Introduction to the Linux Integration Components

by admin on April 27, 2006 07:46pm

Question:
re: Welcome to Kishi's Korner
Monday, April 17, 2006 8:04 AM by Les Kobiernicki

When can we expect to see M$ produce a composite Win/Linux real boot recovery CD/DVD like Bart PE & Ultimate Boot CD for Win ?  I have many legacy systems to keep up & running til we get the scheduled Tech Refresh that gets put back further & further.  A network boot CD/DVD with multicasting server ability to recover remote NT/W2K/XP desktops would be most helpful.  The answer is not necessarily always new technology, but more precisely targetted troubleshooting tools for what we already have deployed out there ..

Answer:
If you are looking for a good Open Source solution for Imaging and recovery one way to do this is by using:  g4u (Ghost for UNIX) http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ . Based on NetBSD, G4u is a bootable floppy/CD for cloning and imaging hard disks and partitions.

If you have a mixed environment, which most of us do, you might wonder what file or operating systems it can handle.  The answer is all of them. G4u reads the disks bit by bit starting with byte #0. This includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the partitions themselves.  G4u can as easily clone a Windows XP disk as a Linux or Solaris/X86 disk. By moving the hard disks to a PC, g4u can even deploy or image operating systems for non-PC based SCSI machines such as HP-UX, Solaris, Irix, and AIX. You can image a drive or partition locally, IE disk to disk, or have the image uploaded to an ftp server. The cloned images can be compressed to save space, however the compression isn’t nearly as good as some of the commercial alternatives so make sure your ftp server has plenty of space!  If space is a concern, be sure to check out the FAQ on G4u’s website. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#hints

Here is a quick example.  I recently imaged my Fedora Core 5 laptop to a local ftp server here in my office. 

Once I booted my laptop up with the g4u CD, I was at the main menu and the command prompt.

g4u>

The laptop only has one hard disk. I used the ‘disks’ command to see it.

g4u> disks

wd0: at atabus0 drive 0: <FUJITSU MHT2060AT PL>

wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing

wd0: 57231 MB, 116280 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 117210240 sectors

I wanted to image the IDE disk (wd0) to my ftp server (192.168.1.1) using the ftp account ‘images’. I typed the following command. 

g4u> uploaddisk images@192.168.1.1 fc5laptop.gz wd0

I entered in my password when prompted.

This took a while on a 100MB connection, a couple hours or so.  I think I went and got coffee while it was running. Ok, so now on my ftp server I have the file fc5laptop.gz.

$ ls –l
-rw------- 1 images images 20259936597 Apr 18 12:18 fc5laptop.gz

To recover the image I booted again with the g4u CD and at the command prompt typed:

g4u> slurpdisk images@192.168.1.1 fc5laptop.gz wd0

Again I entered my password for the ftp server when prompted and went for coffee (anytime is a good time for coffee J )

After about an hour my laptop was restored. I ejected the g4u cd and rebooted.

G4u doesn’t try to do everything but what it does do, it does very well.

by admin on April 27, 2006 07:34pm

Original Post:

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 4:30 AM by Rick Strom

Ok Bill, I have a real suggestion here that is hopefully within the scope of what you are doing (and hopefully you're still reading the comments here). I'd also like to voice it to someone else at Microsoft since the MS rep I spoke to tonight blew me off.

Visual Studio 2005 should support CVS out of the box, or via an after-market but MS-developed add-in.  The Microsoft rep knew as well as I do why Microsoft wants to push "Team System" over CVS -- namely, because it makes OSS development  on SourceForge (and elsewhere) for the Windows platform a pain in the butt.

I love Visual Studio -- since I switched, I haven't looked back.  But its hard to fully love a product that doesn't do something which really should be quite obvious.  If Microsoft is worried about the potential harm that would come from facilitating development of SourceForge projects, or CVS projects in general, I think they are missing the bigger picture.  A first class compiler like VS 2005 with a built in CVS client?  You wouldn't just dominate the market, you'd own it.  You would also benefit from a much larger number of (free) applications for the Windows OS, which would in turn reduce the chance of losing users to a Linux desktop.

"Trust me, Team System is better than CVS" and "maybe SourceForge will look into Team System" are not good answers (but those are the answers I got from the MS rep).  Casual users can be convinced to do things a certain way, but developers generally tend to like to decide for themselves how they want to work.  One of the things that has made Visual Studio so great is that it tries -- and succeeds, for the most part -- to be everything to everybody.  With VS 2005 they seem to be going in another direction, and that makes it hard for me to seriously consider the upgrade from VS 2003.

Response:

Hi Rick,

My name is Eric Lee, and I’m the product manager for Team Foundation Server – a product in the Visual Studio Team System family.

First, let me apologize on behalf of the Microsoft rep that blew you off about this - Visual Studio is certainly a product who cares very deeply about the opinions of its customers.

You have a good point – simple, bullet-proof, cheap/free version control is certainly something that all developers need; whether they are doing OSS, running a small business, or part of large enterprise.

Before I try to address your question directly, let me spend a paragraph or two talking about how we think of version control and extending Visual Studio at Microsoft – I’d be happy to hear your opinions on this.

The introduction of Team System gives us two version control offerings from Microsoft – Visual Source Safe and Team Foundation Server (TFS).  Visual Source Safe (VSS) is what we like to think of as where change management begins – it’s simple, relatively cheap, easy to setup and doesn’t require a server.

VSS will start to bog down a bit when it’s pushed beyond its scope – for example, it has no work item tracking, limited remote access and limited parallel development capabilities.  This is where Team Foundation Server comes in – Team Foundation Server is a from-the-ground up implementation of version control, work item tracking, and release/project management integrated into a single collaboration server.  TFS uses XML Web Services for communication and SQL Server 2005 as its data store.  Both TFS and VSS integrate out of the box with Visual Studio 2005.

In terms of extending Visual Studio, we have always been very cognizant of making Visual Studio as extensible as possible – both for commercial and non-commercial partners.  Lost in all of the announcements of Visual Studio 2005 is that our Visual Studio Industry Partner Program (VSIP) now has a free membership option.  This membership gives you access to the SDK that enables extension of VS2005.

Part of the Visual Studio SDK is the MSSCCI interface (pronounced ‘misky’) that enables partners to implement version control providers; this interface is part of our SCC API.  This interface has become something of a de facto standard for development environments.  This interface gives you access to events like ‘user is trying to edit a file’ so that you can implement your ‘check-out’ operation.  This interface also allows you to provide locked and unlocked glyphs – basically all the aspects of a version control system.  We provide a skeleton version control provider as an example.  Integrating CVS with Visual Studio would involve writing a provider that uses MSSCCI – there are some examples out there today.

Now to address your concern more directly; CVS – VS integration is a perfect example of the balancing act we have to do in Visual Studio.  On one hand, an ‘out of the box’ solution might be very appealing to our customers; but on the other hand, doing this would take an opportunity away from our partners.  In order for Visual Studio to be successful, we feel we have to build it as a platform, and help create a healthy ecosystem of partners.  Doing this means providing viable opportunities for our partners to build value onto VS.  Finding this balance isn’t an exact science, we use a number of ways to get feedback from our partners and we disclose our early plans to our VSIP Alliance and Premier partners.  All of this is done to try to find a happy medium; we don’t do this perfectly all the time, but it is certainly something we constantly evaluate and invest a great deal of time in.

CVS integration in particular – because of the potential partner opportunity and the overlap it would introduce with VSS and TFS - is likely not something we would produce out of the box with Visual Studio.

However, the idea of a simple, bullet-proof, built-in version control system is something we are thinking hard about for future versions of Visual Studio.  The idea of what is integrated in an IDE is changing and expanding all the time, maybe it is time to include version control as a natural part of an IDE?  Would that be a streamlined version of TFS, a free copy of VSS, or something else?  These are certainly all possibilities.  I’d be happy to discuss your thoughts on this as well.

Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion with us.

Eric.

by admin on April 27, 2006 05:27pm

Seventeenth Century Philosopher and Author Voltaire wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This resonates very much with my own thoughts after going through the comments and feedback from my previous blog. I want to thank everyone for providing valuable feedback, regardless of whether I agree with it or not. The principle here is not to choose a side but to put a process in place that allows for an open and honest dialogue and I am exhilarated at the results of this endeavor.

Moving on to “Consistency and Standards” – the short theme for today’s blog. One of the questions put to me recently was to share something that I might have benefited from, during my past life in IT Operations. As I had mentioned previously, I have been involved with IT Operations since 1989 in some shape or form. From a student who worked at the Academic Computing Services in Syracuse University managing Macintosh and Sun Sparc clusters all the way to the past three years when I was managing 7x24 support of Class-A Production Services like AD, DNS, WINS etc. for MSN Operations, I can vouch for the fact that consistency in implementation standards have saved the day countless number of times. The point here is, no matter what platform, toolset, operating system or application you may choose, developing standards towards consistent implementation of these will always reap into rewards towards a lower “TCO” or Total Cost of Ownership in terms of supportability.

I remember a few years ago we were battling the spread of one of the malicious worms across the Internet. We were in the middle of taking inventory of what the configuration of our Production servers providing these mission-critical Class-A services, spread all across the world looked like. We all realized that by adhering to a common toolset, standard SKU’s for Hardware as well as for the OS versions helped us reduce the deployment cycle of a patch from what had seemed like days to a matter of hours. You may ask – “Hey – how does that matter” ? Well, imagine writing a different script for each type of configuration and multiply that by the hundreds of servers spread across the world in eight different datacenters. That’s quite a chore, especially when time is not on your side, you’re facing a crisis and you only have limited number of resources you can muster up for support. You’ll also need to track success and failure of applying the patch across datacenters and monitor where additional attention is needed.

So, what does that mean?  That complex environments require standards to work “for and with” IT Administrators. Admittedly,“one-off” or “out-of-standards” configs are very easy to do if we’re trying to please a group or mend fences with a specific customer. But in reality, we’re doing them (our customers) a dis-service but putting their environment in harm’s way and increasing their risks. Why - because supportability of their environment is ultimately our responsibility. So…the more colors we put on the fence, the more painters we will need and the longer it will take……

by admin on April 25, 2006 07:55pm

Sam Interviews Rob Mensching, maintainer of the WIX project and an Open Source pioneer at Microsoft.

Format: wmv
Duration: 27:22

by admin on April 25, 2006 07:26pm

Reading through some of the first posts to Port25, there has been some great ideas and posts.  There have also been some really interesting conspiracy theories, so let me clarify some things we’ve seen in the blog posts, emails, and even other Web sites and articles:

Port25 is not an attempt to subterfuge the OSS community
Microsoft does not have people posting to Port25 trying to make the OSS community ‘look dumb’
Microsoft moderators do not remove all the controversial posts
Port25 is not a marketing or PR stunt
Port25 is not related to the legal stuff in the EU
The guys in the OSS lab are not soulless sell outs or villainous rascals
Port25 does not have a hidden agenda
It really does not hurt our feelings when people try to get personal or make unfounded and derogatory claims – this is part of the reality of our jobs
I don’t speak Russian – but I’m thinking about learning since we launched Port25

You can disagree with the above, but this is the truth.  We are working hard to make Port25 more of a reciprocal community, but it requires everyone to partake in a two way conversation.  I understand there is a lot we do today and need to do in the future, but it requires smart and mature people and companies to work collaboratively.  I’m sure this will ruffle some feathers, but it’s the only way it will really work.  And after you put down the politics and rhetoric, I think you’ll see the same – it’s no different than any other relationship.  Working together can make it happen.

by admin on April 24, 2006 05:18pm

We are launching the MPEG-4 versions of our interviews today (now linked on the interview pages themselves), and future interviews will be posted in MPEG-4 and WMV simultaneously.  This was overwhelmingly the top request for formats from the community.  MPEG-4 files are fairly large (our typical interview of 30 minutes is about 70 MB) and will need to be downloaded to view.

I’m interested in getting your feedback on the formats.  No doubt you will have feedback on the interviews as well – but those responses are best posted back to their respective posts.

We’ve considered other approaches - for example, we’ve explored posting these as Flash, which is x-platform and streaming by default – but wanted to focus on doing what the Port 25 community has specifically asked for.

Hopefully this solution will work well.  If not – what do you think would be better?

Cheers,
Sam

by admin on April 21, 2006 09:35pm

Oil and Water?

It’s been an interesting week for Interop inside the lab – we’re running an IPSEC interoperability project to test Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, and Mandriva with Windows Networking technology, and ran interviews both with the IDMU (Identity Management for Unix) Program Manager and with Paul Moore, CTO of Centrify.

Today I spoke with Jeremy Moskowitz, a Windows/Linux interoperability expert, to get his take on some of the recurring challenges in starting interop projects and why it matters.  He’s done a lot of work on the topic of group policy, and writes books and teaches on-site classes for IT professionals.

        Sam: What's the main thing that you find people don’t understand about Windows/Linux interop?

Jeremy:  People often don’t realize how many points of contact between the two systems you can actually interoperate. I wrote a book with Thomas Boutell, and in 10 chapters we isolated 8 points, including desktop, applications, email, networking and authentication.

Sam: Authentication is an interesting topic – what do you lay out as the main approaches here?

Jeremy:  There are a lot of different approaches.  For example, if it’s a “mostly Linux” shop that needs to integrate a couple of Windows machines, you’d use OpenLDAP.  If it’s a mixed Windows and Linux/Unix shop running Active Directory, integrate Linux & Unix systems as Windows clients.

Sam: Do you cover that in the book?  Are you using IDMU to run a Windows NIS master?

Jeremy: When we wrote the book, Win2K3 R2 hadn’t shipped and SFU was a separate application.  We decided to write a chapter on updated procedures for Win2K3 R2 as a download from www.winlinanswers.com. It should be available in May, so check back often.

Sam: What do you usually see as the main obstacle in IT shops to do Windows and Linux integration?

Jeremy:  Windows and Linux guys in a given company don't talk much – they usually only meet up playing softball on opposite teams at the company picnic.

Sam: Sounds like some cultural interop issues?

Jeremy:  There has historically been a religion problem which causes problems in doing these things.  I'm a pragmatist - I have Windows running a bunch of systems but my website runs on LAMP.  I needed a great web designer and a site he could maintain, and what he knew was PHP.

Sam: What's one great thing people will get out of reading your book?

Jeremy:  When I gave my session on interop at LinuxWorld, I asked the audience of about 70 people: “Who here is running Exchange?”  60 people raised their hands.  I said, “Keep your hands up.  Now drop your hand if you're planning on walking away from your Exchange infrastructure and just to have something that runs on Linux.” One person dropped their hand.  Exchange is here and people need to manage it.

So the question is, “How do we use Linux to manage the exchange environment?”  In the book we detail an approach that uses a front end Linux server that will, for free, scrub email, scan for viruses, and verify the delivery address for routing across backend mail servers (Exchange, sendmail, etc).  You offload things that typically run on the Exchange server and bog it down.  By using a Linux box to front-end Exchange, you get more horsepower out of your Exchange server so that you get better performance for what you're paying for.
You can see Jeremy’s new site at http://www.winlinanswers.com, or see other stuff he’s done at http://www.moskowitz-inc.com Jeremy will be answering comments on this thread, so if you have some tough questions about AD interop, OpenLDAP, Samba 3.0, SFU, or related topics, this is the place to ask.

Cheers,
Sam

by admin on April 21, 2006 05:35pm

A Look Inside Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab (Part 2)

In “A Look Inside Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab – Part 1,” we examined Microsoft’s motivations for building the lab, its development, and some of the work done there to ensure interoperability between Microsoft software and UNIX/open source software. In part 2, we discuss some of the lab’s other areas of focus and how that research is helping Microsoft to determine current trends and predict future direction for open source software.

When Bill Hilf was hired to build Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab in 2004, he knew from the start that working and testing interoperability between Microsoft software and open source solutions would be a large part of the job. However, that’s only part of the lab’s mission. Another area of focus is helping to make IT professionals with UNIX/Linux skills more proficient in a Windows environment—and vice-versa.

“As a UNIX and open source guy, one of the biggest hurdles for me in walking into a Microsoft shop was the lack of crossover between my skills and those needed to manage the Windows platform,” says Hilf. “While there are a variety of aids that can be employed, many of those are migration tools for moving an application from one platform to another. What I needed was an integrated technology that could help me speak a familiar language on a Windows server.”

Helping to examine and test such a solution is precisely what the lab is doing through its work with new technologies that are being developed in the Windows Longhorn Server timeframe. ‘Monad' is one such new technology, a powerful next-generation command line environment that runs on the Microsoft .NET Framework.

“The vision for Monad is to help automate local and remote administration by delivering a consistent, fast, and composable command line scripting environment that spans the Windows platform,” says Hilf. “Windows and Unix and Linux are all different operating systems - so there is no magical ‘layer’ where they all just work the same.  But the ability to compose an environment so that it looks and behaves similar to what I’ve learned in a UNIX/open source world gives me better control over a Windows environment—and makes it easier to move between UNIX and Windows.”

One of the things the lab is doing with Monad involves writing plug-ins using a popular open source tool called VI Improved (VIM) to call on Monad. One researcher at the OSS lab used VIM, a text editor, to write a plug in that calls on Monad to digitally sign a script when the script is ready to be deployed.

“Such an approach allows VIM users—a large population in the open source/UNIX world—to continue using their favorite tools,” says Hilf. “We use Monad for  performing administrative tasks, and are looking at a number of similar scenarios that can help the UNIX/Linux user community feel more at home with the next-generation Windows command line and scripting environment.”

Using Science to Test Perceptions

Along with software and skill-set interoperability, another mission of the lab is to test common software beliefs, relying on scientific analysis to determine the truth. “We hear a broad variety of assumptions around open source and Microsoft software,” says Hilf. “In the lab, we test those perceptions scientifically to determine what’s real and what’s based on ideology or perceptions.”

The lab also tracks other dynamics of open source software, such as how different the various commercial distributions of Linux are from their original open source projects. Figure 1 shows the number of files changed between the original open source Linux kernel and the same version of that kernel as shipped by a commercial Linux distribution.

“We’re seeing changed files increasing with each consecutive release of a commercial Linux distribution,” says Hilf. “Tracking such data allows us to better understand the community versus commercial dynamics at work in the open source model.  It also helps us make better decisions, such as our recent announcement on supporting Linux in Virtual Server 2005 R2 – this type of data helps us understand what the support differences may be between Linux distributions.”

The lab also is attempting to quantify the breadth of the open source ecosystem so that Microsoft can better understand market trends. For example, in August 2005, researchers began counting the number of supported PC and servers for the Red Hat Linux and Novell SuSE Linux operating system products and compared those numbers against Microsoft’s own supported hardware numbers for Windows.

“This type of data helps us understand the size and growth of current market-leading Linux distributions—and how Windows compares,” says Hilf. “It also gives us an indication of what systems customers might be deploying, which in turn helps us to determine the hardware configurations required in our lab.”

Diving Into the Sociological Aspects of Open Source

Another area that the lab studies closely is the phenomenon of community-based software development. About 20 percent of lab resources are devoted to studying the community development model with the goal of learning in order to identify opportunities for working with the development community at large and improving on existing processes.

“As engineers and technologists, we’re fascinated by the community development model,” says Hilf. “We want to understand how testing is done; which tools are used; how test cases are written; how bugs are filed, tracked and regressed; and what type of training testers are getting. We approach the community development model objectively so that we can fully understand the pros and cons of the model from a scientific perspective, without the surrounding philosophy and hype.”

Such analysis has helped Microsoft find new ways to think about its own development projects—such as Microsoft Shared Source (http://www.microsoft.com/sharedsource) and how the company can take better advantage of the community development process. Educators from the lab work with product teams to ensure they’ve thought through all aspects of the process and the types of issues that are likely to surface.

“By engaging with the open source community, Microsoft has been able to mature its own thinking around how to work with developers who are building software using different development models,” says Hilf.

Because of such involvement, the lab has become a gateway for open source developers to engage with Microsoft. “We’ve seen a steady increase in the number of people who are communicating with us from the open source community, expressing interest in having real technical discussions,” says Hilf. “I see this as an extremely positive development in that Microsoft and the open source community have traditionally been regarded as separate realities. The very idea that there might be some bridge-building going on at this level is very encouraging.”

Looking Forward: The Future of Open Source

To better understand the evolution of open source software and where it’s headed next, the lab is also involved in the trending of open source software projects. Through such study, Hilf hopes to answer questions such as whether certain open source software code bases are getting simpler or more complex, whether the number of defects is increasing or decreasing, and whether the code is becoming more or less efficient.

“If you look at only the code, open source software appears to be growing fairly linearly,’ says Hilf. “As the amount of code increases, complexity grows and, of course, with added complexity comes more defects. This isn’t surprising, nor is it a knock against open source software—it’s how all software evolves over time.  The real question isn’t about who has more or less bugs today, but what is the model to not just write code, but to sustain quality software.”

Another trend the lab is investigating is the increasing commercialization of open source software, which directly impacts how open source software is conceived, developed, tested and distributed.

“Over the past five years, more and more contributions are coming from developers who are employed by a commercial entity that either directly makes money from an open source project—such as MySQL or JBoss—or indirectly through hardware, commercial software and services, such as IBM, Novell, and Hewlett-Packard,” says Hilf “To those in the open source developer community, this isn’t news. But to those in the broader market, the extent to which open source software development has become commercialized is often a big surprise.”

A third trend being looked at by the lab is the market for open source software—that is, who the “end customers” of such efforts really are. “I think it’s fair to say that, at least so far, open source software has largely been developer-driven—that is, a good deal of the code is system software that’s being used by other developers or system administrators. Therein lies a key difference between many commercial and open source development models: commercial software companies design and build software to serve a customer need, whereas open source software is largely designed by and for developers and technical users.  You can see this easily by looking at where open source has been most successful.  It’s a fascinating area that we’ll continue to investigate, and it helps us to understand where we might be successful in our community development efforts.”

Adding Value Through a Balanced View of Trends

Through its work, the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft continues to provide a real-world view on the  maturity and evolution of the open source software movement. By exploring the dynamics of open source software in a way that relies on scientific methods and hard technical data, the lab is benefiting both internal groups at Microsoft and customers who have asked it to look into common open source software questions and issues.

“In some areas, the phenomenon of open source software has become quite powerful and has enabled rapid growth,” says Hilf. “It shows that a variety of software development models can and will coexist into the future. In fact, we’ve found that popular open source software server applications such as JBoss and SugarCRM have a large and growing business on Windows. By continuing to walk the line between cooperation and competition, we’re confident that our efforts at the lab will benefit Microsoft, its customers and partners, and the open source community. It’s an exciting time for everyone.”

Related Links:

Monad Beta:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/download.mspx
Shared Source:  http://www.microsoft.com/sharedsource

by admin on April 19, 2006 05:42pm

Running Command Line Applications on Windows XP/2000 from a Linux Box:

Question:

-----Original Message-----
From: swagner@********
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 2:35 PM
To: Port25 Feedback
Subject: (Port25) : You guys should look into _____
Importance: High

Can you recommend anything for running command line applications on a Windows XP/2000 box from within a program that runs on Linux?  For example I want a script to run on a Linux server that will connect to a Windows server, on our network, and run certain commands.

Answer:

One way to do this would be to install an SSH daemon on the Windows machine and run commands via the ssh client on the Linux machine.  Simply search the web for information on setting up the Cygwin SSH daemon as a service in Windows (there are docs about this everywhere).  You can then run commands with ssh, somewhat like:

      ssh administrator@<hostname> 'touch /cygdrive/c/blar'

That will create a file in C:\ called "blar".  You can also access Windows commands if you alter the path in the cygwin environment or use the full path to the command:

      ssh administrator@<hostname> '/cygdrive/c/windows/system32/net.exe view'

by admin on April 19, 2006 12:30pm

When we launched Port 25 we felt that it was important to leave the comments area open – to invite participation. Our goal is to encourage thoughtful, open exchange of concerns and ideas.  Many of the comments we’ve received have included requests to require registration on the site in order to raise the quality of the discussions.

We are rolling out the first version of our registration feature today – please let us know if you have issues with it or you think it needs to be changed in some way.

Thank you for the time and energy you are spending on this conversation with us.  Please keep the feedback coming – both about the lab and how we can keep evolving the site to meet the needs of the community.

Sam

by admin on April 18, 2006 05:03pm

I got the chance to spend an hour this week with Dr. Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge. He’s been refining a Java/.NET interoperability product for the last five years – starting out with a risky bet on .NET when it was only in Beta. Back then I was at BEA Systems, we tried to use jCOM as a bridge to Microsoft applications that customers needed to integrate with J2EE systems. There were reliability and configuration challenges with this approach, and we found that as .NET grew in our customer base, we could only advise them to use Web Services for interoperability.

WS for interoperability is a good choice when you can build well-defined contracts between systems and coarse-grained, loosely coupled integration is acceptable (despite the performance and reliability impacts). There are situations where tightly-coupled integration is necessary (specific security requirements; chatty communications), which is where I’d apply a product like JNBridge.

JNBridge handles the conversion of Java objects into .NET objects and vice versa – including management of references on both sides to ensure that object extent is handled correctly, and converting “by reference” and “by value” situations to their correct native implementation. I’m simplifying for brevity, but for more detail you can take a look here.

They have 3 modes of operation – XML/HTTP, Binary/TCP, and Shared Memory (for running on the same server). As we proceeded through the discussion, I was interested in how they dealt with the “complex object” issue, where a Java object contains other objects by reference.

When converting complex objects to Web Services, the antipattern is to marshal the entire object graph into a SOAP message, add getters and setters to the remote proxy that handle write-backs. This causes problems both in communication overhead and performance (that’s a lot of data to marshal to XML; plus this marshalling will happen every time the remote client needs to update a field in the complex object). There are other problems that I won’t get into here.

For these situations, it can work better to have a tightly-coupled integration layer – with JNBridge, you could use their Binary/TCP mode to have a conversion from Java to .NET objects happening on the J2EE server, and communicating with the .NET tier through native .NET remoting.

Another common interop request I hear from software architects is to have BizTalk or .NET interop with JMS (Java Message Service). This is an area that I haven’t seen great solutions to in the past. The best approach from performance and reliability standpoint should result from a tightly-coupled integration at the JMS Client layer; here I would consider deploying JNBridge in Shared Memory mode, with .NET application logic on the same machine as JNBridge and a JMS Client, which would remotely access a JMS Cluster via RMI or your Java protocol of choice.

Now if only Java were associated with Guinness we could call this approach a “Black-and-Tan”… as it is I’ll have to leave it “Half-and-half”.

by admin on April 14, 2006 03:03pm

Congratulations to Marc Fleury and team for their success this week in selling their company to a like-minded partner that pioneered Open Source business models.

Running a startup is hard.  Keeping it going and focused is harder.  Selling it while maintaining your principles is nearly impossible – but JBoss has scored a hat trick.  From 97-2001, I was in a string of startups in Silicon Valley, and I know first hand just how hard it is to make them work.

When a company reaches the level of publicity and success that JBoss has achieved, there are pressures to compromise in many dimensions – exemplified by the rumored half-billion dollars that “a large database company” offered them only last week.  Marc could have taken that and walked out of the industry altogether – enjoying a comfortable life on his own private island.  Instead, he has chosen to marry his company to a long-term resident of the Commercial Open Source Software industry that will sustain the JBoss principle of interoperability and heterogeneous support, and is well-aligned to evolve the business model in a pure Open Source tradition.

My lab is working with JBoss on the technical collaboration project that Microsoft announced earlier this year – good, interesting work – and will be exploring new areas to work on interoperability, such as JBossWeb, an Apache-based web server with native support for .NET, Java, and PHP.

We’re continuing to read and sort the suggestions we’re getting – including emails – and looking for clusters of requests that we can turn in to projects.  What would you like to see us do from a Java interoperability standpoint?  What would be most valuable for you?

Cheers,
Sam

by admin on April 07, 2006 07:58pm

Thank you for bringing your honest thoughts to the site in the last two days.  No productive conversation can exist without candor - and you all have been candid.  We've gotten around 800+ comments, nearly half of which have been angry, congratulatory, suspicious, engaging, or surprised.  (The other half were from spam bots, in case you were wondering.)
Some of the comments were the beginning of longer discussions, and we'll carry those on over the coming weeks.  Others gave us a great to-do list which we're working on over the next couple of days.
So, the mea culpas:
1. Videos:  Believe it or not, we hadn't considered the WMV issue.  We've already translated those files to AVIs and will use that format for future videos.  The AVIs will be up on the site next week.
2. Readability issues: We're going to darken and enlarge the text on the site.
3. Phishing filter: We've dealt with a few errors that caused phishing alerts in some browsers - please let us know if you see otherwise.
4. Safari:  We are going to fix the "missing submit button" as soon as possible
Due to requests from the community, we're going to implement a registration system (NOT Passport!) that will let us deal with spamming more effectively.

I wasn't surprised to see some paranoia in some responses - before joining Microsoft in 2004 I was often convinced of various conspiracy theories involving Redmond - and I am going to address this up front.
One poster suggested that the quality of comments overall was significantly lower than the dialog on other sites:

Friday, April 07, 2006 2:50 PM by David Cherryholmes
It looks suspicious to me that so many of the posts attacking MS and supporting FOSS has been poorly written and rabid.  I contrast that with the degree of literacy, elegance, and well-framed arguments that I read on other pro-FOSS sites and, well, it just makes me wonder.... could there be some moderating going on here in an effort to deliberately mis-portray the community?  Of course the question is beyond proof, a point anyone still inclined to give MS the BOD will rapidly point out.  But still, the character of the posts are at odds with many, many other data points out there to be garnered.

We actually believe that many of these comments are from linux.org.ru, and not community members.  We're going to deliver a "modded comments" area in the near term where you can dig in to see what comments we've modded down.  We are NOT modding down intelligent discussion - it is "literacy, elegance, and well-framed arguments" that we hope to see here.
Longer term, I want to establish community moderators.  It will take us a bit to implement this, but if you are interested in being a mod, please let me know.
So again, I thank you for being part of our community at our launch.  Have a great weekend.
Sam

by admin on March 31, 2006 05:00pm

Welcome to Kishi’s Korner (for the record, I did not come up with this name.)

I wanted to take a moment and use my first blog entry to introduce myself. My full name is Harvinderpal Singh Malhotra and somehow “Kishi” was chosen as a nickname for me when I was growing up (don’t ask, like the name "Kishi's Korner", it’s a long story). Okay, so I am the Project Manager for the Open Source Software Lab. I’ve spent the bulk of my career in IT Operations as an Infrastructure Architect with Fortune 100’s such as Pfizer, United Health Care etc. and since 2003 I’d been with MSN Operations. While at MSN I was responsible for re-engineering the server deployment process and providing key infrastructure services including Active Directory, DNS, WINS, SecurID, TermServ, Domain Registrations, SMTP, and AntiVirus for the MSN Operations IS team, among other things.

While much of my life has been spent living IT Operations, one of my true passions is research and writing. That’s why I’m thrilled to be involved with the Open Source Software Lab and Port25. I look forward to sharing our work with you and more importantly learning from you on how we can improve our methodologies and perhaps come up with new projects that we haven’t thought of. This is a unique opportunity for myself and the community and I look forward to being a part of it.

If you are so inclined, please take a moment to shoot me some thoughts on things you’d like to see us work on in our lab. Moving forward I’ll be having some of my team of Open Source, UNIX, and Linux engineers share what they are working on. If you have comments on our methodology or suggestions on how we’ve scoped a particular project, please let me know.

OK, enough with the introductions, let’s talk projects! I look forward to hearing from you.

by admin on March 31, 2006 04:00pm

I’ve often wondered why the principles of software and computing were called “Computer Science”. Science to me is the methodical and inspiring process of discovering the natural laws of things you don’t fully understand – unveiling mysteries about the environment, finding consistent patterns or isolating details you never knew before. But in Computer Science nearly everything studied is known because it was invented by people – so why not call it Computer Philosophy?

But in the Open Source Software Lab we actually do practice science. What’s in a given Open Source package or Linux distribution? How was it written? How has it changed over time? What are the limits of its scope and performance? This is the fun stuff. We get to explore things we don’t understand, learn about them, and document the results. We also contribute to the cause of interoperability through testing various technologies.

Taking over the Lab from Bill Hilf, I’ve been lucky to inherit a strong team, hundreds of servers and software packages, and a lot of momentum. Where I want to go with the lab in the future is to open our processes and our research schedule, get critical feedback on our methodologies and findings, and share our learnings with this community.

We have a number of exciting projects in the lab right now (52, at last count). They range from IPSEC interoperability testing to analyzing deployment and performance of Linux-based HPC clusters, from driver support to power consumption. We’ll cover these projects on Port 25 and invite your thoughts on the projects, what you think we should be researching, and why all this matters.

I am looking forward to creating the next phase of the lab with you!