PORTLAND, OR – OSCON – July 19, 2010 – Puppet Labs, the leader in data center automation, today released Puppet 2.6, a major upgrade with a focus on improvements for enterprise environments. Puppet 2.6 includes new functionality and features that make managing servers even easier. To download Puppet 2.6, visit www.puppetlabs.com/.

“The 2.6 release places an even stronger emphasis on the enterprise while also opening up new opportunities for people with varied skill sets to use Puppet,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “Since our last release was 0.25.5, we say that it’s ‘eleventy times better.’ The changes are truly significant because Puppet is now even more capable of making traditionally painful, manual process easier for systems administrators. We’ve also dramatically improved the ability to integrate Puppet with existing systems, making it a platform for automating your infrastructure.”

New features include:

REST API, making it easier to integrate Puppet with other systems.
Preliminary Windows support for heterogeneous computing environments.
Language enhancements & an Internal DSL so administrators who know and want to use pure Ruby for infrastructure development, can easily do so.
Event model, which lays the foundation for powerful reporting and monitoring. It provides structure to data generated by the system and facilitates reporting and analysis, simplifying the identification of infrastructure problems.
Easy to deploy and maintain, Puppet simplifies many standard tasks for systems administrators, while ensuring consistent environments for application engineers. Puppet is cloud-ready, but can also be used with current infrastructure: internal or external clouds, virtual environments, or in physical infrastructure. Puppet is supported on a variety of operating systems: Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, BSD, Windows, and OS X.

Other additions with Puppet 2.6 include significant work in the core of Puppet to make it easier to work with configuration data, including enhancing how Puppet reports on what it does, adding more audit capabilities and helping export information about the infrastructure environment. The command line interface has also been completely redesigned to allow using a single executable to interact with all of Puppet’s functionality.

Today Puppet Labs also announced a $5 million Series B round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson St. Partners. With this new funding, Puppet Labs plans to accelerate the expansion of its engineering team.

For more information about Puppet, visit www.puppetlabs.com. For more information about the 2.6 release visit www.puppetlabs.com/2dot6.

Source

Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.

I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.

“The cloud” at its most fundamental level is all about a massive supply increase in computing power. The PC era was all about putting a computer on every desk. The cloud era goes a step further, putting the power of supercomputing at the literal fingertips of every individual at anytime. Whether it’s enabling a youth soccer coach to schedule practice across the online calendars of 18 families, or helping a scientist fold proteins to design new cancer drugs, or encouraging a frontline employee to instantly and cheaply test a new marketing campaign, the exponential growth in computing power and applications is changing every corner of our economy and society. And, this era is truly just beginning. We have seen only a tiny fraction of the potential gains that arise from cheap, ubiquitous computing power.

As this landscape has evolved, some have dismissed cloud computing as just a return to the mainframe era. This view is fundamentally wrong. Mainframes were available to only the smartest employees at the richest companies. The cloud is accessible to all, and usable by anyone, at low cost. Its ubiquity is the source of its power.

However, there is one area where mainframe concepts are intruding into the cloud – the vertically integrated technology stack. As hardware and software merge into services, the danger of locked down proprietary software stacks are emerging in the cloud space. The cloud world changes everything, and that is not good to many entrenched interests of the old guard. Core technologies from operating systems to hypervisors to databases are being used to tie cloud customers into an integrated view of the world.

If the web has taught us anything, it is that open systems, portability, and choice drive innovation. The open Linux system brought us a mountain of software and tools to help accomplish almost any task. And, each component, whether a database or a widget could be moved in and out freely based on the job getting done.

We at Rackspace have long talked about an “open” cloud. And as a service provider built on our Fanatical Support difference, we have never had an interest in creating technical walls around our service. But, given that no standards tools have emerged to build massively scalable clouds, we too have had to build custom software that creates some level of wall around our cloud offerings. For months we have debated how to drive greater standards and increase the velocity of cloud technologies in general. We finally converged on the obvious answer: open source our cloud technology.

Today, we announced a new open source project that includes those core technologies: OpenStack. And, we are not alone. As we looked at all the projects that already existed to drive standards we saw that other efforts were underway that complemented what we have done. We saw a ton of promise in the Nebula computing project built by NASA and are making it a core part of the project. Taking the contributions of Rackspace and NASA as a starting point, OpenStack forms a powerful foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine – OpenStack Compute – and a fully distributed storage engine – OpenStack Object Storage.

The community, which we plan to actively support and drive, is live today at openstack.org with code available for download.

Last week we assembled a strong group of cloud community leaders and developers to meet and review the architecture, engage on technology direction and contribute code. The effort attracted more than 100 participants from 25 companies including hosting companies, telecom providers, hardware manufacturers, cloud ecosystem companies and beyond. This enthusiasm and collaboration around OpenStack has laid the foundation for a vibrant and innovative approach to building the core software to power the future cloud world.

What do we expect OpenStack to mean for the cloud community? Some pretty major things. One, anyone will be able to run this cloud and do it anywhere. Enterprises and governments will be able to build private clouds. Service providers will have the same technology used by Rackspace and NASA to build new offers. Choice and portability are inevitable in this world. Two, the whole tech ecosystem can build around this foundation. With wide adoption, there will be a market for new services all around this core engine. From storage systems to monitoring tools to management systems, there is no end to what can be attached to the core project. Three, the cloud will advance faster than ever. Between just NASA and Rackspace, an army of developers are committed to the continued advancement of OpenStack. With our emerging supporters in the project, we expect to dramatically expand that army. Finally, a core set of standards will be freely available and totally open. New technologies can be attached. Better solutions will be driven into the product. And, the use of this powerful technology will not tie you to the use of any other technologies.

For our customers, we think there are many benefits that flow from these community gains. Not only will this help our offers develop faster and more transparently, but our customers can run private editions of our core systems in house or in our managed hosting operation.

We could not be more excited about the launch of this project and the enthusiasm around it. As a company that has invested a great deal in the development of cloud technologies, we did not take the decision to open source lightly. We think this decision will serve our interests and those of our customers. While we at Rackspace hire top developers and engineers to make sure our technology is second to none, seeking a technology advantage has never been our approach. We have our own vision about how to deploy this technology and serve customers – by giving them seamless access to scalable computing with the trusting partnership that comes through Fanatical Support. But, there will be many approaches and winning formulas. We think by welcoming those approaches and driving standards and more rapid innovation we will all win.

We hope you join us in this cause. We know there are many parties who might want to join us in the effort, please reach out to us.

We look forward to updating you as we make progress.

Source

Among these many new features, openSUSE also provides support for netbooks and
the Btrfs file system support. Users can expect to see improved hardware
support with the 2.6.34 Linux kernel and updated graphics drivers. And support
for the next generation of interactive computing for touchscreens like the HP
TouchSmart.

openSUSE continues its tradition of delivering the popular KDE, GNOME and Xfce
desktop environments, and now also provides the lightweight LXDE desktop
environment. With GNOME, you can use the latest 2.30.1 version or take your
installation for a drive with a preview of the upcoming GNOME 3.0. Or choose
KDE SC 4.4.4 for the latest updates. They all feature the polish and
integration that the openSUSE distro has been known for.

For a full view check the complete collection of screenshots [2] or install it
right away [3]. As we expect very large demand for the ISOs we suggest you
check out BitTorrent as download method ;-)

For servers and development platforms, administrators can take full advantage
of the new MariaDB and MySQL Cluster services as well as Conntrack to filter
network packets for iptables. Developers will appreciate the plethora of tools
available at their fingertips with GCC, GDB and Mono and IDEs such as
Netbeans, Qt-Creator and many others. This is all on top of the countless
libraries available through the openSUSE Build Service [4] (OBS).

Visit our Product Highlights [5] page for a detailed list of new features.

The next release will be openSUSE 11.4 in March, 2011.

Thank you, and have a lot of fun!

[1] http://wiki.opensuse.org/Portal:11.3
[2] http://wiki.opensuse.org/Screenshots
[3] http://software.opensuse.org/113/en
[4] https://build.opensuse.org/
[5] http://wiki.opensuse.org/Product_highlights

Source

We have created a set of AKIs (Amazon Kernel Images) which contain the PV-Grub loader. This loader simply chain-boots the kernel provided in the associated AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Net-net, your instance ends up running the kernel in the AMI instead of the kernel specified in the boot process.

You need to install an “EC2 compatible” kernel and create an initrd (initial RAM disk) as part of your AMI. You also need to create a menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) for the Grub boot loader. Once you’ve done this you can create the AMI and then launch instances by using one of the PV-Grub “kernels” as described above. You may find this document to be helpful if you want to learn more about the Linux boot process.

To be compatible with EC2, a Linux kernel must support Xen’s pv_ops (paravirtual ops) infrastructure with XSAVE disabled or the Xen 3.0.2 interface. The following kernels have been tested and/or have vendor support:

Fedora 8-12 Xen kernels
SLES/openSUSE 10x, 11.0, and 11.1 Xen kernels
SLES/openSUSE 11.x EC2 Variant
Ubuntu EC2 Variant
RHEL 5.x
CentOS 5.x
Other kernels may not start reliably within EC2. We’re working with the providers of popular AMIs to make sure that they will start to use PV-Grub in the near future.

You can read more about this in our “Enabling User Provided Kernels in Amazon EC2″ document.

– Jeff;

Source

One way of making this sort of attack more difficult is to make root own the user home directory, files such as ~/.login that are used by the user shell, the ~/.ssh directory and the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. This way a hostile party can’t change the configuration, so a successful attack has to involve a long running process that uses ptrace to intercept the shell and divert an attempt to run sudo.

If the non-root user is prevented from using ptrace then things start to become a little more difficult for the attacker. In some quick tests I was able to capture about half the data through messing with /proc/X/fd/0 and /proc/X/fd/1 for a target process, but it seems that it would be difficult to get an entire password that way. To disable ptrace you could compile a kernel without ptrace support, use a SE Linux policy that prevents prevent ptrace access for the sessions in question, or make the user’s shell SETGID.

If the root account and the account used for su or sudo use different authentication methods, where the options include ssh authorized keys, password, and security token (maybe both password and token for the root account) then it does seem that it would provide some Defense in Depth benefits.

sudo can be used to only permit executing certain commands. While this is a real security benefit it doesn’t allow full sysadmin work, merely delegating some portions of operations to people who don’t have full sysadmin rights. As someone needs to have full access to fix any problem that might occur on the machine someone needs to have access to run any command as root. So while sudo is great for providing limited administrative access to certain junior people, it’s not going to stop an attack on a member of the sysadmin team.

Source

If you can’t wait to get the distribution, simply visit:

http://get.fedoraproject.org?F13an

If you want a quick tour of highlights in this release, check out:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F13_one_page_release_notes?…

You can also find this announcement text at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_announcement?F13an

Or read on for loads of information about the new release and all the
leading edge technologies we’ve packed into it. More links are
available at the end of this message, too. Enjoy!

* * *

Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that
continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new
release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and
greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 13! Join us and share the joy
of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have
several major new features with special focus on desktops, netbooks,
virtualization and system administration.

Source

With the increasing mobility in a regular Intenet user’s life, Peppermint is built keeping in mind the need for speed, efficiency and mobility. Peppermint makes use of LXDE, a light weight Desktop Environment, most suitable for such cloud Operating Systems and light weight systems like netbooks. It aims to be easy for Linux Users, boots pretty fast. Since, its made to run web applications, you don’t need to install software packages, just boot and begin.

Actually there have been a few Linux based cloud OS already – Jolicloud, gOS and even ChromeOS was built upon Linux Kernels.

So, what new does Peppermint provide? It uses the Prism technology of MozillaLabs to easily run web applications as native computer apps. Because of Prism you can run web applications in separate windows and not clog a single browser window with multiple tabs. Web apps can be configured to display status messages and notifications, you can start them from system taskbar. Being a closed Beta release as of now, nothing more can be said, but lets wait for it to get public.

Source

RHEL 6.0 will also have at least one less feature as well. This will be the first version of the OS not to include the Xen hypervisor. Instead the company plans to focus its virtualization efforts around the kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of platform engineering.

For RHEL 6, “Virtualization has been a key focus, as has providing infrastructure that will be part of our cloud services,” Burke said.

To help in cloud deployments, the RHEL 6 OS has the ability to dynamically allocate kernel data structures. “This will allow cloud service providers to give better service-level agreements,” Burke said. As virtual machines are loaded on to the OS, the administrator can specify how much memory, how many processing cycles and how much network bandwidth can be allotted to each machine.

Another new addition is the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS), which “more dynamically balances the workloads among the tasks,” distributing the CPU resources more evenly across all the applications. Borrowing techniques from Red Hat’s software for running latency-intolerant services, it also does a more sophisticated job of scheduling high-priority processes over low-priority ones, Burke said.

Power savings features have been added. The timing infrastructure has been reorganized as well, and uses something called the tickless kernel enhancement. Previously, the kernel would interrupt the CPU 1,000 times per second to take a time measurement, which prevented the CPU going into power-saving sleep mode. The tickless kernel feature relies instead on hardware-based timers, allowing the CPU to go to sleep in those periods when there are no other chores to complete.

The file systems space has been revamped for larger data sets. This is the first version of RHEL to use ext4 as the default file system. (Formerly it used ext3.) RHEL can now run file systems of up to 16 terabytes. The new file system also runs file system checks much more speedily, which means faster recovery times after unclean shutdowns. For really big data sets, RHEL also includes an option to upgrade to SGI’s XFS file system, which can scale to 128 terabytes.

With Red Hat’s emphasis on supporting cloud computing, the company’s decision to drop Xen may seem surprising. But over the past few years, Red Hat has increasingly thrown its support behind KVM. In 2008, the company purchased virtualization software provider Qumranet, whose developers pioneered much of the early KVM work.

Burke said that one of the reasons Xen was dropped is that the company was duplicating a lot of effort in maintaining two hypervisors, a job that requires an increasing amount of energy. For instance, Intel added some virtualization support capabilities in its just-released Nehalem server processor, but these capabilities required some modifications in both sets of software.

Source

It has been almost eight years since the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since then, the product has established itself as one of the leading enterprise-caliber, open source operating systems. With installed systems in use from laptops to mainframes, it has helped set standards for quality, certified infrastructure, long-haul stability, performance and security. From Main Street to Wall Street, Red Hat Enterprise Linux touches almost every industry.

As Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 enters Beta today, the currently supported release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, continues to be the cornerstone of Red Hat’s software product portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was first released in March 2007, and has received regular updates since that time. Just last month, we delivered the fifth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform with new features and hardware support. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform will continue to be supported by Red Hat and its ISV and OEM partners until 2014.

Looking to the future, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 blurs the lines between virtual, physical and cloud computing to address shifts taking place in the modern IT environment. Featuring updated core technology, from the kernel to the application infrastructure to the development toolchain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is designed to meet the needs of the coming generations of hardware and software technologies.

Source

This year’s conference really gave me a smack on the head. It reminded me of not only how many friends and colleagues I had missed, but also the blast of energy you get by seeing so much passion for such a diverse group of topics in one short weekend. NOTACON allows someone like myself to speak about education, while another person is showing off their electronically-infused clothing, and another to do demos of PDF exploitation. Few places short of a local hacker-space will you find such a menagerie of content.

Presentations That Rocked
To start, I thought Sacha DeAngeli’s presentation called “Mine’s Smaller Than Yours: Nanotechnology and Chemistry in a DIY Setting” was super interesting and appropriate for this kind of conference. He combined not only live chemistry on a topic most people were fairly captivated by, but also integrated the message that we really need to save chemistry experimentation as a culture. He had great parallels between ‘hackers’ and chemists (hobby and professional), invigorating at least my opinion that saving chemistry as something that everyone should dabble in as part of their youth is important. Toss it up there with music education as something that is being cut out of schools in lieu of safer and cheaper alternatives — computer simulated chemistry. Boring.

It was really fun to see int eighty (who’s the rapper for Dual-Core) drop the mic, so to speak, and instead give a really easy-to-follow explanation and demonstration of how to deconstruct PDF files and look for potential malicious code streams. His presentation had great structure and provided the tools to follow-along with his demonstrations, making for an interactive presentation that was really fun to watch. He was both humbled by the work of other’s in this field (such as the often mentioned Didier Stevens) and highly competent on the topic, making for an enjoyable hour. It was great to see someone I’ve watched rap so many times really come into his own in another light.

Saturday started early with Adrian Crenshaw covering aspects of Anti-Forensics. While I had personally heard a lot of these areas in a previous Cybercrime class, it was nice to get a more technical overview of some techniques. He provided some interesting notes about ‘data recovery’ and I really enjoyed his muted humor throughout. Seems like a really nice guy in general, too.

Later in the day, I was really impressed with James Arlen, Chris Clymer, Mick Douglas, and Brandon Knight’s skit-based presentation called “Social Engineering Security Into Your Business”. It was a collection of situations in which they demonstrated the right & wrong ways to have security people interact with various members of their company/organization. In one example, they showed how and how not to speak with a developer about an XSS issue. Another, they spoke to management about purchasing a new product to help their infrastructure. I found their examples and dialogs both realistic (at least 90% of it) and accurate to situations I have been in. Frankly, some scenes were uncanny! They did a great job of integrating humor and reality. I think they certainly got a message across which is very important: don’t be an asshole if you want to get stuff done.

The end of the day comprised of “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse”, another in the series of conference talks put on by Tom Eston, Chris Clymer, and Matthew Neely. Hilarious as ever, and now with costumes, props, and a cast of zombie actors. A great 30 minutes of just pure fun and energy. Might I add, this was just prior to my own presentation so I appreciated not only the relaxing fun it provided for me, but also that they were done way before my presentation which gave me extra prep time.

My presentation, “What’s a Linux?: Creating & teaching college courses at 24″
I was pumped to be able to speak to what was quite a large crowd in the palace east room of the hotel. While it was the smaller of the two rooms, it seemed to be quite filled which was great. I’d guess probably 40+ people showed up and they were all really attentive, appreciative, and fun. It seemed like everyone enjoyed my random humor and appreciated what I had to say on education in general. It was a really rewarding experience. I hadn’t spoken at NOTACON since 2005 so I was both glad to be back at the conference as an attendee, but pumped to have had another opportunity to talk about something I was passionate about. A sincere thanks again to everyone who attended my presentation as well as was wearing my uncompiled.com stickers throughout the weekend!

As promised, here are my presentation slides in PDF and if anyone has any questions or follow-ups, feel free to give me a shout. My e-mail is mark.stanislav@gmail.com and my Twitter is mstanisl. It was great seeing so many of you guys again and even better meeting a lot of great new people as always. Feel free to send me any pictures or video you have have from my presentation; I appreciate it.

See everyone next year!