rvanherk's blog

I recently had a customer that had some problems with his ZENworks install on Windows, one of the java processes on the server was generating lots of connections to eDirectory. The unfortunate thing on Windows is that when you have a look at Task Manager it shows several instances of java.exe it however doesn't tell you what each of these processes are.

There are some debug java utilities within the JDK however these are not too easy to use, so I had a look to see if there was an easy way to find out what each of the java.exe instances where doing. I ended up using the process explorer from Sysinternals, it's a great tool that shows exactly what each of the java processes does.

So, in case you ever wonder what java.exe, java.exe, java.exe and java.exe are doing.......

A few weeks ago Shaun already wrote about the next ZENworks Patch Management release, ZENworks 7 Patch Management powered by PatchLink Update 6.3.
PatchLink already released their 6.3 release two months ago but unfortunately there where some issues that made Novell decide to hold the release and get these issues fixed prior to releasing the Novell branded version to our customers. Well, finally it's out and available on our download page. For those people that might want to read the documentation, also the online documentation is updated.

A few months ago, Martin Buckley posted a blog post about “Comments and our editorial policy”, within his post Martin indicated we try to be very open with our comments - and our policy on accepting comments. Moderating the blog comments mainly means taking out the Spam posts that we get in, fortunately many of these are recognized automatic but still we take out a fair amount of spam posts manually.

Besides spam, our general policy is to be very open in allowing people to provide their comments. It's important to have people with different opinions providing feedback, some people might like a certain decision while others might disagree. Feedback is useful as it shows us what people think about what we do, however sometimes I question what to do with comments people provide. I just saw the following comment:

Stupid Novell, you’ll pay the price you deserve!

This specific comment was one of the comments that got in as a reaction on the “Ubuntu's Open Week – and openSUSE” post from Andreas Jaeger. I understand people might have different opinions on certain issues, people have different backgrounds, different jobs, different culture, different thoughts about what happens at Novell. Does this justify a post like this? I don't think it does.

If you disagree with something, explain why you disagree. If you just want to rant, wait for another day and tell us why you wanted to do so.

Comments please......

Anyone with ZENworks knowledge that would like to work at the Support Center in the Netherlands?

We are trying to extend our ZENworks support team, Novell Support is growing and as a result of that we need someone additional for the team I'm working for. We just need to find the right person for the job, some ZENworks knowledge and if possible with some additional language skills. If you are interested take a look at the job description.

Do you think working at Novell might be interesting but you are not into ZENworks or you don't want to live in the Netherlands, have a look at the career page for other jobs in the US or EMEA.

Last week I wrote down my thoughts about the response on the Novell – Microsoft agreement. Well, a week has passed and people have had some time to think about what this cooperation really means. Today I saw a nice post from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on Linux-Watch, "Winners and losers in the New Linux World". The article discusses how the Linux business (yes, Linux and Open Source are business, also Red-Hat does make some money ;-)) is changing and what this might mean for Linux and for companies like Novell, Oracle, Red-Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading from a Linux & Open Source Editor that took some time to think...

So, what does it all mean? Rather than make a snap judgment I decided to sit, wait and watch before trying to make sense of it all. Now, I'm ready to give you my two-cents on who are the winners and losers in this post-deal Linux world.

Some personal thoughts from a tech-support guy....

Last week Novell and Microsoft surprised me, as much as the rest of the world, with the announcement of the partnership between the two.

You might understand that as a Novell employee I've got an additional interest in what happens here, so over the past week I've been watching the news messages and have been reading many blog posts available on the web. As a ZENworks specialist (running SLED on my main workstation, running my VMware images on two SLES boxes but having many of my customers using Windows as their desktop or server) I consider myself to be natural on discussions around Windows v.s. Linux, maybe this is why I'm so surprised about some of the reactions I've seen in the past week.

The great thing about Linux is that it's open, the source code for additional development that adds functionality or resolves some issues needs to be contributed to the community so that others are able to use whatever you have done. Over the past few years Novell has had many engineers contributing to many open source projects, at the same time we have seen several legal issues around Linux where Novell has positioned it self as pro Linux.

Somehow Linux has grown and somehow the importance of Linux at enterprise customers has grown a lot over the last few years. Also for Microsoft, Linux has become more and more important and somehow also for them it's interesting to work together with a partner like Novell in order to make their software work together with thing's like Linux, XEN and OpenOffice. Now Novell made an agreement with Microsoft, effectively not that much changed for the Linux community, still Novell isn't allowed to add any patented stuff into Linux as that would get Novell's Linux business into problems, the work that Microsoft and Novell will do on open source projects needs to be back in the open again so no change there either, Novell and Microsoft agreed not to sue each others customers but that doesn't make thing's any different for non-Novell customers.

Now back to my topic, while reading the news messages and blog posts in the last week I am wondering if it's so bad not to be anti-Microsoft while working with Linux? I wonder what is more important for many of the people responding, being anti-Microsoft or being pro-Linux.

What do you think, is it possible to be pro-Linux without being anti-Microsoft?