Posts tagged Open Source
To Open Source or Not To Open Source?
Dec 8th
At my current day job, I work for a small technology start-up in La Jolla California. We offer web-based solutions for some of the nation’s top banks, and housing lenders. We also provide a database for “closing service” providers, so you can hire people like home inspectors, and exterminators at the best price when selling your house. It’s kind of like the “Orbitz” of the real estate closing market.
Any way, the company is only a few years old, and up until now we are running on a Microsoft BizSpark licensing plan. Now that we’re getting a little older though, and we are using more servers to produce our goods, we need a more robust licensing plan from Microsoft. I decided to go to one of my local VARs to work on some quotes, and what they came back with almost gave my boss a heart attack.
In this post I am strictly going to talk about Microsoft SQL Licensing. Just so you know though, the quote we got for SQL was on top of an already ridiculously high $107K three year quote for server licenses. Before I give you the quote I got for SQL, keep in mind this is only for two physical servers running SQL Enterprise.
So we got our quote from Microsoft, and it was roughly $183K for three years. Yes, for two servers it was almost $200,000! That is because at the time of this writing, they were quoting us based on the number of processors. One of the physicals servers has four processors, and the other has two. Bam! Bend us over for $200K!
On top of that, my VAR is telling me that next year Microsoft is switching to a per-core model of licensing. On my server with four procs, each proc has six cores! On the two proc box, each proc has four cores! Now my boss is starting to hyperventilate.
I’m sorry Microsoft, I know you’re just a mom and pop shop, and you’re just trying to make your way in this crazy world, but $200K is too much to pay for a database. The good news for us is that Microsoft SQL isn’t the only game in town. Good news for my company, I’m not afraid to think outside of the Microsoft box.
After getting that quote, the manager of our dev team and I started talking about moving to an Open Source database solution. First he said MySQL, but since they’re owned by Oracle now they have more strict licensing. I’m suggesting PostgreSQL.
Never heard of it? Here’s a description from their About page:
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
Best of all, PostgreSQL provides all of their Enterprise features absolutely free under a Liberal Open Source License! With something like this we can lower our overhead, and use those cost savings to improve our bottom line.
We will have to no doubt do some serious coding changes to make sure our data is compatible with PostgreSQL, but I think in the long run, the cost savings of switching to open source will outweigh the work to get there.
What do you think? Move to an open source database? Stick with Microsoft and suck up the cost? What’s your argument for or against? Let us know in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
Open Source E-Mail Encryption
Dec 21st
“…Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?…” -Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP
Of course it doesn’t, it simply means you value your privacy.
PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don’t want “The Man” reading your e-mails, and neither do I.
There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.
If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.
If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.
“So ya ya ya, yackity smackity… where do I download this fantastic software?”
I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:
Enjoy!
Written by El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power
Confessions of a dude quiting Microsoft Cold Turkey.
Oct 16th
A little while back I read an article about Open Source – Still afraid of Open Source?
This was an article from ItToolbox detailing an office switch over to being Microsoft Free @ work and loving it. The first article was great (see link above) but the followup with all the programs he is using as M$ alternatives – Is just icing on the cake…(mmmm cake.)
Open Source cake… Here is an excerpt that caught my eye that I wanted to share with you:
I have now been Microsoft-Free at work for about 7 weeks. I have also found solutions for almost all of the initial hurdles I encountered in the first week.
Here is the list:
Email – I now have Thunderbird working flawlessly as my email client in sync with Exchange. I do need to talk to the Exchange admin to change a setting on the Exchange Server so I can use the Calendar functionality with Sunbird. I am currently use Webmail for my calendar.
Office – Open Office has worked well with Word, Power Point, Excel, and Adobe documents. I can use Wine to install Visio on my Ubuntu desktop. This doesn’t allow me to be totally Microsoft-Free but there is no answer for Visio’s proprietary format that I am aware of. This is not an issue with Open Source, the problem is that Microsoft doesn’t use an open standard for
their Visio product. Open Office Draw works fine for creating new drawings but can’t import Visio documents saved in Visio format. I also downloaded OxygenOffice Professional that gives me the much needed templates and clip art that Open Office was missing.Browser – I have been using Firefox at work for years so this a no brainer.
Printer – I do have one unresolved issue. I have an old HP Laserjet (about 8 years old). Although I can see the driver I can’t get the printer to work. I have not invested a ton of time trying to fix it.Before all of the Microsoft defenders start slamming me, let me put my disclaimers out.
My goal of this article is to prove that people can be productive at work without the need of Microsoft software. I am not saying that because I can be productive that everyone should abandon Microsoft and start a project to implement Linux corporate wide. However, I do recommend to those who are open to exploring alternatives that they should start a small pilot project with a handful of desktop users. I think a 5-10 person pilot with Ubuntu or Mepis would be a great way to learn about the opportunities and challenges that an Open Source OS resents.
This is low risk and high return.
A pilot like this will give your IT shop an opportunity to try out alternatives without disrupting the day to day business.When I first started my experiment I was trying to keep it a secret out of fear of attacks from angry Microsoft worshipers (especially from the admins and desktop support). What I am finding out is that most of the folks that I was hiding from are sick and tired of supporting Windows and are proponents of Linux. Several of them are using Linux at home. One of the guys I talked to has Vista and XP installed on his laptop. He swaps out the hard drive when switching between OS’s. He is less then impressed with Vista and complains about the slow boot time (2 times slower then XP).
I recently moved to a new office and a desktop guy saw my Ubuntu desktop when I was moving. I expected an ear full but instead the guy said he fully supports a move to Ubuntu and wished the company would move in that direction.
These stories are coming from Microsoft certified engineers who have spent years supporting Microsoft tools. These stories are not coming from anti-Microsoft people who worship Linux.
Open Source E-Mail Encryption
Aug 11th
“…Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?…”
-Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP
Of course it doesn’t, it simply means you value your privacy.
PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don’t want “The Man” reading your e-mails, and neither do I.
There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.
If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.
If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.
“So ya ya ya, yackity smackity… where do I download this fantastic software?”
I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:
Enjoy!
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo
Why my new favorite web browser is FLOCK
Apr 14th
I was a hard core Netscape user before the days of FireFox and before that I was all about IE4 . (Sorry for the re-run but Kayla didn’t let us sleep this weekend!) So I have realized change is good and you live and you learn. So when I heard about Flock, I decided to give it a go. For you Face-bookers. Flickr’ers and Bloggers you can take advantage of the built in blog editor, Facebook galore in your sidebar and the ability to view yours and your friends photo streams right from Flock. Its neat, has a cool GUI. Flock is Fire Fox like but quicker and customized for what I do. I really dig it so far.
Oh did I mention it not only uses existing Firefox plugins but has its own as well??
This truly is the social web browser. There are downfalls to parts of it like no image uploading using their blogger interface but hey, this is only a beta. It does show integration with the top blogging software and has lots of new stuff I will be exploring throughout the week. If you want to give Flock a try you can grab it here.
From their website:
Flock is a social web browser based on the open source project Mozilla. It can be called a social browser, because of its tight integration with many social networking and social media services. Changing the purpose of a browser from a non-integrated window into the web to a more participatory portal to your favorite interactive sites, Flock seeks to gain significant market share by bringing your favorite social applications one step closer.
With Flock users can do many community involved activities such as uploading photos directly to Photobucket and Flickr, accessing news aggregation services, or using blogging tools. A full list of social media/networking extensions for Flock can be found here.
Can I Replace Telnet With Open SSH on Windows?
Feb 13th
For those of you out there still living in the dark ages, and still using Telnet on Windows because you haven’t found a more viable alternative (You know who you are) We have some good news for you!
Maybe you haven’t decided to switch to a more secure solution because you use Windows Servers and Windows hasn’t adopted using SSH.
Maybe you think SSH is only for Unix/Linux.
Well, your excuses are no longer good here sonny boy. If you haven’t heard there is an OpenSSH port for Windows. Now you can still use the terminal remote access method, but you won’t be sending your login credentials and important information across the wire in plain text.
OpenSSH provides full support for SSH/SCP/SFTP. So what are you waiting for? Download OpenSSH and secure your servers.
As we always say at Asktheadmin.com The Safer the better! If we don’t have to send our credentials as plain text, we are all for it. After all we do know how to use a SNIFFER!
From Their Website:
OpenSSH for Windows
OpenSSH for Windows is a free package that installs a minimal OpenSSH server and client utilities in the Cygwin package without needing the full Cygwin installation. This is similar to the package formerly available from NetworkSimplicity.
The OpenSSH for Windows package provides full SSH/SCP/SFTP support. SSH terminal support provides a familiar Windows Command prompt, while retaining Unix/Cygwin-style paths for SCP and SFTP.
Catch the download page here. [Via SourceForge]
