I want no monuments

Some friends of mine have asked about the reasons for this blog name change.

It’s due to my recent frustrations about the company I work with, the quality of its developers and the vendor lock-in they suffer AND sell.

It’s a general opinion that the project I’m working on was born old. Old technologies, old tools, old libraries.
Nevertheless the architecture is quite new (the SOA thing). At the time the project was plotted, SOA was really new.
So why have they chosen to stick on old tools?

Would you use the Apollo 11 to go to Mars? Nice job with the Moon, but Mars…

Ok, this can’t be a rule of thumb, but sticking on the “Never change a winning team” mantra is just the opposite, so, to me, it’s safe to consider some middle point alternatives.

At the time I was conspiring with my coworkers, looking for ways of giving the thing some fresh air, our beloved (!?) tourism minister, Francesco Rutelli, was magnifying the italian monuments and I was thinking: “Are monuments (and pasta) the only thing we offer to the world market? Wait! I’m working with tools and libs so old that they look just like monuments!!”

So I’ve decided: no more monuments.
Technologically speaking, you can read that as “no big names” or “no corporations”.

Feasible? I’m doing it, so, yes it is. BTW, what do you expect from a penguin like me?

I’ve run into this problem two times so I need to take note of the solution for further reference.

If you are trying to host a virtual machine with a public IP address and you are experiencing the
-3100 (VERR_HOSTIF_INIT_FAILED)
error message, then all you need to do is running the following command as root
tunctl -t vbox0 -u YOUR_NON_ROOT_USERNAME

vbox0 is the name of your tap interface. If you follow the almighty gentoo-wiki instructions, it will be vbox0.

My script for having everything set up on demand is

modprobe vboxdrv
chown root:vboxusers /dev/net/tun
chmod g+rw /dev/net/tun
tunctl -t vbox0 -u federico

I run it whenever I need to work with VirtualBox.

As you may know, I’m on a new business, that’s something like bringing a company back to the present days, technologically speaking.

Since it will be quite hard to “attack” the software part and since the technologies that I’ll use will be all open source, I’m working to give my coworkers proof about the actual value and reliability of OSS technologies in general, replacing windows boxes with linux ones.

The aim is: if it has worked when switching from windows to linux, it would probably work when we’ll switch from VB to Java.

It’s a matter of trust. If they don’t trust me, I’m not the right man for the job.

The first thing was setting up a decent networking. I’ve found an old and noisy box, perfect for such critical tasks such as DHCP and DNS ;)
So everybody now has a fully qualified hostname, with Bind caching DNS queries.

Then I’ve chopped the Vista server. Wait a minute: Vista server? Yes. It’s a Dell box, bought right after the release of Vista: it was cheap but equipped with the most useless operating system ever.
I have proof (even if it’s too long and boring for writing it down here) that it has the useless networking ever: something like a hardcoded limit of 5 TCP connections… and people cracking it to surf the web faster… can’t be real…
Well: chopped. Samba is doing the job right now: faster (and therefore more productive) and cheaper. Indeed I’ve found another old box, plugged in two brand new hard drives, set up software raid 1 and voilà: 30 megabytes is the average memory occupied.

How many Gs do you have on your Vista notebook!? Ahahah, bye bye!