Japz’ stuff

(Or: how do I get my LDIF nice and clean so I only get the objects which actually contain the information I want?)

I was working on a big directory with hundreds of thousands of entries, for which I wrote Access Control Instructions. The only problem was: how do I get those ACIs out of the directory? Of course, first we need an ldif containing the relevant information, in this case:
ldapsearch -x -h localhost -D "cn=Directory Manager" -w password -b dc=example,dc=com aci > aci.ldif


The only problem with this is that this dump turned out to contain every single entry in the directory, so I had tens of megabytes worth of LDIF, for the 25KB of ACIs I actually needed. Here, awk comes to the rescue:
awk 'BEGIN { RS = "dn: " } /aci:/ { print "dn:", $0 }' aci.ldif > filtered-aci.ldif

This only dumps stanzas from the ldif-file which contain “aci:”. Obviously you can use this for any kind of ldif from which you only need objects with a specified attribute. Maybe the mozldap utilities handle this better, but I haven’t investigated.

Short post! For more pictures of this event, see: my Flickr and Francesco Crippa’s Flickr.

It’s back-to-work-day! I got home yesterday, at half past eleven in the evening. The trip back was bit longer, as we had three hours to kill on Frankfurt’s airport. It was also slightly less comfortable, as Air Malta operated the flight from Malta to Frankfurt, and I had significantly less legspace than on Lufthansa flights.

But none of this happened before another interesting two sessions at the Summit. I’ve heard a lot of good things about this guy, so it was time to finally see him doing his job as a Free Software Evangelist! I’m of course talking about Jan Wildeboer, who shared with us an interesting view on Open Source business models (subscription based models), which models work and which don’t. He talked about Sun (or Oracle, whatever, as Jan put it: it’s now Larry’s problem), the CDDL license and why this will not work, and the fundamental requirements for building a succesful business around open source. As a free software enthousiast I was of course already familiar with most of this, but it was explained to us so clearly that it was very good for me, as I can use this in my arguments as well.

Next session was also Jan Wildeboer’s, this time on Open Standards. First defining what open standards are and how they are defined (and why OOXML at this moment is not an open standard). He also told us about the important work he’s doing, lobbying with the European Council and European Parliament, promoting the use of Open Standards. Another very useful presentation: it always starts with awareness, he’s very good at creating awareness, and he gave us the tools to let us do our part. So, good job!

If you ever communicate with your governement in any way, without using open standards, for instance a .doc file attached to an e-mail, please send it back to ask them how you should go about opening this file. They should realize that a government can’t require it’s citizens to buy a copy of Microsoft Office to communicate with them. Ask them how to do this using Linux, and point them at open standards like ODF. Microsoft will be releasing ODF-writing functionality for their Office Suite pretty soon, by the way. But how compliant they will actually be remains to be seen. History is not on their side…

This is a short update after the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit’s second day. We started off with some keynote sessions, or that’s what we thought we would start off with. Instead of listening to a keynote, we found ourselves drumming for almost an hour! It was really fun, and I’d like to acknowledge the folks from Drum Cafe for their inspiring and entertaining show. After this was over, it was time for some serious stuff: Werner Knoblich’s presentation about Red Hat’s last financial year. These numbers looked pretty impressive, but on the other hand: I don’t know too much about that stuff anyway. Half an hour later the audience was handed to Petra Heinrich. I was very honoured that the cloud computing project that I’ve been working very hard on for a long time (LinuxClouds, sorry, it’s in Dutch) was mentioned during her keynote speech as an example of succesful partner collaboration. Petra: thanks! .

After lunch I sat down in the Sattelite Quickstart Lab, which was interesting for me as I had never actually touched the Red Hat Sattelite Server earlier. So I got a quick overview of how the product works, nothing too difficult, but interesting nonetheless. If you want a patch management solution for RHEL, this is it, no question about it. For deployment and configuration management, my personal opinion is that you’re better off using Cobbler (of course RHNSat 5.3 features Cobbler as a deployment backend, so this versatile and powerful deployment backend will be available to RHNSat users soon-ish) and Puppet.

Two senior Fedora engineers installing systems using Cobbler

After this lab I had a quick sit-down with Marco Bussadori, about virtualization. End-result: We might end up looking at InstallFree (comments / experiences?) as a solution to package MS Windows applications for Linux. I’m new to application virtualization, but this looks like an interesting area to explore.

At seven, we were leaving by bus to the off-site dinner. It was a very luxerious place, situated underground. The food was once again excellent, and I had loads of fun at the party afterwards. Some of the guys went to a pub after that, but it was already two o’clock, and if I went, I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now. I’ll have some pictures for you later.

So what’s up next? Unfortunately, the Summit is almost over. But first: Jan Wildeboer about open source business models!

This is just a small update from the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit in Malta. As was to be expected, I don’t really have much time to write these update between the interesting sessions.

Yesterday, we started off with the keynotes. For me, as a from a technical and idealist perspective, the keynotes from Jim Whitehurst and Scott Crenshaw were of particular interest. Call me a hippie, but I think it’s totally awesome that this company can build a financially rock solid company on purely open source products without compromising any of the essential Free Software Freedoms (look at this Microsoft deal for instance, they got the very best deal possible for the free software community). That’s what I call a full commitment. I met a few people new to the open source business, and I see how these events go a long way towards winning the hearts and minds of people who are not as convinced of the free software model as we are.

So, after these keynotes I went for the technical tracks for the rest of the day. After the coffee break we started off with the RHEL roadmap update. After lunch we had a session on cloud computing, where using the Amazon Elastic Cloud was demonstrated to us from a user perspective. The user perspective was quite refreshing for me, as I’m implementing the infrastructure behind Stone-IT’s LinuxClouds project. After this session we had another virtualization session, this time on KVM (the linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and why it’s architecture is superior to Xen’s. I think it’s safe to conclude that from an engineering / implementation perspective, both are excellent products. For Red Hat, maintaining Xen is a tougher choice, because a lot of functionality in Xen has to be maintained both in the hypervisor and the privileged domain, so KVM is a logical choice from a long-term strategical perspective. Red Hat stressed again and again that customers and partners currently implementing Xen as their hypervisor have no reason to worry: it will be supported until at least March 2014.

After this technical talk, it was time for my colleague, Jan van der Torn, to present the work (ours and theirs) at the St. Antonius Hospital in the Netherlands, where we’re assisting them in migrating from proprietary software products to free software and open standards. I won’t go into too much detail here, but if you’re interested you should read this article.

After all this listening it was time for some liquid refreshments. I must say the Maltese wine is pretty good, and I had loads of fun talking to all these interesting and smart people walking around. It’s a very inspiring atmosphere.

That’s all for this update, I do have some pictures, but I forgot to bring my USB cable to the conference today, so I’ll be posting those later.

So, after an early morning of traveling I’ve arrived at the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit (that’s a mouth full) in Malta. I had to get up at four, to meet a colleague at his place at five. Of course I overslept, this does not happen to me, unless I have to catch a plane at seven. Luckily he lives close by and by 5:30 we were on the road, on our way to Schiphol. From there, everything went quite smoothly, we arrived at the gate just as people started boarding. That’s actually perfect timing.

We met the folks from Red Hat Netherlands at the gate, so this was a fun and interesting start of the three days to come. I just registered at the Conference center and checked in at the hotel (which is pretty darn nice). We got the afternoon off, and there’s some kind of team activity planned for the evening. I’m on the Fujitsu team and wonder what’s to be expected.

It’s time for some beer now!