Linux servers

Well, it finally happened. My long-time friend "slamd", the experimental Linux server box, has died.

( The picture shows the pub-machine 'slackr' )

I got it from my brother about 4-5 years ago, when it had been obsolete for almost 2 years already. It was not a custom power-house, nor was it bleeding edge technology.., it was MINE. And it did what I had in mind for it, and it did it pretty damn well too I must add.

It was a scruffy AMD Athlon XP 2500+, running on a special legacy ATX-board made by 'ABit' --not the most stable hardware I've ever used--, with 2GB Corsair DDR RAM, a GeForce 6600 GT GFX card, some USB 2.0 extension cards and a Creative Audigy 2 ZX 7.1 digital surround soundcard.

I used the box as:

• a house-central secondary NAT router
• an UPnP multimedia server
• a network fileserver
• a central database server (for hosting web-content served by my public-machine)

Lately, the motherboard just wouldn't boot up properly. My suspicions fall on the rather dusty CPU-chip I had put in it, but for all I know, the motherboard has met it's end of days...

So, I had to disconnect my public-machine (a dusty, dirt-old Pentium III 800MHz box), throw out 'slamd', put in the public-machine as a temporary replacement and route all the public requests in to my private internal LAN where the pub-machine acts in it's own DMZ.

Then I had to re-compile my UPnP mediaserver software because 'slamd' had it's software repository stored on one of it's internal IDE harddrives, and I just couldn't be bothered about doing backup-jobs and the like... so, I went with 'K.I.S.S.' like I usually do ;P

MySQL, Oracle og EU

I et tidligere innlegg, skrev jeg om Oracle's oppkjøp av Sun Microsystems, og deres relasjonsdatabase MySQL, og hvorvidt applikasjonen konkurrerte mot Oracle's eget database-produkt...

Nå har EU-kommisjonen som var ansvarlig for den europeiske valideringen av Oracles oppkjøp av Sun Microsystems Inc frigitt resultatene av spørreundersøkelsene de sendte Suns kunder og samarbeidspartnere angående markedskonkurransen til MySQL.

Oracle uttalte seg også i forhold til deres databaseprodukt:

Standpunktet til Oracle er at MySQL ikke konkurrerer mot deres database, men mot SQL Server fra Microsoft, og at de vil satse på MySQL nettopp for å skjerpe konkurransen mot Microsoft.

Så MySQL ser ikke ut til å forsvinne allikevel. Men stiller seg sterkt innenfor Oracle som en direkte trussel mot Microsoft.

MySQL and the EU

There have been concerns about commercial distribution and utilization of the business-licensed MySQL variant among IT companies doing development on the SQL-engine in the EU. Basically, Oracle just recently bought Sun Microsystems (who created MySQL). And since Oracle has it's own SQL database, many companies are worried about further commercial MySQL development.

The debate now is about the EU stopping the Oracle-Sun merger, to force Oracle into debating the future of MySQL on a commercial basis. The proprietary MySQL license is the only thing making other database-companies able to improve and innovate on SQL-technology. But since Oracle has all power over the licensing, they have indirect power over all MySQL-forks out there, which makes a lot of people nervous.

Oracle is in the favourable position (for themselves) on database innovation with their own implementation of SQL AND MySQL development. The danger for everyone else now, is if Oracle takes the opportunity to create a database monopoly.

It is not a completely absurd thought, since MySQL puts quite the market and price pressure on Oracle.

As in the link below, quite a few people think the deal should be put off until they can pan out the future of commercially available MySQL.

It could be argued that MySQL does not pose a direct threat, since it's revenue hardly compares to Oracle DB. Actually, the MySQL revenue for 2008 barely came close to 1% of Oracle's.

There is also the argument that Oracle DB operates in a high-level market, with large deployments, heavy db-driven applications and the like... Whereas MySQL's main focus is on the web-market and web-applications. MySQL does not operate in many high-level environments, and is therefore not considered that big a threat to this market.

Whatever happens, Oracle is holding MySQL's fate in it's hands...

P.S.

This has nothing to do with the GPL-variant of MySQL. Commercial companies cannot use the GPL-variant, and so, it is not viable for commercial interest. That said, open-source projects can also suffer from this happening, because all the forks of the original MySQL that use the commercial license will also cease to be able to do further development. And who's to say someone will continue to develop MySQL once the commercial interest vanishes? So, if worse comes to worse, we all lose in the end some way or another.

Link to ComputerWorld.com:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/

Root webserver down

My domain webserver @ "www.pizslacker.org" is currently down for maintenance and localizational reasons.

I had to move the darn box because it produced a whole lot of PC-exhaust raising the room temperature quite excessively, put simply, using obsolete hardware has it's caveats.

I moved the linux-server into the room containing the access-gateway to the ISP, hooked up a SOHO switch to spread one of the three RJ45 connectors on the gateway, and am planning to hook up a second server-box running Windows.

The plan is to have one L.A.M.P.-setup ("Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP" capable linux-box) and a W.I.M.A.-setup ("Windows-IIS-MySQL-ASP" capable windows-box), and to port my web-applications between the two. This will both strengthen my knowledge of AJAX-programming in both *nix- and Win32-environments. But also, force me to troubleshoot any weird and abstract problems that may occur in the process, thus making me learn the frameworks from the ground up.