Stands for "Shoot The Other Node in the Head." Means: a device that kills power on the peer node as a means of data fencing (this is your guarantee in a Linux-HA cluster).
A WTI RPS-10M is an ideal unit for this: it is a power switch controllable with a serial port. You can even chain up to 10 of these together with phone lines and control them with one serial port.
There is lots of info on STONTH on the the Linux-HA site.
I won't dis Smalltalk. Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of mutual respect between the Smalltalk and Python communities?
Commercial support for Python app servers: My company uses Zope. There are a few strong players in support of Zope in the app server and content management space, including Zope Corp in the US, as well as a bunch of folks in Europe, Brazil, and other places.
Perhaps you have the luxury of creating non-modular software all by yourself in a cave. Even in non-OO languages (esp. C, since there are a lot of C programmers about), people still use design patterns that are OOish or hacks that approximate OO. So don't give me the "OO is lies and FUD" BS... explain WHY you think its all one great big lie.
PHP : pretty hackish programming. Great for what it is good at (inlining simple code in HTML). Bad for anything else (enterprise apps). If you want something simple (but not decafinated like PHP) as an alternative to Java and.NET, the Python and Perl communties have quite a few options that might be better suited than PHP (Python moreso than Perl, for pure OO apps).
Boa constructor. Good enough to build real apps quicker than something like VB... Integrates with Zope, has very nice code editing; Toolkit is wxPython, so it is cross-platform to Win/*nix/Mac.
Ugh... I'm sick of these industry horses wearing blinders. There are more than two choices, of course. When.NET and J2EE developers finally get sick of watching their compilers sing and dance, I'll still be here adding new features to my Python applications at run time in a much better language.:)
I'm a Debian user who is quite likely to stay a Debian user; Debian makes sense primarily because of the ease of upgrading (especially for managing lots of servers). I assume RPM will be your package format. I would think that UnitedLinux would be wise to leverage Connectiva's port of Debian's APT to RPM for your packaging system to give you something that RedHat doesn't have.
That said, it sounds like the financial barrier-to-entry for use of the UnitedLinux products is much greater than something like RedHat or Debian, either with the inclusion of a proprietary installer, or per-seat licensing, or restrictions on binaries. It could be argued that Linux's strength in the Enterprise is the simplicity associated with not having to keep track of specific licensing, as well as easy access to freely and quickly install binary packages, be they RPMs or DEBs, among other things, and it seems that distribution restrictions hinder that. Why isn't it suicide to make the barrier-to-entry higher, especially when it is so easy to freely download a 30 MB ISO for a mimimal install of something like Debian, and install completely over the network from one of many very fast mirrors?
In other words, what is UnitedLinux's competitive proposition when compared to a distribution that I can download and ISO for quickly, share CDs built from that ISO freely, and get quick downloads and installs of packages from mirrors freely?
For Java folks, I think the usefulness of Zope (well, just ZODB) will come as 3rd party CORBA support matures; using ZODB as a data-store for Java apps could be very interesting.
Then you are an idiot if you only buy into marketing materials or old case studies... Zope is used by a bunch of big media companies, the US Navy, NATO, and a bunch of other folks, including the company I work for, a Top-20 US daily newspaper (for many significant and growing portions of our site).
Yes, technocrat.net is not there anymore; perhaps if you paid attention to slashdot, and were not oblovious, you would have figured out why: Bruce Perens moved on to HP, and didn't have time for Technocrat anymore, but it was a good, popular weblog site, often linked to by slashdot.
Read past the brochureware; how hard is: apt-get install zope zope-parsedxml? Or for that matter downloading the source package and compiling? Try it sometime!
ParsedXML in Zope is a perfect example of how to do this; put DOM in an ODB, and make it accessible for interaction with other sets of heterogeneous data; with Zope...XML, peristent objects, and relational data-stores can sit along side one another. Pick the right storage tool for the job: Zope will support it. Built in services for FTP, WebDAV, XML-RPC, add ons for SOAP, CORBA, etc make this ideal for XML in a complex application and heterogeneous environment. Plus you get to do it all in Python, which makes it perfect.;)
Read this: it may not change your life, but it might just change your mind. If it does, mod it up;)
Zope has Enterprise-level scalability and is the closest OS competitor to the most advanced Java app servers, with much, much more and no Java BS.
However, Zope is more advanced than those, and has now:
Enterprise clustering with ZEO; replication will improve with ZEO2
Built in object database, strong XML tools, and modular access RDB access to Oracle, Sybase, ODBC, MSSQL, MySQL, PostGres, etc
Built in object catalog and search engine, could be used as a front end for WSDL generation and code/method organization
Best/Quickest development scripting language for Large-scale development out there - Python is THE secret weapon.
SOAP (3rd Party), XML-RPC (Built-in)
Built-in security model - No need to force app developers to invent one. Allows for basic http auth as one of MANY means for authenticating web services!
Built-in transaction system
Built-in content managment features, and web-management interface.
Everything is OO - web services IS object publishing! Zope has been publishing objects for YEARS...
Improving Unicode and internationalization support
Supports Utility methods and automation to be written in Perl and Python
Develop on the filesystem in Python modules, or through the web with ZClasses and method instances.
Cluster safe session tracking WITHOUT THE NEED FOR A RDB TO DO IT!
Improvments being made continually via current Projects:
Full exposing of Zope to web services via WSDL and services registries
New component model where objects assert interfaces and services can be bolted on
Use of Zope in desktop applications using XML-RPC and/or ZEO clients
Improving scalability of object database infrastructure.
Politically correct for all camps: Zope and Python's licenses are University-type, but are both moving toward a single license with GPL compatibility.
Zope is open-source, works well with Apache and Squid, has great RDB abilities. It naturally exposes objects for publishing using a strong, easy to use security model. It supports authentication off of LDAP, NT Domains, RADIUS, etc. It's odb catalog features allow the development of applications that use dynamic queries to organize content (and potentially code) objects. It's the strongest suite of features for web-services oriented middleware out there, because it has a several year lead in many respects on the competition! Python is XP, so it has the same advantages as a CLR, provided it is coupled with an XP GUI component model or class library, like PyXPCOM (Mozilla) or wxWindows (Unix, Win32, Mac). Last, but not least, it is easy to develop for.
An open challenge to all the folks trying to develop their own toolkits from scratch (dotGNU, Mono, etc): DON'T - instead use something that is already proven in this problem domain: Zope and Python!
It is a flexible open-source system that can be used for roll-your-own content systems; it uses a built-in object databse and cataloging system to allow you to create full-text and fielded searches. There are some Zope 'products' that already start to tackle the knowledge managment space (Knowledge bases, FAQ bases, Bug tracking, etc), and I'm sure that you could improve on them; rolling your own KB system, in this case, would be easy.
I still wonder if there is any case law on "clone" products? I mean, think of diet drugs: how many people create knock-off products of a trademarked "big" product like "metabolife;" I guess what I am asking is if someone could create a product called "metabodrine" (refering to the ephedrine), could they get sued? What about grocery store-brand konckoff names, like "Alpine Mist" for a generic Mountain Dew? Can Pesico sue?
I think this is of high relvance to the open source community, since a lot of people get started in projects when they see the downside to a commercial piece of software that really needs a quality open source competitor. Do these folks have a commercial or fair-use right to even poke fun at the name of a commercial competitor?
Is it free/protected speech?
The way I see it, it is like the difference between a counterfeit and a copy in the art world: fine art counterfeits are meant to fool the world; a copy is simply a reproduction that is clearly NOT the original; differentiated, but certainly referring to the original. Of course, I bet federal judges are more interested in case law than art theory, so I am interested to see what is protected in the case of free speech vs. trademark infringement?
Is there a balancing test provided in federal case law?
...to propietary software. Note: Hopefully this is not off topic, but this (in addition to licensing), seems to be an important issue.
I have noticed that many open source projects are started as an alternative to a closed source product. For, example, from the looks of it, OASIS (an open sourc ad server), seems to be started by folks who wanted a better, open-source alternative to RealMedia's OAS (open AdStream). The name is very similar; likewise, *-GL or *-GLX seems to be the norm for Open-GL clones. From what I read on Slashdot and elsewhere, it seems SGI is more than happy to sue some of those *GL[X]? folks for trademark infringement.
So, I guess, my question is: if you create an open-source project that is designed to compete with a commercial product, and you name is similar (like OASIS vs. OAS), what liabilities might you have in terms of trademark infringement? What is the likelyhood that a trademark holder would have the grounds to sue? Are there any legal tests/thresholds to determine this? Well-known federal case-law?
Seems like BIND is a problem, and DNS in general is crazy. I'm in the process of trying out djbdns (in order to deal with the new BIND problems!) from cr.yp.to.
Check out this:
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/namedroppers.html. This is info on how closed the process of dealing with DNS issues already is. The guy that wrote this is the guy that wrote Qmail...
Please mod this up, I think it has important implications for this topic!
UAW v. JOhnson Controls, US Sup. Ct, 1991 - The majority decision struck down fetal protection policies in the workplace which kept all women of child-bearing age from working in blue-collar jobs...
Johnson controls left a really bad loophole (seems like the court fucked up) which would allow discrimination against an employye if a company can prove that there would be a substantial risk of tort liability --oops. BUt it is proof that the union has the clout to FILE A TITLE 87 SUIT AND FOLLOW THROUGH.
Sparc CPUs are not going to match up to the performance you will get for cluster use that you would get out of an alpha or an intel CPU.
That said, they might just kick ass at this price (in theory) for a load-balanced HA web farm...
My bad. Looks like above someone had indicated that the AC200 (because it has a UltraSparc IIe) won't run Linux yet...
The Netra T1 105 will, and these boxes are still available (and still pricey, but you might be able to get a deal on them, as the AC200 will likely replace them).
The thing about Sun equipment is that, yeah, it's overpriced. But it offers something that not a lot of other vendors can offer in terms of hardware quality. The parts used by Sun are generally of very high quality (and I'm talking the stupid, but important stuff, like cables, power supplies, and PCBs). Sun hardware, while never being a shining star in the CPU department, makes up for it in I/O throughput, if those type of apps are your deal (though CPU intensive stuff is best left to CPUs like IA32/Alpha).
The Netra T1 boxes (at least the 105s, and I assume the 220s) run Linux, have lights-out managment of power via dial-in or terminal server, and come standard with 10kRPM disks, and have dual ethernet, and have plenty of expansion (via the E1 box for 4 extra PCI cards, if you need it).
Overall, the netras might be overpriced, but they are a good choice for folks that have the money (and the people) to use them in the right situation.
Terminal
- or -
Linux+Minicom+Rollover cable
- or -
Terminal Server (Computone, Cisco, Lightwave Comm)...
They all work fine with Netras... the T1 models have LOM, which is nice if the boxes are remote, because you can telnet to your terminal server on the correct port for the serial console (Netra serial port A) and type "poweron" to power them up, then get a console Login or OpenBoot.
The T1 105s are good boxes; just slightly lesser than the T1 AC200 (same box with 440 MHz cpu and only up to a gb of RAM). Get them before they are gone; that might be a very good deal. They are not a bad box to run Linux on either...
At other newspapers, intranets handle everything from archives to graphic information--and now, editorial systems. The advantage? By doing these things with a standard Internet browser and protocols, everyone can share information despite all the varied software and platforms found in a typical media company.
This is not an entirely new concept. In a paper presented in April at the Seventh World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Vlad Ionesco, then a researcher with KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, reported on a Swedish daily that has operated since June 1997 on an intranet-based production system.
The intranet for the 67,000-circulation, two-edition, six-day newspaper manages everything from tracking the work of individual compositors and designers to page scheduling. The system accepts messages from QuarkXPress about page status (through a QuarkXTension) and from other production equipment. Written in Java, a language that can run on almost any computer, it also enables variety of production reports.
Content Management+Editorial+Workflow+Publishing? Newspaper editorial systems do this already; for example, the DewarView system from Harris, which is a prepress system that uses a database to manage versions of documents created using a MS Word-based editing environment for publishing. Other pre-press systems, I can't recall which at this point (but there are dozens of them), have builtin workflow managment systems. This is nothing new. Seriously, take a good look at products on the exposition floor being demoed at any major publishing conference, such as NEXPO (newspapers), etc, and you will see tons of vendors selling this sort of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Saw this a few weeks back... Spam filter in Python using Naive Bayes.
Stands for "Shoot The Other Node in the Head." Means: a device that kills power on the peer node as a means of data fencing (this is your guarantee in a Linux-HA cluster).
A WTI RPS-10M is an ideal unit for this: it is a power switch controllable with a serial port. You can even chain up to 10 of these together with phone lines and control them with one serial port.
There is lots of info on STONTH on the the Linux-HA site.
I won't dis Smalltalk. Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of mutual respect between the Smalltalk and Python communities?
Commercial support for Python app servers: My company uses Zope. There are a few strong players in support of Zope in the app server and content management space, including Zope Corp in the US, as well as a bunch of folks in Europe, Brazil, and other places.
Perhaps you have the luxury of creating non-modular software all by yourself in a cave. Even in non-OO languages (esp. C, since there are a lot of C programmers about), people still use design patterns that are OOish or hacks that approximate OO. So don't give me the "OO is lies and FUD" BS... explain WHY you think its all one great big lie.
PHP : pretty hackish programming. Great for what it is good at (inlining simple code in HTML). Bad for anything else (enterprise apps). If you want something simple (but not decafinated like PHP) as an alternative to Java and .NET, the Python and Perl communties have quite a few options that might be better suited than PHP (Python moreso than Perl, for pure OO apps).
Boa constructor. Good enough to build real apps quicker than something like VB... Integrates with Zope, has very nice code editing; Toolkit is wxPython, so it is cross-platform to Win/*nix/Mac.
http://boa-constructor.sf.net
Ugh... I'm sick of these industry horses wearing blinders. There are more than two choices, of course. When .NET and J2EE developers finally get sick of watching their compilers sing and dance, I'll still be here adding new features to my Python applications at run time in a much better language. :)
A quick comment and a question:
I'm a Debian user who is quite likely to stay a Debian user; Debian makes sense primarily because of the ease of upgrading (especially for managing lots of servers). I assume RPM will be your package format. I would think that UnitedLinux would be wise to leverage Connectiva's port of Debian's APT to RPM for your packaging system to give you something that RedHat doesn't have.
That said, it sounds like the financial barrier-to-entry for use of the UnitedLinux products is much greater than something like RedHat or Debian, either with the inclusion of a proprietary installer, or per-seat licensing, or restrictions on binaries. It could be argued that Linux's strength in the Enterprise is the simplicity associated with not having to keep track of specific licensing, as well as easy access to freely and quickly install binary packages, be they RPMs or DEBs, among other things, and it seems that distribution restrictions hinder that. Why isn't it suicide to make the barrier-to-entry higher, especially when it is so easy to freely download a 30 MB ISO for a mimimal install of something like Debian, and install completely over the network from one of many very fast mirrors?
In other words, what is UnitedLinux's competitive proposition when compared to a distribution that I can download and ISO for quickly, share CDs built from that ISO freely, and get quick downloads and installs of packages from mirrors freely?
For Java folks, I think the usefulness of Zope (well, just ZODB) will come as 3rd party CORBA support matures; using ZODB as a data-store for Java apps could be very interesting.
Then you are an idiot if you only buy into marketing materials or old case studies... Zope is used by a bunch of big media companies, the US Navy, NATO, and a bunch of other folks, including the company I work for, a Top-20 US daily newspaper (for many significant and growing portions of our site).
Yes, technocrat.net is not there anymore; perhaps if you paid attention to slashdot, and were not oblovious, you would have figured out why: Bruce Perens moved on to HP, and didn't have time for Technocrat anymore, but it was a good, popular weblog site, often linked to by slashdot.
Read past the brochureware; how hard is: apt-get install zope zope-parsedxml? Or for that matter downloading the source package and compiling? Try it sometime!
and I forgot to mention add ons for an object query language, XPath, and XSLT...
http://www.zope.org
ParsedXML
Read this: it may not change your life, but it might just change your mind. If it does, mod it up ;)
Zope has Enterprise-level scalability and is the closest OS competitor to the most advanced Java app servers, with much, much more and no Java BS.
However, Zope is more advanced than those, and has now:
Improvments being made continually via current Projects:
Zope is open-source, works well with Apache and Squid, has great RDB abilities. It naturally exposes objects for publishing using a strong, easy to use security model. It supports authentication off of LDAP, NT Domains, RADIUS, etc. It's odb catalog features allow the development of applications that use dynamic queries to organize content (and potentially code) objects. It's the strongest suite of features for web-services oriented middleware out there, because it has a several year lead in many respects on the competition! Python is XP, so it has the same advantages as a CLR, provided it is coupled with an XP GUI component model or class library, like PyXPCOM (Mozilla) or wxWindows (Unix, Win32, Mac). Last, but not least, it is easy to develop for.
An open challenge to all the folks trying to develop their own toolkits from scratch (dotGNU, Mono, etc): DON'T - instead use something that is already proven in this problem domain: Zope and Python!
www.zope.org
www.python.org
www.zope.org
I still wonder if there is any case law on "clone" products? I mean, think of diet drugs: how many people create knock-off products of a trademarked "big" product like "metabolife;" I guess what I am asking is if someone could create a product called "metabodrine" (refering to the ephedrine), could they get sued? What about grocery store-brand konckoff names, like "Alpine Mist" for a generic Mountain Dew? Can Pesico sue?
I think this is of high relvance to the open source community, since a lot of people get started in projects when they see the downside to a commercial piece of software that really needs a quality open source competitor. Do these folks have a commercial or fair-use right to even poke fun at the name of a commercial competitor?
Is it free/protected speech?
The way I see it, it is like the difference between a counterfeit and a copy in the art world: fine art counterfeits are meant to fool the world; a copy is simply a reproduction that is clearly NOT the original; differentiated, but certainly referring to the original. Of course, I bet federal judges are more interested in case law than art theory, so I am interested to see what is protected in the case of free speech vs. trademark infringement?
Is there a balancing test provided in federal case law?
...to propietary software. Note: Hopefully this is not off topic, but this (in addition to licensing), seems to be an important issue.
I have noticed that many open source projects are started as an alternative to a closed source product. For, example, from the looks of it, OASIS (an open sourc ad server), seems to be started by folks who wanted a better, open-source alternative to RealMedia's OAS (open AdStream). The name is very similar; likewise, *-GL or *-GLX seems to be the norm for Open-GL clones. From what I read on Slashdot and elsewhere, it seems SGI is more than happy to sue some of those *GL[X]? folks for trademark infringement.
So, I guess, my question is: if you create an open-source project that is designed to compete with a commercial product, and you name is similar (like OASIS vs. OAS), what liabilities might you have in terms of trademark infringement? What is the likelyhood that a trademark holder would have the grounds to sue? Are there any legal tests/thresholds to determine this? Well-known federal case-law?
Seems like BIND is a problem, and DNS in general is crazy. I'm in the process of trying out djbdns (in order to deal with the new BIND problems!) from cr.yp.to.
Check out this: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/namedroppers.html. This is info on how closed the process of dealing with DNS issues already is. The guy that wrote this is the guy that wrote Qmail...
Please mod this up, I think it has important implications for this topic!
UAW v. JOhnson Controls, US Sup. Ct, 1991 - The majority decision struck down fetal protection policies in the workplace which kept all women of child-bearing age from working in blue-collar jobs...
Johnson controls left a really bad loophole (seems like the court fucked up) which would allow discrimination against an employye if a company can prove that there would be a substantial risk of tort liability --oops. BUt it is proof that the union has the clout to FILE A TITLE 87 SUIT AND FOLLOW THROUGH.
haven't done it, but it can be done. the www.ultralinux.org FAQ has more deatils.
Sparc CPUs are not going to match up to the performance you will get for cluster use that you would get out of an alpha or an intel CPU.
That said, they might just kick ass at this price (in theory) for a load-balanced HA web farm...
My bad. Looks like above someone had indicated that the AC200 (because it has a UltraSparc IIe) won't run Linux yet...
The Netra T1 105 will, and these boxes are still available (and still pricey, but you might be able to get a deal on them, as the AC200 will likely replace them).
Sean
The thing about Sun equipment is that, yeah, it's overpriced. But it offers something that not a lot of other vendors can offer in terms of hardware quality. The parts used by Sun are generally of very high quality (and I'm talking the stupid, but important stuff, like cables, power supplies, and PCBs). Sun hardware, while never being a shining star in the CPU department, makes up for it in I/O throughput, if those type of apps are your deal (though CPU intensive stuff is best left to CPUs like IA32/Alpha).
The Netra T1 boxes (at least the 105s, and I assume the 220s) run Linux, have lights-out managment of power via dial-in or terminal server, and come standard with 10kRPM disks, and have dual ethernet, and have plenty of expansion (via the E1 box for 4 extra PCI cards, if you need it).
Overall, the netras might be overpriced, but they are a good choice for folks that have the money (and the people) to use them in the right situation.
Terminal
- or -
Linux+Minicom+Rollover cable
- or -
Terminal Server (Computone, Cisco, Lightwave Comm)...
They all work fine with Netras... the T1 models have LOM, which is nice if the boxes are remote, because you can telnet to your terminal server on the correct port for the serial console (Netra serial port A) and type "poweron" to power them up, then get a console Login or OpenBoot.
The T1 105s are good boxes; just slightly lesser than the T1 AC200 (same box with 440 MHz cpu and only up to a gb of RAM). Get them before they are gone; that might be a very good deal. They are not a bad box to run Linux on either...
Sean
At other newspapers, intranets handle everything from archives to graphic information--and now, editorial systems. The advantage? By doing these things with a standard Internet browser and protocols, everyone can share information despite all the varied software and platforms found in a typical media company.
This is not an entirely new concept. In a paper presented in April at the Seventh World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Vlad Ionesco, then a researcher with KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, reported on a Swedish daily that has operated since June 1997 on an intranet-based production system.
The intranet for the 67,000-circulation, two-edition, six-day newspaper manages everything from tracking the work of individual compositors and designers to page scheduling. The system accepts messages from QuarkXPress about page status (through a QuarkXTension) and from other production equipment. Written in Java, a language that can run on almost any computer, it also enables variety of production reports.
Content Management+Editorial+Workflow+Publishing? Newspaper editorial systems do this already; for example, the DewarView system from Harris, which is a prepress system that uses a database to manage versions of documents created using a MS Word-based editing environment for publishing. Other pre-press systems, I can't recall which at this point (but there are dozens of them), have builtin workflow managment systems. This is nothing new. Seriously, take a good look at products on the exposition floor being demoed at any major publishing conference, such as NEXPO (newspapers), etc, and you will see tons of vendors selling this sort of stuff.