Monthly Archives: June 2018
4MLinux: More Than Just Another Lightweight Distro | Linux.com
I don’t want to get up on yet another “Here’s another lightweight Linux distribution to revive your aging hardware” soapbox. So many distributions make that promise, and most of them do an outstanding job of fulfilling their mission statement. Also, many of those distributions are fairly similar: They offer a small footprint, work with 32-bit systems, and install a minimal amount of software dedicated to the task of helping you get your work done as best a lightweight operating system can do.
But then there’s 4MLinux. This particular take on the lightweight Linux distribution is a different beast altogether. First and foremost, 4MLinux doesn’t include a package manager. That’s right, the only way you can install packages on this distribution is to do so from source (unless you install the limited number of packages from within the Extensions menu (more on that in a bit). That, of course, can lead to a dependency nightmare. But if you really give it some thought, that could be a serious plus, especially if you’re looking for a distribution that could be considered an ideal desktop for end users with specific use cases. If those users only need to work with a web browser, 4MLinux allows that while preventing users from installing other applications.
What’s in a name?
The name 4MLinux comes from a strong focus on the following “Ms”:
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Maintenance — 4M can be used as a system rescue Live CD.
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Multimedia — 4M offers full support for a large number of image, audio and video formats.
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Miniserver — 4M includes DNS, FTP, HTTP, MySQL, NFS, Proxy, SMTP, SSH, and Telnet servers.
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Mystery — 4M includes a collection of classic Linux games.
It is the inclusion of servers that makes 4MLinux stand out above the lightweight competition. On top of that, the distribution goes out of its way to make the managing of these servers pretty simple (more on that in a bit).
Let’s install 4MLinux and see take a look at what it has to offer.
Installation
The installation of 4MLinux is a bit more complicated than many other distributions in its class. When you boot the live CD/USB, you must first create a partition it can be installed on. To do that, click the start button > Maintenance > Partitions > GParted. I installed 4MLinux as a VirtualBox VM. In order to do that, I had to first create a partition table on the virtual drive. Do this by clicking Device > Create Partitions Table (Figure 1).
Once the partition table has been created, click the New button and create a partition that can house 4MLinux (Figure 2).
With the partition created, go to Start > 4MLinux > Installer. This will open a terminal window. When prompted, hit the Enter key on your keyboard and then select the partition to use for the installation (Figure 3).
You will then need to answer two questions:
After you type “y” to start the installation, 4MLinux will install (a process that takes less than 5 minutes). When you see “Done” presented, close the window and reboot the system. Upon reboot, you will be prompted (in a text-only window) to create a root password (Figure 4).
Creating a standard user
Naturally, you don’t want to run 4MLinux as a standard user. Of course, you won’t find a GUI tool for this, so open the terminal window and issue the command adduser USERNAME (Where USERNAME is the name of the user). After typing (and verifying) a password for the new user, you can log out and log back in as that user.
The Desktop
4MLinux employs Joe’s Window Manager (JWM). It’s actually quite a lovely little desktop, one that includes all the features you’d want for easy interaction. There’s a panel, a start menu, launchers, desktop icons, a dock, a system tray, a mouse menu (Figure 5), and, for good measure, Conky (the lightweight, themeable system monitor).
Applications
Out of the box, you won’t find much in the way of productivity tools. And even though there isn’t a package manager, you can install a few tools, by way of the Start > Extensions menu. Click on that menu and you’ll see entries like LibreOffice, AbiWord, GIMP, Gnumeric (Figure 6), Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, Skype, Dropbox, FileZilla, VLC, Audacious, VirtualBox, Wine, Java, and more.
Click on one of those entries and a terminal window will open, asking if you want to continue. Type y and hit Enter. The package will be downloaded and installed. Once installed, the package is started from the same Extensions menu entry used for installation.
Miniserver
Let’s talk about that Miniserver menu entry. If you open that menu, you’ll find entries for StartAll, StopAll, Settings, Tests, and MiscTools. If you click the StartAll entry, all of the included servers will start. Once they’ve started, click on Miniserver > Settings > LAMP. This will open up the default web browser (Chromium) to a page allowing you to select from LAMP Admin, Webmin, or Help. Out of the box, Webmin is not ready to be used. Before you can log into that powerful tool, you must first open up a terminal window and issue the command webmin. This will download and install Webmin on the machine. You’ll have to answer a few questions (Figure 7) and create a password for the Webmin admin user.
Once you’ve installed Webmin, you can click Start > Miniserver > Settings > LAMP and, when presented with the available links, click the Webmin entry. You’ll be required to log in with the user admin and the password you created during the Webmin installation. You can now administer your LAMP server (and quite a bit more) from within an all-too familiar web GUI.
Is 4MLinux for You?
4MLinux is a very intriguing distribution that’s really hard to classify. It offers the best of a few worlds and misses out on the best of others (such as a traditional package manager). It’s one of those distributions that might never wind up your go-to, but it is certainly one you need to experience first hand. And, who knows, you might find this unique flavor of Linux just right for you.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Data Center Tech ‘Graduation:’ What IT Pros Have Learned
As schools around the country hold graduation ceremonies, classic songs like Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” will be sung, played, or reminisced about by students everywhere as they reflect on fond memories and lessons learned in school. Graduation is a symbol of transition and change, a milestone that represents growth, progress, and transformation.
Just as education fosters growth in students, digital transformation drives progress in an organization and ultimately leads to innovations in the data center, but not without a few lessons learned from setbacks and failures.
In the spirit of graduation season, we asked our THWACK IT community to tell us what technology they “graduated” to in 2018. According to the SolarWinds 2018 IT Trends Report, 94% of surveyed IT professionals indicated that cloud and/or hybrid IT is the most important technology in their IT organization’s technology strategy today. But what else have organizations experimented with over the last year? Check out some of the most popular technologies that THWACK community members tell us they have implemented this past year, in their words.
(Image: Nirat.pix/Shutterstock)
Linux dpkg Command Tutorial for Beginners – 8 Examples | Linux.com
If you are on a Debian or Debian-based system (like Ubuntu), there are high chances you might have encountered .deb packages. These are Debian packages, and Linux command line offers built-in commands/tools to deal with this kind of packages. One such tool is dpkg, which we will discuss here in this tutorial.
But before we do that, it’s worth mentioning that all examples in this tutorial have been tested on an Ubuntu 16.04LTS machine.
Linux dpkg command
The dpkg tool is basically a package manager for Debian/Debian-based systems. Following is its syntax:
dpkg ACTIONS
Read more at HowToForge
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Released » Linux Magazine
SUSE has announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (SLES15). It’s a major ‘leap’ not only in terms of the architecture of the operating system, but also the numbering. Thanks to some superstitions in its core markets, SUSE skipped numbers 13 and 14 and jumped to 15. Technically this would have been SLES13.
SUSE calls SLES15 a multimodal operating system that’s designed to cater to both traditional and modern workloads – from data centers to cloud.
“As organizations around the world transform their enterprise systems to embrace modern and agile technologies, multiple infrastructures for different workloads and applications are needed,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE CTO. “This often means integrating cloud-based platforms into enterprise systems, merging containerized development with traditional development, or combining legacy applications with microservices. To bridge traditional and software-defined infrastructure, SUSE has built a multimodal operating system – SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.”
With this release, SLES also accomplishes its modular architecture. Customers don’t have to concern themselves with different versions of SLE for different workloads, there is only one installer; there is only one code-base. Users can install the desired version depending on the workload.
SLES 15 is complemented by two other components from SUSE line of products – SUSE Manager 3.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15, with a focus on helping customers innovate in this era of rapid digital transformation while meeting the needs of multimodal IT.
SUSE said in press releases that the latest release of SUSE Manager delivers new features focused on lowering costs, improving DevOps efficiency, and easily managing large, complex deployments across IoT, cloud and container infrastructures. SUSE Manager also helps customers improve DevOps efficiency and meet compliance requirements with a single tool that manages and maintains everything from edge devices to Kubernetes environments. SUSE Manager makes managing large, complex deployments easier with new extended forms-based UI capabilities.
Software-Defined Storage Products: IT Pro Perspective
Software-defined storage describes storage products in which the storage virtualization separates storage management software from the underlying hardware. In some cases, SDS products may offer storage resource pooling, abstraction, management workflow automation, and artificial-Intelligence (AI)-based resource allocation. SDS may also enable use of commodity hardware.
This article offers insight into some of the top software-defined storage products, according to online reviews by enterprise users in the IT Central Station community. The products reviewed include Dell EMC ScaleIO, HPE StoreVirtual, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, Red Hat Ceph, and StorPool.
What do enterprise IT pros actually think about these products? Here, users offer a balanced view of their benefits and shortcomings.
Vladimir G., infrastructure services system administrator, wrote about the advantages he sees with Dell EMC ScaleIO:
“There is no built-in system for viewing history data, such as volume IOPS. We have to provide graphing by Prometheus and Grafana, which would be a good new feature in ScaleIO. The next good new feature would be moving volumes between different storage pools, e.g., from a SAS pool to a SSD pool. It would be nice to set minimum IOPS per volume, besides just the maximum, to be able to satisfy this demand from customers out of the box, not by calculating number of disks, etc. It would be nice to have better integration with monitoring and other vendor provisioning and orchestration tools. I am aware that this is a hard-to-achieve task, where it is necessary for product not to be proprietary and to become industry standard.”
Joe H., R&D engineer at a tech company, highlighted the product’s benefits:
“The ScaleIO UI has been working with storage for a long time. Therefore, they know how to clearly present any important data, including data flow and each drive’s IOPS/bandwidth, and allow the user to easily monitor bottlenecks and problems, especially the rebuild and rebalance status of child objects. It controls them, as well as maintaining them well.”
He also said if ScaleIO “could introduce a write cache feature, the product would be perfect overall.”
HPE StoreVirtual
Matthew A., system and network administrator at a non-tech company, described what he sees as HPE StoreVirtual’s valuable features: “Ease of carving out storage and the seamlessness behind the scenes of block management. I just let it do its thing. I don’t worry too much about it.”
An IT manager for infrastructure at a government agency who goes by the handle InfraITMgr243 said the product has benefitted his organization:
“StoreVirtual has been real good for us. We started with the original P4300 LeftHand SANs before they became StoreVirtual. What I love about those is the two nodes and the mirroring back and forth, and you can’t lose anything. It’s very solid, and we haven’t really had any trouble with those either. We have a newer StoreVirtual that we’ve connected to one of the C3000 Blade Enclosures and it runs well. We lost a system board once and we lost a couple of servers, but we were able to bring everything back. Equipment-wise, it allows us to do all our work. We’re real happy with that.”
Benoit H., WIS system engineer at a paper and forest products company, offered thoughts on how HPE StoreVirtual could improve: “Features like data deduplication would be great because in the end, this solution requires a lot of raw disk space because of the use of RAID5 on the hardware and RAID1 on the network.”
Philip S., solutions engineer at an insurance company, would like to see a new user interface:
“The user interface needs to be updated. It’s getting kind of long in the tooth, and the user interface makes it look a lot more complex than it actually is to manage, and I think that you can mask a lot of that with a refresh of the user interface. While HPE has created a new HTML5 UI for the HyperConverged 380, it is not available to the rest of the StoreVirtual population.”
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Craig J., storage administrator at a retailer, described the benefits of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for his company:
“The product helps us to manage our storage in a way that allows us to put different frames inside or out of our storage infrastructure and migrate. The benefits are that it speeds up provisioning of the storage across different tiers and allows a small team to manage that function, for many petabytes of data.”
A storage engineer for a healthcare company who goes by the handle StorageEc5c3, also likes the software:
“It gives us a lot of flexibility and ease of management. We have all the tools in one place. We pretty much do all our storage using the Spectrum Virtualize. It makes it really easy for us to manage all our storage. It gives us the flexibility to move things in between these. I think a lot of the benefit is just the ease of use of the tool itself.”
But a storage admin at a financial services firm that uses the handle StorageA62f0 cited drawbacks with the product:
“There is third site replication. Right now, we’re limited in our ability to migrate data between clusters. Like I said, we had to scale wide rather than tall and continue to protect our data while we migrate. Additionally, if we wanted to set up a third site for additional DR, we don’t really have a good option for that.”
Joshua M., technical analyst III at a healthcare company, also cited some shortcomings with Spectrum Virtualize:
“The feature that’s kind of missing is getting us up to the point where we can help the application owners see where their data is at, understand it, and potentially help us breakout. We’ve used easy tiered functions in the pools, so we’re trying to help step that storage down. If they can get visibility somehow into that data, help us further break that down, or better tier and separate out their data, that would be helpful.”
Red Hat Ceph
Anthony D., a senior software engineer, praised the community aspect of Ceph:
“By being open source, Ceph is not tied to the whim or fortunes of any one vendor. The community of Ceph code contributors and admins is large and active. Ceph’s ability to adapt to varying types of commodity hardware affords us substantial flexibility and future-proofing.”
Diego W., founding partner tech lead and DevOps consultant at a tech services company, values Ceph for its reliability. “I have experienced failures and human mistakes. However, Ceph was able to recover automatically the data with a special procedure,” he wrote.
However, Flavio C., senior information technology specialist at a tech consulting company, said he sees room for improvement:
“In the deployment step, we need to create some config files to add Ceph functions in OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Glance). It would be useful to have a tool that validates the format of the data in those files, before generating a deploy with failures.”
George P., systems engineer at a marketing services firm, highlighted a challenge for Ceph:
“Ceph lacks a little bit only in performance. It needs to scale a lot and needs very fast and well-orchestrated/configured hardware for best performance. This not a downside though, it is a challenge. Ceph only improves the given hardware.”
StorPool
Suha O., CEO at a tech company, gave high marks to StorPool:
“StorPool is a software-only solution with practically unlimited expansion capabilities. Its performance is very high. We were able to replace our SSD-only local storage systems without any performance penalty. Its price/performance is very high!”
He also suggested an improvement: “It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete.”
Richard L., a company president, likes StorPool’s manageability: “Managing StorPool is much simpler than our previous storage system, especially having a CLI option which our previous storage system was lacking.”
Maria R., head of IT services operations center at a communications service provider, said a better interface would help. “At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases.”
To learn more about SDS solutions, download IT Central Station’s SDS Buyer’s Guide based on real user reviews.
