Francesco Crippa

After a couple of weeks, here I am to write a quickly post about RedHat Summit.

It was the first time for me in Boston (Great and beautiful city) and I really enjoyed the Summit, especially social events like party at Fenway Stadium or dinner at the 50th floor of Prudential Centre (see photos below). RedHat parties are great as usual!

On the square, food quality wasn’t every time so good… Definitely +1 for the Lobster Ravioli (have you ever tasted this kind of ravioli in Italy?), but surely -1 for the “welcome cocktail” or sandwiches served during meal… Sorry, but I’m Italian guy…

BTW, Summit surely represents the most important opportunity to keep in touch with lot of “remote friends”, colleagues and come out with new ideas and new business strategies.

Fedora is everywhere

Me and Jim

Fenway Stadium with the Boston skyline in background. Awesome!

Neon

Audience

Every year, Byte-Code organizes a event for its employees and consultants to build new strategies and watching new technologies all together.

This year focus was agile approach on java development, with technologies like groovy and grails. There were also some very interesting (and useful!) presentations about regression tests for web applications, project management strategies an, last but not least, some new and innovative products developed in Byte-Code and released under GPL license: Symbolic and “SuperVisor”.

Antonio (RedHat channel manager) presented the “strong” relationship between Byte-Code, RedHat and JBoss. The only problem was the time! There wasn’t enough time to make some discussion about technologies after presentations… surely next year we’ll try to organize something better and with much more time!

All presentation were very professional and have opened new opportunities for lot of byte-code crew!

But this is nothing compared to the rafting activity planned for Saturday! It was simply great! I’ve never done rafting before, but it is very exciting and awesome!

It was really “go wet”, not only for rafting… it rained during for all the time of the event! …as usual (the same last year for golf activities…)

Samuele trust me that all material made for the event (slides, videos and so on…) will be available online as soon as possible.

I really would like to thank you all Byte-Code people for all theirs help and contributions. MeetUp is being a really cool event!

Byte-Code People

Go Wet! Rafting rules

Simone’s presentation

Nice girls

Gourmet activities…

Feedback withe board was filled by lot of notes

I’m here! ….with some red hat presents made by Antonio

Two years after Canness RedHat event, a new summit reserved to RedHat Partners strikes back in Europe (Malaga). This time the format is a bit changed, and now it seems really similar to the offical RedHat Summit (USA).

I’ve spent three long days (for “long” I mean get up at 7.00 AM and never go to sleep untill 2.00 AM…) speching with other european partners about new solutions in Linux and JBoss markets and new opportunities for OpenSource software over the European countries. For me it was also my first occasion to meet Jim Whitehurst (new RedHat CEO) and to hear him saying things that are already MUST in Byte-Code, such as share custom customers software as OpenSource, to avoid writing and re-writing same things every time, not only to build “OpenSource products”, but also to build “OpenSource customers”.

It was also a great occasion to meet some old friends I didn’t see from a long long time, and to know new exciting friends.

It was also first big event for Carmen, RedHat employee since last month, now involved into RedHat Marketing team. I hope to see her also in Fedora marketing as soon as possibile

In my hopinion the only big missing stuff in the event was Fedora. Of course, it was a “business” event, but I can’t belive RedHat wants to manage event where community is too far, also because bussiness could (IMHO should) need to know the “voice of community”.

Due to the party on the beach I couldn’t attendee last Fedora Ambassadors meeting, last Wednesday, but I’d like to put this event in agenda for next year also for Fedora community.

Davide Presentation about JBoss migration is ready

Wonderful place

Benalmadena harbor

My work often requires me to select (or develop) different kind of technologies. Every time I’ve got to make a choice between “traditional approach” and “OpenSource approach”, the questions I ask to myself are (more or less) always the same:

• Is this new technology able to stay alive for a long long time?
• Is it able to keep itself on the top of most used technologies?
• Is it able to move people from old style approach into new OpenSource world?
• …

…but since a couple of months ago, I’ve started asking to myself another important question:

• Is this technology able to keep close to itself key people (basically the “community”)? Or it is only able to keep the “maintainers”, but not the innovators?

I think the ask for this question is very important to know the future of a product. Some time ago, I’ve blogged a post about “80% and 20% of developers“, where the real innovators are (IMHO) only a few people, and lose these people could be the end of a project.

I think OpenSource community needs to move over new and exciting technologies day by day. And innovators ARE OpenSource community. No way to keep a good innovator stopped to a technology for long time. Technology has to change and grow up fast if it wants to benefit by these extraordinary geeks.

So, here’s why you have to run out of town from static “huge” technologies (usually defined “enterprise”): best guys, best developers, best architects need to “go west”, to find new lands, looking for new opportunities to innovate world and make it better.

RedHat and Fedora (and, of course, Byte-Code! ) are the best example I know (and they rock! Great innovations in Fedora make RedHat a REAL enterprise technology)

OpenSource community should be considered a “quality guarantee” by everyone, also when it try to head straight for new and unknown ways.

Just my two cents

Only two days ago I blogged a post to tell to the world about my new RHCA Certification, and today, Alberto Trivellato (a friend of mine and one of my best colleagues), takes Sun Java Enterprise Architect certification (the full name of cert. is quite long: “Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for Java Platform Enterprise Edition Technology”). It is the highest certification in Sun Java panorama as well as RHCA is the highest certification in Linux panorama.

I’ve spent a lot of my time into java environments and I know how hard this certification is. So, I’m really proud to work with Alberto and it’s for me an honor to join with this kind of high-skilled people.

Congratulations Alberto! I hope to follow your way as soon as possible

…and now it’s time to buy an expensive Italian wine and make a party!

RHCA is one of the most interesting certification I’ve never seen in information technology marketplace. To pass all exams you’ve got to DO what you have to know, not only make a check into multiple choice questions.

It was hard, but I’m happy because yesterday I received  the result of my last exam: passed!

Today, I am RHCA!

For the first time I think to have a “valid” certification to show my own skills In Italy it’s pretty unusual. University degrees, certifications and so on are usually not related to practically experiences: you can have a master degree in information technology or computer science without know how using your mouse…

Changing this point of view is hard, but I think it’s not impossible. RHCA is a reality. I hope other companies will follow RedHat way. I think it’s the right way.

Murphy never makes a mistake!

In a project with tons of “overhead complexity”, what do you expect after hard months of work? When you’re so near to the goal… When you can feel it on your fingers…

…simply new architecture. x86_64? Itanium? PowerPC?

Too simple (…and too smart…).

Just i386…

…with 16Gb RAM machines…

…with full x86_64 yum repositories (with custom rpms for WebSphere and other strange things)…

…with complete puppet and puppet-team 64bit config support…

…we now have to rebuild all provisioning and configuration management subsystem in order to support “new” i386 machines…

So, we never forget the past. Never.

Amiga500, I’m waiting for you next upgrade!!!

Wonderful evening spent in “Boccon Divino” during last “Byte-Code” Christmas Party.

Food was very very very very good, but it was really really really too much for us… I’ve never left dessert for ages, but there’s always a first time After last cheese I couldn’t eat anything else. I won’t be able to be hungry for (at least) next week…

But food was not the main topic of the party… alcohol’s, wine and “grappa” were the really leaders of the evening. Please, have a look of my flickr shots to see what happened

If you have to install Zimbra on a single machine with a public IP, your life will be easy and relaxing.

But, if you have to install Zimbra on a server with private IP behind a public reverse proxy with mod_security (and other funny security stuff), and you don’t want to use external relay MTA, your life will be fully of terrible pains!

Obviously Byte-Code has this kind of internal mail server… so this week I’ve made a strange thing to made possible using Zimbra behind a reverse proxy

Here you are some suggestions:

• Remove some mod_security rules not compliant with Zimbra:
  • SecRuleRemoveById 960010 950006 960015 960017 970903
• On Zimbra internal server setup some aliasing IP addresses, with real public ip (don’t worry. It’s only for localhost communications)… one for each real server configured (this is the key of the post! with this useless configuration you can cheat Zimbra about MTA server)
• On Zimbra control panel check “DNS lookup” on both “Global Settings” and server panels.

Life in Byte-Code could be described with two different words: mobility and movability.

The day before yesterday I had breakfast in Milan, lunch in Lecce and dinner in Rome… and my tasks spacing from Linux, clusters, gfs to identity management, mail systems and thin-client projects… (only for this week…)

These are good reasons in order to:

• have a laptop
• have a good book to read
• do not have a desktop
• have a mobile phone with “push-mail” capability
• have an umbrella into laptop-bag (always)
• do not live in a country where Alitalia is the principal air carrier
• have “15 days” a week
• have “25 hours” a day