centos

We're at the stage in the Red Hat drama where everyone is consulting history, trying to figure out what parts are being repeated in 2023 after Red Hat effectively locked down the sources used to build RHEL clones.

One talk linked quite often was Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos, by Bryan Cantrill over a decade ago. Bryan was a software engineer at Sun, who went over to Oracle after the buyout, then left to join Joyent, and now resides as CTO of Oxide.

The talk focuses on Sun Microsystem's handling of Solaris and OpenSolaris, both before and after their Oracle acquisition, and the whole talk is worth a listen—so much context about the history of ZFS, Solaris, Illumos, dtrace, and even UNIX and Linux history are contained within.

But there was one section (around the 32:00 mark) where if you substitute "Red Hat" for "Sun," rhymes with this year's "open source company" drama:

I went back and looked at some of the mail trails about this and like, "oh, my God!"

As someone who champions truth, yet knows truth is bent to espouse many ideas, I realize clever phrasing often turns irrational lies into strong beliefs—especially when passion takes over.

And we in the open source community are a passionate bunch.

But to clear the air a little bit—especially as I have seen some zingers going both directions (from Red Hat employees to the community, and vice-versa):

I've started getting a lot of bug reports on my repos to the effect of "Ansible won't install on my Raspberry Pi anymore". Accompanying it is a debug message like one of the following:

$ python3 -m pip install ansible
...
No matching distribution found for ansible-core<2.13,>=2.12.0 (from ansible)

# Alternatively:
ERROR: No matching distribution found for ansible-core<2.13,>=2.12.0

The problem is ansible-core 2.12 has a new hard requirement for Python 3.8 or newer. And ansible-core 2.12 is included in Ansible 5.0.0, which was recently released. Raspberry Pi OS, which was based on Debian 10 ("Buster") until recently, includes Python 3.7, which is too old to satisfy Ansible's installation requirements.

There was recently a fix that makes it so Ansible 5.x won't get installed on these older systems, but who wants to get stuck on old unsupported Ansible versions?

There are three options:

I've worked in open source my entire career¹. To say that I'm worried about the impact recent events have on the open source ecosystem would be an understatement.

In the past couple months:

• Red Hat effectively killed CentOS
• Elastic effectively killed Elasticsearch

People may rightfully refute these statements, but the statements are more complicated than you might think. Killing a project doesn't mean the project will vanish overnight, but what has happened so far is two very large companies in the 'enterprise open source' space have shown the chinks in the armor of the monetization of open source software.

For many years, everyone in the industry pointed at Red Hat as the shining example of 'how to build a company around open source'.

And for the past decade, the open source Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana logging ecosystem was on a tear, becoming a standard in the open source cloud stack.

From time to time, there's a security patch or other update that's critical to apply ASAP to all your servers. If you use Ansible to automate infrastructure work, then updates are painless—even across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of instances! I've written about this a little bit in the past, in relation to protecting against the shellshock vulnerability, but that was specific to one package.

I have an inventory script that pulls together all the servers I manage for personal projects (including the server running this website), and organizes them by OS, so I can run commands like ansible [os] command. Then that enables me to run commands like:

If you're running CentOS 6.x (I use 6.4 currently), and you have installed the EPEL yum repository, you can install Node.js simply with:

Done. Check for node's successful installation by running $ node -v (it should return something like v0.10.4).

Adapted from my answer on Server Fault.

Nowadays, most people assume that all modern computers and operating systems have network time synchronization set up properly and switched on by default. However, this is not the case with many Linux servers—especially if you didn't install Linux and configure it yourself (as would be the case with most cloud-based OS images like those used to generate new servers on Linode).

After setting up a new server on Linode or some other Linux VPS or dedicated server provider, you should always do the following to make sure the server's timezone and date and time synchronization are configured and working correctly: