I just completed the migration of my parents computer to a new 3Ghz
clone PC. It is pretty amazing … and it is fast! This is
the fastest PC that I have ever worked on. I picked it up from DreamTech today, and set-up the Windows XP Pro that they are now going to use.

One thing that was cool was how the Intel Hyper-Threading
support in Windows XP recognized the Pentium 4 processor as *two*
processors. When you open Task Manager it appears to be running
on a two-processor box. And does it scream … it’s amazing to
think that we’ll probably be seeing another 1Ghz added by Christmas and
break the 4Ghz mark …

I also picked up a copy of IBM’s Via Voice today. I want to see
where voice recognition is at these days. I’ll write about my
experience … or maybe I’ll “talk” about my experience in my blog!

We have been having some really fun weather in Utah the last several
weeks. It seems that we are caught in the cusp of Winter and
Spring … and even saw a glimpse of Summer. This morning I
headed out on a trip to the Bay Area of California, and when I drove
through Park City at ~6:30am it was snowing … again. What makes
this wild is that over the weekend it was in the 80’s!

I’m not complaining at all … I really like the variety and I know
that it’s great for the water levels. It is quite a wild weather
pattern though …

It was fun today … I got to go home for lunch. Our furnace is
having final death throws (made in 1976!) and it faltered. I had
to go meet the repair man and make the call on buying a new one.
He was able to breath life into it … and left the estimate of $1850
for a new furnace. We’ll get that this fall …

Sam woke up while I was there, and so we got to sit and eat chicken
strips and pickles. He liked the chicken … but he really liked
the pickles much more!

I have been too busy with too many projects lately. Not enough
time in the day to catch up on all the ready, and to blog. Well
… I just haven’t been setting aside the time …

We are moving forward on our next operating system product releases,
and the initial release of our SCOx Web Services Substrate
product. I’ve been working with UnixWare 7.1.4 builds, and also
implementing some new experiments on OpenServer 5.0.7. I set
aside the Darwin work for a few weeks while we get these product into
production. The Web Services Substrate is coming together.
We’ll have two of the core ‘encapsulators’ complete for
console-applications and SQL databases, along with the latest release
of WebFace and WebFace Studio. We already have some interested
customers, and are working to complete some demonstrations for Forum
2004 … it’ll be coming up quickly. It’s been fun to create a
set of web services that interface with UNIX and UNIX utilities …
we’re working on a WebFace UI for one of the demo services today.

I’ve been working with Virtual PC 2004 a lot lately … I bought a 60GB
external 2.5″ USB 2.0/Firewire hard disk … it is amazing. I’ve
stored all of my music, along with the Virtual PC .vhd disk files, and
countless .iso images … 60GB is a lot for a “second” drive.

I’m also working with MRTG again … I’ve written a set of scripts that
scrape statistics from various devices “web management” pages. I
also wrote a couple of custom scripts to graph data counts and stats
from a couple of MySQL databases. I now have a very complete view
of my wireless network, and the remote Internet cafe’s.

I have to get caught up on reading … there have been too many SCO
announcements lately … I’m sure there is a lot of conspiracy theory
to catch up on! Let’s see, last I heard Baystar was a puppet for
Microsoft … then they were wonderful for asking for their $20 million
investment back (still Microsoft puppet?) … now they are weakening
their position, and not commenting on the details of their request, and
saying that we just need “new management” to focus on the lawsuits and
not products … what will the Groklaw community think?

I am always accused of being too far ahead of the main stream in many
areas where I make predictions.  I think this comes from my habit
of watching the fringe areas of development, and simply noticing some
trends early on in their development.  I then tend to extrapolate
what – IMHO – seem to be the little trends with huge growth
potential.  As much as I love Virtual PC today – for what it
provides me in doing my job and R&D – there are numerous projects
that I am coming across that further indicate that Virtualization is
becoming a growing trend … both hardware virtualization and Operating
System virtualization.

First on the OS front – ReactOS –
this is becoming more and more of a solution.  With this release I
was able to complete the installation, and boot it to a graphical
interface.  There is some basic functionality, and it’s very crude
today … but this is an impressive effort from a team that is intent
on creating another kernel and application platform.  As they
continue to work on their road-map, I’ll be following their work
closely … it is going to be an indicator to me of several core
trends.  The ability to develop a kernel and user space that is
able to support end-user applications will be the real proof of how
easy it is becoming to create and commoditize these environments.

Now on the Virtualization front – Qemu
– this is another project to create a Virtual PC / VMware type
environment … and it appears to be gaining momentum.  With
processor power still doubling at nearly an annual rate, we are already
seeing the 4.3Ghz motherboards arriving.  With all of this power,
the ability to emulate a complete PC in software – running at an
acceptable speed – is becoming the norm.  Qemu appears to be a
project that is going to bring this capability to a broader market
quickly.  I’m going to be installing this solution – and tracking
it’s progress – also.

What all of this is doing is pushing the value in computer software and
technology into new places, and new markets.  As we began work
last year on our own Application Substrate we knew this was coming …
just not this quickly.  The acceleration continues …

It seems like people here in Utah are always complaining about Qwest
and the phone and Internet services that we get.  I don’t have as
many problems as others … and yesterday it got even better.

I called Qwest about increasing the bandwidth on my primary connection
at my office in Heber City.  Right now it’s a 640k/640k line …
and they indicated there was a special to upgrade the line.  Great
… what’s the “special”?  Well … when the rep checked my
service, he indicated that I could jump to the 1.5Mbps/896kbps line
right now … and for $27 LESS!

So I doubled my bandwidth … and saved $27.00/month.  Not bad in my opinion …

I have to admit that I really like Virtual PC
on Windows XP. I still use XP as my primary laptop/desktop
operating system. Virtual PC extends what I can do tremendously
… I now carry a SCO UnixWare machine with also … virtually.
And I am experimenting with a variety of other kernels and operating
systems virtually. The other day I saw a reference to a new release of Darwin v7.0.1
… and I thought about checking it out. I’ve downloaded the ISO
… booted and installed it … I was able to get X configured
and working with the basic ‘twm’ window manager. I have now been
working on getting the LAN driver working … the DEC Tulip driver on
the CD was for Power PC … I’m now close with the OpenDarwin Tulip driver … got it to make with some assistance … it’s not quite installed.

What’s fun is that I am now downloading and carrying around numerous
ISO images of various operating systems … and booting them at
different times to experiment and learn. It’s like carrying
around a bunch of PCs … all within my laptop. Also, with the
“Undo Disks” I am able to boot, experiment and see how far I can get
… if I can’t get things working, I just close the Virtual PC and
discard the disk changes … rolling me back to my last “known-good”
point.

I just saw a new build of ReactOS
… I was going to take another look at it tomorrow … the last
version would start to install, but failed to partition the hard
disk. I’m also going to continue to work on Darwin also … both
of these are interesting efforts!  Both of these also appear to be
free of the current issues surrounding the Linux kernel …

Virtual PC rules!

Wow. There is almost too much to think about after BrainShare
2004. Being that I worked at Novell four different times, in
numerous different roles, I can see there is a lot that has changed … and a lot
that is still the same. It was great to see a lot of my friends
and former co-workers …

First, although I really loved NetWare as an operating system and a
kernel, it is obvious that its days are numbered. The “100%
Linux” message being communicated at the conference seems to seal the
fate of this, once-dominant, operating system. It will be very
interesting to see how quickly the $300mm-$350mm revenue stream
generated from NetWare sales will shift to the new strategy proposed by
the leaders of Novell. Customers who are still committed to
NetWare, IMHO, are going to find themselves painted into a corner if
they do not quickly begin the progress of planning their
migration. These types of migrations are complex and will take
time … and they will have to look at NetWare as the old 8-track or
cassette player in their stereo rack … it works, but don’t expect
much of a future out of it. In addition to that, it seems that
Novell customers are being pushed to adopt the “100% Linux” strategy
… which brings into question the Novell strategy on two fronts.

First … what is Novell going to provide to customers if they are not
interested in moving from their existing desktops to GNU/Linux
desktops? What if customers are just fine with Windows on the
desktop? Will Novell be able to offer them anything? I
believe that the world has been – and always will be – a place filled
with multiple-choices, and heterogeneous environments. Windows is
not going away anytime soon. We are working on solutions that
bring the best of UNIX and Windows together in our customer
environments … that is what they are asking us for. In
addition, we are looking for ways to leverage the best of the Open
Source world … within the law.

The second big issue … what is the impact to the Novell strategy as
the intellectual property issues continue to expand? Jack and
Chris made a really bold move in altering the foundation of the
business … they moved from one where they had a sinking platform, to
one that is on shakier ground! I can only imagine that they are already
accounting for the impacts on their business as the issues are resolved.

Novell’s future hinges on somehow resolving the revenue issues –
replacing the dying $300mm+ stream with a $40mm+ stream – and surviving
the transistion period … not to mention dealing with the implications
of the lawsuits surrounding the new foundation. Quite a risky bet.

Outside of that, I have to admit that I am also surprised by the amount
of “misinformation” or poor marketing when they continue to represent
UNIX-compatible software as “Linux software”. As I wrote through
my week of blogging … there are numerous areas and projects where
they seem to alter the “truth” and grab for the “Linux” market hype …
at the expense of customers and partners. I’ll be experimenting
with many of their projects on UNIX since they are completely
UNIX-compatible … and demonstrating where the “Linux” that they are
talking about is just a UNIX-compatible kernel.

And did things pile up while I was out of the office! Bummer … ;-(

Erin Quill and Ted Haeger are presenting this one … two people that I
have a lot of respect for, and that I’m glad to see owning the
directory. Few people understand the power of directory services,
and how to effectively implement them within a system. Even OpenLDAP has evolved to encompass the majority of what is required for directory-based management to be implemented.

They are going to be covering eDirectory, the recent releases, the upcoming releases, and then a “Project Destiny” Preview.

They started by showing the market, and the market leaders … and how
directories are being commoditized. Ted indicated that Novell’s
target market is “gigantic” directories, or the “high-end”
market. These start at 50,000 identities, and go to
hundreds of thousands. They focus on: Scalable, Compatible,
Reliable, Manageable, and Securable.

Erin took over to talk about the recent releases and what they
added. In v8.7 they added: Hot Continuous Backup, Dynamic
Groups, eDirectory Event Monitoring, Extensible match LDAP search
filters, Novell iManager 1.5.2, Novell iMonitor 2, Novell eGuide 2.1

With v8.7.1 they added: support for Red Hat Advanced Server 8,
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, Solaris 9, and HP-UX 11i, Universal
Passwords, DIBclone (creates exact copy of local directory set), More
Dynamic Group enhancements, Novell iMonitor 2.1, and bundled iManager 2

With v8.7.3 they added: support for Windows 2003, UNIX
package-based installer, Novell Cert ificate Server 2.7, iManager
2.0.2, Novell Modular Authentication Service 2.3, eGuide 2.1.2

Moving on to Upcoming Releases, they outlined the features of “Rosalind” v8.8(?):

Install and upgrade enhancements
– they are making a variety of scripting enhancements and command-line
options. In addition they are altering the rights requirements to
install or upgrade, providing more health checking, making it more
“patchable” with tighter version labeling, and all of this leads to Red
Carpet support for deployments.

Data Import (Bulk Load) – they
are getting huge performance increases ~7x, along with more selectable
options – No schema check, Indexing off, Skip validity checks.
Much of this is driven by customers who do not use DirXML (the old
name) but instead do daily mass imports

Priority Sync – Used for
instant convergence for real-time attributes like passwords. This
will be configurable per attribute, and writes to all replicas at once.

Multi-Instance Support –
this is primarily intended to increase the search speed. It will
allow more than once instance of eDirectory running on a server. Each instance must have a dedicated IP address.

Backup/Restore – Oops …
they skipped this one for now!  Ok they came back to it after the
encrypted stuff. They are adding an LDAP Extension to allow for
backup, and an archive bit that can be reset.

Encrypted Attributes and Replication
– this is where attributes become encrypted in the DIB, and where the
replication traffic is encrypted. This is for government
requirements.

SASL GSSAPI support – skipped …

Case Sensitive password Policies – skipped …

Next set of high-level features – Project “J.C. Bose”: more
installation improvements, Replication Policies, Optimized Referrals,
Group Enhancements, inetOrgPerson can be a container, Clustered Linux
support, and Solaris, LDAP Sounds-like searches, Federated Attributes,
and …

“Project Destiny” … What is Kepler? This is some pretty good
stuff for directories. They are creating a “reverse-proxy
directory server” that allows you to point to *any* corporate identity
server (be it a directory or database) and have the LDAP requests
proxied through to it. This allows Kepler to augment requests
with its own attributes and information, while preserving the “glass
house” identity server. This is a very interesting stuff …

Alan Nugent kicked off the keynote … and the microphones wouldn’t
work. They eventually ran a new mic out to him and he got
going. He indicated that this was the “techy” keynote, with a lot
of demos … he then went into some background information.

He offered his perspectives of the core points of Technology Strategies

• Devotion to Customer Satisfaction
• Focus (know your limitations)
• Compliments and substitutes
• Temporal Constraints (2-4 years)
• Forward, into the past

I like these in general.  Obviously, committment to customers
is the primary goal … they are the ones paying for solutions. 
The rest are also fairly obvious …

He also offered some “General Trends” …

• Customization
• Commoditization
• Consolidation./Convergence
• Consistancy
• Complexity
• Compliance (Regulatory)

He then reviewed “What does it mean to Novell?”

• Support/Facilitate customization/personalization
• Embrace Commoditization
• Drive and Manage consolidation
• Reduce complexity and risk
• Increase Predictability

Under his command, the office of the CTO is looking at the following areas:

• Open Source and Linux
• Wireless
• Grid Computing
• Wireless Grids
• “Autonomous” Computing
• Virtualization
• Service Oriented Architectures
• Trusted Computing
• Identity-based Computing
• Context-based Computing

He then said that he would focus on things that are really being worked
on …even if only in an investigation stage. He then showed a
slide of “Ubiquitous Linux”. After completing a quick brush of
this slide, he showed an intro SGI video and introduced Rich Altmaier,
VP of Storage and Software at SGI.  Interesting partner …

Rich began by introducing the SGI solution for it’s markets. He
talked about their Numaflex architecture, and adoption of the Linux
kernel. He indicated that the are using the Intel Itanium – “the
fastest processor on the planet.” He then walked down on the
floor to show one of the SGI 3000(?) machines. One of the VPs
from SuSE then began a demo using ‘linpack’ benchmark running 32 and 64
threads … and he showed a bunch of graphs showing activity … uh,
not that impressive since most people probably don’t get the context of
what is occuring. Wow … SGI is done … he left. That was really short …

The SuSE VP then went through what is coming in SuSE Linux 9.1 …
Linux Kernel v2.6, KDE 3.2.1, GNOME 2.4.2, OpenOffice 1.1, KDevelop
3.0, SLP support, and support for Intel and AMD (32 and 64 bit)
processors. Note that everything listed (except for the Linux v2.6 kernel) is all UNIX-compatible software.

Cluster Resources, Inc. – a Utah company – came on stage to talk about TeraGrid, and grid
computing. They demonstrated their software, submitted a job into
TeraGrid, and explained some of the optimizations and resource choices
that are made to pick the appropriate. He indicated that they are
now using Red Carpet to automatically deploy the resources to be able
to run any particular application. This is much like what we have
been working with in our Application Substrate.

Nugent then introduced the Chief Architect of Xiotech, Rob
Peglar. He talked about Storage Clustering and Future Storage
Design. Ok … he had some good examples of the evolution of
storage and storage networks … his “jokes” were a little weak. 😉 Ugh … the
jokes are continuing …

He is showing (in between the “jokes”) a variety of Storage
Clustering
architectures. These are very similar to the types of storage
systems that I was working with as Chase Manahatten. He expanded
to touch on clustering in general … and leading to grid
computing. They are unifying much of their architecture around
directories and LDAP. He mentioned that “CPUs are peripherals”
… an interesting concept.  His point is that “memory” is where
the data is … and that CPUs are just peripherals that manipulate
memory.

Robert Wipfel from Novell then came on stage. I worked with
Robert for years while at Novell and he is an amazingly bright guy when
it comes to clustering. They again emphasized their adoption of
CIM from the DMTF … and are showing a demo of extending a filesystem
in real-time, while mounted and in use, based on the disk free space
exceeding a threshold. This *is* the future of storage systems
… where you will add bulk disk to a storage network, and have it
allocated to servers on-demand. There are numerous vendors providing
this type of solution. They went on to show a cluster failover
demo.

Miguel and Erik showed up to do the Mono demo. They indicated
that their objective was to improve Linux developer productivity, and
ease application migration. Miguel went through the current
Mono stack and architecture, and talked about the .NET libs that they
currently have. He then went on to create a very simple app, and
showed it running on SuSE and Windows. He is going to expand the
demo using Glade … he’s doing his browser demo again. This time
he showed some of the power of this environment, icluding the language
support. He talked about this being a part of the power of using
the stock components. Erik then showed off their “Wiki-Doc” for
Mono … this is a very good idea for docs and how to allow for
contributions to documentation … so it’s “Open Source” docs … not
just code. Miguel then showed the SOAP/Web Services capabilities built into the .ASP server.

Nugent then showed the Novell Student Videos winners.

Then up came
Ed Reed … I forgot that he had returned to Novell. He is now a
part of the Office of the CTO working on security. He showed the
ability of the Linux Security Module capabilities of the v2.6 kernel to load “policies” to restrict what can be done on a system .

Martin Buckley came up to show a Windows 98 to SuSE Dektop
migration. There were numerous issues that were not addressed …
but the overall migration demo was impressive.

They went into the drawing for the Segway … and that is the end of the keynote!