Celebrations²

First of all,

1st: congrats to the whole Ubuntu Team for releasing Ubuntu 10.10.(10 10:10). Well done and as always in time.

2nd: congrats to Jono and all people invovled in Severed Fifth: Nightmares By Design. Sounds awesome. Now I'm waiting for the "Singstar: Severed Fifth" Edition for the PS3

News on the FAI and (DC)² Front

I forgot to blog about it, so here are the news:

1. After 10 years the FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) Project got a new home. In former times you found the FAI project on http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai . This URL is not valid anymore (it will be still served for some time though). You find the new homepage of the FAI project now under http://www.fai-project.org/. What is still missing? A wonderful logo for this great project. If you are a fan of automatic operating system deployment and you want to help a Debian Project, please submit your proposals of an FAI logo to the FAI mailinglist (check the homepage!)
2. The day before yesterday Michael Prokop (grml-maintainer and stable release FAI maintainer) released the new FAI 3.4.3 version. Several bugs were fixed and before FAI 3.4.3 reached the Debian Archives, it reached the Ubuntu Archives for Ubuntu Maverick (which will become Ubuntu 10.10.10)

(DC)² is already working with FAI 3.4.3 and in this very moment, I'm working on the Puppet Integration. This is large ammount of work, because it's not just that simple, to provide all necessary bits for a Puppetmaster  Server. I'm doing some infrastructure design work now, and it really looks like that I'm using the latest, greatest software techniques on the market.
That includes Python, Django, a Javascript Toolkit named Qooxdoo, XMLRPC, JSON-RPC, a Message Broker named RabbitMQ, Carrot, Celery, MySQL and CouchDB

I'll write in the meantime an article about what (DC)² actually is, how it will be used in your datacenter environment and why you should start thinking about using it.

Server Hardware of Hewlett Packard which works out of the box with Ubuntu

Canonical and hardware vendors like HP, Dell or IBM are doing hardware certifications of the Ubuntu Server OS.
Well, this page  lists some servers from HP, but actually there are a lot more models which are totally missing, or not in the certification round, but which are working with Ubuntu Server OS (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) out of the box.

So, here is a list of HP Server Models which are working, too:

1. HP BL460/465G5 -> Server Blades for the HP BL3000/BL7000c Chassis, NIC driver+firmware: bnx2 (Broadcom)
2. HP BL460/465G6 -> Server Blades for the HP BL3000/BL7000c Chassis, NIC driver + firmware: bnx2x (Broadcom 10GigE), be carefull with the Ubuntu Server ISO, that's a bug, which should already be fixed.
3. HP BL460/465G7 -> Server Blades for the HP BL3000/BL7000c Chassis, NIC driver + firmware: bnx2x (Broadcom 10GigE), be carefull with the Ubuntu Server ISO, that's a bug, which should already be fixed.
4. HP DL380/385G7 -> 2U Server,NIC driver + firmware: bnx2x (Broadcom 10GigE), be carefull with the Ubuntu Server ISO, that's a bug, which should already be fixed, another thing: SmartArray P410i inside, which means no RAID6 for free, license required

I would like to see those models as well certified, and I would like to please HP to provide updated HP Agent Packages for Debian and Ubuntu for the Supported Releases (LTS Releases).

I don't know if there is a ubuntu wiki page with more server hardware models which are working with Ubuntu OS but are not certified. When there is an interest in such a page, I would create one and you can add your server hardware to this list.

Flattr Proposals for October

This month to be  Flattred:

1. etckeeper - by Joey Hess, a very, very good tool to put your /etc directory under a revision control. Simple, but very helpful. Try it out.
2. The Battle of Wesnoth - I don't have anything to say about this thrilling game. 
3. Again the DPKG Developers...

I think I'll stumble upon more jewels on flattr during the month...