Posts Tagged ‘basis’

The creator of C and UNIX Dennis Ritchie passed away R.I.P. Dennis

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Dennis Ritchie old young picture

I just read the lwn.net – Linux Weekly news ‘s website the very sad news that one of the greatest modern day computer heroes Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie after a long illness has passed away in his home.

The original notification for this grieving news are on Rob Pike’s Google Plus wall , this is the original message:

Rob Pike - 1:02 AM - Public
I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information.
I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately.
He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.

For all those who haven’t heard about Dennis Ritchie , he was a computer scientist who developed the C Programming language and had an immeasurable influence on all kind of Modern programming.

C Programming Language cover Dennis Ritchie

Dennis worked on the development of Unix’s predecessor Multics as well as with Ken Thompson worked together in Bell Labs and are practically the fathers of UNIX.
Unix the Seventh Edition source code has later become the basis for the early UNIX BSD distributions. Among the most important technical contributions Dennis has done is the introduction of a Streams mechanism – pipes – (as called today in GNU/Linux and BSD and other unices).
Ritchie’s C Language creation on top of Ken Thompson’s B Programming language has been standartized and become the de-facto standard for almost every modern existing OS around.
Moreover dmr has been among the co-creators of Plan 9 Operating system (which is currently open-source distributed) as well as coded a few bits for the Inferno OS which today is known under the code name Vita Nuova

Unix Live Free or die Bell labs early UNIX logo

dmr (the hacker nickname of Dennis) lines up across the most notable computer hackers of all times. He received U.S. national Medal of Technology in 1999 from president Bill Clinton for his contributions to co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the creation of C Language

Denis Ritchie receives national prize in 1999 for Technology from president Bill Clinton
To sum it up DMR is just an “icon” in the computer geek world and his memory will surely live forever in the hacker undeground and computer geek culture.

Dennis Ritche near a personal computer picture

A few quotes dmr is so famous with:

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party."
"Usenet is a strange place."
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
"We really didn't buy it thinking we'd have this enormous investment."

Here is also a short video telling a few words of UNIX history and showing Dennis Ritchie in his UNIX development years:

Farewell Denis! See you in Hacker’s paradise 😉

How to load custom Kernel (tun) module in CentOS and RHEL Linux

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

kernel module load on boot in CentOS and Fedora

Just recently it was necessery to load up a tun kernel module on few CentOS Linux servers.

I’m using Debian on daily basis, and everybody that had even little of experience with Debian should already be aware about the existence of the handy:
/etc/modules file.
On Debian to enable a certain kernel module to load up on Linux boot, all necessery is to just place the kernel module name in /etc/modules.
For example loading the tun tunneling kernel module I issue the command:

debian:~# echo tun >> /etc/modules

I wondered if CentOS, also supports /etc/modules as it was necessery now to add this tun module to load up on CentOS’s boot.
After a bit of research I’ve figured out CentOS does not have support for adding modules names in /etc/modules , anyhow after consulting CentOS documentation on http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-kernel-modules-persistant.html , I found CentOS and RHEL use /etc/rc.modules instead of Debian’s /etc/modules to load up any custom kernel modules not loaded by default during system boot.

Therefore instructing the RHEL Linux to load up my desired tun module in kernel on next boot was as easy as executing:

[root@centos ~]# echo 'modprobe tun' >> /etc/rc.modules
[root@centos ~]# chmod +x /etc/rc.modules

Now on next boot CentOS will load up the tun module in kernel. Achiving the same module load up is also possible through /etc/rc.local , but it’s not recommended way as /etc/rc.local would load up the kernel module after all of the rest init boot scripts complete and therefore will load up the module slightly later, at the final boot stage.

Cloud Computing a possible threat to users privacy and system administrator employment

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Cloud Computing screenshot

If you’re employed into an IT branch an IT hobbyist or a tech, geek you should have certainly heard about the latest trend in Internet and Networking technologies the so called Cloud Computing

Most of the articles available in newspapers and online have seriously praised and put the hopes for a better future through cloud computing.
But is really the cloud computing as good as promised? I seriously doubt that.
Let’s think about it what is a cloud? It’s a cluster of computers which are connected to work as one.
No person can precisely say where exactly on the cluster cloud a stored information is located (even the administrator!)

The data stored on the cluster is a property of a few single organizations let’s say microsoft, amazon etc., so we as users no longer have a physical possession of our data (in case if we use the cloud).

On the other hand the number of system administrators that are needed for an administration of a huge cluster is dramatically decreased, the every day system administrator, who needs to check a few webservers and a mail server on daily basis, cache web data with a squid proxy cache or just restart a server will be no longer necessary.

Therefore about few million of peoples would have to loose their jobs, the people necessary to administrate a cluster will be probably no more than few thousands as the clouds are so high that no more than few clouds will exist on the net.

The idea behind the cluster is that we the users store retrieve our desktops and boot our operating system from the cluster.
Even loading a simple webpage will have to retrieve it’s data from the cluster.

Therefore it looks like in the future the cloud computing and the internet are about to become one and the same thing. The internet might become a single super cluster where all users would connect with their user ids and do have full access to the information inside.

Technologies like OpenID are trying to make the user identification uniform, I assume a similar uniform user identication will be used in the future in a super cloud where everybody, where entering inside will have access to his/her data and will have the option to access any other data online.

The desire of humans and business for transperancy would probably end up in one day, where people will want to share every single bit of information.
Even though it looks very cool for a sci-fi movie, it’s seriously scary!

Cloud computing expenses as they’re really high would be affordable only for a multi-national corporations like Google and Microsoft

Therefore small and middle IT business (network building, expanding, network and server system integration etc.) would gradually collapse and die.

This are only a few small tiny bit of concerns but in reality the problems that cloud computing might create are a way more severe.
We the people should think seriously and try to oppose cloud computing, while we still can! It might be even a good idea if a special legislation that is aming at limiting cloud computing can be integrated and used only inside the boundary of a prescribed limitations.

Institutions like the European Parliament should be more concerned about the issues which the use of cloud computing will bring, EU legislation should very soon be voted and bounding contracts stop clouds from expanding and taking over the middle size IT business.