Stephen Green Online

It’s happened to us all. To be honest it’s happened to me a number of times – this time though I decided to fight back so when two of my 500Gb Seagate Barracuda drives recently gave up the ghost I went straight to Google, as we do these days, and typed in “how to recover from a disk drive crash”

An astounding amount of information come right back at me…fortunately on the first or second pages there was a link to the Ubuntu Rescue Remix site. Being an Ubuntu and Linux man myself a wry smile broke out on my face – this was going to be fun.

I downloaded the iso from the site – ended up not needing it because as I read through the examples I saw that I could just as easily install individual applications into my existing desktop which made sense to me – the tools would be right there for me to use on any occasion.

I ended up really only using the GNU DD rescue program – ddrescue referenced from here

Another awesome resource was this one here directly off the ubuntu documentation site.

I am happy to report that the software recovered almost the entire contents of one of the drives. The other seems like it’s going to need the freezer treament before it works…I’ll report back on that in next few days

A few days later…Hmmm, the freezer exercise never worked for me…so now I have a 500Gb Seagate door stop..oh well

Happy to say that I have however gone on to restore a number of family and friends drives using the method described below since then.

My recovery process:

Step 1 – make a copy of the failed drive (if possible) using ddrescue.

Step 2 – Discover information about the failed drive.
Using Linux I’ll run sudo fdisk –l from a terminal. I check the System column of the output to see what filesystem is in use.
Once I have an idea of what we are dealing with I’ll then use either testdisk or gpart to explore the details of the drive file system structure.
sudo testdisk disk_name or sudo gpart disk_name
Using either of these tools I’ll try to repair the filesystem information.

Step 3 – Recover the data from the disk (either to another drive or a drive image)
Depending on the nature of the damage on the drive (mostly logical at this stage) I try to recover the filesystem structure, using various undelete or file recovery programs. If the drive does not have mechanical problems I am mostly successful with this exercise and move on happily with my life.

Step 4 – Take it to the professionals
If not then that usually means that the drive has mechanical failures in which case I call in the experts you are able to dismantle the drive under a controlled environment. There they can fix the mechanical problem and recover the data.

Additional resources
GNU ddrescue man page
Ubuntu Rescue Remix
The Sleuth Kit or their wiki
dd_rescue on DebianAdmin
SystemRescueCd
TestDisk
A Recover HOWTO
ddrhelp
NTFS Undelete
Fixing NTFS with Ubuntu

“Royal Pingdom conducted more in-depth research on the topic of Ubuntu versus Mint rankings. They contend that Ubuntu is down 47.2% while Mint is up 105% in recent months according to Distrowatch Page Hit Ranking. But no matter the method they used to test, Ubuntu is shown to be losing users while Mint continues to gain. Royal Pingdom summed it up with, “it’s time for Ubuntu to take notice.”

Reading this type of feedback is disturbing for a Linux and an Ubuntu supporter especially in the light of the opportunity presented to Linux and perhaps more so Ubuntu around the impending desktop refresh away from Windows XP in the next few years. (Windows XP goes out of support in April of 2014) Finally there could be an alternative to Windows on desktop if that is not solely taken by Apple.

So given the opening paragraph I guess the question is whether or not the customer is always right? In this case is the user community voting with their seats right or is Mark, the founder and one of the driving forces behind Ubuntu right, and the big debate here is around the Unity UI.

I have used Linux for a very long time – my first Slackware installs where way back in the early 90’s when Linux was delivered on 5 stiffy disks. Those where the days of the real Linux hackers if you like – getting X to work was a mammoth task and most applications took at least a few days to successfully install – many in fact had to be compiled. As Linux developed I moved over to RedHat as my favourite distro – I guess I enjoyed the fact that they made things easier to get working and there was a strong community that supported the product (this was before the days that a commercial offering existed).

When Ubuntu first arrived I did not pay much attention to it as I was happy with RedHat and what had by then become Fedora. I kept hearing more and more about Ubuntu though and so one day I finally relented. As a South African I thought it only right to support a countryman and his efforts to deliver a world class offering. After all he was the first African in space and that achievement is difficult to argue with.

I installed the Hoary Hedgehog (Ubuntu 5.04) and have been an Ubuntu supporter and user since then. What made Ubuntu so ground breaking in my mind was the fact that they made Linux easy to use. That was a massive differentiator in those days!

Each edition of Ubuntu improved on the last, more applications, better integration, graphic installs with few mouse clicks and reboots. Pretty soon Ubuntu led the distro listings.

As innovation has accelerated across the globe so too the need for Ubuntu to radically improve and perhaps depart from its roots to earn the right to stand alone as an offering that had earned and deserved it’s position in the market. Some of the innovations Ubuntu delivered I thought was awesome.

The Ubuntu Software Centre – great stuff. It makes is so easy to install, and browse software out of the various software repositories, combines overviews and reviews, free and commercial software into a very intuitive and I believe ground breaking services catalogue. This represents a major requirement in the enterprise at the moment especially with the move to automated, self served and provisioned IT services being so important in business. With some work Ubuntu Software Centre could make a play for this space within the enterprise and if I were once of their executives I’d actively be seeking out partnerships with leading virtualisation players.

UbuntuOne – is another example of a great innovation which has far reaching benefits and offerings for the consumer market as we move into Cloud Computing and Cloud based services as we have already seen in some of the offerings they have delivered to date. UbuntuOne could easily be further developed to enable enterprise Dropbox type services that allow for the sharing and collaboration required to conduct modern business.

And then there is Unity. I am using Unity at the moment with Oneiric Ocelot as my main machine.

I like innovation and am always open to change and improvement so I readily adopted the new UI. I captured my first impressions on a previous post. Given my system limitations I am using Unity 2D so perhaps my experience is not complete, but I understand from the release notes that this is not the case.

So while I can see the UI changes/improvements I am still not sure I understand the end point with the changes. At the moment we seem to be a little in between a touch based and a legacy desktop environment with neither working in its completeness.

What I like:
I like the use of the Windows button for the Dash Home. It is neat to have a single button to push to get to the main menu’s. It’s also neat to be able to quickly navigate to open applications but I don’t like that the application buttons don’t expand to give you previews of the different application windows. and the ability to quickly jump to applications from the keyboard rather than the mouse.
I sort of like the Filters off the Dash…just not sure that is applicable in a journaled system with powerful search features – I’d recommend improving on the search capability. I am using Activity Journal 0.8.0 and some of my searches have failed.
The way the icons are presented though keeps reminding me of an iPad or iPhone so again my confusion as to whether we are in transformation towards a natural UI. Don’t like that – I’m somewhat attached to my keyboard

What I don’t like
I don’t like that the icons for the applications are hidden by the bar
I don’t like the size of the icons and that fact that when you have a group of windows open you can’t see or flip between them
I don’t like that the Windows->Tab key sequence is no longer active. Don’t like that the Alt->Tab sequence has seen no innovation – in fact I think it’s regressed somewhat.
I know Canonical promise speed – that is not my experience.

I could go on, but this is the jist of it.

Perhaps the focus of the innovation should be in small progress steps that bring continued usability rather than these radical departures.

Some additional links
http://www.junauza.com/2011/12/is-ubuntus-popularity-declining-answer.html

Cloud Computing is not that mature as a computing paradigm and many companies, CIO’s and technologist still debate the merits of “the cloud” sighting challenges around security and privacy as just of a few of the many concerns.

Cloud however has demonstrated three very valuable benefits to the enterprise:
1. Elasticity
2. Scale
3. Automation

In short, these means AGILITY and time to BENEFIT for business – both critical for success in the modern business environment.

The elasticity demonstrated in Public Cloud environments like Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) really illustrate the value propositions of virtualization and converged infrastructure. These are two drivers of significant innovation and cost savings in the enterprise. In the past businesses deployed a storage, compute and network environment for each application that they used – today because of virtualization companies are able to deploy clusters of servers together with shared storage making it possible to share these resources amongst many application workloads – in general this increases the utilization of the servers (many companies have these servers running at between 60 and 80 percent utilization as compared to stand-alone servers running at below 15% utilization). In a converged infrastructure solution as more compute or storage is required additional storage arrays or servers can be added to the clusters. Naturally this has a great cost benefit for companies and helps them to respond to market and or customer demands with agility.

The value for the enterprise of Public cloud implementations was clear to see, but most companies were concerned about security and privacy – many challenges still exist in the public cloud space around these issues although vendors have and continue to address the concerns. But as a result of this – companies adopted public cloud principles into the enterprise and the private cloud was born – this way companies achieved the benefits of public cloud offerings without many of the risks.

Positioning all this become more and more complex and so we went to defining what the cloud was and is, and the various formats it could take (Public, Private and Hybrid, Community, Closed Group etc.)

The concepts of Cloud Computing are still very much in their infancy and as the ideas continue to mature our appreciation of how cloud can be adopted and be defined will continue to evolve. One area where I think significant change is coming is in the definition of the Public Cloud. To day Public Cloud is delivered as a best effort solution across the Internet – the stories of cloud failures have received a lot of press hype because as you can imagine because of the scale of public cloud the failures have been spectacular. And this brings me to my point. While Public Cloud as we know it today may work fine for none mission critical or even business critical environments like Google, Yahoo or MSN Mail, it certainly does not work well for companies looking to conduct reliable business on it. As a result we have already seen the emergence of Cloud SLA’s around many Cloud Service offerings.
This is simply the Public Cloud beginning to evolve to what Private or even Hybrid Cloud offers today – I want a cloud service that is as reliable as if I had it built in my own data centre of hosted by an enterprise partner locked down with SLA’s that are to my benefit.

Enter the Enterprise Public Cloud.

The reasoning is made clear from this.

Clouds, data centers etc all exist simply because we need to use computers to achieve a result or outcome – none of us (well maybe a few) actually care about the computers, the storage or even the data center. What we are really looking for is the reliable outcome of their usage.

We want computing environments to be reliable and available because more and more so in the modern era we depend on the services computers deliver. And herein is the hypothesis – since we need reliable computing, and today Public Cloud efforts are based on best effort, these environments will fall away as we introduce reliable and consistent, guaranteed computing environments for both companies and individuals to use.

This way we can bank on the service.

So in order for Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc to remain viable for computing environments other than those of web companies and enthusiasts they will have to evolve their offerings more and more to include SLA’s and Private Cloud reliability. This is already evident in their enterprise editions of their offerings.

The same argument can be made for Hybrid Cloud – Hybrid Cloud you remember is where companies have the ability to leverage additional resources (compute, storage and network) from Public Computing Service Providers when these resources are required – typically at high usage periods in the month or when they are experiencing a burst of activity (as in web sites that experience bursts of interest based on the news etc – imagine being CNN when the news of 911 or Muammar Gaddafi being killed broke.

What you want is reliable, guaranteed compute capability to make sure that your service remains available to your customers.

This requirement I believe will be the demise of Public Cloud as we know it today.

Deeply touched with the passing of Steve Jobs.

Just want to say thank you for your great vision, for enriching our lives and leaving us with such wonderful gifts.

You will be deeply missed.

Rest in peace

I recently fielded a questions about what would drive cloud services in the next few years.

I had to think about the answer and over the past few days I have been thinking about the idea more and more – here are some thoughts…

I guess there are two places that cloud services are going to emerge from – the data centre and the migration to cloud based infrastrucuture and the rethinking of consumer based devices and services.

As far as the data centre and the enterprise are concerned there is “the journey to the cloud”. In broad terms this will include consolidation and virtualisation, the emergence and utlisation of converged infrastucture (of fabric based compute, storage and networking) and the implementation of private and then possibly hybrid cloud services as these make sense to companies.

Many who have already embarked on the journey to virtualisation understand the benefits of converged computing environments. As these mature and begin to scale in the enterprise companies will be able to better utlise these environment to build out private cloud solutions (cloud solutions being solutions that meet the criteria for cloud as set out by the NIST (that, the service is an on-demand self service, that it is made possible from a broad network with resource pooling of the infrastructure that is elastic which is measured).

Applications as they exist today will be able to run on these environments and enable companies to save because of the shared infrastucuture, however. to truly enable cloud based services applications themselves are going to have to undergo tansformation. I expect to see functionality bundled into “smart services” that can be consumed from within the application, but which can also be embedded into other programs and or compute environments (perhaps simialr to API’s but more intelligent than API’s because these smart services are bundled together to provide an outcome and not just intergration). These changes to the applications will thus be the start of what makes cloud services more accessible – examples of this include being able to get a running statement from your bank without having to log into a web site for access, or being able to send information from a trusted source (like a bank or a telco) to another requesting party. In the South African context consider the data held by banks and telcos related to the FICA and RICA requirements – this is verified personal information which their systems have access to and which, should you desire could potentially be shared with another party and be considered a secure and verified set of information.

If one considers mashups and the capability that they represent one can see the potential of the above.

So, while the above transformation happen in the data centre I think they things driving the adoption and usage of these smart services will be the developments taking place in the consumer space.

Mobility is probably the first enabler – more and more mobile and wireless networks, which are fast and reliable, are within the reach of all consumers. We are connected albeit at expensive rates in certain instances.

Devices: This is another very exciting area at the moment. One would not have imaged a number of years ago that companies like IBM and HP would self off the PC and consumer devisions which companies like Google and Samsung bought these capabilities. Not to mention the advent of tablets which are probably one of the more existing innovations in the end user space. Tablets bring it all together – the networks, the smart services or small usable applications AND??

The innovation in the device space is also unlocking very exciting innovations into the User Interface space of technology – the advances in tablets, smart phones and the like is driving the tension to unlock and enable enterprise applications to be consumed in new intuative ways – the point about the application transformation highlights this. Add to this the ability to use gestures and voice with which to interact with systems and one can quickly see how full of possibility this space is for innovation. I suppose one can say that Apple with the iPhone started this revolution – the touch and icon based interface to applications and services made it super intuitive for all ages to pick up a device and start using it without feeling intimidated. I mean, what is more simple than pointing and pressing on an interface. Hence the incredible success of the iPhone and iPad. Windows 8 (in fact Windows Mobile 7 as well ) will further evolve this interface with the introduction of tiles into the interface – each tile can be an executing applicatin or can deliver information based on events.

These dynamics will see the rise of applications that are optimised for this type of usage. These short, yet powerful, interactions will start the evolotion of the way that we do work with computers into a much more naturall and succinct user experience. I believe our ability to collaborate and share information as we do in the physical human world will be much better refected by this new abiliy to interact with an application or information and then pass it on to the next person for additional inputs.

I know that I have not fully addressed the ideas here, perhaps I’ll come back at another date and see if I can embellish on some of them. But, it is an exciting space to be involved in at the moment…

I thought I’d share this cool Cloud Computing infographic. I like the visual aspects of this

For those still wondering about the Cloud ( or omphaloskeptics ) – this is a great introductory Cloud resource http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-cloud-computing-2011-10

Enjoy

I have been thinking about this for some time now and having recently joined a solutions provider from the vendor the thoughts have started to crystallize.

Interesting that as you move beyond a vendor centric perspective of cloud computing you have some bigger challenges to address – and so it was for me in taking on this role. Instead of leading with a vendor centric model one quickly has to start delivering and understanding the value proposition of the business you represent rather than just the product. While there is inherent value in the vendors product the customer expects you deliver beyond that to create value for their investment.

More and more this got me thinking about what I have termed “Fabric based cloud” – in simple terms:

Customers don’t necessarily care about the vendor or the product they are using to deliver enterprise cloud services into their businesses, whether this is software or hardware.
What they care about is response times, reliability and availability. To lead that discussion with a particular product or vendor is often times limiting because of the constraints of individual products.

So as a solutions provider it should be our goal to offer fabric based compute, fabric based storage and fabric based networking for the enterprise and the data centre based on the specific needs of a customer – these needs including above mentioned ones but also price sensitivity and comprehensiveness of individual offerings. When you begin to offer this services to customers in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or even Compute as a Service (CaaS) offering this idea of fabric based offerings is even more relative.

From my thinking this would allow us to make the choice of any specific hardware that a customer might need – so in certain environments we might deploy HP or IBM hardware. In other environments it might make sense to deploy CISCO or even Dell blades. What does the customer care – provided his requirements are met.

The same is true for virtualisation, management and monitoring software – what feature or function the customer may require could in fact require two or three solutions – at the end of the day as long as their requirement is met what do they care?

Testing this with colleagues and customers at the moment and will update and share information and thoughts as this idea matures.

The day you where born I cried
The joy and emotion I felt could not be contained

You became the beacon of my life
Everything changed

Every ounce of effort to achieve
from there on in has been for you

I wish and hope you will see in me
A mentor and friend
albeit floored with the mistakes I have made

Take the time to
Learn from where I have fallen
forget all my wrongs
Focus on my rights

Where possible
Stand on my shoulders and reach beyond my dreams
to become the man you were destined to be

Be a man where I could not
And don’t make the mistakes
which I have already paid for

Let our conversation not be father and son
Not I said and you failed
But man to man
and friend to friend

Be everything I could not
Stand proud where I failed

Be my son
and make me proud
Realise the dreams which I have held
in being the man I could never be

Dedicated to Devin Green
My son born 27/03/2001

So far in life I have been very fortunate not to have spent much time in doctors waiting rooms or hospitals

Today I have had that privileged.

I find myself sitting here very nervous and anxious.

Around me the room if full of patients, mothers with young children coughing or crying, both looking very miserable. The sound of the crying, their mothers shooing them seems to penetrate into my mind stringing out the tension – when you have had crying kids of your own you’ll understand the stress there is in having a sick child.

I have a huge sense of anguish building in me for these people – the system is so cold and we are lined up like animals to the slaughter having to pay for the privilege.

Where have we lost the sense of what this is all about – about caring for the people with compassion and kindness – instead this just feels like a production line of wealth for doctors and the makers of the medicines they dispense.

It’s cold and uncaring
I imagine for a minute of those less priviledged and then force myself not to think about that because I can just imagine…

I’m hurt also at the hopelessness and desperation of our situation – we allow ourselves to loose our dignity and be treated in this way. That is not right!

Today for the first time I come to understand the anguish and pain that some endure weekly, and monthly – it is sad indeed.

Originally I wanted to stay on Lucid Lynx because it was a LTS release and I thought I’d be able to play with the newer releases in VM’s.
As it turns out I started to have some issues with grub and my first and second drives so with some frustration I relented and have made the move to Natty Narwhal and the much debated Unity Interface.

I like things like they were – I am an “originalist” (if there is such a word, and PS you heard it hear first ), maybe purist would be a better word…whatever. It is just hard to replace the keyboard and mouse as efficient input mechanisms and my thoughts are that the windowing system has gone through many iterations to get it to the level of productivity it has reached.

But, at the same time I appreciate and understand the need for development and improvement. So then first thoughts on Natty, without considering much of the press it has already endured.

Dislikes

1. I do not like the quantify of clicks required to get you to a place where you start navigating or searching for your program. So that is putting some strain on my mouse as an efficient input mechanism.
2. I am not sure that we have improved anything putting the “new” Unity menu as a side bar – although not the norm, you have been able to do that for a long time. I still need to work with the interface to see what if any benefits there are.
3. I think there is still a lot of work to be done to slicken up the UI – the icons are just that, icons from the X era. If we are going to do something with them we need to turn them into glossy exciting buttons that reach out and ask you to press them.
4. The little buttons to the left of the icons indicating the number of the screens that you have open of any program are novel…but there is no preview capability for mousing over them…so it’s interesting to know that I have three Firefox windows open, so what – it would help if I could preview them and decide which one to click on thereby saving me time with both mouse travel and clicks.
5. If you don’t know the name of the program you are looking for to use with the Search Launcher, then the amount of clicks to get to where you want to be – too many clicks and not much productivity.
6. Not sure that I like the way programs pile into the bottom corner of the launcher…looks tardy and not thought through properly in my mind – a Windows flash back to Windows 3.x when the icons got more and more compressed on the task bar.
7. I still had to do the multple installs to get my media to work properly – that’s just untidy and to be taken serious in the enterprise that is something that should still be high on the agenda.
8. There is still work to be done to polish the interface – things are getting overwriting etc.

Likes
So as an old UNIX/Linux hack that cut my teeth on green and amber screens I have a passion for typing and the command line. You want to see real productivity go and watch someone that is proficient with the keyboard, keyboard shortcuts etc – they develop an ability to interface with the system very quickly driving up productivity. This might be important for business…although I am not sure that there is still a Windows vs Linux debate for the Enterprise desktop – is there?

1. I like the use of the Windows or Super key (in Ubuntu speak) to activate the launcher. From what I can see in my few minutes of playing tonight (while watching the solar eclipse which was very cool) is this. A single press opens up the Search launcher (somewhat like clicking on the Windows Start button) and then typing in the name of the program you are looking for. Makes for quick access to the program provided you know the name.
2. Probably the coolest feature I have found thus far (again a little like doing an Alt key combination in Microsoft Office) is being able to hold down the Super key which brings up a alphanumeric listing on the icons allowing you to navigate directly to them from the keyboard. I think that drives efficiency and speeds up getting around. Like that one also because it bring the window to the foreground automatically no matter what workspace it might have been placed on.
3. Talking about the Workspace (have not figured the keyboard shortcut for it yet) but I like the ability to drag programs between workspaces – much easier than before, but do remember being able to do that in earlier editions of XWindows.
4. Glad that Alt-Tab still works, miss Super key-Tab…perhaps will have to install the window animations etc again.
5. I suppose being able to Esc the launcher is okay.
6. I like the Ubuntu Software Centre – I think there is a much broader application to the interface and the concept than was originally anticipated. It has an intuitive UI and I think could be extended without much effort to fit into self provisioning Cloud SaaS environments from VMware (VMware Horizon Application Manager) and Newscale not to mention others – hope someone from Ubuntu stumbles across this idea.
7. I like the new sliding bars – it is great to see that there is still active innovation on such an establish concept. It will be interesting to see where this ends up.

That’s it for now…thanks to the Ubuntu community and developer teams for shipping yet another great Ubuntu product with a ton of improvements. I think I am still undecided about whether I see the full benefits of the thinking thus far…as we say here in SA, “The jury is still out on that one…”