Showing headlines posted by dcparris

James Courtier queried the Linux Kernel mailing list on the feasibility of restoring the kernel ring buffer after a reset. He proposed simply writing the ring buffer data redundantly to memory in the hope that not all RAM is erased at boot time, allowing the buffer to be reconstructed. The kernel ring buffer is typically viewed with the dmesg command. Referring to the method of collecting data from an oops through a serial connection, James explained, "the main advantage of something like this would be for newer motherboards that are around now that don't have a serial port." An existing solution to this problem is usingkexec to boot a special lightweight kernel after a crash to collect a kernel crash dump.

The general consensus to James' query was that data written to RAM before a reset will not be available after, though exactly how much of the RAM is overwritten was debated. Kexec author Eric Biederman explained, "clearing the memory can be done at full memory bandwidth which can happen in seconds. On systems with ECC you need initialize all of the check bits so some kind of write to memory needs to happen." He then went on to note, "in practice a reset does not clear the memory and only a few bits tend to get flipped." Andi Kleen offered an alternative solution, "define a generic interface that allows drivers to register memory storage handlers. Add a entry into the oops die and panic notifiers that saves the kernel log into these backends." As an example, Andi suggested that video drivers could make available a small portion of video card RAM which could be used to preserve crash data across reboots.

Novell president and chief operating officer, Ron Hovsepian believes the company’s new Linux desktop, based on Suse Linux 10.0, has made Novell an enterprise player while its competitor Red Hat has been marginalised for ignoring the space.

Is Hovsepian taking a misinformation note from Ballmer? I thought Fedora Core was the testing version of Red Hat. I could be wrong; I'm human after all.

SourceForge.net's community has spoken: its favourite open source application is the Azureus Bittorrent client. The results of the 2006 SourceForge.net's Community Choice Awards, announced late last week, saw two South African open source projects nominated, but not placing in the top three.

Toulouse, Oberhaching – The Letux project is happy to announce the first release of its commercial distribution of free software, aimed at off-the-shelf handheld devices.

Until furter notice, don't trust the Address Bar in IE, it lies like a rug. Plus: Critical patches coming Tuesday from Microsoft.

O.k., I think it's time for a different perspective on Internet Explorer. I suggest Microsoft ditch Internet Explorer and ship Windows Vista with Firefox. That may be a bitter pill for them to swallow, but at least their users will be safer - or at least as safe as you can be on a system that relies too heavily on remote procedure calls. - dcparris

Some organizations, in spite of their best efforts, are not able to attract high-caliber IT personnel. In the increasingly competitive world of business, IT plays a critical role in the success of the enterprise. Failing to attract highly skilled IT employees takes a competitive toll over time.

Sunday, April 09, 2006: iWave Systems, an embedded systems design company from Bangalore, has announced its new design, the iW-RainboW-Giga, at the ICT Pavilion, HongKong Electronics Fair 2006.

Microsoft said last week it would remove the price tag from its Virtual Server and begin offering the virtualization technology as a free download to Windows users.

Entrepreneur has a software suite to help companies build their own service-oriented architectures

Red Hat, Inc., a vendor of open source products to the enterprise, has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire JBoss, a vendor of open source middleware.

Merrill Lynch analyst Kash Rangan said the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco has reinforced his firm’s conviction on the Linux open source market, and that what’s good for Linux is also good for leading open-source provider Red Hat.

ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Xchange Network announced that their advanced collaboration software, XC Connect, is now available in a secure hosted environment. With XC Connect, users can seamlessly share calendar, contact, and task management data between and across familiar desktop applications such as Microsoft(R) Outlook(R), Microsoft Entourage(R), iCal, Mac Address Book, and Novell(R) Evolution -- whether running on Windows, OS X, or Linux operating systems.

In conference sessions and hallway discussions at LinuxWorld Expo last week, open source users swapped strategies for hardening Linux servers and building open source applications that can repel hackers, stand up to regulators and survive the sc

I had a comment on the blog entry on waiting for official IE patches or not. The comment asked this: why don't people just switch to Firefox? This isn't to say that Firefox doesn't also sometimes have security issues (it does) but there are advantages to using a browser that isn't as tied into the operating system as Internet Explorer.

LONDON, April 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Frost & Sullivan's 2006 European Technology Leadership of the Year Award in digital simulation for prototyping and manufacturing processes goes to the France-based ESI Group for its ProCAST 2005 software for foundry simulation. ProCAST 2005 has demonstrated exemplary success in streamlining casting process design. Based on proven finite element technology, ProCAST 2005 provides a complete solution for a wide range of casting processes including high-pressure die casting, investment casting, shell casting, low pressure die casting, sand casting, gravity die casting, tilt pouring and the lost foam process.

International Judges Reward Innovative Character of the Leading Open Source Collaboration Server

April 10th, 2006: One of the world's most popular message transfer agents is going Open Source. A surprise, as most people thought it was already.

SYNOPSIS: World's largest open and supported distance learning university standardizes on SQL Anywhere for relational databases course.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet Bundled With Linksys Wireless Routers and Gateways To Create New "Go Wireless at Home" Solution

Microsoft stunned LinuxWorld attendees last week by pledging to support Linux virtual machines on its Virtual Server and revealing free virtual machine additions for Red Hat Linux and Novell SUSE Linux. It wasn't the only dogs-playing-with-cats kind of moment last week: Apple offered up software to let Windows run on Intel-based Macs.