All in all, it was definitely  worth attending this event. Given my role at HP, I regularly participate in similar events and I have found it well executed. Not all sessions were equal both in their content and delivery, but the informations I have gathered in Boston will definitely help me better understanding and managing Red Hat and JBoss on HP servers.

The slides of all presentations are now available. Enjoy !

The second presentation was made by the technical director of the JBoss project at Red Hat about tuning of JBoss.

I then attended a presentation about SElinux that was unfortunately not technical enough and did not meet my expectations.

However, the two last presentations (actually, one presentation filling two time slots) were absolutely fantastic. One kernel developer and a guy from Red Hat’s performance team have made a presentation about tuning Red Hat. It could not go further, as far as the technical level is concerned, and the questions from the audience were also interesting.

Finally, the day ended with a party in the Faneuil hall in Boston and in the surrounding pubs.

The first day started with a good keynote speech from Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who talked about the shift that software companies will have to make in the future towards more modularity and more openness. He also mentioned how customers could get their money trapped in IT projects for several reasons: complexity, project failures, etc.  It was not a revolutionary speech, but rather a well executed introduction to Red Hat’s vision for the future.

Then came Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s VP for products and technologies who did the dirty job and first explained how Oracle wants to lock customers in their proprietary model with Solaris, Weblogic and the Oracle database.
Wait a second, isn’t that exactly what IBM is trying to do with AIX, Websphere and DB2 ? Of course yes, but IBM being the top sponsor of the event, Mr. Cormier preferred to target Oracle. Fair enough. Then Mr. Cormier tried to show us how Microsoft, VMware and Novell were offering closed proprietary solutions. Even though Red Hat remains a model in terms of a company making money out of open-source software, I do not buy what Mr. Cormier said about Novell and VMware. Novell remains a strong Linux vendor that is committed to open-source software and VMware, even though it is based on a proprietary and costly model, does an interesting job from a standards perspective: they have backed the OVF standard for virtual machines and have acquired SpringSource, a company selling free software.

Finally, a Cisco VP came to tell us how simple the world is with UCS. The more Cisco presentations I am hearing, the more I find their architecture complicated and their rip-and-replace-and-buy-new-switches approach brutal. But I have never seen their systems in action so far.

Following the keynote, I chose the 2 hours lab on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Even though the management interface is not as polished as VMware Vcenter (it lacks, for instance, the storage view) and even though storage online migration is not available, it will, in my humble opinion, cover the needs of 85% of the customers for a much lower price.

I then attended a session about achieving best I/O performance, both storage and networking, in a KVM virtualized environment., followed by a great presentation about how to setup a clustered environment with Red Hat 6. Even though RHEL6 is still in beta, the cluster management tool looks really promising.

Finally, I attended two sessions: one about SOA architectures in the cloud and RESTful applications with JBoss SOA platform which were fine.

To conclude the day, Red Hat organized an on-site party with a barbecue. It was interesting to see Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, be there and discuss very simply with the attendees.

All in all, it was a very interesting day and I am looking forward to seeing tomorrow’s presentations!

That’s fine for users running proprietary software, but I have found a simple solution to flash your BIOS without even have to run WinFlash with Wine (which did not work for me anyway).

1) Download the BIN file provided on the Shuttle website for your version of the Shuttle

2) To install the flashrom package on Ubuntu (from the universe repository) enter

$ sudo apt-get install flashrom

3) Determine what is your BIOS by entering

$ sudo flashrom
[sudo] password for user1:
Calibrating delay loop… OK.
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset “NVIDIA MCP67″, enabling flash write… OK.
Found chip “PMC Pm49FL004″ (512 KB) at physical address 0xfff80000.
No operations were specified.

I obviously own a PC with the chipset Nvidia MCP67 and I check if this chipset is supported
I perform a backup of my existing BIOS and then I flash it

$ sudo flashrom -r backup.bin
$ sudo flashrom -wv SN68SP0P.BIN

SN68SP0P.BIN being the file downloaded in 1)

Reboot to check if you really have the latest version of the BIOS (press Del if you just see the hiding screen instead of the real BIOS screen) and you should see “SN68SP0P” on the top-left corner of your screen.

ATTENTION : to flash a BIOS can have severe consequences for your PC so be careful when doing it and do not make me responsible for having screwed your box

sudo modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In order to fully use your Intel processor on a HP laptop, follow the following steps :

- boot your computer
- when the BIOS window shows up, enter the BIOS manager
- enable the Virtualization technology in the BIOS menu
- save the changes and exit
- shut down your computer
- remove the battery and put it back in your PC
- boot your computer

and Intel VT should work without problem.

The usage of Linux is fostered within the company : each employee has access to LinuxCOE (which is a HP product and licensed under the General Public License) and can install his favorite distribution pretty easily on his personal computer. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Gentoo and others are at disposal and HP even provides licenses for SUSE and Red Hat.
Since MS Office is the most widespread office suite and most of my colleagues have Windows XP, it is unfortunately hard to work without it. With Crossover, which is a product based on Wine, allows me to use the MS Office suite as well as Internet Explorer 6 in some cases (*sigh*…).
The officially supported instant messaging protocol was Jabber, which is ideal to use in a GNU/Linux environment (for instance with Pidgin) but has been changed for Microsoft Communicator that I use via its web-based interface.
Due to the massive demand of employees, Firefox is officially supported by the internal IT service, in addition to IE.
On the customer side, HP is committed to Linux : the ProLiant servers are the most sold servers running GNU/Linux on the world and the Integrity servers shipped with the Itanium processors also run RHEL 5 and SLES 10 SP1. Moreover, there are lots of people at the company working as developers for open-source projects or kernel developers.

Nevertheless, the situation is not perfect for GNU/Linux or alternative software desktop users.
Linux is not officially supported by HP’s IT and there is an evident lack of communication around LinuxCOE. I even personally made senior technical consultants aware of it.
Not all internal web-based applications run correctly with Firefox and some multimedia streamed videos are encoded with codecs Linux cannot play.
I cannot share my calendar with my colleagues because Evolution does not work perfectly with Exchange 2007 (even if my e-mails and meetings invitations work fine) and there is no native application to take part to Netmeeting conferences (did someone try this solution ?). The move to Vista and MS Office 2007 is also planned but, so far, Crossover does not support this version so I hope there will be a workaround until here.

So far, using GNU/Linux as a primarily desktop operating system as an HP employee was not hard and I have been pleasantly surprised by the LinuxCOE offering, among other things. Even though I experience a little loss of productivity, I prefer to stay a little longer at work than use an other OS than GNU/Linux. If things need to do something which is really urgent and only doable under Windows, I have a VMware virtual machine ready to boot, however, this happens really rarely. So if you are hesitating to apply for a job or an internship at HP, thinking that you will not have the right/possibility/authorization tu run GNU/Linux, I hope this article will help to change your mind.

Of course, HP is a huge company and from an IT perspective, support multiple operating systems is a big effort. One the other hand, this is the best example of the advantages of respecting standards (real ones…) in order every user to have access to the information, independently of his OS.

Create a log-directory into your Subversion repository

$mkdir logs

and save the following script into the repository as svn_cron.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# Variable REPOS is the path to the repository on the server

REPOS=.
echo “”
date +”%B %d %Y”

test $# = 0 || ( echo “Please enter the path to the local copy”; exit 1 )

cd $1 2>&1 >/dev/null || ( echo “$1 does not exist”; exit 2 )

/usr/local/bin/svn info 2>&1 >/dev/null|| ( echo “$1 is not a working copy”; exit 3 )

if [ `/usr/local/bin/svn update $1 | sed -n "/^C/p" | wc -l` -ne 0 ]
then

# Collects all files and directorys which are to add on the repository
/usr/local/bin/svn status | sed -n “/^\??*/p” | sed “s/^\? *//g” > $REPOS/logs/toadd

# Collects all files and directorys which are to delete on the repository
/usr/local/bin/svn status | sed -n “/^\!?*/p” | sed “s/^\! *//g” > $REPOS/logs/todelete*//g” > $REPOS/logs/todelete

# Add and delete Subversion actions
cat $REPOS/logs/todelete | while read line; do /usr/local/bin/svn delete “${line}”; done
cat $REPOS/logs/toadd | while read line; do /usr/local/bin/svn add “${line}”; done

# SVN commit in order to save the changes with a log message
if !(/usr/local/bin/svn commit -m “Daily commit for changes done directly on the server”)
then echo “A problem has occured during the commit”
exit 3
fi

else
echo “Problem with the daily update, there may be a conflict within the following files  \! ”

# Displays the files which are currently in conflict
svn status $1
exit 4
fi
exit 0

Then edit the crontab

$crontab -e

or if you want the uploads to be done by another user

$crontab -e -u username

Of course, the user must have write permission to write on the logs directory.

Put the following lines at the end of the file

##Automatic update of the Subversion repository every day at 0:00
0  0   * * *  /path_to_your_repository/svn_cron.sh /path_to_your_local_copy >> /path_to_your_repository/logs/script_cron

And that’s it !