One point twenty one jiggawatts! Yesterday (March 8, 2010) the OpenSSH project released version 5.4 and naturally will start hitting the various distributions and platforms soon, and again there are some great things to be interested in:
- Although many distributions of OpenSSH have SSH1 disabled, the project is now shipping with SSH1 disabled by default.
- There is the ability to revoke keys (host and user) in both sshd and ssh.
- Netcat mode connects stdio on the client to a single port forward on the server. For example the following would connect to smtp.server.example.org on port 25, and redirect the output to stdio on my client side. Useful if you need to test connectivity to a mail server, but can't from your direct location, but can from your SSH server (my.ssh.server.example.org).
ssh -W smtp.server.example.org:25 my.ssh.server.example.org That has pretty much bags of possibilities, ranging from simple connection tests to piping a file to a remote server that you can't get to directly. - sftp-server has gained a read only mode!
- Passphrase-protected SSH2 private keys are now protected with AES-128 instead of 3DES. This counts if you reencrypt your key or create a new one.
- Feb 24, 2010 by the_angry_angel
- Geek, Windows, Daily HTF and System Administration
Mark Baggett over at PauldotCom put together an interesting article on running a command on every machine in your domain from the command line. I genuinely hadn't considered tying dsquery and wmi together in this way. The best thing is that with a little tweaking you can easily run the same command against a subset of your domain. For instance, say you had X terminal/web/sql servers that all lived in the same OU - just dsquery against that and you're laughing.
If you're looking after any more than a handful of servers, without something like SMS/MOM/something you've rolled yourself, then this is a real time saver.
- Feb 04, 2010 by the_angry_angel
- Geek, Windows and Work
Licensing is a pain in my arse. There are whole companies full of people who can tell you that you're doing it wrong. Personally I cannot stand licensing, and the only thing that I find more annoying (in this field) than the proliferation of Open Source and Free Software licenses (and figuring out what I'm allowed and not allowed to do and what is an "arms length" exactly - but thats another rant for another time), is the software licensing by Microsoft and other vendors who shall remain nameless for this article.
To try and make things easier at work two and a half years ago I put together a very small document/cheatsheet describing the licensing terms for various Microsoft products and virtualisation. Yesterday Microsoft released an updated document for Windows Server 2008 R2, and interestingly not much has changed for Window Server, with the exception of a few new products. The table below should help out a bit if you're confused .
| Instances |
|---|
| Server Product | License Type | Physical | Virtual |
|---|
| Windows Server Foundation (2008 only) | OEM | 1 | 0 |
| Windows Server Standard | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 1 |
| Windows Server Enterprise | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 4 |
| Windows Server Datacenter | OEM, VL | 1 | Unlimited |
| Windows Server Web | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 0 |
| Windows Server HPC | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 1 |
I decided to check the licensing for other products, just incase I'd missed any changes. It doesn't look like it, so here the run down (as I understand it).
As a general rule, for anything per processor licensed, if you're running it in a virtual environment it will simply count the number of virtual processors you assign it.
It gets a bit complicated with SQL 2005 and newer. To quote Microsoft:
When licensed per Server or CAL Workgroup and Standard editions allow you to run any number of instances of the server software in one physical or virtual operating system environment on the licensed server at a time. Previously, only the Enterprise edition of the Server license allowed multi-instancing. When licensed per Processor Workgroup, Web, and Standard editions for each server you have assigned the required number of per processor licenses, you may run, at any one time, any number of instances of the server software in physical and virtual operating system environments on the licensed server. However, the total number of physical and virtual processors used by those operating system environments cannot exceed the number of software licenses assigned to that server. For Enterprise if all physical processors in a machine have been licensed, then you may run unlimited instances of SQL server 2008 in one physical and an unlimited number of virtual operating environments on that same machine.
As far as I'm aware anything else licensed per server doesn't currently have any special rules regarding virtualisation; so this includes Exchange, Sharepoint, and so on.
- Feb 01, 2010 by the_angry_angel
I just wanted to apologise for any noise that may've been caused by this feed over the last 3 days. I've switched the underlying software and in the process changed the URL slightly. I've attempted to ensure that any old URLs will continue to work, as well as the feeds.
So far it's worked out fairly well, with only facebook and one or two desktop based feed readers giving people a few duplicate articles. PlanetPlanet seems to be coped very well, so my hat goes off to the PlanetPlanet team!
- Jan 27, 2010 by the_angry_angel
- Geek
Whilst I totally support the goals of the FSF I'm not sure that I can totally endorse their militant wing; Defective By Design.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to DBD as a concept. I totally support what they intend to achieve. It's just a shame that their methods and actions are perceived as being completely mental by real people, in the outside world, and it's starting to show that these perceptions are beginning to be applied to anyone who supports Free or Open software.
