Active Endpoints is the world’s first all-in-one, standards-based visual orchestration system.

Active is the only SOA-based process orchestration and business process management (BPM) system that allows enterprises and developers to:

1. Automate business processes
2. Collaborate across IT and business boundaries
3. Control the overall state of the business
4. Adapt rapidly and easily to change

Ok, so what’s SOA? What’s BPEL? What is Business Process Management?

SOA – Service Oriented Architecture provides enterprises a design framework to deploy new application in a more faster and economic way. You can say that SOA is a bunch of different business services that can communicate with each other.

Web Services Business Process Execution Language(BPEL) – Web service interactions can be described in two ways. Executable business processes model actual behavior of a participant in a business interaction. Abstract business processes are partially specified processes that are not intended to be executed. An Abstract Process may hide some of the required concrete operational details. Abstract Processes serve a descriptive role, with more than one possible use case, including observable behavior and process template. WS-BPEL is meant to be used to model the behavior of both Executable and Abstract Processes. ( taken from Wikipedia )

Business Process Management, well in short it’s a process where organizations satisfy their clients by studying and enhancing their products or services.

Now Active Endpoints let’s you do all these three things. There’s a free trial, you can download it at http://www.activevos.com/download-trial.php by filling out some forms.

If you opt to purchase the software, they give you two options:

1. You buy the software for Development Environment. ActiveVOS is $5,000 per CPU socket.
2. You buy the software for Deployment Environment. ActiveVOS is $12,000 per CPU socket when the Deployment licenses are ordered with a first-time purchase of Development licenses. Subsequent ActiveVOS deployment purchases are $25,000 per CPU socket.

Support is given at annual fee of 20% of total license fees. If you need training,  a 5-day skills transfer program geared specifically to your project teams needs. Includes 5 days on site for $10,000 plus travel and expenses.

You can follow them via their online blog at http://www.vosibilities.com/

For those who don’t know much about Malaysia, the capital of Malaysia is Kuala Lumpur(KL). And Johor Bahru is like 5 hours drive from KL. Yeah, so for me that’ll be another journey to that side of the country. Lately I’ve traveled to Singapore twice and Singapore is just opposite of JB.

Barcamp Johor Baru 2008

So I went to their website and checked out the sessions. Here’s the ones I liked:

• Azure, Cloud computing from Microsoft.
• MSC Malaysia pre-seed fund.
• Microfinancing(?) from Kiva
• Drupal
• Enterprise PHP

For the final sessions and tracks please check back at their website http://barcamp.org/BarCampJB

So see you at Barcamp JB 2008!

Update:
It’s Johor Bahru. New Johor

So let’s get started. The first thing to do is sign up at Amazon EC2. I’ll be using Ubuntu on this.

You need Java JRE, do:

apt-get install sun-java5-jre

vim .bashrc

# Amazon Ec2
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-VGKIRWAKVSIEXEPVFQ2NSVQ4APUMYAC3.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-VGKIRWAKVSIEXEPVFQ2NSVQ4APUMYAC3.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
type bash to reload your bash_rc

cd ~/.ec2

Amazon has this services where you can use virtual servers, either your custom or prebuilt publicly shared server images. The key point here is that Amazon has a lot of servers that can be used at any time.

So let’s get started. The first thing to do is sign up at Amazon EC2. I’ll be using Ubuntu on this.

You need Java JRE, do:

apt-get install sun-java5-jre

vim .bashrc

# Amazon Ec2
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-VGKIRWAKVSIEXEPVFQ2NSVQ4APUMYAC3.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-VGKIRWAKVSIEXEPVFQ2NSVQ4APUMYAC3.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
type bash to reload your bash_rc

cd ~/.ec2

Amazon has this services where you can use virtual servers, either your custom or prebuilt publicly shared server images. The key point here is that Amazon has a lot of servers that can be used at any time.

So let’s get started. The first thing to do is sign up at Amazon EC2. I’ll be using Ubuntu on this.

You need Java JRE, do:

apt-get install sun-java5-jre

vim .bashrc

# Amazon Ec2
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-VGKIRWAKVSIEXEPVFQ2NSVQ4APUMYAC3.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-VGKIRWAKVSIEXEPVFQ2NSVQ4APUMYAC3.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
type bash to reload your bash_rc

cd ~/.ec2

ec2-add-keypair arstan-keypair

Save those lines including  —–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—– and also  —–END RSA PRIVATE KEY—– lines.

sudo chmod 600 id_rsa-arstan-keypair

ec2-describe-images -o amazon This will show the server images that Amazon has for you. You can see ec2-describe-images -a to see all the server images you have access to.

ec2-run-instances ami-0459bc6d -k arstan-keypair

ec2-describe-instances will show you instances you are running.

So here’s a note to myself on how to make raid in dell servers:

1. While booting the server, enter PERC/CERC BIOS Configuration Utility by pressing Control + M key.
2. From the Management menu select Configure option.
3. Select Clear Configuration from the Configure menu, Select Yes when prompted. At this point we have deleted all existing arrays and/or logical drives. Pressing Escape button go to Management menu.
4. Go to Clear option in Management menu. Select drives by pressing spacebar and when you see READY status flashing you press F10 button. Select Yes and you will be reformatting those drives. This will take some time depending on your drive capacity. With my drives (2×73GB) it took around 1hour ++. When it’s done press escape and reboot your server
5. Repeat Step 1.
6. Select Easy Configuration from Configure menu. Make sure all drives are in GREEN and READY state.
7. Using arrow keys select the drives one by one and press spacebar. This will change drives status from READY to ONLINE A00-00. Repeat this step for as much hard drives you have.
8. If you want to make a hot spare, select a hard drive you wanna make hot spare and press F4.
9. Select all ONLINE status drives and press F10. This will bring you Select Configurable Array(s) dialog. Now pressing spacebar you get A-00 window, here you should get Span-1. Press F10 key to verify your logical drive settings. Here you will get options of RAID-0 and RAID-1. When you made your mind and set your RAID configs go to Accept option and press enter. When prompted select YES.
10. Now it’s time to make our logical drive bootable. In Configure menu go to Specify Boot Drive and select Specify a Logical Drive as BootDrive. The number in Logical BootDrive set to 0. (This will change according to your drive configs). And press enter.
11. Pressing Escape button you quit from the menus and go to Exit dialog. Reboot your server and you are set to install your preferred OS now!

This note is for RAID-1 with 2×73GB SCSI hard drives. For your case it might be slightly different but the overall process should be something like this.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Here’s a snapshot of the PERC/CERC BIOS Configuration Utility

However, there’s not much choice in regards to broadband internet connection over here. Yes, I know about Celcom’s 3G, Maxis broadband and Jaring as well, but I think they aren’t yet ready to compete with Streamyx. It’s kinda monopoly.

On the positive note, the WiMAX is coming to Malaysia soon. So I hope it will make things get better at Telekom Malaysia, if it happens.

Streamyx = Screamyx!

So enjoy!

#!/bin/sh
#      log-apache.sh
#
#      Copyright 2007 Arstan Jusupov <arstan>
#
#      This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#      the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#      (at your option) any later version.
#
#      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#      GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#      along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#      Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.</arstan>

# Exporting paths
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

# Assign variables
LOGS_FILE_ZIP=`date +%Y%m%d`_logs.zip
LOGS_DIR=/var/log/httpd
LOGS_BACKUPS_DIR=/var/logs_backups
FTP_BACKUPS_DIR=/path/to/backup/`date +%Y%m`
APACHECTL=`which apachectl` # or hard-code full path

FTP_USER="backup"
FTP_PASSWD="backup"
FTP_SERVER="192.168.x.x"

# Check if we can access $LOGS_DIR
if [ ! -d $LOGS_DIR ]; then
echo $LOGS_DIR does not exists or cannot be accessed.
break
fi

# Check if $LOGS_BACKUPS_DIR exists, if not create.
if [ ! -d $LOGS_BACKUPS_DIR ]; then
mkdir -p $LOGS_BACKUPS_DIR
fi

# Rotate the log files
for X in `ls $LOGS_DIR | grep log`; do
mv $LOGS_DIR/$X $LOGS_DIR/$(date +%Y%m%d)_$X
done

# Archive log files
zip $LOGS_BACKUPS_DIR/$LOGS_FILE_ZIP $LOGS_DIR/$(date +%Y%m%d)*

# Verification for successful zipping and removal of old log files.
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
rm $LOGS_DIR/$(date +%Y%m%d)*
fi

# Re-create the log files
for X in access_log error_log ssl_error_log ssl_request_log modsec_audit_log modsec_debug_log; do
touch $LOGS_DIR/$X
done

# Finally, restarting apache or if you want $APACHECTL graceful
$APACHECTL restart

# Off-system transfer of the log files
# Change local dir
cd $LOGS_BACKUPS_DIR

ftp -n $FTP_SERVER &lt;<end>
user $FTP_USER $FTP_PASSWD
binary</end>

# create the remote backup dir in %Y%m format, if exists wont hurt
# I dont know how to do: if [ -d $DIR ]; then
mkdir $FTP_BACKUPS_DIR

cd $FTP_BACKUPS_DIR
put $LOGS_FILE_ZIP

bye
End-Of-Session
echo Done
exit 0

I’m not a designer, but I tried to do something out of Silhouette theme originally designed by Brian Gardner. I liked Silhouette for its plain and web2.0 look design(not so much!). Also it was very easy to customize.

Hats off to Nurba for sending me the link!

For those who are new here is old theme screen shot. Compare it with the new one and leave your comments!

Here’s the explanation from James Troup, Canonical sysadmin team leader:
a) the servers, especially zambezi were running an incredible amount of web software (over 15 packages[1] that we recognised) and of all the ones where it’s trivial to determine a version, they were without exception out-of-date and missing security patches. An attacker could have gotten a shell through almost any of these sites.

b) FTP (not sftp, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, so an attacker (in the right place) could also have gotten access by sniffing the clear-text passwords.

c) The servers have not been upgraded past breezy due to problems with the network card and later kernels. This probably allowed the attacker to gain root.

So, based on this I can say that this has nothing to do with the Ubuntu Servers security. I think it was the poor management of the servers. The compromise has taken place because sysadmins were lazy(or may be too busy with other stuff) to install relevant patches and upgrades.

Well, anyways this thing happened, so let’s read what are they doing to prevent another hacking.

Move the servers to Canonical Data Centers or move the servers to managed/outsourced hosting companies.

This incident one more time proves that at some point, any OS(Operating System) or any software will be hacked. To be secure, you need to always watch out for patches/upgrades, advisories from the vendors, research and stay alert!

Overall, presenters talk pretty much the same things but in other words and with different approach. Mr. from Novell, I forgot their names, did a welcome speech and threw some linux penguins in to the audience.

The presenter from IBM made everybody feel asleep right after the breakfast. It was boring and I couldn’t understand much from his Indian accent. I wonder if he did prepare for this event, because I saw him only read the presentation slides from the screen. I’m sure there’s no point in the presentation if you are going to do that. We can read that kind of information in the websites, thanks to Internet. Other people generally was quite the same, except that AMD guy who made a great presentation and explained why would we chose AMD over Intel. It was a good marketing pitch also!

Novell called this tour as Virtualization 7 in 7, meaning there were 7 alliances in this – AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel and Novell.

Personally, the stuff they talked about was not very new for me. I wish Novell did a hands on experiments and showed us how it all works in real life. This would be more resourceful for attendees. Otherwise, it was all one way communication.

I wasn’t lucky win iPod, SLES watches, T-Shirts or even the penguin toys.

I’ve tried almost all kinds of linux distributions on them, I even give it a shot and install Mac OS Tiger on my last R60 Thinkpad. This was a great exploration and I had my first experience using OS X. I was quite happy with the performance, although I couldn’t manage to install wireless card(ipw3945) I could after some tricks use my built-in network card.

I was, I’m sure as all of the thinkpad users, afraid that since IBM sold the PC business line to Lenovo Group the quality of the products will go down.

Personally, I think they could manage the transition quite well. The quality is also not bad, they managed to introduce a few new models, changed the charger for the laptops, have different kind of batteries, gave business to Targus with their bags. All in all it’s quite OK still.

And now I’m kissing good-bye to my thinkpad leaving my current place. I’m not sure what kind of laptop or PC am I going to get at my new place. I hope it will be MacBook

If not, I seriously consider buying one myself, may be in near future.

1. Tilda – If you have played Counter Strike or Quake, remember how console terminal is used? It will be hidden and if you press some keys it will show up. You press the keys again it will disappear. Nice thing to have if you use command line quite often.
2. Liferea – RSS reader in Linux. It’s lightweight and does everything you expect from such application.
3. Geany – Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. I like that it loads fast, supports all the documents that I currently work with. The disadvantage is that its very new, so need to be patient.
4. Graveman – This tool lets me handle almost every kind of CD/DVD burning. I say almost coz there are some minor problems with DVDs.
5. Thunderbird – I have blogged that it’s my only E-Mail client. My lovely!
6. Axel - console based download manager. Do you know flashget for windows? It’s sth like that, minus the ability to login to the downloading server. I’d love to see ubuntu integrating it into apt-get.
7. screen – let’s you run stuff even if you lost/closed connection to the linux box.

More to come soon!

Before I begin, I need to note that AdesClrPicker is not developed to run on Linux, it’s a Windows application. So if you encounter any kind of problems, bugs while running it on Linux Ades Design is not responsible, neither am I!

Here’s a short list of what we need:

1. Ubuntu 7.04 installed on your machine
2. Wine – Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.
3. Latest Firefox version installed in Wine

I have tried using AdesClrPicker in native Linux applications and the picker can detect and pick color but it cannot send color codes to the AdesClrPicker which is running in Wine. Since it was developed for Windows users this kind of things incompatibility might happen. Just remember that AdesClrPicker does work fine in Windows OS. Having said that let’s go to the first step and run it:

we start AdesClrPicker:

blackman@blacky:~$ wine AdesClrPicker.exe

we start Firefox in wine:

blackman@blacky:~$ wine /home/blackman/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe

So, after starting Firefox in Wine we can now pick colors and make use of this wonderful and yet very small in size application – AdesClrPicker!

Screenshots:

| | |

Links:

Ades Design

AdesClrPicker

• Extra desktop – I am sure an extra workstation at home won’t be a bad idea after all. You can let your family members, guests use the PC with no worries of viruses, spyware, adware, etc.
• Network Server – Set up a home networking server with Firewall, DHCP, DNS even your local E-Mail Server.
• File Storage – Setting up a SAMBA will not only let you access them easily via M$ Windows and do backup, you can also create yourself a local DOMAIN with some user restrictions for each account.
• Application Server – Are you into application developing? Like Java, PHP or the currently famous Ruby on Rails? You can setup your old junk PC as Application Server and have more or the same platform of your Hosting provider.
• Database Server – Enterprise class databases like DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Informix and lots of other databases can be easily installed on them.
• Media Streaming – Do you have hundred gigs of MP3 or video? You can setup streaming server, so that other users can just tune to your streaming server and enjoy the music and movies.

So, again, if you have some old PCs that you think is outdated and old, think again. Maybe you can find some job for it?

There are lots of Linux/BSD distributions you can use for the above mentioned purposes. I will be posting my experiences setting up those examples on old PCs that I can find in my office and home. So, this post will be like intro for that.

After a long time of planning and thinking, I started my own blog.

So, welcome to my blog, please register yourself in order to leave comments.

Arstan