the ol’ uranium mines!

Oh, this is cool.

Okay, so I’ve been doing a lot of work on Linux lately. Not only for the bootable ZENWorks imaging system, but just plain Linux stuff.
Last week, I set up a Red Hat AS2.1 machine for use as an FTP server, but, just as I was starting this for the folks who need it inhouse, they start talking about needing a Windows 2000 server to run some specialized print server for eMatrix, which is what the FTP server was for. So, my boss suggests that we use VMWare for Linux. Brilliant! Of course, most people are running VMWare on a Win32 machine and emulating Linux, but we think outside the box. No problem, I get it all installed and running, though the first time I ran the VMWare PERL script that set up the program, it failed. No reason for it to fail, as far as I could tell, because it ran the second time. Great, so I get it all installed an running and let the boss know. Then, he asks me, so what are we going to manage this machine with? Er…. VNC, I guess.
Right, so I get that setup on the Windows machine in VMWare without a hitch. Getting it installed on Red Hat wasn’t a problem, but getting it running…. Well, thankfully, I finally figured out that the Real VNC website has the answer on a page called Native X display Support. The only thing is I need to edit XF86Config-4 instead of XF86Config. No problem! Now the VNC server autostarts. And the boss asks me if I can get the VMWare session to automatically launch at reboot. Er…. Well, I can see what Google turns up!
What I eventually came up with was a shell script I called “xvmstart” that was as follows:

#!/bin/sh
# Written by JKH on 10-13-04
. /usr/bin/vmware -x /vmcfg/Windows2000Server/Windows2000Server.vmx

(Where vmcfg is where you stored your configurations for the virtual machines. Oh, and if the last line wraps around, that should be a three line script.)
I saved that file in /root/.kde/Autostart and rebooted. As soon as I logged in, BAM! VMWare loaded like a charm. So, now, I had to make this badboy autologin… Er, back to Google.
I finally found a forum that told me I had to edit /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to set AutoLoginEnable=true and AutoLoginUser=skippy (or, whatever you want to autologin as). KerPlow! A fully automated solution brought to you by Linux, Google, VMWare, VNC, and me, the Network Geek.

I love my job!

Ok, it’s not actually a Palm device, but…

It is pretty cool. “It” is a handheld called “node” which is ruggedized for the outdoors. And, you can run either Windows CE or Linux on it, so it’s not all bad. Frankly, I’m surprised that Palm hasn’t come up with something like this yet. It’s a genius idea. The device itself comes with GPS built in, not to mention wireless networking and, of course, a full-color touch-screen. But, the best part is, the entire thing is waterproof! Totally cool! There’s a memory expansion port of somekind, but no word on any additional devices that can be added on, so to speak. Still, this is a giant leap forward for handheld computing. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes and what Palm’s response will be, if any.

A follow up to yesterday’s entry.

Okay, so, if you follow Slashdot, you’ve seen this, but I thought it was worth reposting. Of course, part of that is because I’m just a little bit of a Novell zealot. To put it mildly.
I thought the article was interesting. I especially liked the way that Mr. Schlaeger emphasized the idea that Novell was really supporting Linux, KDE and OpenSource. It’s really the way of the future with IT and computers in general. I have a friend that used to work for Microsoft and is now totally hooked on Netware, Linux, and Mozilla. All it took was a little push from your friendly, neighborhood technology pusher (i.e. ME!) and the rest was as easy as blue-screening a Windows server.
In any case, the interview over at KDE.org is worth reading if you have anything invested in Linux of any flavor, Novell, or KDE. I hope it’s a continuing trend for both Linux and Novell.

I saw this on Slashdot.

And, I think that means that Novell is finally getting their marketing right! First of all, there was this story on Slashdot, which, of course, generated all sorts of anti-Microsoft chatter. Then, I followed the link over to Novell’s site, which redirected me to this SuSE news release. So, not only is Novell developing for Linux and supporting OpenSource projects, but they’re getting plenty of exposure in the IT community.

About damn time.

Well, it seems that I’m the “Lone Ranger” again.

So, trouble started brewing with my counterpart at work yesterday. Nothing personal, unfortunately, but rather something having to do with the company. Well, I say that the trouble started yesterday, but, really, that was when I became aware of the problem. See, he’s no longer with the company today. I’m not 100% sure what happened and I sure don’t have all the details from either side, so I’m keeping fairly mum about what I do know. Either way, I’m now the sad, sole captain of the S.S. “Let’s-Standardize-The-Remote-Sites”. It always happens, sooner or later.
The really sad thing is that the guy I knew who’d be perfect to take over is dead now. Parrish would have loved this gig and we would have gotten along famously. The whole company would have been talking about what a great job we did… Ah, well, nothing to be done about that now.

It’s a shame, really. This is just a nice job. For a big shop, they’re really low pressure and everyone is friendly. I mean everyone, too. People smile and say hello to me in the hall as I pass. People I’ve never met, mind! And, as a Novell guy, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I mean, I get to do all kinds of crazy things with Novell and Linux. Within certain fairly broad parameters, I can do pretty much whatever I want to get the job done, too. Just such a good thing. Well, I hope I don’t do anything to screw it up! I’ll have to put in some extra effort to make sure they have a good opinion of me. Just in case.
I’m sorry to be in this spot again, but I’m glad I’m still working.
Thank you, God, or Fate, or Whoever arranged this all for me. I appreciate the opportunity.