ubuntu

And you thought the various Linux distributions were hard to understand..

I’ve talked with users who have stated that they don’t understand what Linux distribution to use, with so many of them available that it is confusing.

If that’s confusing then how in the world do you figure out what Windows version you are going to use? Windows Vista had six SKUs and it looks like Windows 7 is going to have two..or is it still six?

Sure Microsoft is pushing the Home Premium edition and a Professional edition as it’s two primary versions. The third SKU that is supposedly not going to have an impact on all of this is the Windows 7 Home Basic. Supposedly this will only be sold in emerging markets but, well it still exists as a valid SKU.

Then there is the Starter edition. The what? The Starter edition. You know for people who are just starting to use computers. It will run a whopping three applications simultaneously. That sounds suspiciously like the Windows 7 Home Basic. Why anyone would want either one of those is past me.

By my count we are up to four. Enter Microsoft’s offering of an Enterprise and Ultimate version of Windows 7. Both of these versions contain applications that should be standard with any operating system. Not so for Microsoft when they can squeeze some more money from their faithful. That brings us to six.

Now go pick one of the three mainline distributions. Any of them-Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSuSE. No separate SKU, no licensing hassles, and not one dime comes out of your wallet to install any of them. Install only the applications that you want or better yet install everything. If you are a new user this is a great way to learn which applications that you like to use for various task. Usually two or three for any given task are included. You don’t have to buy it nor do you have to download a separate version to get a particular feature or application. Straightforward and simple.

Enjoy the freedom and lack of confusion!

-j

But what about the fast growing part of the pc market, the Netbook? I don’t believe the Netbook will have enough power to run either one of these. That brings the versions up to three.

SELinux on Ubuntu

The other day after installing Ubuntu on one of my test machines I noticed that there was an ls -Z command which shows various selinux information about files and directories.

Running this command however gave some strange output, primarily ? marks. I thought this was a little strange but had other things that I needed to do at the time and decided that I would look into it later.

This weekend was that time. Let me say that I use SELinux on my Red Hat and CentOS machines and think that it is a very good way to help secure a machine. However it is anything but intuitive. If it weren’t for some very good documentation at Red Hat I probably never would have been successful at using this security tool. Mind you I’m no guru with it but I have six servers using it and I know how to troubleshoot SeLinux problems.

Which brings me to the part about Ubuntu and SELinux that I find disturbing. Doing some Google searching I ran across two pages regarding Ubuntu and SELinux. Both of them had no usable information in them other than how to install SELinux. Nothing about what to expect, how to troubleshoot, what a context or a boolean is nor did it mention if Ubuntu provided any troubleshoooting tools like setroubleshoot. You can find these two pages here and here.

The documentation only warned that SELinux is for experienced users. While that is an understatement how do they expect people to start using it to protect their machines? It would seem to indicate that they have no real interest in their users having the ability to use SELinux. I personally think that is a shame. I also believe that it is going to hurt their efforts at becoming enterprise ready especially with their server product. I certainly won’t be installing Ubuntu on any of my critical machines.

-j

Ubuntuserver is unbelievably stupid

Yes you read the title right. Ubunutserver is unbelievably stupid.

Ok let’s take it from the top. I had Ubuntuserver 7.0.4 installed as my WebDAV secure server, my son’s baseball team’s website, samba and so on. I run this server headless and without a gui. Note here that the normal install is without a gui and is touted loudly by the folks who develop ubuntuserver. This is all well and good.

Lately it’s been on my mind to look into and install a collaboration suite. Having searched around I finally landed on Zimbra.

After reading the documentation I see that Zimbra is certified on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Ok, well this is as good of a time to upgrade as any. This is where the fun (read stupidity) begins.

I ssh into my server as normal. I do all of the pre-distribution upgrade stuff, reboot and begin the distribution upgrade. The first thing I get is a message saying something to the effect of “We do not recommend using SSH while you upgrade. If you lose a connection it is difficult to recover.” Ok. I’m not doing this over a WAN link but on my local LAN. I haven’t had any network outages since I don’t know when, the sun is shining so no power outages looming. Things are looking good.

The upgrade proceeds smoothly. On several occasions I am asked if I want to replace any of my configuration files. This include the sshd configuration file. On all of these I take the default which is “Do not replace, I want to keep the configuration file that I am currently using” . That’s paraphrased but that is what it meant.

The distribution upgrade finishes. I get a nice message saying everything went well and asking me if I want to reboot. Of course I do. I type y and off we go. After waiting the appropriate amount of time I try to SSH back in. I am pretty excited at this point about getting my Zimbra install started.

Uhoh. No such luck. The dreaded “ssh: connect to host 10.10.15.105 port 22: Connection refused” message. What?!? Are you kidding me? No way. I try pinging the server. Yep, network came back ok. I try again. Nope. And several times after that. Now I’m writing this rant.

You see, here is why I think this is stupid. The server installs without a gui. That implies that no one is going to use this for a workstation. If no one is going to use it for a workstation, why then, should it have a monitor on it? If it doesn’t have a monitor on it, why would you not want someone to upgrade using SSH? Would the Ubuntuserver people prefer telnet instead? If the upgrade process is smart enough to know that you are upgrading over SSH then why not start SSHD on the reboot? If that is in fact the problem since I haven’t dragged a monitor over there to see.

I made a decision not long ago not to scrap my Ubuntuserver in favor of CentOS. I am starting to regret that decision. You see there is at least one other annoyance with Ubuntusever that I don’t find appealing either. This is the fact that they have decided that using an inittab is old fashioned or something. While this doesn’t have much affect on a server, at least one not running a gui, have you tried to boot into runlevel 3 lately? It’s not nearly as easy as it is with a GRUB boot loader where you can edit it, type in 3, hit enter and b and boot to runlevel 3.

Ok, I’m done. Next free time that I have I’m putting CentOS on there (as soon as I drag a monitor to the server and get SSHD started that is).

-j