Monthly Archives: January 2014

IBM Finally Leaving the Intel Server Market

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After selling off the consumer side of their PC business to Lenovo the other shoe has dropped for IBMs x86 business, they are going to (try and) sell the rest of the x86 offerings (and the BNT network switches they bought recently) to Lenovo as well.

The Lenovo announcement is here here: http://www.lenovo.com/ww/lenovo/pdf/announcement/E_099220140123a.pdf (the IBM website is silent on the matter at the moment) but basically it boils down to:

Subject to the terms and conditions of the Master Asset Purchase Agreement, the Company will acquire certain assets (the “Transferred Assets”) which include, among other things, the following assets at the Initial Closing and Subsequent Closings:

  1. certain enumerated hardware products (including “System x”, “BladeCenter”, “Blade”, “Flex System”, “Pure Flex” products and system networking products including “Blade Network Technology” and certain other related tangible properties);
  2. certain intellectual property rights in connection with the Business;
  3. certain transferred contracts that are related to the Business; and
  4. inventory of the Business consisting of System x products, including the “System x”, “BladeCenter”, “Blade”, “Flex System” and “Pure Flex” products and certain other system networking products including “Blade Network Technology”.

By my reckoning that’s all their Intel related gear (and the network switches they recently bought when they acquired BNT).

So with no more BlueGene series and now no x86 that really leaves IBM with just Power for HPC workloads. I wonder how that will work out for them?

First beta release of Vacation 1.2.8.0

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Vacation 1.2.8.0-beta1 is a release that fixes a long standing bug handling wrapped email headers. Many thanks to Zdenek Havranek for the fix!

Richard Keech contributed a chkvacation script to enable/disable and check your vacation status. He also contributed some SELinux information for Vacation that you can find in the INSTALL file.

It also has some minor changes to the build system including the ability to do “make install DESTDIR=/foo/bar” and to also put the German manual page in the correct location.

Please see the ChangeLog for more information.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vacation/files/vacation/1.2.8.0-beta1/

Please test and let me know of any bugs you find!

An Aide Memoir for Debian Upgrades

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Documenting this as it’s the process I followed for upgrading Debian on the VM that runs this blog and others, for the purposes of having notes for next time and in case it helps others. Please do not consider it complete, if it breaks your upgrade you get to keep both parts..

  • Ensure all current updates to Debian and installed
  • Firewall the VM from all external access to quiesce activity and prevent email delivery and web access before it’s all tested
  • cd /etc; etckeeper commit "Commit any uncommitted pre-upgrade changes" – Make sure there are no uncommitted changes in /etc
  • Change /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the new Debian version
  • apt-get install debian-archive-keyring – to ensure current PGP keys are in place to verify the archive
  • postconf -e "soft_bounce = yes"Set Postfix to do soft bounces in case of issues bringing things back up
  • Stop all web and email services
  • Comment out all crontab entries for amavis
  • Ensure Maia Mailguard has processed all its outstanding quarrantined items by running the script by hand.
  • Do a full mysqldump, copy it offline
  • Stop MySQL to quiesce it
  • Use the hosting providers web interface to take a snapshot backup of the current state, just in case..
  • script -f upgrade – log everything to a log file
  • Start Postfix only so apt-listchanges can email news to root
  • apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade – do the actual upgrade!
  • Fix all the things. 🙂