Fedora 14 - A Take On Its New Features

Fedora 14 named after physicist "Robert B. Laughlin" has been released. In my opinion, Fedora is geared more towards developers and system administrators than the ordinary users. However, it is perfectly usable as a Desktop too - baring a few exceptions (See the drawbacks below).
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Red Hat 11th fastest growing company in America

Forbes magazine recently compiled a list of the top 25 fastest growing companies in America. And guess what, Red Hat is placed 11th in the list (See Fig. below). The criteria for Forbes’ list mainly focused on sales growth , profitability (at least $25 million in sales over the past four quarters), growth outlook and the lack of legal, accounting or corporate governance issues. Google which generated nearly $15 billion in revenues in the last 12 months topped the list.

Fig: Red Hat placed 11th in the list of top 25 fast growing companies in USA

Way to go Red Hat....

Introducing Red Hat's New Virtual training programme

Are you living in a part of city or town where it is not possible to get trained in Red Hat Linux ? Then take heart as Red Hat has rolled out its Virtual training program.

Virtual training is real time training conducted remotely featuring Red Hat instructors. The classes are taken in 4 hour increments, Monday through Friday, over a two week period. All sessions start at 1 pm eastern standard time (EST).

The salient features of the virtual training are as follows ...

• Conducted by Red Hat's own specially trained instructors.
• Interactive sessions via real time chat with the instructors.
• You get your own copy of Red Hat enterprise Linux which you can access via a Java enabled web browser.
• You will receive all the printed study materials by post a couple of days before the commencement of the course.
  

Virtual Training is currently available for RHCE track courses - Red Hat Linux Essentials and Red Hat Linux System Administration.

Prerequisites for training program.

• Require a broadband internet connection and
• A willingness and sufficient motivation to set a timetable and learn on ones own.
  

Get more details of the virtual training program from the offical website. And here is the press release.

Cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat has introduced a new service in association with Amazon web services called Cloud computing. This is basically an on demand, hosted solution which provides you managed computing resources as a web service.

The cloud is basically a series of virtual servers powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux , which make use of the Amazon EC2 service.

When you run servers in a cloud, you have complete access to the server via secure network interfaces and can perform any configuration, management, or development tasks you would normally perform on a remotely accessible server.

As part of this service, Red Hat populates the cloud with virtual machine images which can be readily instantiated with one simple command line interface or via a Firefox extension. Once instantiated, you are able to access your server with standard utilities (such as SSH) from a client machine, add and remove any software and services you wish to perform, and transfer data to and from the servers. You have complete control.

This service is primarily targeted at developers, small businesses, IT infrastructure owners et al. For instance, you can use it to host your website if what you need is something more than a shared hosted solution but not exactly a dedicated server. Basically it is computing power provided on demand.

This service is currently at beta stage and is available at a starting price of $19 / month per customer plus $0.21 per hour for every deployed server, plus additional bandwidth and storage fees.

More details at Red Hat website.

Howto: Build an selinux policy the Red Hat enterprise way

Red Hat / Fedora has now got GUI tools to help edit and create SElinux policy files. And it is much more simpler to create a custom selinux policy in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In this detailed article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process.

A lot of people think that building a new SELinux policy is magic, but magic tricks never seem quite as difficult once you know how they’re done. This article explains how to build a policy module and gives you the step-by-step process for using the tools to build your own.

Read more on a step by step guide to creating an selinux policy module explained by Dan Walsh.

Update: Also check out this PDF presentation on Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 which also contain information on SELinux.

Metric equivalent of Microsoft fonts for Linux

Visit any random website and chances are the website expects your machine to have a set of fonts which have become the de-facto standard on the Internet. The fonts being Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New and so on. While it may not be illegal to install these fonts on a Linux machine, they are propritery and are owned by Microsoft. And Microsoft does not licence third parties to redistribute these fonts - a reason why you don't find these commonly used popular fonts installed in Linux by default.

This is going to change once and for all. Red Hat in association with Ascender Corp has developed a set of fonts which are the metric equivalent of the most popular Microsoft fonts, and they have released it under the GPL+exception license. Three sets of fonts have been released, them being:

1. Sans - a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans
2. Serif - a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif and
3. Mono - a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
   

The advantage for Linux users is that now you don't have to explicitly install Microsoft fonts anymore as the web sites or documents which use Microsoft fonts will display flawlessly using the metric equivalent fonts which can be included in all Linux distributions by default.

The work on the fonts is yet to be completed and so will be released in two stages. In the first stage, all the fonts are released as fully usable but will lack the full hinting capability provided by True Type/Free Type technology. In the second phase of the release which will happen some time in later half of 2007, the fonts will have full hinting capability and will be at par with or excel the Microsoft fonts in quality. For now Red Hat has made available all the fonts for download so that you can test it on your machine.

Creating good quality fonts - ie. fonts which retain its quality even in smaller sizes is a very tedious and time consuming process. And buying good quality fonts is a very costly affair with each set of fonts costing anything upwards of $100 . By taking the initiative to develop good quality fonts which are the metric equivalent of Microsoft fonts, and releasing them under a Free licence, Red Hat has done a very good deed for the Free Software and Open Source cause.

How to setup a home web server - the Red Hat way

In previous posts I have explained how to set up apache server to serve webpages on ones personal machine. But then I explained how to do it the Debian way. Obviously there are other ways of doing the same thing. For instance, if you put the same query (of setting up apache webserver) to a person running RedHat, the steps he will list out will be some what different from what I had covered. By now you will realise what I am getting to. There is obviously a Red Hat way of doing things and a Debian way of doing things.

In Debian based distributions, the apache webserver uses a modular structure of storing configuration information using different files for each site which makes it less cluttered. Where as in Red Hat, you have a single flat file called httpd.conf in which you add all the configuration details of each site.

Jeff Goldin has written an excellent article which explains the Red Hat way of setting up a home web server which makes a very interesting read. But apart from the minor differences, the article contains lots of information like the type of hardware to select, the partition scheme to use, increasing the level of security of the webserver and so on which I believe are important concepts which could be applied while hosting a web server in other Linux distributions too.

Setting up multiple IP addresses on a single NIC

In linux, you can bind multiple IP addresses on a single NIC. This is usually done in case you are using your linux machine as a web server and is hosting multiple domains and you want to bind each domain to a unique IP address. This is how it is done.

Let us assume that you already have a NIC which is bound with a static IP address. Then you will have a file called /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 .My ifcfg-eth0 file has the following entries:

# File: ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
HWADDR=00:80:48:34:C2:84

Now to bind another IP address to the same NIC, I create a copy of the above file ifcfg-eth0 and name it as ifcfg-eth0:1

# cd /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts
# cp ifcfg-eth0  ifcfg-eth0:1

Now just change the values of the DEVICE and IPADDR in the file as follows:

# File: ifcfg-eth0:1
DEVICE=eth0:1
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.5
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
HWADDR=00:80:48:34:C2:84

And lastly, restart the networking service. If you are using RedHat, then it is as simple as :

# service network restart

Note: If you do not know how to configure a NIC, see my previous posts - How to install a network card in Linux and How to assign an IP address.