Linux thoughts from a linux Geek (aka GEEX)

There is a functionality that is also a very big security flaw – FACE RECOGNITION. Google warns you about face recognition not being the safest of methods to unlock your phone, but nevertheless you can pass the locking feature just by using any other photo of you.

Hello,

Recently I’ve updated my openSuSE 11.4 to the latest openSuSE 12.1, it was a hassle free upgrade and my system is running smoothly, nevertheless I didn’t use one of my favorite features on this laptop, the built in GSM card. Today I needed it and, bummer, it didn’t work, even if I could see it in network manager…

SSH is extremely versatile and although the use of tunnels is a well know feature of ssh the reverse tunnel is not. First where can you use a reverse tunnel? Imagine that you need to service a server/desktop that is behind a firewall and the only communication available is must be started on the host behind the firewall.

Usually I write about technical stuff, or my rc cars, but this time I’m going to write about cloud computing, which isn’t that technical.

While reading two magazines today one had in the cover “Cloud computing you can’t afford to leave this one out” and the other “Cloud computing a must for every company”.

So, if your in IT certainly heard about cloud computing, but lets start by defining cloud computing; cloud computing is is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them (Wikipedia definition).

Having said this you probably are using the cloud, if you use gmail,hotmail, or something like that, apart from the mail service you may be using picasa storage, dropbox, or even HI5 or Facebook to share photos and if you use a blog is probable that’s on the cloud too.  But the cloud concept is wider. Imagine that your company as all the info on the cloud, all the applications that support your business, and that your systems are on the cloud too. You just leave your cheap PC clients, or thin clients, or whatever equipment you use to connect to the Internet and your piece of the cloud.

In theory this is a great tool, you won’t have to worry about uptime, backups, system maintenance, sys admins, power failures,air conditioning, but on the other end you’ll be dependent on your providers and your ISP. You won’t be free to change and you won’t be so versatile, your choices will be your providers choices and in the end applications and systems won’t be made to suit your needs but they’ll suit part of your needs and all your provider needs. Apart from that you’ll probably end spending more than you would if you had your own IT.

Sometime ago I was thinking in using amazon S3 for backing up my personal  data, photos, personal movies, my documents, as well as my family ones. Right now I’ve a BackupPC on a server to do it all and backing up about 3.5TB of info. With my usage profile amazon would cost me about 350€ a month, so as fast as I though in using amazon I lost the idea of using it, with 2 month of service I could buy a new server to do all the backup and with another month of service I could pay electric bill,space, and man work hour for a year.

Then a client that happily uses Sugar CRM, heard about “the cloud” and thought that easily could migrate sugar to SalesForce and all the applications on the company to Google Apps. So we asked for prices and the price of the cloud was about 960% more than the regular prices of applications and Sugar licenses, and this including all the system maintenance, space and electric costs.

So I started wondering, in the end I don’t see people pay less for the cloud usage, I see people having a smaller initial cost that in the end will be much greater than the original one.

I’m sure many of you had already made your own investigations about the cloud? Are you getting to the same conclusions?

Till now I’ve been writing  about costs, now lets get to  flexibility and limitations.

Usually when talking about the cloud everyone sells you that the cloud is flexible, that the cloud will suit your needs and that it will grow when your business grow and get smaller when your business is going through a bad time.

In the end your cloud won’t be that flexible, most of “cloud providers” will have well established limits on amount of CPU usage/time, there will be limits on bandwidth, limits on connections per second and if you need to pass those limits you’ll be paying a lot for it. Then the small letter of the contract, sometimes you can have more processor power because you needed it but then you have to keep it for the minimum period, sometimes a year or even more.

But well the cloud is cutting edge innovation so this is something worth paying for. Once again this isn’t totally true, IBM as a cloud scheme running for decades, corporate clients may pay for processor, MIPs, processor time and memory usage. Apart from IBM, other companies worked like this for ages, companies like HP, SUN, and others.

So what’s new? In my opinion the news are the way you interact with the cloud, making the browser the central part and unification point. The larger bandwidth available today also made this possible and the content is much richer.

I can see a really good usage for the home user who don’t want to worry with tech things, I see youtube, twitter, hi5, facebook and others growing and companies using those with a business mind, honestly I don’t see companies putting their secrets, their know how, their experience, and their core on the hand of a cloud, I may be wrong but right now I don’t see it moving that way (maybe I need glasses). I see a big fuss on the cloud as I’ve seen the .com bubble and IT recession, I’ve seen the thin-client revolution and the virtualization boom, now I see the cloud hype and in a few months or years something new will come up and all this will be forgotten. I’ll see companies moving towards a new hype and I investors spending they bucks on something else.

So to conclude; I don’t think the cloud is a must, I think it’s something that you already had with a different name, and  it became an hype because of a lot of marketing and publicity. If you think a little bit you’ll see who wins  with all the hypes, usually isn’t your company nor mine.

Cheers,

Pedro Oliveira

I’ve been running it for 3-4 months now about every weekend so my experience with the setups is growing, I’m more at ease with the car and finally I can write about the experience I’ve had with the car.

Hi! It’s been a while since I wrote about my nitro buggie (linux is a big part of mi life…). These photos were taken in Azambuja track in Portugal. That day we (my car and me) won the weekend club race. I’m using a GO 7P engine.

If you want you may check some more photos in http://pitsar.myphotos.cc

Cheers,

Pedro Oliveira

One of the disks didn’t show up in the RAID array, a few tests later and declared the hardware fault the cause of the downtime. Read more about a common architecture failure that can lead you to down time

In the 80′s I was only a child but I had an holder brother who was an electronics geek. More I grew up in the middle of music tapes, spectrums (from the 48K till the 128K), the atari, and the firsts Nintendos (that weren’t available here and a friend bought in the states and gave it to me), electric cables, transistors, oscilloscopes and so on… this till I was about 10 more or less.

Hi folks!

Usually I run openSuSE distro and I use the command sudo a lot but if you use Ubuntu I’m sure that you’ve come across with it. It’s a great tool that will help you maintain you server/laptop safe an secure. Here’s a little trick so sudo doesn’t bother you with passwords.

My name is Pedro Oliveira, I’m a Linux fan and enthusiast for the last 10 years. Apart from that I’m also a Sys. Admin for the same time.

Right now I’m working in a Portuguese open source company called DRI.

With this blog I expect to share some of my experiences while working it and heterogeneous environment (MS, Linux, Solaris, etc) and some other skills and visions I had over time. This may include thoughts about football, hobbies (like radio controlled stuff), traveling and so on.

Have fun, as SuSE guys say…