Open Source Geek

Google are developing a new operating system, aimed squarely at the netbook market. The ethos behind it, like with most things at Google in the last 12 months, is speed – they want it to take no more than 7 seconds to boot.

Once logged in you will only have access to a web browser – the browser will be Googles Chrome Browser, as you may expect. There will be no desktop or other apps, everything will be done from the browser. They are going to build in functionality for  working offline, for when you are not connected to the net.

Many people, even in the Linux world, seemed to be opposed to this but I can only see it as a good thing. Under the hood its based on Linux, Google have said they have been working with Ubuntu in this respect. Google have stated that Chrome OS will be Open Source and released the current dev version on Chromium.org. From my point of view I think its going to be good for the Linux platform. The improvement in boot speed and hardware drivers alone can only be good.

I really dont know why Google seem to have so much opposition. I understand peoples concerns about a company that knows so much about its users but they are the only company to have a “do no evil” moto. Whats more Google are also a very transparent company, the information that they have on you can easily be found and deleted if you so wish. For example, if you want to view or delete your web history, just go here and do so.

I do wonder how many people know about the Data Liberation Front, a team of Google engineers who work solely on making sure that you can easily get your data in or out of as many Google products as possible, as simply as possible.

I really do feel that Google are a friend of open source. Their Android phone OS is Open Source and while I know there was some concern over their reation to the Cyanogen mod, when you read into it, you can understand their point of view – plus they worked with the Cyanogen guy to come up with a work arround.

Also, lets not forget the Google Summer of Code. Each year they make this great contribution to Open Source. Im sure its not entirely altruistic but never the less it is a very valuable contribution.

Recenlty Google seemed to cause some more negative ripples with their aquistion of the Etherpad Project. I think anyone who has tried both Wave and EtherPad will understand why Google wanted Etherpad. Etherpads real time document editing is much better than the current Google Wave client. So the Etherpad team have been pulled off Etherpad and put to work on Wave. The controvesy was not so much about this but that the fact they closed Etherpad, a product that many people use and find invaluable. They gave people about a months notice to trasition away from it. The thing I will say about this is that as soon as they became aware of the communities concern, they re-examined the decision and have re-opened EtherPad – in a matter of days. They then said, in a very open way “what were we thinking”.

UPDATE: They have also released the sourcecode for Etherpad under the Apache Licence

This brings me on to Google Wave.I know that people who have been able to try this out are not that overwhelmed with it. What I will say is that its very early days in this products development. I would also so that Wave is all about the protocol underneath that lets you collaborate on document editing and the current Wave client is just the first implementation of a client – there will be other clients. In other words, think of Wave as SMTP and the current client as Outlook Express. There will be better clients

My main point about Wave though is how Google have gone about this. They said, from the outset, that they wanted to create an open protocol, just like SMTP. They also built federation in and they have also desinged it to be extensible, so that people can develope their own plugins. This shows that they are a company that just seem to get it. The understand why Openess is important.

So whats the point of this article, well what Im really saying is give Google a break. Yes they have a lot of information about us and its right to be concerned but their every action to date seems to have been honorable. Lets save the paranoia for companies that treat us and our data appallingly on a daily basis

I’d love to hear your opinion of this subject, please leave a comment or use the contact form

OSG

Some of you may have noticed that this site was down for a little while. It seems my hosting company were victims of a massive incursion by malicious hackers and, at the time of writing, my original server still hasn’t been restored after 24 hours downtime.

While you have to feel sorry for them and all the extra work that they have been doing to rectify the issue now is a good time to go back over that age old question. Do you have a DR plan? Are you backing up, is your documentation up to date, have you tested a restore? Luckily I was in the process of documenting my setup when this happened and so my pain hasn’t been as great as I should imagine some others are experiencing

I think its also worth mentioning that, as I had no ETA of when my sites would be restored (or even if they could be restored by the provider) I moved everything into Amazons EC2 offering. This seems like an ideal platform for just such an occurrence, if you dont know how long your main site will be down you can very quickly get servers back on-line and then when and if your original platform is ready you can move back and you will only have had to pay for the hours/bandwidth that you have used.

If your on-line presence is important to you, and I cant think of many businesses that this doesn’t apply to, I would encourage you to look at adding something like Amazons Cloud offering to your DR strategy – and don’t forget to test, remember you only pay for the hours that you use and this is from as little as $0.10 an hour

OSG

Ive been a cloud *client* for quite some time, firstly with Gmail and Google docs, later with Dropbox and Amazons S3 storage (via Jungledisk). I’m also a fan of virtualisation and, while listening to a recent FLOSS Weekly netcast with Ian Pratt, I found out that Amazons EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is indeed based on Xen. Now I had an interesting chat with one of the guys from Citrix recently also, I decided it was time I took a look at Amazons offering.

EC2 offers you the ability to “stand up” multiple servers almost instantly, configure and run them and only ever pay for the number of hours they are up. A server instance starts at $0.10 an hour – this is for their “small Linux instance”, which is 1.7gb ram and 350gb disk space. They also offer Windows instances which are slightly more, but still amazingly low priced. This makes it extremely cost effective to use for large proof of concept work or for full time production. Anyway, let me walk you through my first steps in/on Amazons cloud.

First of all you have to have an Amazon account, as I already had one all I needed to do was to “sign up” for the EC2 service (remember you pay for what you use in server/hours). Two clicks later and Im ready to go.

In my eagerness to get started I overlooked the “Getting Started” video on the front page and decided to see how for I could get without reading the documentation. If you want the short answer – I had my first box up and running in less than 5 minutes. For the more detailed version read on,

There are a couple of steps to complete before you get you box up and running and the interface holds your hand nicely through these. Im impressed with the level of security that is setup right out of the box. The two steps you need to do (apart from choosing your instance) are both security related. Firstly you need to select or create the security group – in other words the firewall settings. There are suggested entries there already and customising it is very simple.

Secondly you will need to generate a keypair that you will need to administer the boxes. Again the wizard walks you through this step also, Once those two steps are done and you have chosen your instance type, you click on create and after a minute or so you can see your first instance change its status to starting.

Cool, lets see the console then.

The first instance I chose to create was a Fedora box, so when I hit the “Console” button I was provided with details on how to connect to the instance. For now, you connect to the DNS name that Amazon give you, which maps to a local IP address within Amazons cloud. You can also rent “Elastic IP” addresses for $0.01 per hour, I decided the funky DNS name and private IP was fine for my testing. So I SSH to the DNS name, referencing the file that contains your keypair. The provide the exact syntax that you need to use but its pretty straightforward. You are not prompted for a password as you are using, the more secure, keypairs. And thats it – you have a bash console your box.

I yum installed an Apache server and hit the page in my browser and there was the default webpage. I then went on to setup a Wordpress install jas i would on a hosted server. Everything went to plan

As my first hour approached its end I shut down the instance and went out. Upon my return I wanted to try a Windows host. Interestingly the previous instance had disappeared. It seems that if you shutdown an instance, for a certain period of time, the diskspace is reclaimed. If you want to keep instances around when they are shutdown you can do this by using Amazons EBS (Elastic Block Store) which is $0.10 per gb per month.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I decided to try a Windows box next. I selected the Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 instance. This time the firewall settings suggested were as follows

• Remote Desktop (3389)
• HTTP (80)
• SQL Monitor (1434)

I accepted the defaults but if I was going to use it “in production” I would close the SQL port. I clicked the button to fire up the instance and a minute or two later it changed its status to “running”. Hitting the console button this time brings up a box explaining how to connect to the server, namely via RDP. Again security is there right out of the box because the local Administrator password is randomly set and then encrypted in the instances log file. To get to this password you have to right click on the instance in Amazons control panel and select decrypt password. You are prompted to paste in your key to a dialog box and a few seconds later your password is displayed.

Pointing your RDP client to the DNS name of the instance and using these credentials gets you logged onto your server – its as easy as that. This would make testing things like large scale Exchange setups, that involve many servers talking to each other, really easy and you wouldn’t have to stump up for the hardware required to do this in your own lab.

This (EC2) is just one of the services that Amazon offer. I’ve been very impressed with my first steps in the cloud, things couldn’t have been any easier to get up and running and I’m pleased to see that security has been part of the core design. When you consider that the underlying technology is Open source then I think its something we (the Open Source community) can be proud of.

OSG

Update:
There is talk on the net about Amazon open sourcing its cloud tools – this would great news and very beneficial for The Cloud as a whole. So nice to see people aren’t trying to lock down or lock you into their offerings – lets hope it turns out to be true

More Screenies

Edit:
Sorry about the lost screenshots, this was due to a major incident at my previous hosting provider. At least I had the databases backed up :-/