Episode 36 - Novell is finally bought and other news...

Thanks to the LinuxOutlaws.com guys, Dan and Fab, for the mention on their show.  Check it out for great insights and  commentary.

Running Time:  43:19

1) Introduction

 

2) News

Linux Server troubleshooting

Who will be your next Enterprise Architect?

Will or should Ubuntu stick with a 6 month release cycle...

Novell Get's bought by Attachemate?

Who owns what in the Novell Deal?

3) Conclusion

Recommendations for People to interview

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Unity and Wayland will lead Ubuntu to the....

Mark Shuttleworth on his blog this week explained why Connonical are going to not only use their own window manager but also a replacement for the traditional X.org windowing system.  The article does a pretty good job of explaining his points.  He is a little lacking on hardcore details.  However it helped us clear up what  they were thinking.  Remember that no matter what if you don't like their choice you can always switch yourself back to Gnome and/or KDE.

Tales From the Linux Dark Side

Have you ever deleted an entire system with a rm -rf / ?  On this weeks podcast we discussed Joe's and my biggest ones...Here are a few others from a scary Linux Insider post... There are a few that just make you go ooooohhh...

Sudo or not to Sudo...

I love SUDO....It let's me audit who became root or ran certain commands...It keeps me from having to remember Roots password on all of the systems I use.  That then let's me set really crazy passwords for Root.  The problem is that except for Ubuntu no one setups any groups or users to be able to run anything with it.  Sudo is one of the most powerful tools for managing users access to critical commands.  It let's you audit what has been done and by who.  As long as you take the time to define the programs and make everyone not just do "sudo su -".  For my home stuff though I am the only Linux Admin.  I probably will be until my son or daughter get old enough.  So setting myself up with sudo access on all my machines isn't that big a risk.  So for all of those systems you don't have it setup for automatically here is a link to a quick how to at Linux Journal to help you get it set up.  Thanks to Walt Jevack for pointing me to the link...

Should we reboot our servers?

The short but not very helpful answer is yes.  This article however trys to help you find the answers of how and when.  We at linuxinstall.net believe that it all depends on what the system can handle, what the business can accept, and when can take the system down.  It's rare that a system truly does have to be up 24x7x365.  Most normal situations call for outage windows which can be used to apply patches and reboot the systems.  You really probably should reboot a system, patches or not, around every 90-120 days.  That doesn't mean they can't stay up longer.  I had one system I choose to reboot every 180 days just to make sure it never hit the kernel bug at 368 days.  Even on Linux rebooting a system is healthy and tends to improve performance for the short run.  No matter what reboot your systems when it makes sense.