Robert Pogson

They use Debian GNU/Linux on 12000 machines scattered across the country. At DebConf11 there was a presentation given about how updates to the software are done in a single night remotely. The presentation mentions a rescue system they built in case something goes wrong. They do the normal testing followed by tests on 300 accessible clients and finally the whole set. They have a variety of clients some as small as 256MB RAM and 256MB storage to 4gB RAM. They have some custom packages and they polish the Debian packages to remove all unnecessary bytes like documentation. A messaging system notifies systems updates are available and the clients poll in a staggered and randomized pattern to spread the load out through the night. Systems that are in use 24×7 have a manual polling function. To trap defective installations, watchdog timers grab applications that fail to load and re-install packages in real time. They customize the distributions so that different types of clients and different application groups are all handled by the APT package manager.

This system has been running reliably for more than five years.

Again, this shows the extreme flexibility of Debian GNU/Linux and the reliability that can be achieved even for a nation’s whole healthcare system. These clients handle authentication, billing, medication, drug interactions and physician’s reports. They can function off-line but normally report to central servers. It also shows that what Munich is attempting to achieve can be done in a very complex system. As I have claimed many times, with GNU/Linux all problems are soluble.

Slated.org has a post about finding a cross-site scripting attack from M$’s network. I checked my log, too.

grep ^207.46 access.log > M$.log
grep bingbot M$.log|wc
5467 82005 975524
wc M$.log
8137 154312 1733632 M$.log

So, a lot are bingbot but a lot are not… Someone is still using IE6 there:
grep MSIE\ 6 M$.log|wc
1134 33067 340898
grep MSIE\ 6 M$.log|sed -e s/\ .*$//|sort|uniq|wc
105 105 1481


The most popular story on my blog that M$ read?
grep GET\ /2011/03/15/why-ie6-thrives-in-china M$.log|wc
12 238 2493

Why IE6 Thrives in China
“Back in 2007, IE6 had a large share everywhere. M$ and its friends decided to lean on the government of China to combat illegal copying of M$’s software. They sparked a prosecution that put away an organized criminal outfit for years. The result is that there exist, out there, many millions of CDs of XP with IE6 and no one is updating the version… Talk about unintended consequences. M$ was trying to get everyone to go legal and buy the latest koolaid. Instead they have frozen XP and IE6 in time, creating a generation of users of PCs that are unfamiliar with M$’s current products.”

Chuckle. I could just block their subnet but this is just too much fun. I guess I will have to start reading Slated to see what ticked off M$ so much. Perhaps I am not trying hard enough…

I’ve hated that other OS for more than a decade and I still meet people who also hate it but have not realized GNU/Linux could save them and their PCs from the drudgery/slavery that is Wintel. I was reading a blog post on the similarities between pets with character and GNU/Linux when I came upon a pithy comment: “it finally dawned on me: it’s windows i hate. not computers. and i never reinstalled windows again. not on a tiny partition, not to dual boot in any way, shape or form. i went cold turkey.”

I have installed that other OS a few times and restored from backups since my conversion and I felt disgusted every time. That other OS is just not the right way to do IT. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It works for you.

Unlike the shenanigans with OpenOffice.org and Java, Oracle seems to be promoting use of MySQL. Perhaps they see MySQL as an invitation to use their cash cow of a database after business grows but they actually are giving free lessons in how to use MySQL effectively, including

• a 3 part webcast,
• Debian packages, and
• session management on MySQL Cluster.