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This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Fedora 12) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

I don't have the expertise to fully comprehend these NPRMs that were recently issued, but did spend the last few hours reading large chunks of all three. The area they cover is huge, and I fear open source and small EHRs are about to lose big, and big corporate EHRs are about to get total lock-in courtesy of our government. The bills cover a lot of territory, proposing many requirements that I do not think support "meaningful use" requirements. There are numerous interesting items, one surprising to me was that the ONC expects a Certified EHR will cost $163 million over 3 years to develop, excluding costs for testing and certification. The majority of the NPRM is framed with that mindset.

Multimedia apps for Ubuntu is really coming around. Now its the Songbird, the long forgotten multimedia application. Songbird has really turned around since I last tried it out an year ago and it now even have a PPA. Lets see how to install songbird in Ubuntu Lucid, Karmic and Jaunty.

CodeWeavers, supporter of the open source Wine project, have released their latest version of CrossOver for Linux and Mac. CrossOver 9.0 (codenamed “Snow Mallard”) is a commercial product that makes installing Windows applications via Wine extremely easy for Linux users. We’ve been waiting for this new release for several months, and it seems it was worth the wait. So far, we’ve tested it with Office 2007 and IE 7 with great results. Look for a full review at a later time. For now, here is an overview of the new features and some screenshots.

The news has been confirmed. Ubuntu One Music Store is how it is going to be called. And it will be there by default in Rythmbox Music Player in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. And that is NOT welcome because most of us don't use Rythmbox at all. But hold on, Ubuntu One Music Store is going to have a plug-in support as well. That is sweet!

When the $499 iPad tablet was announced last month, many journalists commented that the device was surprisingly affordable for an Apple product. This may not be the case however, as several sub $200 competitors running Google Android operating system have appeared. Will the iPad be able to gain major market share when it costs more than twice the price of other tablets or is the iPad doomed to be a "high-end only" product like the Mac?

Great timing from Google as Microsoft is forced to start giving European Windows users the choice to switch from IE, it releases a new beta version of Chrome with hugely uprated privacy controls.

The cloud hype is getting thicker and smellier every day. All the cloud excitement is coming from those who hope to profit from it, the vendors and breathless tech journalists who can't think of anything worthwhile to write about. They're working very hard to make it sound like a wonderful thing, a miracle of rare device that will transform life as we know it.

In related news, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Sasquatch, Yeti, and Elvis are all throwing a fabulous party at Graceland and everyone is invited. If you don't live in Memphis they'll send a private jet to pick you up.

Last month saw the opening (and then closing) of the 2.6.33 merge window (the time during which Linus takes potentially ‘intrusive’ patches to the kernel, followed by a period of stabilisation) and with it a flood of patches intended for the 2.6.33 kernel release…

SCO is still drowning in its own fail sauce but hasn't completely suffocated yet. The company's Chapter 11 Trustee has proposed selling off SCO's mobile technology business for some quick cash. The prospective buyer is said to be none other than Darl McBride, the company's much-despised former CEO, according to a report by Groklaw.

Among the important benefits of Linux's permission hierarchy is its ability to keep untrusted users from running amok. The all-or-nothing nature of root access, however, can present headaches when users are trusted, but only so far. That is a problem the sudo utility attempts to solve, and does so fairly well — except for the occasional glitch. A glitch of this sort turned up last week, allowing less-privileged users to skirt around sudo's protections and gain the powers of other users, including the superpowers of root. The advisory notes that impact of the vulnerability is mitigated by the utility's defaults, however. Sudo versions 1.7.2p4 (now superseded by 1.7.2p5) and 1.6.9p21 patch the vulnerability. Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu have already pushed updated versions out to users.

A former Sun Microsystems' executive has re-assured worried OpenSolaris users the open-source operating system has a future under new owner Oracle. Dan Roberts, Oracle director of product management, has said the database giant will continue to invest in OpenSolaris and will deliver the operating system's next incarnation: OpenSolaris 2010.03.

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my stable of laptops that use Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3? There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail. Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways and includes building for a specific CPU architecture. Linux Magazine benchmarks four such options; i486, i686, pentium3, core2, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.

Sprint and Verizon Wireless have released Palm's upgraded 1.4 version of the Linux-based WebOS for Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones. Ofering much-anticipated video capture and editing functionality plus improved messaging features, WebOS 1.4 arrives shortly after Palm announced lowered investment guidance due to disappointing smartphone sales.

Configure Microsoft Outlook Express with TLS and SMTP_AUTH. This is a common issue that can be overlooked by administrators for users who insist on using Outlook Express. The set up for secure login and sending email is not intuitive.

Several Linux distributors have released updated sudo packages to fix two vulnerabilities that allow users with limited access rights to escalate their privileges. The sudo (super user do) command is intended to allow users to execute certain commands at another user's privilege level - usually root. The contents of the /etc/sudoers file determines whether or not a user is authorised to execute a command at a higher privilege level (by preceding the command with sudo) without further authentication. This allows administrators to give other users the rights required to handle certain management tasks without giving them overall root access.

It's may be a twee name but MeeGo could be the next big thing. It sounds like something a child would say, or the name of a baby's toy, but MeeGo has much bigger aspirations in mind. For those that weren't completely sucked into the Mobile World Congress last week, and consequently missed the announcement, MeeGo is the name of a new - yes another - mobile phone operating system launched at the conference. In truth it's not really so much new as being a new collaboration. In this case between Intel and Nokia and their respective Moblin and Maemo operating systems.

When the SAP Partner Summit started yesterday, Red Hat had a prime sponsorship position at the welcome reception. Read between the lines, and a quiet battle is brewing between Red Hat and Novell; the two leaning Linux service distribution providers are battling for the love and affection of SAP. Here’s why.

The KDE Project has announced the availability of packages for Microsoft Windows, bringing the KDE 4.4 applications to Windows. New in this release, the packages have been broken out from the main KDE modules so it should be easier for users to simply install a single package if they choose. Not everything is available for Windows yet, for instance Amarok is not available for Windows at this time, but most KDE apps should be good to go on Windows with this release.