Development

Open source community reacts to Oracle-Sun deal

Yesterday’s news that Oracle had entered an agreement to buy Sun sent a bit of a shock wave through the open source community. After weeks of pondering what an IBM buyout of Sun would mean, the IT community now had an entirely different scenario unfolding.

The news was the first thing I noticed when I logged onto Twitter, and I saw that SearchDataCenter.com was working on the story. I “retweeted” Executive Editor Matt Stansberry’s play for feedback and heard back from Tom Howard, who said “IBM missed its chance. I want to know what Oracle’s commitment to Open Office and Solaris are, personally.”

But the bigger fear was from the MySQL folks. Satoshi Nagayasu, an open source database engineer from Tokyo, Japan, asked “Should we say goodbye to MySQL?” He then pointed to a blog from 2005 that was a reaction to Oracle’s purchase of Innobase, and said “Josh’s article gave me some insights why we use community-based open source [PostgreSQL].”

One of the more fun and mood-illustrating reactions was from tartansolutions: “Oracle now owns MySQL?! In related news, the Rebel Alliance has been acquired by Darth Vader for three wookies and a tantan :(“

John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, said “Seems like there’s a lot of concern about Oracle screwing up MySQL. People may look to PostgreSQL as a ‘safe’ open source DB.” He linked to a blog post by Om Malik, providing the GigaOM perspective on the purchase. Of the things Om said, the central point in the concern could be summarized by this paragraph:

At this price, it looks like Oracle found itself yet another bargain and in one fell swoop became a worthy competitor to IBM. It allows Oracle to become a player in the cloud computing business. More importantly, the company ends up acquiring MySQL, the upstart database that has been viewed as Oracle’s Achilles’ heel. In one fell swoop, it has taken out its No. 1 competitor.

Not all in the open source community was doom and gloom though. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, in his blog post in reaction to the deal looked for a silver lining. Zemlin pointed out that Oracle is strategically aligned with Linux in its position as a Linux distributor, and all its products are developed and run on Linux.

“Oracle is a key supporter of open standards such as ODF and we believe this only strengthens that stance,” said Zemlin. “This acquisition could prove fruitful for Open Office and ODF support in the enterprise.”

I was on the phone for the Canonical Ubuntu 9.04 release press conference, and one of the participants asked Canonical CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, what his reaction was, specifically regarding Java support.

“It is far too early to tell,” said Shuttleworth. “Java has been open, it tends to be a one-way trip – once you’ve made that commitment it makes sense to have it as highly available as possible.”

Shuttleworth also saw the move as a bit of further evidence of the worth of open source in the enterprise software industry.

“This really cements that free software and open source is the driving force today,” he said. “All of the major forces today are either free software or powered by free software — Java, Google, and onward. The software marketplace is consolidating at an extraordinary pace. Part of the reason for that is that open source is dominating the innovation pipeline. The fact that one of those five has just announced a $7 billion acquisition of a company that describes itself as the world’s biggest free and opens source software company proves that open source is the big game in town.”

Lastly, analyst Dana Gardener painted what I feel is the most level-headed picture of what the whole deal means.

Suffice to say that whatever momentum Sun had behind open source everywhere will be muted to open source some times as a ramp to other Oracle stuff, or to grow the community and keep developers happy. If nothing else, Oracle has been pragmatic on open source, not religious.

What do you think this means for open source? Are you considering moving to PostgreSQL if you weren’t already? Are you a programmer worried about Java support? Share your thoughts in the comments

More analysis from TechTarget:
Oracle-Sun combo: What does it mean for enterprise Java?

Will Sun help Oracle eclipse IBM?

VARs turn wary eye on Sun-Oracle combo

Oracle-Sun: A threat to VMware?

Java virtual machine performance: Ubuntu wins over Windows

In May we reported results of a Windows Server 2008 power test conducted by Michael Larabel at Phoronix. Last week he released the results of his most recent open source versus Windows test, a test of Java virtual machine performance running in Ubuntu Linux, Windows Vista Premium, and Sun’s OpenJDK.

For this round-up we had used a Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook (PM965 + ICH8M Chipset) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor clocked at 2.0GHz, 3GB of DDR2 memory, 250GB Hitachi HTS543225L9A300 HDD, integrated Intel 965 graphics, and a screen resolution of 1280 x 800. On the Windows side we were using Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 while with Ubuntu we were using Ubuntu 8.10 and the stock packages (Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5, etc). Each OS was left to its default settings, including the use of the standard desktop effects.

Larabel’s graphs and detailed technical specifications and analysis tell the full story, but the good news to Linux fans is that Ubuntu was a clear winner, and OpenJDK seemed to hold its own compared to Vista.

Well, Java on Ubuntu was pretty much the hands-down winner compared to Microsoft Windows Vista Premium SP1. Running the Java tests on Ubuntu had experienced significant advantages when it came to file encryption, Fast Fourier Transforms, Successive Over Relaxation, Monte Carlo, and the composite Java SciMark performance. In only the Sunflow test were the results between Ubuntu and Windows even close. With the Java 2D Microbenchmark, Windows was faster but that likely falls on the Intel Linux graphics driver having little in the way of performance optimizations and Java on Linux not yet utilizing the X Render extension.

Comparing Sun’s Java and OpenJDK / IcedTea on Ubuntu had roughly the same performance between the two except for a few areas (FFT and Monte Carlo) where the official JVM was noticeably faster.

Last time we reported on these tests and it appeared that Windows had the lead, you responded. Larabel’s article includes a discussion link, and a brief review of some of the comments reveals that some Windows fans don’t like the results.

Linux got owned where it matters the most: Graphics.

But RealNC’s comment about graphics doesn’t quite align with a recent article reporting the results of the 2008 Linux Graphics Survey compiled by Phoronix.

What do you think? Are Linux graphics lacking? Are you surprised by the Java VM performance?

LAMP stack story overlooks impact of cloud, reader says

My recent story on the dimming of the LAMP stack sparked a thoughtful reader response from John Locke, the manager of Seattle-based Freelock Computing. The story concluded that while an all-open source stack is still a valid concept, there are many more open source options that LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, Python, PHP) is largely irrelevant.  I made a single exception for Apache, the popular Web server.

Locke argued, however, that even Apache has a growing array of alternatives such as the Lighttpd Web server, the Apache FastCGI Web interface,  the Nginx proxy server and others.

But what undercuts the LAMP stack more than the advent of additional open source options is the emergence of cloud frameworks, Locke said.

Initially, cloud computing meant renting compute power on demand from the likes of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This meant renting a host virtual machine, programming the top layer, adding libraries and then when it was all done, managing the host and the virtual application, Locke said.

The problem with this model is that data centers are responsible for scaling the application up or down in response to changing volume requirements, he said. To solve this problem, Google, as well as Microsoft’s recently announced Azure platform, go beyond computing-on demand and manage the entire process with frameworks. All you do is write the application code (yes, you still need the P in LAMP), put it atop an application framework, and the framework will scale the application up and down as needed. No further involvement required. No LAMP stack required either.

Two successful examples of cloud frameworks are Salesforce.com and Facebook, he said.

The downside of frameworks, however, are loss of control and potential vendor lock-in, Locke said. The risk is less with Amazon EC2 since its controls are far more limited, he said. When writing an application for a specific vendor’s framework, however, a customer can lose portability because the provisioning and scaling mechanisms are behind-the-scenes and the source code and licensing are not necessarily readily available, he said.

The biggest challenge to LAMP as well as the Java and .NET stacks, therefore, is not the growth of additional choices but the cloud frameworks which may make all the stacks irrelevant. While handing over management and control is convenient, it also has its downside: you have to live by someone else’s rules, Locke said. Just  like a condo or regulated housing community, you’ve delegated the work, but you’ve also lost your freedom. Time will tell if you’ve made a good bet.

More Linux commands for your scripting pleasure

One of our users, James Lowden, emailed us to say that our recent 77 useful Linux commands and utilities guide missed a couple of his favorites:

I’m a NetBSD guy, but I have RHEL at work.

As for commands, I like:

1. pax better than tar

2. hexdump better than od

3. tnfpt better than wget

Pax has a much better command-line interface than tar, especially for copying trees. Consider:

$ pax -rw -pe src dest # to copy a tree

$ pax -wzf file.pax.gz src # to create and archive

hexdump -C is what you almost always want.

Tnftp (a port of the NetBSD FTP client to other systems) is a much saner way to fetch stuff. Why the GNU world focuses on wget instead is a mystery to me. It doesn’t do anything tnftp doesn’t do, and it doesn’t do anything better, either.

If you would like to share your opinions of our essential Linux command guide, feel free to drop us line and share some of your favorite commands with the Enterprise Linux Log.

Red Hat makes Java contribution — what was the hold up?

It took them about a year, but Red Hat finally got on board with Sun Microsystems and Java this week when it announced that it signed Sun’s contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects by all Red Hat engineers.

We covered the news angle at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, and today the Business Review Online’s Jason Stamper gives the news a fresh spin at the CAOS Theory blog:

The only question really is why it took Red Hat so long to make this move. As The451 Group’s Raven Zachary noted (in our article — J.L.), until now Red Hat has been a little coy about fully backing Java, choosing instead to work with BEA Systems on JRockit for optimization on Linux.

What’s changed of course is the open sourcing of Java, which has made it simpler for Red Hat to use it in its Linux distribution and related tools, Zachary said. The question remains though, what took them? Sun officially open sourced Java a year ago (emphasis mine).

I’m sure it was a variety of things: pride, business acumen, the intricacies of working collaboratively with a competitor who wants to bury your OS and replace it on the server with his own. But the question kind of lingers in the air like a whiff of freshly brewed coffee, doesn’t it? (indirect pun totally intended)

One Slashdot commenter also wondered about this partnership earlier this morning, saying:

“With all the ‘openness’ going on with Java these days will things get even more complicated? I have three important commercial apps that run on Java, all three have their own run time environments that are incompatible with each other. I have no end of trouble with jre and firefox. I can’t count how many times I’ve had problems with classpaths trying to run Java stuff. Will the OpenJDK mean another runtime? As in Blackdown, Sun, Open?”

There’s no doubt that this partnership is a good thing for Red Hat Linux and for Java. Nevertheless, these persistent little questions remain. I don’t know if RH dragging its feet has too much effect on the end user, but still, we’d like to know what the delay was all about.

Script tracks Perl modules for you

Michael Hurley shares a script that he wrote called modlister. I’ll let him explain:

It’s a script to tell you what Perl modules you have installed and where, to query whether you have a particular module installed, to see associated files, etc. For example:

1. 1. List all installed modules:

modlister.pl

Only show filenames (strip directories):

modlister.pl -f

See if Compress::Zlib is installed:

modlister.pl -m Zlib

See all the files associated with Zlib:

modlister.pl -m Zlib -a

Thanks for the script, Michael.

Try this one out yourself. Tell us what you think or submit one of your own. If we use your script, you will receive a gift a Starbucks gift certificate. More scripting goodness after the jump… Continued »

Handy script protects Linux against traffic spikes

We received another user-submitted Linux script for our “Share scripts… win Starbucks” series. This one comes from David Witham, who writes:

I administer a consumer VoIP switch for a VSP. The switch acts as a SIP registrar and proxy. Many thousands of devices register and re-register with the registrar every few minutes so there’s a pretty constant stream of traffic hitting it. Some SIP devices have flakey firmware and misbehave in such a way that they flood the registrar with registration requests to the point that performance is compromised, so I needed a way to protect the registrar from those devices.

I wrote a script that takes a sample of network traffic using Ethereal, checks for IP addresses transmitting excessive packets and blocks them by adding them to a list of addresses to drop in the INPUT chain of iptables.

David suggests running the script every 15 minutes to allow new IP addresses to be added to the list, then flushing the addresses and re-adding them so IP addresses that have stopped flooding can re-register.

Give it a try. This script was optimized for RHEL4 but should run on other Linux and Unix systems that have Ethereal or iptables. Feel free to modify it any way you like, or maybe you have one of your own to share? Share a script with us and, if we use it, we’ll treat you to Starbucks.

Keep the scripts coming!

#!/bin/bash
#
# Run from cron on a frequent basis, including on the hour, to block IP addresses flooding with SIP requests
# Use -f to force a flush of the INPUT chain
#
# First 3 octets of destination IP address of the flooding packets

BASE=xxx.xxx.xxx

# Whole destination IP address of the flooding packets

HOSTIP=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

# Interface on which the flooding is occurring

INTERFACE=eth3

# Flush iptables INPUT filter chain each hour in case some IPs have stopped flooding and are genuinely trying to use the service
if [ $(date +%M) = "00" -o "$1" = "-f" ]; then
        /sbin/iptables -F INPUT
        # Wait 5 seconds for IPs to start flooding again (most flooding IPs send REGISTER every 4 seconds if not getting a response)
        sleep 5
        # Add IP address to drop to iptables INPUT filter chain. Repeat a couple of times to catch all IPs
        /usr/sbin/tethereal -i $INTERFACE-a duration:10 2>/dev/null | awk ‘{print $2;print $4}’ | grep -v $BASE | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | awk ‘$1 > 30 {print $2}’ | while read ip; do /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s $ip -d $HOSTIP -j DROP ; done
        sleep 5
        /usr/sbin/tethereal -i $INTERFACE-a duration:10 2>/dev/null | awk ‘{print $2;print $4}’ | grep -v $BASE | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | awk ‘$1 > 30 {print $2}’ | while read ip; do /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s $ip -d $HOSTIP -j DROP ; done
        sleep 5
        /usr/sbin/tethereal -i $INTERFACE-a duration:10 2>/dev/null | awk ‘{print $2;print $4}’ | grep -v $BASE | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | awk ‘$1 > 30 {print $2}’ | while read ip; do /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s $ip -d $HOSTIP -j DROP ; done
else
        # Add more IP addresses to drop to iptables INPUT filter chain
        /usr/sbin/tethereal -i $INTERFACE-a duration:10 2>/dev/null | awk ‘{print $2;print $4}’ | grep -v $BASE | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | awk ‘$1 > 30 {print $2}’ | while read ip; do /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s $ip -d $HOSTIP -j DROP ; done

fi 

Does this script work for you?

Recently, we asked our readers to share some of their Linux scripts with us. Our first script comes to us from Diethard Ohrt, who sent us a script named “survf”. He writes:

The script “survf” monitors a file so you can check whether this file is growing (e.g. during ftp transfer). If you link it to the name “survp,” it monitors a running process… when the process terminates it sounds a bell and terminates.

Take a look at survf and give it a try. Diethard adds that he originally wrote it for the Korn shell on a Unix box a few years ago (so you might want to tweak it with “proper, real bash syntax.”)

Thank you, Diethard! To show our appreciation, we are sending you a gift certificate for some Starbucks coffee. Enjoy.

Let us know what you think of the script or send us one of your own. If we use it, you can earn yourself a Starbucks gift certificate plus you’ll be helping out other users.

If you would like some more scripts, check out our tips section. Whether it is help with Linux migrations or managing high-volume CPU processes, our SearchEnterpriseLinux experts help you navigate through the Linux world.

Hope you like the script. Keep them coming.


!/bin/bash

Apache lead over Microsoft IIS shrinks again

Call out the chaperons — they’re practically touching! Apache and Microsoft IIS market share! They’ve almost met in the middle at 50%! Six inch space and no kissing, please!

Well, close, but not quite. Apache continued its “winning streak” in September over Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, but by a smaller margin than the month before (when Netcraft, which watches these kinds of things like a hawk, said that IIS was poised to challenge Apache’s market share lead sometime soon).

Part of this — as we’ve reported before — is due to Tomcat and to Google’s big server switch in 2006. Both of these phenomenons had a profound affect on Apache’s numbers, but were not in and of themselves an indicator of any slippage.

However, all that said, IIS is growing thanks to a rise in social networking sites like MySpace and Windows Live Spaces, both of which use ISS.

Says Netcraft:

The high growth so far this year has been largely driven by the increasing number of online blogging and social networking communities. This month sees strong growth in the number of sites at Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, and Blogger appearing in the survey. The increased popularity of these blog hosting services continues to have a dramatic effect on the web server market shares: Apache suffered a sudden decline in share when sites at Blogger switched to Google’s GFE.

Apache gains over 3 million hostnames, and around 0.9 million active sites this month. But this is not enough to prevent its market share declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft also gained over 3 million hostnames (a large part of which come from MySpace and Live Spaces, both of which use its Internet Information Server).

So the battle continues.

Netcraft August Web server report: Apache down, Microsoft up

The executive summary for Netcraft’s latest Web server market share report says it all: “Microsoft’s recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache’s leadership position.”

Or does it?

The August Netcraft report, out on Monday, showed that the trends established over the past year concerning Apache Web server and Microsoft IIS have continued unabated. We reported on the trend last month in our article, Apache loses more ground in latest Netcraft report, and we found that things are not what they first seemed. Yes, Microsoft IIS is seeing an uptick, but the Apache decline is not entirely a result of that growth.

Mark Brewer, CEO of Covalent Technologies, an Apache support provider based in Walnut Creek, Calif., spoke with us for that article, and his analysis then still applies to the August report. Part of the decline can be blamed on Apache Tomcat, a Web container developed by the Apache Software Foundation, which also created the Apache Web server. According to Forrester Research Inc., 51% of enterprise-class production-level deployments run Tomcat. So, simple deduction: As Apache Tomcat increases, Apache Web server decreases.

“When doing a Netcraft lookup on Web sites that are known to be using Tomcat, [the search] frequently does not report as Apache,” Brewer told us during a visit to our offices in Needham, Mass. Examples include the JBoss site, the Sakai site and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s digital photo center Web site.

Additionally, Brewer said most Web sites that use Tomcat to serve up Web content via HTTP would show up in surveys as a “mod_jl.conf” entry — not Apache — and thus would not be counted as sites that use Apache servers.

Google’s “to blame” too. Netcraft originally classified Google servers as Apache machines, but earlier this year the firm began reclassifying these servers in their own unique category. The move affected Apache market share

But this isn’t the whole story. Even as Tomcat/Google cannibalizes Apache, IIS is seeing gains. Netcraft’s report says, “It’s worth noting that Apache has lost market share to another open source server, lighttpd (1.2% of all sites), and Google (4.4%) as well as Windows. But if Microsoft continues to gain share at its current pace, it could close the gap on Apache sometime in 2008.”

That’s a key point, because 2008 is when the new Microsoft Server is *supposed* to come out. We’ll be watching.