Jason Antman’s Blog

The next week will be quite busy. For one, I’m going to attempt an OpenSolaris operating system installation on my Asus eeePC. Last I heard, there were some compatibility issues – though this was my first attempt at running the Solaris operating system on a laptop, and it took quite an effort to get my favorite mainstream Linux distro installed on the eeePC, though I’ve been running that on laptops for 6+ years.

This Sunday, March 30^th, the Rutgers University Student Linux Users’ Group (RUSLUG) will be hosting our annual Installfest in the EIT Lab from 10 AM until 6 PM. While the event is generally marketed towards Linux newbies, it’s usually attended by a diverse range of students (and staff) from first-timers to Solaris sysadmins. I’ll be attendance, as always, and will also be conducting some demos of new Sun technology (mainly OpenSolaris and NetBeans). For anyone in the New Brunswick/Pisctaway area, I’ll also be armed with some door prizes and a whole plethora of CDs and DVDs. For anyone interested, I’ll be providing information and pointers on NetBeans and Solaris, as well as installation assistance (and maybe some prizes) for anyone looking to give OpenSolaris a whirl on their system.

Following up the Installfest, on Tuesday, April 1^st at 9 PM (also in the EIT lab) will be the RUSLUG Newbie Night. It’s generally a fun-filled evening with Ubuntu LiveCDs and a general Q&A session about Linux. Generally this includes one-on-one assistance for new Linux users. In an effort to raise the level of content (and provide a diversion for more experienced users if there aren’t many new faces), I’ll be once again demo’ing some Sun technology, and specifically providing an overview of my recently completed personal mailserver migration from SuSE Linux to OpenSolaris. Once again, visitors can expect some door prizes and lots of fun CDs to take home.

In other RUSLUG news:

• It looks like I’ll be running to become an officer next year. Anyone else at Rutgers can feel free to contact me with ideas, etc.
• RUSLUG’s current box, ruslug.rutgers.edu, is a Dell desktop thrown on a shelf in a closet. I’d like to find someone willing to help out with procuring a new box. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy – just pretty simple, though I’d like to look into high capacity storage for mirroring distros. FYI, the current box is a Dell desktop with a 1.7GHz P-4 (256KB cache), 512 MB RAM, and about 250GB of IDE storage (150GB + 100GB, no RAID). We don’t need a big upgrade in processor power, but more RAM and RAID for the system and user disks would be nice (distro mirrors can be a big IDE/SATA or an external disk).

Higher Education ruslug, solaris, sun

Well, I don’t have much time for a real post. I’m quite busy with school work and prepping for an OpenSolaris demo at RUSLUG on this Tuesday. Also, I’ve pretty much finished my initial evaluation of Hyperic HQ and, after reviewing the features of most of the options, I’m looking at Zenoss Core for the next round.

So, instead of anything interesting, a few news stories from the past few days:

• Slashdot – an interesting article on search and seizure of electronic devices at airports

• From asuseeehacks.blogspot.com, also bugtraq – the Asus eeePC apparently has a root-level vulnerability in its’ out-of-the-box Xandros distro, involving Samba. For people like me who put a much better OS on it, it’s not a big problem.
• InformationWeek is reporting that the EU is investigating Microsoft – again. This time, for violating antitrust laws during its’ push for MSOOXML. There’s also a small page at GrokLaw dedicated to this newest development.
• According to Ars Technica, the congressional bill on college funding that would require schools to filter out P2P traffic has PASSED in the House, with the filtering clause intact. Fine. Whatever. A gross invasion of privacy, and of college students’ rights, but that’s nothing new. However, if I’m sitting in my office at Rutgers and have a single hiccup downloading the OpenSuSE Beta 1 via BitTorrent on April 17th, mark my words, my congressmen (and Rutgers administrators) will learn my phone number by heart.
• Some progress in Arista v. Does 1-21, the RIAA’s attack on Boston University students. But, unfortunately, the end of the McCarthy-esque tactics doesn’t seem to be near yet and, even worse for me, neither does the likelihood that the recording industry will wake up and see what the market’s asking for, and give me downloadable DRM-free music and movies.

Interesting Links and Resources antitrust, microsoft, msooxml, opensolaris, p2p, privacy, riaa, rights, ruslug