Red Hat Enterprise Linux

It's been a while since our last deep-dive into the Docker project graph driver performance. Over two years, in fact! In that time, Red Hat engineers have made major strides in improving container storage: Introduced the docker-storage-setup package to help make configuring devicemapper-based storage a snap. Introduced full support for overlay FS in RHEL7.2+ when used with containers Introduced overlay2 as Tech Preview mode Gotten SELinux support to both overlay and overlay2 merged into upstream kernel 4.9 Added a warning...

Today, Red Hat announced the beta availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.3, Red Hat’s newest installment of open source web development tools, dynamic languages, and databases. Delivered on a separate lifecycle from Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a more frequent release cadence, Red Hat Software Collections bridges developer agility and production stability by helping to accelerate the creation of modern applications that can then be more confidently deployed into production. New additions to Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 Beta...

MACsec is an IEEE standard for security in wired ethernet LANs. This blog , will give an overview of what MACsec is, how it differs from other security standards, and present some ideas about how it can be used. MACsec is a Layer 2 protocol that relies on GCM-AES-128 to offer integrity and confidentiality, and operates over ethernet. It can secure all traffic within a LAN, including DHCP and ARP, as well as traffic from higher layer protocols. It is...

I've recently gotten hold of a developer subscription of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The following are the steps I took to have a minimal RHEL installation as a Parallels Desktop virtual machine guest. My simple goal is to have a local, ready-to-use RHEL box that I can use to try stuff out. The items below may be well suited for new RHEL developers like myself. Installation Preparing the Virtual Machine First thing to do is to prepare a Parallels...

Open vSwitch is a software switch responsible for providing network connectivity to virtual machines or containers. Since it is programmable, it brings a challenge to understand what is going on in the network. Open vSwitch (OVS) is an OpenFlow virtual switch, so before talking about OVS itself, it is necessary to introduce OpenFlow a bit. OpenFlow is an open standard protocol that allows separation of the packet forwarding (data plane) from the high level routing decisions (control plane). The control...

Developers have a lot of choices when deciding how to start using OpenShift and Kubernetes locally --- without going through a native OS installation. We all need to have a development environment as close as possible to production (to prevent defects caused by environmental differences), but ideally we need to do this without spending a lot of time to setup and a lot of computational resources (cpu, memory and disk space). This post will present four alternatives to create a...

As a consultant, I've spent a decent amount of time working on a full stack development project in the realm of IoT. Over the years, our teams have run into a lot of avoidable issues. Here are some lessons I learned from using IoT devices in industry. I define IoT as "connecting a device to a larger system with the goal of that device providing information to the system that is then leveraged in some way". This can range from...

This article describes how an administrator can migrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with the help of the Preupgrade Assistant. The Preupgrade Assistant is a tool which assesses your running system for anything that might adversely affect the success of your migration. As Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will have only extended update support after March 2017, administrators will find a tool like that useful to help them...

P/Invoke(Platform Invocation Service) is one of the features of CLI (Common Language Interface) on .NET Framework. P/Invoke enables managed code to call a native function in DLL (Dynamic Link Library). It's a powerful tool for .NET Framework to execute existing C-style functions easily. .NET Core also has a P/Invoke feature and it means we can call a native function in .so file (Linux) and . file (Max OSX). I will show you the short example P/Invoke in .NET Core on...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is not Ubuntu. Out of the box, it seems the default packages installed for developers are somewhat limited. To provide exceptional long-term stability, Red Hat takes a different approach to default packages and software repositories (repos). Development tools aren't installed unless specifically selected. The repos that are initially enabled only contain packages that Red Hat supports over the long term lifecycle of RHEL. Because RHEL’s default repos don’t have as large a selection of development...

Being able to edit your C# (or F# for that matter) code on your Linux VM from Visual Studio in Windows is pretty great. As a Windows developer, you're able to work in an environment you know and trust while still being able to experiment -- and hopefully produce production code -- in Linux, where you may not be quite up to speed. Yet. Visual Studio, that familiar, productive and helpful IDE, is at your fingertips even though your code...

In the process of writing my posts ( #1 and #2) on . NET Core and RHEL, it was made clear to me by several friends that I had neglected to use the de facto standard for continuous integration on Linux, Jenkins. Always happy to try out new (to me) tools, I settled in for what I was assured would be a simple configuration to test out my previous work in this bastion of automation. What is Jenkins? The first...

Note: This post is from 2016. For current instructions, reference the documentation. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/index.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/ With DevOps taking hold in businesses ranging from small design agencies to large enterprises, there has been a real push to automate deployments and make them consistent. As part of this, maintaining configuration as code and utilizing a version control system such as Git or Subversion to house it is becoming more prominent. Tools like Puppet and Chef have been around for a number of years...

From a developer’s perspective, “incident management” can be a pretty ambiguous term. While the first thing that comes to mind is receiving and responding to alerts, most IT professionals know it is so much more than that. Effective incident management starts with data collection and continues through alerting, escalation, collaboration, and resolution. At the server level, the most important pieces of incident management are infrastructure monitoring and log management, the vast majority of which are easily configurable on a Red...

Around this time last year, Fedora 22 brought a major update for anyone working under the Fedora hood -- Yum was deprecated and replaced by DNF. It brings some significant changes: Faster, more mathematically correct method for solving dependency resolution A “clean”, well documented Python API with C bindings & Python 3 support Isn’t this a Release by Another Name? No, DNF marks a shift, and not just a fork to Python 3, C support and cleaner docs. The move...

The sheer number of tasks involved in building out automation infrastructure for a new organization never ceases to amaze me. One of the most often overlooked groups of tasks, however, is security. Though I am in no way a security expert, I know there are some basic steps we should take to protect ourselves and our precious systems. I also know that not everyone who administers RHEL systems has an extensive background working with Linux. If, like me, you’re normally...

You obviously know what a LAMP stack is if you’ve managed to find your way here, but for those who may be unsure, the key is in the name (L)inux (A)pache (M)ariaDB (P)HP—a term that has become synonymous around the globe for building a basic web server with database and PHP functionality. There are a myriad of web applications, ranging from Wordpress to Joomla to Magento that all use this setup, and if you know how to get it up...

Wait... what? I was involved in diagnosing a production system performance problem: a web application serving thousands of interactive users was acting up. Symptoms included significant time running kernel code on behalf of the application (unexpectedly), and at those times substantial delays were observed by end users. As someone with a systems programming background, I figured I had a decent shot at figuring this one out. Naively I reached for strace(1), the system call and signal tracer, to provide insights...

The charter of Open Innovation Labs is to help our customers accelerate application development and realize the latest advancements in software delivery, by providing skills, mentoring, and tools. Some of the challenges I frequently hear from customers are those around Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment provisioning and configuration. This article is first in the series of articles that guide you through installation configuration and usage of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This...

Red Hat Software Collections can make your life as a programmer or admin immensely easier. Like death, taxes and zombies, dealing with different versions of software is something you just can't avoid. It's a nasty but necessary fact of life. Traditionally, when developers and system admins grapple with this issue, they have to sacrifice something. If you want to run the latest and greatest version of a web app, it might not support users with outdated browsers. If you install...

Editor's Note: If you have a Linux system that runs KVM and would like to try Red Hat Enterprise Linux on KVM, follow our KVM Get started guide, https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/getting-started The kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization infrastructure many have become familiar with throughout the industry. This article will guide you through getting a basic KVM hypervisor up and running and ready for use. In order to fully utilize the KVM, you will need a CPU that has virtualization extensions...

Situation: You’re a great software developer and a fearless leader. Your CEO bursts into your cubicle and he is giving you vast amounts of investment capital, no data center, and limited staff. Your task: build a multi-region, highly available presence in AWS (or your favorite cloud provider) that can be maintained by minimal man-power. Your multi-tier Java EE app is almost ready. You are going to be required to create, maintain, and monitor a large amount of servers, RDS instances...

Service Bus is, according to Microsoft, “...a generic, cloud-based messaging system for connecting just about anything.” Most commonly used as an Azure service, it can be an excellent tool for managing non-critical workloads within an application and offers the benefit of being AMQP compatible when compared to Amazon’s SQS. Connecting to Service Bus (SB) on Windows is simple, but will the new .NET Core (DNX) platform be capable of the task? Library Adventures As of the writing of this post...