Category Archives: Software

The silent victories of open source

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Tux, the Linux penguin

Image via Wikipedia

For years, free/libre/open source software (henceforth referred to as FLOSS) have proclaimed, year after year, how that year is the year of Linux, or the year that open source will become mainstream, or the year that open source will finally take off etc. But it never has, at least traditionally speaking. Linux based desktops haven’t penetrated either the enterprise or consumer markets; with a few notable exceptions (Apache httpd, for instance), most FLOSS products — be it office software like OpenOffice, multimedia software such as Gimp or Inkscape — remain popular with economically insignificant niches. And yet, this year, more than ever before, open source forges ahead with its silent victories.

Consider the following shifts:

  • all the top brands of the day — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — they ALLstand tall on the shoulders of FLOSS giants.
  • Contributing software back to the open source community is becoming increasingly common, even expected. Take a look at the GitHub repositories of Twitter and Facebook, or the various Google projects. In fact, when screening engineering candidates, I often look for and encourage people to talk about their open source contributions.
  • Most of the activity around “big data” and “cloud computing” is being driven in large part by FLOSS, whether it is the Hadoop-powered ecosystem or the Xen/Linux powered Amazon Web Services.
  • Given the current smartphone landscape, it is highly likely that Android will become ubiquitous on tablet devices and a variety of consumer smart phones. Already, Android has more search mindshare than Linux, despite the fact that Linux is part of the Android stack.
  • If you start a software company today, I would bet that you will find yourself bootstrapping almost entirely using open source software. The entire development process — from the GCC compiler toolchain, to the build systems, to the scripting languages, to the version control systems, to the code review systems, to the continuous integration systems — everything is dominated by FLOSS products. Good bug trackers and enterprise Wikis are the last bastions but it is just a matter of time.

I’ve had a chance to see the enterprise software market up close and increasingly find more and more open source everywhere I look. FLOSS has not arrived, it has taken over.

Startup Infrastructure: Where Linux Fails

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It is no secret that I’m an open source evangelist and so when it was time to set up internal infrastructure at work, naturally the first order of business was to evaluate the various OSS projects out there — everything from wikis, bug trackers, source control, code review and project management. Running Ubuntu LTS (10.04) on all of our servers was a no-brainer and there were plenty of excellent options for most everything else as well (a follow-up post on our final choices later). The Linux ecosystem is fabulous for most of the infrastructure needs of a startup, but I learnt the hard way that there are still some areas where Linux needs a lot of work before it can become competitive with proprietary, non-Linux solutions.

Authentication

Centralized account management (users and groups) and authentication is critical component in any IT deployment, no matter the size. Even for a small startup, creating users/groups repeatedly for each new server, separate authentication mechanisms for each new service is simply not scalable. That is precisely why Active Directory is so ubiquitous at enterprises.

LDAP was the obvious solution in Linux-land and I figured it would be trivial to setup an OpenLDAP server that can manage user/group information for us. It would also be the single authentication source for all servers and services. I was so wrong.

After struggling with OpenLDAP for several painful hours, I gave up — the documentation is fragmented, Google doesn’t help much and personally I think the LDAP creators had never heard of “usability” when designing it. The seemingly simple task of creating some new users and groups involved several black-magic incantations of the LDAP command line tools. Getting servers to authenticate against the resulting directory was even harder.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel and setup an AD instance in-house, I stumbled upon the 389 Directory Server (now known as the Fedora Directory Server). With a new found hope, I set about installing it on Ubuntu and hit another roadblock — there are no up-to-date packages of FDS for Ubuntu. Reluctantly, I setup a Fedora instance (the only one so far) and installed FDS. Thankfully, Red Hat has put together really comprehensive documentation and guides for the Directory Server, which was invaluable.

From there on, it was mostly downhill (only a few minor hiccups). Finally we have a nice GUI to manage users and groups, and all servers/services authenticate against a single Directory Server. But the journey was unnecessarily painful. Here’s what I’d like to see:

  • Up-to-date packages of FDS for Ubuntu. Sane defaults and functionality out-of-the-box
  • Ready to consume documentation on how to integrate LDAP with various web applications, Linux distros etc (I’ll put together some of this soon)
  • More awareness — I should have found FDS a lot sooner than I did, but it is certainly not very well marketed
  • Single sign on: This is a whole different beast

Remote Access

At my previous company, we had a Cisco VPN solution. There were plenty of Cisco compatible VPN clients on Windows and Mac. In fairness, it was relatively easy to get vpnc working on Ubuntu as well. In fact, with Network Manager, you can manage your VPN connections using a simple and intuitive UI. But the setup was not very reliable and my connections would get dropped relatively frequently. It was impossible to have a long-running VPN session without disruption. I’m not sure if the problem was with the Cisco hardware or the Ubuntu vpnc client; I did see similar issues with the built-in VPN client on Mac OS X.

But at least VPN on Linux works. I can’t say the same about other remote access mechanisms, in particular IPSec and L2TP over IPSec. It took me some time to figure out which package to use (Strongswan, Openswan, iked etc etc); another couple of hours to get the Openswan configuration just right; several hours of struggling to automatically setup DNS lookups when using the IPSec connection (gave up and ended up using entries in /etc/hosts!). There is no UI in Network Manager to manage IPSec connections either. Strongswan does have a NM plugin, but that only works for IKEv2 (certificate based authentication), while I had to use IKEv1 (shared key based authentication).

At the end of the day, I do have a working IPSec tunnel and it is definitely more reliable than the Cisco VPN (been up for more than 2 days without disruption). But all this can and should become a lot more seamless.

These are a few areas where Linux failed me in setting up the infrastructure for a startup; it shines most everywhere else. Hopefully these last few kinks will get ironed out soon.

Reclaim the TV

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Do you:

  • wonder who watches all of the 700+ channels that you get from your cable provider?
  • wonder why you are paying more than $50/month for all those channels, when you only watch a handful?
  • find yourself channel surfing, just because you can, not because you know what you want to watch?
  • feel like you are not getting the most out of your TV?
  • feel like you can’t wait for Google TV or the Boxee box to improve your television experience?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I have a few tips for you. There have been times when I spent an hour flipping through channels, not really watching anything in particular, and later feeling like an idiot for having wasted my time. All this while I just accepted that cable TV as a given, an inevitable companion of our internet service provider… until I met a few friends who were perfectly happy without any cable service.

With that inspiration, I started looking around for a better TV experience. There is so much content available online (and good content!) that I wasn’t really worried about lack of material to watch. Both Google TV and the Boxee box seemed very promising (not to mention, the new Apple TV). There were two little problems:

  1. Neither Boxee box nor Google TV are here yet, and
  2. All of these devices have very very limited functionality. They address the problem of Internet TV, but I don’t want to use my TV to just watch TV. I want it to become a hub for all my media. I want to access my local music, photos, videos and more.

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do — I built my own media center PC. It runs Ubuntu; it hosts all my media in a single location; it serves as media server and storage server; and it serves as a compute server when I have to transcode media. You can find all the gory details in this guide: HOWTO Build an Ubuntu based media center.

And just like that, I’m a GNOME user

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When I first started using Linux (more than a decade ago), I did my share of playing around with various desktop environments: the classic FVWM, GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment etc. I settled down with KDE. Over the years, I kept coming back to GNOME to check it out but somehow KDE always felt home to me.

Well guess what, not any more. As of a few days ago, I’m (mostly) a GNOME user.

I still love KDE (the desktop) and KDE based applications (KMail, Amarok etc). It is still infinitely more configurable than anything comparable in GNOME (Evolution and Thunderbird are still fairly limited in comparison) and over the years I’ve tweaked it to just the way I like it. But GNOME has something the KDE project does not: Canonical.

Thats right, I switched to GNOME because of Canonical, the company that drives Ubuntu development. Sure, there is a lot of effort behind the various Ubuntu variants such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. But make no mistake, none of these variants are first-class citizens in the Ubuntu ecosystem.

The switch was a result of my recent experience setting up Ubuntu on my home theater PC. The effort Canonical has put into making the Ubuntu experience more seamless and pleasant is clearly visible. Pretty much everything works out of the box: folders that I share show up on other computers in my home network, bluetooth/webcam etc all work just fine, setting up remote desktop is a breeze and so on, Avahi/bonjour works like a charm; I can setup a DAAP server to share my music and it shows up on iTunes just like that.

Note that all of these things are obviously not limited to Ubuntu in any way. But the user experience in Ubuntu is unparalleled in comparison with Kubuntu etc. Subtle niceties like the notifications (the Ayatana project), the Me menu,  the messaging menu, the “light” themes etc. come together in a very cohesive way to deliver an experience that rivals that of Mac OS. But beyond the subtleties, Canonical is shaping the future of Linux on the desktop, laptop and mobile devices: the Unity interface, multi-touch support for mobile devices and more. Bottomline: having a company put its weight behind a desktop has ramifications.

So as much as I love thy, KDE, for now we shall part ways. I’m still using some KDE apps (like digiKam), but until Canonical decides to officially adopt Kubuntu, GNOME it is.

Toying with node.js

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A commenter rightly complained that despite my claims of “playing around” with node.js, all I could come up was with the example in the man page. I replied saying that I did intend to post something that I wrote from scratch, and as promised, here is my first toy node.js program:

var sys = require('sys');
var http = require('http');
var url = require('url');
var path = require('path');

function search() {
  stdin = process.openStdin();
  stdin.setEncoding('utf8');
  stdin.on('data', function(term) {
    term = term.substring(0, term.length - 1);
    var google = http.createClient(80, 'ajax.googleapis.com');
    var search_url = "/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=" + term;
    var request = google.request('GET', search_url, {
      'host': 'ajax.googleapis.com',
      'Referer': 'http://floatingsun.net',
      'User-Agent': 'NodeJS HTTP client',
      'Accept': '*/*'});
    request.on('response', function(response) {
      response.setEncoding('utf8');
      var body = ""
      response.on('data', function(chunk) {
        body += chunk;
      });
      response.on('end', function() {
        var searchResults = JSON.parse(body);
        var results = searchResults["responseData"]["results"];
        for (var i = 0; i < results.length; i++) {
          console.log(results[i]["url"]);
        }
      });
    });
    request.end();
  });
}

search();

This program (also available as a gist) reads in search terms on standard input, and does a Google search on those terms, printing the URLs of the search results.

I was quite surprised (and a bit embarrassed) at how long it took me to get this simple program working. For instance, it took me the better part of an hour to realize that when I read something from stdin, it includes the trailing newline (as the user hits ‘Enter’). Earlier, I was using the input as-is for the search term, and that was leading to a 404 error, because the resulting URL was malformed.

Debugging was also harder, as expected. Syntax errors are easily caught by V8, but everything else is still obscure. I’m sure some of the difficulty is because of my lack of expertise with Javascript. But at one point, I got this error:

events:12
        throw arguments[1];
                       ^
Error: Parse Error
    at Client.ondata (http:881:22)
    at IOWatcher.callback (net:517:29)
    at node.js:270:9

I still haven’t figured out exactly where that error was coming from. Nonetheless, it was an interesting exercise. I’m looking forward to writing some non-trivial code with node.js now.