Foooka - Exploring Linux for fun, some freeware, open source, web app and even fun stuff here

Professional CISCO certificates such as CCNA, CCMP and CCIE might not be needed in Sabah IT environment

linuxfoooka — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:42:19 +0000

Last weekend, I managed to talk to a friend of my wife’s, who has been working in KL for a couple of months as a CISCO certificate trainer, such as those CCNA, CCMP etc. She was asking me if she could have any chance to find a job in Sabah, as the dad has been asking her to get back here to work instead of working in Kuala Lumpur, which the living environment is not as safe as in Sabah.

I was frank to her, the Sabah’s IT work enviroment might not appreciate that much for someone to have a CISCO CCNA, CCMP kind of certificates. Especially what she’s been specialized is in training those people to get these certs. As I mentioned to her, I haven’t touched and implemented any CISCO products in any of our major projects recently. The last memory that I’d ever implemented CISCO products was at least 4-5 years back.

Of course, some recent project tenders grabbed by our sister company, do have some requiring the CISCO products. But mainly nowadays fall under to implement WiFi access points and some Catalyst series entry-level switches. Perhaps, all these setup will NOT need you to possess a CISCO CCNA or even higher such as CCMP to get them to work.

Besides, the IT enviroment in Sabah is still pretty weak and not aware at all what so important, and they couldn’t be bothered if a Cisco-certified engineer is to handle or implement their company networking requirement, as long as the person or the company that they’ve assigned the projects to, is able to get it setup and done in good shape!

Refreshing some of my memories, back in about 5 years. The highest-range of Cisco products that I’d ever implemented were setting up some point to point routers for some companies, some Cisco 2500 routers etc, which I believe these products have gone obsolete.

Besides, on switching the highest-end that I has ever touched was the Catalyst 6000+ series, which the project involved using the Catalyst 6000 as the core switch and to link to a couple of the Catalyst 3000+, 2000+ switches. And the physical cables involved were both UTP 100-based-TX and some Fiber 1000-Based SX etc.

As I mentioned, most companies in Sabah are lacking of a solid IT department. Especially on the private sectors, they’re worse. For the government sectors, they have an IT department, but those involved in the IT department are NOT technical enough to appreciate how important to get a switch properly setup, such as to fully utilize VLAN feature to segregate accesses for servers for different departments within the organization.

My experience while setting up the mentioned core switch and the rest of the networking environment, we did propose to the IT department of that organization if they wanted to have VLAN setup properly. And asking them if they could provide the details how they wanted to setup, such as what group of users, and what resources and access privileges that we’d need to work out etc. But they seemed to have gone blur with what we’d told them. And they couldn’t be bothered for such a complex setup. Especially explaining about how important and useful VLAN, and those technical jargons such as VLAN tagging etc, the IT administrators of the organization have completely gone blur. An they finally chose NOT to have VLAN setup. Leaving a core switch Catalyst 6000+ that cost about RM60-80K or more (I can’t remember the price, I guess it was in that range), was being used as a normal switch only.

Besides, nowadays, most IT projects in Sabah involve a total solution, which networking contributes only a very small part. There isn’t anymore big projects that could raise pretty much high budget for implementing only the networking infrastructure. Nowadays, projects with higher-budget mostly involve a total solution, and system integration such as delivering software applications, setting up various servers, and some also include setting up the proper network infra and security. Meaning to say that networking involves only a small part of the total budget, which will probably hardly afford a CCMP-certfied person.

And furthermore, there is a super big gap between the management people, the decision makers, who control the financial of the company and the IT departments. It’s kind of hard for these laymen to understand the IT departments why they need such a complex networking equipment, and this equipment can do only for the network, instead for the entire solution. As instead they have various other China and Taiwan-made products such as Huawei or Dlink or 3Com, which are much cheaper. And I’ve been told these products are all web-enabled now, which you don’t have to deal with complex IOS commands, so you don’t need a certified engineer for that! (This is what in the mind in most IT business men)

Besides, a partner company that we used to deal with, had a guy who got the grand CCIE, but he had flew to Japan for work. As being a CCIP, it’s simply NOT worth staying in Sabah. As there is no big ISP, that you can experience with those Border Gateway stuff!

UBIS – A water billing system that really sucks!

linuxfoooka — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:56:27 +0000

It’s been a long while that I haven’t updated this blog. As the past couple of months some work has really made my life going little miserable. I’ve been involved in a project which is a conversion from an old water billing software application system into a new one.

I’m now in Malaysia, have been involved in a project as mentioned that involves migrating an old Water billing system for a state in Malaysia into a new Water billing application system. And I’m actually attached to a company, which is considered as the main contractor that has got this project. And our company has outsourced this project to a company in Kuala Lumpur, who has been involved in producing such a kind of Utility Billing Application system, and who has got the ready-made product.

Lets have some little background about the new water billing application system. In this post I will NOT disclose who the company and the developers are that built this new water billing application system. If you wanna know the name of this new water billing application system, it’s called UBIS (Utility Billing Information System).

The UBIS app is to run on Oracle platform. Everything seems fine up to here. Okay, we were given about two years to complete this project, which includes various tasks such as converting the old billing system into the new UBIS app, and deploying it over couple districts of the water billing department across the state.

The experience of involving in this project is totally sour. Which the main reason is the company that provides this UBIS software app, simply sucks! It’s resulted lots of unhappiness, especially for the users. There were lots of unplanned activities and failures in deploying this new UBIS system. Especially with the failed data conversion from the old system into this new UBIS system. It’s all basically because of that our sub-contractor, the company that makes the UBIS system, fails at all to provide professional services. And they failed in a couple of tasks such as data conversion, which high percentage of data from the old system were not properly converted and the system has been deployed with lots of bugs, which there was a need for up to 20 over patches since the deployment of the system. The system has got a few other auxiliary components, such as the RM20CEC, RM20ePos, which have also been deployed “badly” with full of bugs!

In short, the company that develops and sells this UBIS system, totally fails to deliver a professional service. And it’s the worst software application developer and company that I’ve ever seen in my life!!!

Will Novell be another evil SCO?

linuxfoooka — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:02:13 +0000

Novell won the court case. Linux finally goes legit! The copyright of Unix belongs to Novell, so SCO no right to claim billions from IBM and the Linux disti for claiming the Linux contains some Unix codes in the kernel. If you’re still unsure and simply paranoid that Novell will follow the steps of SCO to dig out some money from Linux users, now you can be relieved. As they promised, they won’t do the same thing as what the SCO had done over the past few years. They’ve defeated SCO and they’re the supporter of Linux, what for they’re gonna repeat the same thing as what the evil SCO did?

The Novell spokesman says: “We’re not interested in suing people over Unix, We’re not even in the Unix business anymore.”…..”We don’t believe there is Unix in Linux,” Lowry said. “We’ve been fighting that all along. It wouldn’t be consistent for Novell to say, ‘Oh gosh, now that this has been confirmed, we’re going to suddenly take a different position’ and sue companies for copyright infringement.”. But, what if they just simply feel it’s fun to be inconsistent? This is how today’s business men are reacting…. LOL.. Who knows? Perhaps, Novell wanna kill other Linux disti, so their SuSE Linux will be the king?

Anyway, there are still some unresolved issues here. Companies like Microsoft and Sun started paying SCO a few years ago as they didn’t wanna get sued that would have given them bigger loss if SCO won the case. The court will decide later if the money paid to SCO for the past few years by these companies need to be thrown out to pay Novell…

Source

Yeah! Linux finally goes legit!

linuxfoooka — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:47:31 +0000

I almost forgot this lawsuit that happened in year 2003. Still remember? A lawsuit was fired by bloody SCO, which claimed that IBM and the Linux community has some codes in their Kernel that was stolen from the SCO Unix etc bra bra bra! At that time, probably everybody started worrying about if the uncertainty of using Linux.

Especially, those started migrating from Windows to Linux since couple of years ago. Yeah, we’re one of them, our office servers especially mail, web, name servers are on Linuxes. Even, our databases on Oracle are now on the Linux platform too. Except the workstations, we have now only two Windows servers out of 12 servers here in the office. Lets get back to lawsuit, don’t get out of track of what this post is meant for.

Yeah, Linux is finally legitimate. You can now freely use it as your workstations and servers. The lawsuit that lasted for 4 years finally ended last Friday and Novell is the winner. Yes, Novell came out to defend while SCO was pushing for asking billions of dollars from Linux distis and IBM. And the lawsuit has even created the uncertainty over using Linux in their companies. As people were all worried about deploying their servers or workstations in Linux would end up of having to pay much more expensive licensing to SCO, if SCO won the case. Anyway, Novell is the winner, some more SCO has to pay Novell. Since Novell is the Linux supporter, so there won’t be any issue about the uncertainty of Linux…. Start converting all your servers platform to Linux now if you have NOT!

Source

FireFTP, a drag and drop FTP client that works as a Firefox extension

linuxfoooka — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:11:30 +0000

I’ve used couple of FTP client software over the past few years due to heavily involved in web development that always need me to upload files to servers. I’ve used the kinda FTP client from command line to Windows GUI, some support secure FTP and some don’t, such as CoreFTP, CuteFTP, WinSCP or you name it!

FireFTP is the one that only recently caught my attention, simply but its name that has the word fire. Of coz having a name associated with the word fire is nothing a big deal, it could be just a marketing gimmick for boosting the product. The name FireFTP actually caught my eye from an attached CD that came with the magazine that I bought recently. But, anyhow, I misplaced that magazine, but the name, FireFTP, still remained in mind. So, having a little free time today, I tried googling around what the hack this FireFTP is about.

Well, I got it, it’s downloadable here. It’s a little different than the other FTP clients that I’ve ever used. Yes, it’s different as it works as a Firefox extension instead of a standalone program to be installed on your desktop. Frankly, I’ve been a Linux user for couple of years, but I haven’t got a clue what FTP client available in Linux platform, which is in the GUI mode that allows me to drag and drop as what I’m used to doing it in Windows, such as those CoreFTP, CuteFTP can do. On Linux platform, I’ve been using on the command line interface, firing those commands such as “put”, “mput”, “get” to get those files uploaded or downloaded. Of course, it’ll be lacking some kinda handiness while compared to the drag and drop feature in GUI version of FTP clients. Especially coming to uploading hundred of files or directories.

FireFTP works as a Firefox extension, just enough for me to use it as a drag and drop FTP cliemt, even though I’m now on Fedora Core 7 now. To install it, just download it from the website, it’ll go thru the process similar to what other Firefox extensions offer. And after the installation, you will be able to access it again on your Firefox by going to “Tools” then you’ll see it there! Anyway, FireFTP is still lacking the SFTP feature, I’d love to see an improved version later that supports the secure FTP over port 22.

GIMP, just enough for me to have picture editing while blogging!

linuxfoooka — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:29:33 +0000

It seems to be lacking of some ideas what to write about today. Anyway, this blog post is all about ~~is always~~ the question that my friends and colleagues always ask, “what I use for picture/image editing since I’m on Linux platform?”. It’s GIMP. I’m no good at all at any graphic editing work. But, I’ll always need to include some pictures on my blog, as I always feel that the blog post must be associated with some pictures then only ut looks nice. So, GIMP is the one that I always use for resizing pictures and then upload to wordpress here.

Especially, when writing on this blog, I always need to capture the screenshot, as this blog contains entries about software, web app, Linux stuff that always involve capturing screen shots and also resizing these captured screenshots into smaller images in order to go nicely on blog posts. So, GIMP is the tool I use for doing all that. I ain’t no expert of graphical editing. What I know only is to open up a picture, lets say a captured screen, and then using GIMP’s image scaling function to scale down the image. For example, a captured screen of 1024×768 then I’ll always scale it down to have only the width of 450.

I hope to spend more time to explore more on GIMP. I’m kinda no graphical design background although I’m pretty familiar with web app development such as those PHP, JSP. But when coming to using GIMP or exploring other similar image processing tool, such as Photoshop, I seem to go impatient of doing that. Anyway, GIMP has been the ~~tool that~~ main tool for image editing since I was on Windows platform. Due to mainly it’s open source, no need to bear any license. All free for use. And it follows me even I’m on Fedora Core 7 now. GIMP had gone in during the installation, so to access it, I normally go to the terminal there to type “gimp”, then it will pop up! I hope to free up some time to explore more about the tutorial on GIMP later…

Who is the king or queen in the blogosphere? Wordless or wordful blog?

linuxfoooka — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:03:59 +0000

Isn’ t it a pretty hot topic that you have to have a wordful blog or a wordless blog? What I call a wordful blog is a blog that contains many posts that each has at least a 200 hundred words. Those folks like ProBlogger will mostly ask you to write a post blog that is long enough in order to be liked by Google search engine and its crawler.

But, recently another type of wordless blog, ICanHasCheezBurger, a very famous blog that is all about those cute and funny pics of fat pussies simply for LOL. This kinda of blog is simply wordless or contains only one or two lines of words as what is mentioned in the pic. And they’re full of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Of course, it’s definitely a blog full of fun, funniest ever over the blogosphere with all the cute pics of those fat cats. It’s not meant for writing formal stuff, the kinda of grammatical & spelling mistakes are simply meant for the cats, for the LOL fans, that’s how they keep it funny. And they’ve even triggered some hot trend over the famous “icanhas” phrase and people seem to create the kind of craze to purchase those “icanhas” domain names.

By judging at ICanHasCheezBurger’s archives, it’s only a blog of 7-month-old started in January, this year. But, it’s obvious that it’s a super hot blog that receives millions of page views a day and makes few hundred dollars or more from blog ads a day. This can all be learned from its WhosAmungUs stat counter that shows over 500-1,000 concurrent LOL fans over the past 10 minutes. Theb history about this blog was it first started by the two programmers which was meant to have fun only. And they started finding the traffic doubled each month. Finally they “can has blogads” that is profitable enough to even make them quit their day job and focused on this blog!

My conclusion is your blog needs to be unique with content, no matter it’s the kinda of long content or simply short content or only funny pics. The most important is keeping a blog to target audience instead of search engines. But think in another way, isn’t it ICanHasCheezBurger able to pull more organic traffic from the search engines, due to most performing searches on Google or Yahoo all failed to spell or construct sentence correctly? It could be! That could be the way how the cheezburger managed to pull all the traffic initially. Of coz, the icanhas blog is definitely the funniest one that ensures its success to retain its audiences! Ummmm… started thinking of to have more typo in blog posts here, so I could probably pull more organic traffic, LOL!

SELinux dead annoying?

linuxfoooka — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 04:08:23 +0000

As mentioned before I have just switched to Fedora Core 7. But after switching what I’ve found dead annoying is the SELinux. I haven’t got much clue about what this SELinux is about. It seems to be some kind of new security policy for program execution that has been added for the recent distributions of Linux system. I appreciate the additional security on Linux, but it damn gives some inconvenience especially coming to installing third party software.

The first thing I wanna do after getting my Fedora Core 7 was to get my Apache web server with PHP to run. I quickly mounted my ~~own~~ old hard drive that is still on Fedora Core 3, where I have an Apache there. I tried to start that Apache on the mounted partition, but it failed to start telling me message saying “cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied” (Preceded with other longer message, so not handy to print here). At first I thought this was due to different lib or modules with the new kernel that I had to recompile my Apache + PHP (I’m used to using the unix compilation version instead of those RPMs). So, I did that for all the Apache and PHP, going thru those ./configure , make, make install. All gone thru well, and then I tried to start Apache again. Agai, it showed me similar problem, the same message.

The only thing I could do then was to google around, by typing the message “”cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied” into Google’s search text box. And I found this web page telling me that SELinux is the culprit behind all these. So, I followed the instruction, first I tried to issue the command

chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /usr/local/www/modules/libphp4.so

Then tried to restart Apache, but it seemed to give NO avail. So, I then tried using the GUI SELinux Management tool, by adding label, but the system gave me a big window with all the errors… as shown in the following attached screenshot.

Finally, I decided to set SELinux to disabled (I set it to enforcing during installation time as I didn’t know much about what it was. My thought was having extra security was good at first). So, I did that by editing /etc/sysconfig/selinux , then set SELINUX=disabled instead of enforcing. I then thought I probably needed to do some kind of /etc/init.d/selinux restart to activate it, but it has nothing to do with that. When I got back to the SELinux GUI Management, it showed me the System Default Enforcing Mode is now “disabled”, but the Current Enforcing Mode still remained “enforcing”. Then I tried to start my Apache, this time it works! Even though I set the SELINUX variable in the /etc/sysconfig/selinux back to “enforcing”, I still can start and run my Apache web server. So, this currently left me some kind of puzzle which the one that had taken effect to let the Apache run. The only thing I need to do is to explore more about this new SELinux security feature. Or totally disable SELinux to avoid any hassle for running any 3rd party software. Doesn’t it mean, we have to sacrifice some security if we wanna run some 3rd party software on newer disti of Linux? Sounds getting more complex. But, I’ll try to explore more about SELinux when I have some free time later.

Can we customize WordPress.com’s template? Yes, you can! But it costs some money!

linuxfoooka — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:59:58 +0000

Actually, having a blog on WordPress.com is only an idea recently popped up, just for a try. I’ve read somewhere else that having a blog on a blogging commonplace such as WordPress.com or Blogger would be potential to pull more traffic. As this commonplace has the feature to roll your blog or your most recent post among the bloggers who registered and blog here. It could be right and it could wrong. Although, I’ve been blogging over my own domain name using downloaded wordpress blog software, but I’d like to take a try here today to start blogging on WordPress.com simply for fun. Currently, I still remain anonymous about who I’m, which I’m gonna disclose after this blog is 5-month-old.

As mentioned, I’ve been blogging on my own domain using downloaded wordpress and I’ve been very used to having blog ads and some other customization for blog templates to make some money out of blogging. The first shock after a few posts on wordpress.com here was the themes and templates allow NO customization. I’ve tried thousands of mouse clicks over the presentation option, switching themes but I failed to find anyway to do it. So, something came up in my mind, oopppsss, what if one day this blog gets popular, then I wanna make some bucks out of it? What can I do if there is no way to customize it? So, I started googling around and I found this post of Lorelle on wordpress. Yes, you can customize it, but with a fee, which costs you $15 a year. $15 per year, sounds cheap, why not if your blog has started making quite a lot from blog ads and others such as ReviewMe, PayPerPost. And it’s simply cheaper than hosting the blog on your own hosting, unless you’re quite a tech savvy, that you have to deal with MySQL and some PHP.

There have been tons of debates out there if to host the blog yourself under your own web hosting and domain or to write on blogging commonplace such as Blogger or WordPress.com. There is always good and bad sides of any of the two. To have blog on WordPress.com is easily to create buzz and pull traffic for a newly start-up blog. Anyway, I can only tell you more precisely once this blog gets popular. I’ll have a blog post to track this back if this blog manages to become the lucky guy, being one of the popular blog in the blogosphere, then I’ll pay the $15 and start adding blog ads here….

Texty, a dead simple CMS??? Yes, so dead simple to create a web page!

linuxfoooka — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:08:01 +0000

Texty was buzzed a few days ago to claim that it’s one of a the CMS (Content Management System) that is dead simple. So I jumped to Texty website, then what I was first presented was the screen above. A WYSIWYG editor , similar to the wordpress visual editor for creating a blog post. So, I quickly took a try and typed some words…”bra bra testt….”. Of course, Texty will then need my email and my password in order for me to be able to save or publish the text I’ve typed.

So, then I proceeded to do that by giving my email and then I chose “Copy Texty”. After all, it presented me the screen of a JavaScript code that asking me to copy to my webpage. And I then use my pico editor to create a new page, then paste the code there and then open up with my Firefox browser. Voila, as shown in the screen below, my first Texty page is formed and it allows to add comment furthermore and the comments posted by users will be saved into your Texty account.

Furthermore, users are allowed to subscribe to comments via RSS feed. Cool? A very easy way to create static web page. Go Texty website and try out yourself, it’s fun!