Oracle Cold Call

rthomson Leave a comment

I just received a cold call from Oracle moments ago. I’m actually a bit shocked to be honest.

Let’s describe my relationship with Oracle for a moment:

  • In seven years as a sysadmin, I’ve never had a business relationship with Oracle
  • I’ve never run an Oracle product in any of my shops
  • I’ve never directly or indirectly inquired about Oracle products with Oracle or their resellers
  • I’ve never once feigned interest in anything Oracle has done until the day they bought Sun Microsystems

So what was the cold call about? They wanted to sell me on Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM. They were targeting our RedHat (well, CentOS) installations and wanted to get a foot in the door for their virtualization product (Xen) Thanks, but seriously… No thanks!

I’ve been approached by vendors before at trade shows or expos or even via existing reseller relationships but this out of the blue cold call is entirely new to me. I can ignore the fact that Oracle’s representative had less than stellar English skills. That’s not paramount, although it made for lengthy repetitions where it otherwise wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s that cold call tactic that has me fired up! Are they seriously trolling my employer’s public directory in which my name and number is listed to see if anything bites?

Overall, I’m really turned off by Oracle’s slimy cold call tactics. Please don’t call again, Oracle. Your rebranded-and-slightly-modified RHEL and Xen clones be damned!

Is Ubuntu Ready for the Enterprise?

rthomson 1 Comment

Yep, the title is click bait intended to grab attention… well as much of click bait as anything on techslaves.org can be (which is decidedly not very much) but I’ve just been pretty frustrated with Ubuntu as a client OS recently.

There are two really annoying and critical bugs that have been sitting around, unresolved for too long. One revolves around the NFS client. Apparently there was a regression in the mainline kernel at version 2.6.27 that causes NFS lockup/freeze. Both 10.04 and 10.10 have been affected but Ubuntu has yet to release the fix although it’s been available since august in the mainline kernel. The second bug revolves around Network Manager and autofs maps in LDAP. Basically, you have to get Network Manager to “autofs reload” every time it brings up or down the network interface. No big deal as this can be scripted, but I would really expect an official fix for this.

Ok, so it’s not Ubuntu’s fault there was a mainline kernel regression regarding NFS client code and it’s not Ubuntu’s fault that Network Manager behaves the way it does. However, I do expect a Linux vendor that considers themselves ready for the Enterprise to be able to backport critical kernel fixes so that their users don’t have to sit around waiting with their thumbs up their asses until the fix makes it’s way into an official kernel release and then into an Ubuntu kernel update. As for the autofs maps in LDAP/Network Manager issue, I would not only expect an enterprise ready distribution to have tested this functionality before release but also that once it’s reported that a real, official fix released quickly that everyone can use instead of having to follow bug report comment suggestions to get things working.

I realize Ubuntu is mainly a desktop OS. That’s ok. But all this “Ubuntu is ready for the Enterprise!!! GO CANONICAL!!!!” stuff simply can’t be justified when two official releases in a row come up with show-stopping bugs and there still isn’t a fix nor an official recommended workaround.

</rant>

I’m in z-push Limbo

rthomson Leave a comment

Sparked by the purchase of a new phone with Internet connectivity and native support for push email (ableit with ActiveSync), I decided to see what I could do about pushifying the IMAP server at work.

We run Dovecot 1.1 with a MySQL backend and Postfix for MTA duties. Everything requires both TLS and SSL for authentication and everything requires authentication except for sending mail from the local subnet. It works pretty well. I never touch the thing anymore, it just runs. However, it doesn’t support push email and it certainly doesn’t support ActiveSync. So I went looking for something that could do push email to my spankin’ new phone.

I was surprisingly happy to discover z-push, an open source, standalone ActiveSync implementation in PHP. Well hot damn!

I initially installed the latest stable release, but then quickly tried the SVN trunk for any potential fixes that have yet to make it out to the stable release because I wasn’t having much success. After a few simple problems got resolved and I was updated to the SVN trunk things started to work… kind of. The initial sync takes forever! I didn’t have the patience to wait for all my mail to download because it appeared to be taking several minutes per email. The folder list loaded right up and my nearly empty inbox too but any folder with more than a few messages was taking forever to sync. Not to mention the apache server started to churn CPU pretty hard on the server. Also, it seemed the sync would only even start to work if I had “No Limit” selected on the iPhone for history of emails to sync. Maybe the large volume initial sync by using “No Limit” is just too taxing and that’s why it’s brutally slow but I kept getting “Cannot Get Mail – The connection to the server failed.” on my iPhone if I selected any option besides “No Limit”.

On top of that, push didn’t work!

I’ll keep plugging away at it next week, maybe post on the z-push forums to see if I can get this figured out. Cheers for now.