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Monday, February 09, 2004

LinuxWorld proved interesting yesterday.

This is purely my impression, but it seemed to be better attended than the past two years. There were definitely more biz-types, but, surprisingly, it also seemed that "geek attendance" was up as well. There seemed to be a lot of college guys floating around in a sea of suits.

Oracle, IBM and Intel were pushing "grid computing" (think SETI@Home) heavily. [SNIP]

I received demos from RedHat, Novell and Sun on three products that seem worth exploring.

Novell was touting RedCarpet, which they acquired when they bought Ximian. This tool allows for fairly good site-wide administration of package deployment. It was unclear as to whether it was only going to work with SuSE or with all flavors of Linux, but they suggested that they would continue to support the Enterprise RedHat offerings. (Actually, on viewing this page, it appears as if they're definitely going to be supporting Novell Netware services on RedHat and this suggests the same for Red Carpet Enterprise 2). [SNIP]

Next up is RedHat's new Provisioning module for the RedHat Network. Details on it are available here. In a nutshell, it
would allow us to do many of the things that Proto does now from a clean GUI interface, including package management, kickstart configuration, centralized config file management and the ability to assign different users differing RHN administrative roles. [SNIP]

Last is Sun's Control Station. Originally developed by Cobalt to manage their server appliances, Sun obtained it when they bought Cobalt. It allows for similar functionality as the RHN Provisioning module, but it also supports multiple Linux distributions (RedHat, SuSE and Sun Java Desktop as of now). It also supports Solaris clients, although the literature suggests that it only works on x86 platforms, which is a shame. If it allowed us to manage our Sparc boxes as well as our x86 boxes, I could see it being very useful. There is a 90 day trial if we
wanted to give it a look.

I also received a copy of Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX 3.5. It looks interesting, although I don't know how useful it would be since we
already do a lot of UNIX-to-Windows filesharing by means of Samba.

I received a demo copy of Astaro Security Linux, which is a (by-reputation) excellent Linux-based firewalling and spam filtering
package. [SNIP]

I looked to see if anyone was offering a spam-filtering application. Other than SpamAsassin (built in to Astaro Security Linux), the pickings were pretty slim.