Posts Tagged ‘open source software’

Web and Middleware JBoss Training at Hewlett Packard – Intro to JBoss JAVA application server

Thursday, November 21st, 2013

jboss application server logo- serve java servlet pages on Linux and Windows

I and my TEAM Web and Middleware Implementation Team @Hewlett Packard are assigned an online training to follow on topic of JBoss Application server.It is my first online training of this kind where a number of people are streamed a video from a trainer who explains in real time concepts of JBoss – A Community Drive open source middleware (Application Server), since some time JBoss is known under a new name (WildFly).

Wildfly new name of jboss application java servlet server

In short what is JBoss? – It is an application server similar to Apache Tomcat  -an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

Apache Tomcat java servlet application server logo

In case you wonder about what is Middleware it is a buzzword well established in Corporate world referring to all kind of servers in the middle between Servers on pure OS and hardware Level and end client. Middleware includes all kind of Web and Application servers like Apache, JBoss, Tomcat, Adobe's WebLogic Webserver, IBM WebSphere application server etc..

What this means is JBOSS is very similar to Tomcat but it is designed to run interpret through (Java Virtual Machine), higher scale of Java Applications and then return content to a a web browser. In other words if you need to have a Webserver with support for Java VM. JBoss is one of the open source technologies available which can be a substitute for Tomcat. In Fact Jboss itself started as a fork of Tomcat and n owadays, Jboss has an implementation of Tomcat embedded into itself. Jboss is mainly developed and supported by Redhat. It has 3 major releases used in IT Companies. Jboss 5, JBoss 6 and JBoss 7. In most production server systems running some kind of Java servlets currently still Jboss ver. 5 and Jboss v. 6 is used. Just like Tomcat, the server is messy in its structure. But if we have to compare Tomcat with Jboss then JBoss is at least 100 times more messy and hard to configure tune than Tomcat. Actually after getting to know JBoss 6 I would not advice anyone to use this Application server. Its too complex and all configuration and performance tuning is done through hundred of XML so it is like a hell for the usual System Administrator who likes clearness and simplicity. JBoss has a Web configuration interface which in version 7 is a bit advanced and easier to configure and get to know the server compared to previous versions. But same web interface for older releases is lousy and not nice. Just like Tomcat, JBoss supports clustering, here is full list of all features it supports:

  • Full clustering support for both traditional J2EE applications and EJB 3.0 POJO applications
  • Automatic discovery. Nodes in cluster find each other with no additional configuration.
  • Cluster-wide replicated JNDI context
  • Failover and load-balancing for JNDI, RMI and all EJB types
  • Stateful Session Bean state replication
  • HTTP Session replication
  • High Availability JMS
  • Farming. Distributed deployment of JBoss components. Deploying on one node deploys on all nodes.
     

Looks like JBoss is among the few Application Servers supporting deployment of Java JSP, WAR Archive files, SAR Archives, JMS (Java Message Service), JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface). Jboss supports load balancing between clustered nodes, supports SOAP, Java servlet faces and Java MQ (Messaging Queue). JBoss can be installed on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. So far from what I've learned for JBOSS I prefer not to use it and don't recommend this Application server to anyone. Its too complex and doesn't worth the effort to learn. Proprietary products like WebLogic and Webspehere are in light years better.

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Posted in Everyday Life, Various | 1 Comment »

PeaZip good Windows and Linux free software alternative to non-free WinRar and WinZip archiver tools

Thursday, June 27th, 2013

peazip extract rar and zip files Winrar Winzip good alternative program free windows linux freebsd graphic software

Until recently it was almost impossible to have Microsoft Windows without WinRar and WinZip archiver programs installed.
Though both can be used as trial versions for personal use for commercial use one had to purchase license. It is pretty annoying that each time you run Winrar you get reminded you're using its trial version. As I'm trying to substitute all non-free software with free software even whether I have to install or maintain Windows, just recently I found out about existence of PeaZip – Free Zip file utility / Free Rar Extractor.

Besides being open source software PeaZip and supports Windows it is also available prepackaged for Linux / BSD as well.
PeaZip supports unarchiving of 150 archive file types, and by installing it you save time otherwise spend in installing two separate tools on Windows. It can do plenty of other useful stuff for instance joining / splitting files ending in suffix (001, 002, 003) etc. as well as splitting archives in parts (…part1, …part2, …part3 …), create self-extracting (.exe) archives, do multiple archives at once.

Peazip Windows Linux rar zip archives create and extract supported basic formats screenshot

Here is list of  most popular archive file types supported to browse / test / archive / dearchive:

7z, bz, bz2, bzip2, tbz2, tbz, gz, gzip, tgz, tpz, tar, zip, zipx, z01, smzip, arj, cab, chm, chi, chq, chw, hxs, hxi, hxr, hxq, hxw, lit, cpio, deb, lzh, lha, rar, r01, 00, rpm, z, taz, tz, iso, jar, ear, war, lha, pet, pup, pak, pk3, pk4, slp, [Content], xpi, wim, u3p, lzma86, lzma, udf, xar, dmg, hfs, part1, split, swm, tpz, kmz, xz, txz, vhd, mslz, apm, mbr, fat, ntfs, exe, dll, sys, msi, msp, ods, ots, odm, oth, oxt, odb, odf, odg, otg, odp, otp, odt, ott, gnm, doc, dot, xls, xlt, ppt, pps, pot, docx, dotx, xlsx, xltx, swf, flv, quad, balz, zpaq, paq8f, paq8jd, paq8l, paq8o, lpaq1, lpaq5, lpaq8, ace, arc, wrc, 001, pea, cbz, cbr, cba, cb7, cbt …

Even better PeaZip has ports for both 32 and 64 bit Windows (XP / Vista / 7 and 8), Linux and *BSD. Official PeaZip download page is on Sourceforge here

peazip winrar winzip unarchive all in one unarchive windows linux freebsd program screenshot

Next time you need multi-format unarchive program on a new Windows install, give it a try.
PeaZip has good compitability with new versions of WinRar and WinZip archived files, so it is not very likely you will ever in future need these proprietary applications.
One note to make is during install as most software, it offers installing some useless stuff like "Free Smilies" and a Toolbar, make sure you don't click Next by mistake – ( un-tick them ) !

peazip-installation-process-registryreviver-offer

peazip install screenshot get the free smileys we love extension screenshot

For Linux users on PeaZip's website there is package in deb, rpm and tgz. Packages are available with builds for GNOME graphical environment with GTK2 lib or KDE QT.

I tried installing PeaZip  on my Debian 7 Wheezy downloading deb provided by Sourceforge, but install failed with error:

noah:~# dpkg -i peazip_5.0.LINUX.GTK2-2_all.deb
Selecting previously unselected package peazip.
(Reading database … 226682 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking peazip (from peazip_5.0.LINUX.GTK2-2_all.deb) …
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of peazip:
 peazip depends on libgmp3c2; however:
  Package libgmp3c2 is not installed.

dpkg: error processing peazip (–install):
 dependency problems – leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 peazip

In previous Debian release Squeeze there was package libgmp3c2 but it is no longer available from repos on Wheezy. Thus to install it on Wheezy I used Universal Linux .TGZ Package and just extracted it in root directory ( / ):

noah:~# cd /
noah:/# links http://sourceforge.net/projects/peazip/files/5.0/peazip-5.0.LINUX.GTK2.tgz/download
noah:~# tar -zxf peazip-5.0.LINUX.GTK2.tgz

To run it:

hipo@noah~:$ /usr/local/bin/peazip

PeaZip on Debian Gnu Linux screenshot rar unrar zip unzip archive dearchive ms windows and linux free instrument
PeaZip's archive / unarchive operation speed compared to CPU use and memory consumption is fast, though it eats a bit more ram than GNOME's default Archive Tool – File Roller.

Peazip rar zip archive unarchive windows linux program archiving zip file screenshot

Thanks God for PeaZip! Buy-buy forver to Winrar and Winzip 🙂

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Posted in Everyday Life, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Various, Windows | No Comments »

How to run your Own / Personal Domain Web WHOIS service in a minute with SpeedyWHOIS

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Running your own personal WHOIS service speedy whois in browser screenshot

I've been planning to run my own domain WHOIS service, for quite sime time and I always postpone or forgot to do it.
If you wonder, why would I need a (personal) web whois service, well it is way easier to use and remember for future use reference if you run it on your own URL, than wasting time in search for a whois service in google and then using some other's service to get just a simple DOMAIN WHOIS info.

So back to my post topic, I postpopned and postponed to run my own web whois, just until  yesterday, whether I have remembered about my idea to have my own whois up and running and proceeded wtih it.

To achieve my goal I checked if there is free software or (open source) software that easily does this.
I know I can write one for me from scratch, but since it would have cost me some at least a week of programming and testing and I didn't wanted to go this way.

To check if someone had already made an easy to install web whois service, I looked through in the "ultimate source for free software" sourceforge.net

Looking for the "whois web service" keywords, displayed few projects on top. But unfortunately many of the projects sources was not available anymore from http://sf.net and the project developers pages..
Thanksfully in a while, I found a project called SpeedyWhois, which PHP source was available for download.

With all prior said about project missing sources, Just in case if SpeedyWhois source  disappears in the future (like it probably) happened with, some of the other WHOIS web service projects, I've made SpeedyWhois  mirror for download here

 
Contrary to my idea that installing the web whois service might be a "pain in the ass", (like is the case  with so many free software php scripts and apps) – the installation went quite smoothly.
 
To install it I took the following 4 steps:
 
1. Download the source (zip archive) with wget 
 
# cd /var/www/whois-service;
/var/www/whois-service# wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/files/speedywhois-0.1.4.zip
 
2. Unarchive it with unzip command 
 
 
/var/www/whois-service# unzip speedywhois-0.1.4.zip
…
3. Set the proper DNS records

My NS are using Godaddy, so I set my desired subdomain record from their domain name manager.
 

4. Edit Apache httpd.conf to create VirtualHost
 
This step is not mandatory, but I thought it is nice if I put the whois service under a subdomain, so add a VirtualHost to my httpd.conf
 
The Virtualhost Apache directives, I used are:
 
<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin hipo_aT_www.pc-freak.net
        DocumentRoot /var/www/whois-service
        ServerName whois.www.pc-freak.net
        &lt;Directory /var/www/whois-service
        AllowOverride All
        Order Allow,Deny
        Allow from All
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
 
Onwards to take effect of new Webserver configs, I did Apache restart
 
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart
 
Further on You can test whois a domain using my new installed SpeedyWHOIS – Web WHOIS service  on http://whois.www.pc-freak.net
Whenever I have some free time, maybe I will work on the code, to try to add support for logging of previous whois requests and posting links pointing to the previous whois done via the web WHOIS service on the main whois page.
 
One thing that I disliked about how SpeedyWHOIS is written is, if there is no WHOIS information returned for a domain request (e.g.) a:
 
# whois domainname.com
 
returns an empty information, the script doesn't warn with a message there is no WHOIS data available for this domain or something.
 
 
This is not so important as this kind of behaviour of 'error' handling can easily be changed with minimum changes in the php code.
If you wonder, why do I need the web whois service, the answer is it is way easier to use.
I don't have more time to research a bit further on the alternative open source web whois services, so I would be glad to hear from anyone who tested other web whois service that is free comes under a FOSS license.
In the mean time, I'm sure people with a small internet websites like mine who are looking to run their OWN (personal) whois service SpeedyWHOIS does a great job.

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Posted in Everyday Life, System Administration, Web and CMS | 5 Comments »

What is the real development costs of Debian GNU / Linux – How much costs the development of a Free Software projects

Friday, February 17th, 2012

Free Software (FS) is free as in freedom as well as free as in price. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is developed by geek hobbyist which voluntarily put their time and effort in writting, testing and sharing with anyone for free million of lines of programming code. This doesn't mean however the price of free software costs is 0 (zero). Though the "end product" –  Free Software developed is FREE, "real" software costs as with any other product costs huge money.

I've recently read on Jeb's blog an estimation on how much is the cost of one of the major Free Software project efforts – Debian GNU / Linux
According to James E. Bromberger – the whole Debian project was estimated to be at the shocking price of $19 billion – $19 000, 000, 000 !!!

Here is how JEB got the $19 billions, a quote taken from his blog:

"By using David A Wheeler’s sloccount tool and average wage of a developer of US$72,533 (using median estimates from Salary.com and PayScale.com for 2011) I summed the individual results to find a total of 419,776,604 source lines of code for the ‘pristine’ upstream sources, in 31 programming languages — including 429 lines of Cobol and 1933 lines of Modula3!

In my analysis the projected cost of producing Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR€14.4B, GBP£12.11B), making each package’s upstream source code worth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost).

James has done incredible job with this great research and he deserves applause.
However I believe the numbers proposed by his research are slightly different if we speak about realistic cost of Debian GNU / Linux.
The real costs of the working software ready to install on a user PC are way higher, as according to Jeb's research only the software cost based on code line count is considered.

Hence James software estimation calculates only the programming costs and miss many, many factors that constitute the software end cost.
Some of the many, many REAL COST / expenses for developing a huge Free Software project like Debian GNU / Linux to be considered are:
 

a) bandwidth costs for hosting free software (on the server side)b) bandwidth cost for developers or FS users downloading the software

a) Time spend to spread the word of the great added value of Debian and bundled software (Mouth by Mouth Marketing)

b) Time spend to advertise Debian and its free software components on blogs, social networks (identi.ca, facebook, twitter) etc.(Voluntary online Marketing, SEO etc.)

c) Time spend on generating ideas on future program versions and reporting them to Debian FS community

d) Time on evaluation and feedback on software

e) Time spend on managing free software repository (download) servers voluntarily (by system administrators)

f) Time spend by users on Bug Tracking & Bug Reporting

g) Time spend on research and self-actualization by software developer)

h) Time spend on software Quality Assurance

This are most of the multiple factors which should probably influence the cost of any non-free (proprietary software) project. No matter this costs apply for non-free software, it perfectly applies for free software as well.With all said if if we assume the non-programming costs are equal to the programming costs of $ 19 000 000 000 (suggested by Jeb). This means the real cost of Debian will presumably be at least $32 000 000 000. Putting $ 19 billion for all this long list of "additional" costs (besides pure source) factors is probably still very under-scored number.
 

  • the developers use of their own computers (hardware depreciation)
  • electricity bill of the volunteer (developer) working on the program or project
  • electricity bills for servers where free software is stored and available for download
  • volunteer developer IT skills and tech knowledge (KNOW HOW)
  • Internet, network, dial up bandwidth cost
  • personal time put in FS development (programming, design, creativity etc.)! here the sub costs are long:
  • Costs for Project Management Leaders / Project Coordination
  • The complexity of each of the projects constituting Debian

Very interesting figure from Jeb's research is the Programming Languages break down by source code figure.
Jamesresearch reveals on the 4 major programming languages used in the 17000+ software projects (part of Debian GNU / Linux):

 

  • ANSI C with 168,536,758 – (40% of all projects source code)
  • C++ at 83,187,329 – (20% of all projects source)
  • Java 34,698,990 – (lines of code 8% of sources)
  • Lisp – (7% of all projects source code)

  His research also provides a general idea on how much the source code of some of the major FOSS projects costs. Here is a copy of his figures
 

Individual Projects

Other highlights by project included:

Project Version Thousands
of SLOC		 Projected cost
at US$72,533/developer/year
Samba 3.6.1 2,000 US$101 (AU$93M)
Apache 2.2.9 693 US$33.5M (AU$31M)
MySQL 5.5.17 1,200 US$64.2M (AU$59.7M)
Perl 5.14.2 669 US$32.3M (AU$30M)
PHP 5.3.9 693 US$33.5M (AU$31.1M)
Bind 9.7.3 319 US$14.8M (AU$13.8M)
Moodle 1.9.9 396 US$18.6M (AU$17.3M)
Dasher 4.11 109 US$4.8M (AU$4.4M)
DVSwitch 0.8.3.6 6 US$250K (AU$232K)

 

As you can imagine all the source evaluation results, are highly biased and are open for discussion, since evaluating a free software project/s is a hard not to say impossible task. The "open" model of development makes a project very hard to track, open source model implies too many unexpected variables missing from the equation for clear calculation on costs. What is sure however if turned in money it is very expensive to produce.  At present moment Debian Project is sponsored only through donations. The usual yearly budget 5 years ago for Debian  was only $80 000 dollars a year!! You can check Debian Project annual reports throughout the years here , for year 2012 Debian Project budget is as low as $ 222, 677 (US Dollars)! The output price of the software the project provides is enormous high if compared to the low project expenses!

For us the free software users, price is not a concern, Debian is absolutely free both  as in freedom and free as in beer 😉
 

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Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Various | 2 Comments »

Little Registry Cleaner (Free Software / Open Source Windows XP Registry Cleaner)

Saturday, December 17th, 2011

Little Registry Cleaner - Free and Open Source Software Windows XP Registry cleaner / Alternative to Registry Booster
Have you ever wondered, if there is a free (open source) software that could fix Windows XP registry irregularities e.g. (obsolete or unwanted items that build up in the registry over time.)?

I did not either until now, however when I had to fix, few Windows XP computers which was not maintained for a long time fixing the Windows registry was necessery to make the sluggerish computers improve their overall stability and performance.

The reasons of the slowness in computers who run for a long time by users who does not have a "computer culture" are obvious.
Windows programs which has incorrectly placed registry records withint the Windows registry database, Programs which on Uninstall / Removal left behind a lot of registry records just to hang around because of impotent (coders), or records created on purpose on program uninstall to intentionally further track the user behavior etc.
Other reasons why Windows registry gots bloated with time, are due to Malware or polymorphic Viruses which load them selves everytime on Windows load using some obscure registry records.

Though I'm not a big proprietary software lover still my job as a system administrator , enforces me to fix some broken Windowses.
I haven't fixed Windows machines for a long time, so my memories on programs that clean up registry are from my young years.

The software, I've used before to fix Windows 2000 / XP Registry was:

1. Registry Booster

From my current perspective of a free software hobbyist / evangelist it was important for me to clean up the Windows PCs with a program that is Free or Open Source Software.
When I'm asked to fix some Windows computer I always do my best to make most of the programs that roll on the PC to be FOSS.

Using FOSS instead of downloading from torrents, some cracked software has multiple benefits.

1. Usually Free Software is more stable and more robust2. FOSS software for Windows usually does not come with Malware / Spyware as many of the cracked proprietary software

3. Free and Open Source Programs are simplistic in interface and way of use

A bit of research if there is a Free (Open Source) Software immediately lead me to a program called Little Registry Cleaner
You can see a screenshot of the program in the beginning of the article, the program is very easy to install and use and uses some .NET framework classes so right before installing it installs .NET library (code).

The use results of Little Registry Cleaner were amazing. Even though it is a free software the program found and fixed more registry problems than its competitor Windows Registry Booster! 😉
 

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Posted in System Administration, Windows | 4 Comments »