System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.
If you’ve missed it like I did, RFC 6885 has been published recently. Â It introduces four additional status codes for the HTTP protocol. Â The codes are:
Here is a blog post that gives a nice summary of purpose for each of the new status codes.
Fedora 16 finalized the migration of the system start-up from SysVinit to Systemd. Â The old commands still work, but as with any other new system, it is recommended that you get used to the new way of doing things. Â I suspect, eventually, the old commands will get dropped.
If you want to prepare yourself to that day, or if you are just curious about the new way of doing things, Fedora people created a wiki page for you, with a very handy table that shows the old service or chkconfig command, thew new systemctl alternative and a brief description.
I am all for new ways and better software, but on a personal level, I really like “service httpd stop” better than “systemctl stop httpd.service“.
GitHub – the place to host and manage your source code – announced the release of GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise is a self-hosted version of GitHub. What I find the most interesting is the pricing.
GitHub Enterprise is priced at $5,000 per 20 users, per year. It comes with everything you need in one tidy package: code browsing, code review, issue tracking, wikis. No extra software to buy, no extra software to install, no extra software to manage.
The target is not on the disk space (understandable, with your own severs) or private repositories, but on the number of developers. $5,000 per 20 developers per year is $250 per developer per year, or about $20 per developer per month. That’s not too much, especially when compared with the salaries paid to the same developers each month. A fraction of the salary.
So, not only GitHub Enterprise is an excellent option for those companies that cannot use third-party hosting for source code, but it is also a Christmas present for those companies that work on a lot of projects. With private repositories, the price of a regular GitHub organizational subscription can go up pretty fast. With GitHub Enterprise you’d be able to have everything in-house for a tiny fee, compared.
It’ll be interesting to see how well this business will go for GitHub. It sounds viable to me. Convenient and not too expensive. With easy OVF-based installation, that would work on many virtual machines (VMware, VirtualBox, etc), with additional features for enterprise integration (LDAP!), I don’t see why not.
I’ve just learned of yet another great loss – Dennis Ritchie, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 70. It’s difficult to describe his contributions and achievements to non-technical people, but anyone with even a grain of knowledge of computer history and modern affairs can appreciate what this man have done. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia page:
Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).
Ritchie’s invention of C and his role in the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson has placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing. The C language is still widely used today in application and operating system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now well-established precepts of computing.
Ritchie was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for “development of the ‘C’ programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system.”
Thank you Sir for all your hard work. Rest in peace.
Yesterday I received some very good news from the service that makes this website faster for people all around the world – CloudFlare. Â In summary: it is CloudFlare’s first birthday since they went public, and to celebrate this they implemented an extremely easy to setup IPv6 gateway service. Â Anyone using CloudFlare can enable the IPv6 gateway either for the whole domain or for specific hosts, and it only takes a couple of clicks. Â Of course, I’ve done so and used a few testing tools around the web to confirm that my website is now accessible via IPv6 also.
Thank you, CloudFlare! Â Happy birthday! Â And please, by all means, keep doing what you are doing.
Continue reading Happy birthday, CloudFlare! Thank you for IPv6