Deep Dive: Rebasing vs. Backporting

Background Impetus Recently, I saw a discussion was started, asking about the importance of the operating system on the LinkedIn OpenStack group: Ubuntu can overtake Red Hat in private clouds because the OS doesn’t really matter I found the conversation wildly interesting because several people expressed reasons for why they think the operating system does

Open Source vs. Proprietary Software in the Supply Chain

Background Open Source Software Proprietary Software have very different supply chain mechanics. Programmers, Architects, and Systems Administrators need to understand the long term impact of leveraging Open Source software versus Proprietary Software. For as long as I have been programming, it has been common for programmers to leverage libraries of code. Historically, these libraries were

A Practical Introduction to Docker Containers

Background Why Docker has quite an amount of buzz around it today because it makes so many things easy that were difficult with virtual machines. Docker containers makes it easy for Developers, Systems Administrators, Architects, Consultants and others to quickly test a piece of software in a container; much quicker than a virtual machine, and

Software Collections Quickstart

As I discussed in an article entitled Red Enterprise Linux Release Speed, developers sometimes have a problem with how slow Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux releases new versions of software. Well, the good news is, Software Collections are here. Software Collections provide Red Hat Enterprise Linux users with newer versions of programming languages and server daemons

Learning Django with OpenShift

Background The goal of this article is use the OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) as a learning platform for Django. Most of the technical articles out there about running Django on OpenShift assume the user already understands how to administer Django environments and projects. This article is written from the perspective of someone who

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Release Speed

Background Recently, I came across an article entitled: 5 Reasons Not to Use CentOS. While I actually disagree with all five points from a technical debate standpoint, I think this article is really the result of a few pain points that some developers express when talking about enterprise editions of Linux. Working as a technology

CentOS Post Mortem & Analysis

Background I manage the crunchtools lab and the infrastructure for this blog similar to a development data center. I have a rigorous weekly checklist, which includes optionally applying operating system patches as they are available. I do not perform the updates every week because of time constraints, but when I do, I patch all of

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) & Identity, Policy, Audit (IPA)

Background In my ever evolving lab, it came time to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEV) with Identity, Policy, Audit (IPA).There were a few caveats and searching Google didn’t help, so hopefully this article can save you some time. Integrating the two was fairly straitforward. The biggest challenge was finding a quick and easy way

RHEL6 and Cisco WRVS4400N Networking

Background This weekend I decided to upgrade my home network with a Cisco WRVS4400N wireless router. Like a typical router it can provide standard wireless services WPA2, DHCP, etc, but the this model also provides support for four distinct VLANs and four distinct SSIDs. This has allowed me to create separate networks for work, play,