According to InformationWeek, open source use is on the rise but management policies are not keeping pace.

According to the survey, 44% said they were using more open source software than they were a year ago, with 32% saying they were using about the same, and 12% saying they were using less.

So open source software usage is up but the primary concern is how to integrate, secure and manage them centrally.

“There are a complex set of compliance, security, and management problems that can surface when OSS is used at enterprise scale, but these concerns seem to be secondary to getting the work done,” said Peter Vescuso, an executive VP with Black Duck Software, from the conference.

FreeIPA intends to solve some of these management problems.

* Identity (machine, user, virtual machines, groups, authentication credentials)
* Policy (configuration settings, access control information)
* Audit (events, logs, analysis thereof)

I suspect the tough part of making such a system work will be policy enforcement in non-contiguous environments.

10 tips for sensible systems administration

Benjamin Franklin: scientist, scholar, statesman, and . . . systems administrator? Yes, 200 years or so before the birth of UNIX®, Franklin scribed sage advice to keep systems humming.

Lots of people want to know, how does Google do it? I certainly don’t have the answers but here are some neat videos.

* An enlightening look at the Google data center.
* The Google server; an individual, battery supported uncovered tray, probably built to map and reduce.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes Twitter as a poor man’s email system.

“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?”

It seems like most of these systems are doomed on some level to reimplement all the basic features of SMTP. Abstracted a bit, it’s as if everyone had their own personal mailing list and anyone else can subscribe.

Some software I wish I had time to play with:

- EUCALYPTUS – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems — is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing Elastic/Utility/Cloud computing using computing clusters and/or workstation farms.
- oVirt is a small host image that provides libvirt service and hosts virtual machines and a web-based virtual machine management console.
- collectd is a daemon which collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD-files.
- Cft (pronounced sift) watches a system administrator as she makes changes to a system. Those changes can then be saved and replayed on other systems.

Software I hope succeeds:

- Free IPA is an integrated security information management solution combining Linux (Fedora), Fedora Directory Server, MIT Kerberos, NTP, DNS. You know, like Active Directory.
- Oracle VM, which I don’t think gets enough press.
- Openchange aims to provide a portable Open Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols.

Update

I forgot to mention genome:

- Genome is both a set of light weight tools and framework for introducing new server configurations and replicating those server configurations from one environment to another.