Here are my new sweethearts that are going to run CentOS. I brought them home yesterday and today after some re-arrangements of the harddrives I’m ready to install them. They’re going to take care of everything my poor P3 700Mhz with 312MB ram has been doing for about 2 years, which is everything from MySQL databases to Nagios monitoring system.

A short specifications on these cuties are:

forth: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 6x 18.2 GB hdd

perl: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2,5 GB RAM, 6x 9.1 GB hdd

draco: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18,2 GB hdd

dibol: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18.2 GB hdd

pascal: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

prolog: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

Open Source Forum 2008 toke place in Stockholm on October 7th – 8th. During the first day one of my favorite speakers on this kind of event was having two presentations. First up in the morning Arnoud Engelfriet from ICTRecht in Holland talked about the legal aspects of using and develope open source software and how your company lawyers and engineers could work together with open source. In the afternoon he finished the subject with talking about everything from embedded open source software, distribution of open source software and how GPLv3 could affect your business.

This first day offered a few other interesting presentations such as Alexander Schanz from DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH who talked about their open source radar data processing system PHOENIX runing on SUSE Linux and Lennart Hagberg from TetraPak who showed us and talked about the open source software behind their communications plattform for videos and documentation, an internal “YouTube”-service together with a wiki for documentation built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and WordPress.

On day two of Open Source Forum 2008 there were two tracks, one track with presentations like the day before and one track with live demonstrations of products and services. I begun day two at the live demonstrations track listening to Urban Anjar from Ubuntu Sverige talk about Ubuntu Linux and show KVM virtualization on Ubuntu. After the coffee break I ended up talking about Nagios and Op5′s Nagios-based network monitoring system with Jonas Björk and a representative from Op5.

Next up before lunch was Erik Lönroth from Scania Infomate who talked about how the use Linux in their cluster for calculations and simulations. With open standards and open source software they reduced many performance problems, but when they got here they found a new problem, no one had solved the problems they encountered before. To my surprise it would be until this point of this conferense when someone finaly said that you can get far with open source, but when you’re there it’s time to solve the problems never solved before and share them with others. At this moment I found myself thinking that with people like Erik Lönroth out there on the IT departments of the companies there’s hope for open source to survive the step into the world of business.

A presentation that surprised me during this conference was Anders Wallenquist from Vertel/Dataföreningen who talked about the CMS Drupal. I was surprised because I’ve never understood how competent Drupal acctually is and on top of this Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper, will move their webpage to Drupal instead of Escenic and Polopoly like most other newspapers in Sweden uses. To read more about di.se and Drupal IDG wrote about it at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.182311.

Back to Open Source Forum 2008, during day two there were two tracks which means a lot of presentations that you don’t have to time to see. I’ve been writing about those presentations that impressed or surprised me during these two days. For the full agenda of this conferense see http://www.opensourceforum.se/Program.htm.

So, what’s my summary of this conferense? Well, it was terribly expencive, only ~50 visitors and I had some very interesting conversations about various subjects with other visitors which would mean that since I’m not paying for it, it was totaly worth it. :)

Does your company have an old IBM iSeries or zSeries with the POWER processor architecture that’s not in use anymore? I’m looking for an IBM iSeries or zSeries to have at home to learn about how to virtualize Linux or IBM hardware. If you have one you don’t need anymore or if you know someone who does, would you concider giving it away to someone who wants to learn about it’s hardware and systems? .

I already have one IBM AS/400 with the 48-bits CISC-processor from 1993 running OS/400 V3R5 that was given to me in 2004 from a company where my dad was working at the time, my most greatful thanks to them. Now I look forward to combine the knowledge I’ve gathered from working with both Linux and IBM hardware to take the next step and learn how to virtualize Linux on IBM midrange and/or mainframe with the POWER processor architecture.