Mohamed M. Hagag's Blog

Who do you trust with your data ?!

mohamedhagag — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:31:14 +0000

Wadsworth’s Way: * Who do you trust with your data ?!

* Who do you trust with your data ?!
Well, by now anyone who has an interest in the alternative operating systems to Microsoft Windows will have read the numerous reports relating to the announcement made by Google concerning their development of the “Google Chrome OS”.
It seems clear that their intention is to develop an OS that is based around Google services but more importantly where applications and data will be hosted in the “cloud”.
Now lets be clear just what we’re talking about here.

WinFF – FFMPEG GUI – Video Converter

mohamedhagag — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:40:48 +0000

Another Great tool for video converter, this time based on the great ffmpeg project – all open source for sure.

WinFF – Free Video Converter

WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions.

VirtualDub the great but forgotten Open Source Video Converter

mohamedhagag — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:34:43 +0000

Welcome to virtualdub.org! – virtualdub.org

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

I basically started VirtualDub in college to do some quick capture-and-encoding that I wanted done; from there it’s basically grown into a more general utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program. I released it on the web and others found it useful, so I’ve been tinkering around with its code ever since. If you have the time, please download and enjoy.

Knoppix 6.2 – is it still alive ?!

mohamedhagag — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:48:38 +0000

i was thinking that knoppix died long time ago, but today i noticed this, so long live knoppix, the father of all Live Distros

Knoppix rev’d – News – Linux for Devices

Klaus Knopper has released version 6.2 of his Debian-based live-CD Linux distro. Based on Debian 5.0 (“Lenny”), the new version uses the lightweight LXDE as the default desktop, and includes a new version of the ADRIANE talking menu system for vision-impaired users.

The live-CD version of Knoppix, called Microknoppix, offers a complete rewrite of the Knoppix boot system, and includes a number of bug fixes and updates, says Knopper in his release notes. The release is said to be based on the “Testing” and “Unstable” branch of Debian 5.0 (“Lenny”), as well as Linux Kernel 2.6.31.6, and X.org 7.4.

Devices for Linux or Linux for Devices ?

mohamedhagag — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:56:10 +0000

All About Linux-powered Devices – Linux for Devices
this site have lots of information about devices compatible or made to run linux, devices like embedded systems, smartohones, servers, set-top-boxes, storage, network and many other types of devices.

i will not talk alot about this site, browse it and see your self .

Welcome to Fedora 12

mohamedhagag — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:10:16 +0000

Release Notes

As always, Fedora continues to develop (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions) and integrate the latest free and open source software (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features). The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the previous release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are included in Fedora 12 refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress:

Linux: 400TB of Climate Data

mohamedhagag — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:46:36 +0000

Linux Powers Giant Database: 400TB of Climate Data and Counting – Linux and Climate Change

Climate change is perhaps the biggest issue facing humanity today – but one vital part of the puzzle is to calculate what exactly the future possibilities are. The Millennium Simulations project – now almost a year old – aims to tackle that issue, generating data which will in due course be used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international scientific body which is generally regarded as the authoritative voice on the effects and risks of climate change. The Millenium Simulations creates models of the earth’s climate, looking at the influence of human activity (including carbon generation and changes in land use), together with natural activity such as volcanoes, to project future climatic changes. It’s the first model which uses an interactive carbon cycle, and it also has various sub-models available, looking at land, ocean, and atmosphere.

Free good UNIX/Linux resources online

mohamedhagag — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:19:21 +0000

For anyone interested in UNIX/Linux and want’s to improve his knowledge in this field or just try it.

Linux: Beginners – Intermediate
Ubuntu – if you’re looking for a Wandos replacement with nice looking for your PC/Laptop.
RHEL – the great RHEL documentaion for Servers/Clusters and many others
Fedora – On the edge RHEL compatible and Red Hat sponsored version with nice looking for your Laptop/Desktop.
Debian – the most stable GNU/Linux for Desktop, Server, Cluster and embedded solutions with nice look just like ubuntu.
Slackware – slackware is the plain GNU/Linux for the intermediates who wants to dig deeper in UNIX world
Gentoo – gentoo is your hand made home, do it by your self as you like and the easy way .

UNIX: Intermediate – Advanced
PCBSD – PC-BSD is the Desktop/Laptop Oriented BSD system with nice and easy to use look.
FreeBSD – FreeBSD – Berkeley System Distribution is one of true UNIX systems available till now with modern desktop apps.
OpenSolaris – Open Solaris from Sun microsystems is the free version of Solaris and compatible with it.

NOTE: if you just want to try/learn any or all of them without affecting your system you can use VirtualBox and install what you want on a virtual machine.

Opinion: Cloud Computing

mohamedhagag — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:12:22 +0000

Linux Today – Editor’s Note: Cloud is Just Another Word for “Sucker”

As much as we warn about privacy, security, and reliability problems in cloud computing, it’s coming and we can’t stop it. So do we join the cloud party? Heck no.

It seems like it should have some advantages. Geeks back in the olden days used to say that a simple network appliance running hosted applications would be a good thing for unsophisticated users. Pay a monthly fee just like for phone services, use a subsidized terminal, and let the vendor have all the headaches of security, provisioning, system administration, updates, backups, and maintenance. What a boon for the business owner– outsource to a service provider, no muss, no fuss, and everyone is happy.

How to Build HA/LB LAMP Cluster

mohamedhagag — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:45:36 +0000

How to Build HA/Load-Balanced LAMP Cluster

In this article i will tell my experience with building a High-Availability Load Balanced Linux+Apache+PHP+MySQL Cluster using 2 web servers + 2 DB servers.

first of all i would like to say ” Many Thanks Sun Microsystems for the great work and projects you are always donating to FOSS world and my Best wishs”, I used the great virtualization platform VirtualBox or Sun XVM to do the lab for this project.

I advice every one who want to test Clustering or HPC to use VirtualBox get it here it’s very easy to use and its perfomance is the best.

Cluster Description:
This cluster will contain 4 nodes as follows:
- 2 x Apache servers configured as Active/Active load-balanced cluster.
- 2 x MySQL servers configured as Master/Slave with Replication and also as Active/Active Load-Balanced Cluster !!! .

The Distro. used in this project is CentOS and the real project contained a SAN storage with 2TB Disk space divided as 1TB for backup, 400GB for each MySQL Server and 200 GB shared Document Root between Apache web servers and formated as GFS2.

here i would like to say “Many Thanks to the Great Red Hat company, without your great support to FOSS and specially to GNU/Linux there will never be this great HA/Clustering platform.

It’s almost easy to do this project using Conga and/or system-config-cluster utilities, i used these tools to configure the cluster storage only as there’s no need to configure fail-over’d services because the whole cluster will be load-balanced.

the most problematic part is the Piranha and LVS configuration part, till now i can’t configure load-balancing using piranha nor /etc/sysconfig/ha/lvs.conf.

the easiest way for me was configuring every thing from the command line using ipvsadm and iptables then make changes permanent by saving them to /etc/rc.local .

to do this cluster using virtual machines, i did make 2 CentOS virtual machines !!, yes only 2 my laptop can’t run fine with more than 3 VMs .
one will be publicly accessible from WAN which acting as Load-Balancer + router + web server + DB server.
the other will be web server + DB server.

the configuration goes like the following:
- configure Apache on the 2 nodes ( i did configure it on the 2nd node to use an exported NFS DocRoot form node1).
- configure MySQL Replication on the Master (node1) and the slave (node2).
- configure ip_forwarding on 2 nodes.
- configure firewall masquerading and NAT on the first node
- set node1 as the default gateway to node2
- set the virtual IP on node 1 using an alias/virtual network interface or using iproute2
- use ipvsadm to set the virtual server and real servers and load balancing algorithm

you will have to this for Apache and MySQL so you’ll have to have 2 virtual services assigned to one virtual server.

and it’s done now you can use a PC on the WAN of node1 to check the cluster.

I know you’re saying WTF is this shit where’s the configuration and commands , it’ll be here soon.

To Be Continued and detailed….