Patrick's Blog(2)

For a moment there I thought XMas came suprisingly early this year as Red Hat keeps announcing new Open Sourced projects. It all started in June 2005 with the release of the Fedora Directory Server. FDS is the enterprise-class Open Source LDAP server for Linux. It is hardened by real-world use, is full-featured, supports multi-master replication and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world.

After the release of FDS it went quiet for a while. But on March 19 2008 Red Hat released the Dogtag Certificate System. DCS is is an enterprise-class open source certificate authority (CA). It is a full-featured system and has been hardened by real-world deployments. It supports all aspects of certificate lifecycle management, including key archival, OCSP, smartcard management, and much more.

Then on April 25 2008 Red Hat released freeIPA. freeIPA is an integrated security information management solution combining Linux (Fedora), Fedora Directory Server, MIT Kerberos, NTP, DNS. It consists of a web interface and command-line administration tools. Currently it supports identity management with plans to support policy and auditing management

This week at their annual Summit Red Hat announced two more gems: Spacewalk and oVirt.

Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It is the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived. Spacewalk manages software content updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, within your firewall. You can stage software content through different environments, managing the deployment of updates to systems and allowing you to view at which update level any given system is at across your deployment. A clean central web interface allows viewing of systems and their software update status, and initiating update actions.

In addition to software content management, Spacewalk provides provisioning and monitoring capabilities. It will enable you to kickstart systems, as well as manage and deploy configuration files. Spacewalk’s monitoring feature allows you to view monitoring status for your systems alongside their software update status. Spacewalk also has virtualization capabilities to enable you to provision, control, manage, and monitor virtual Xen guests.

oVirt is the next step in open virtual machine management. From running a few virtual machines on a single host to managing thousands of VMs over hundreds of hosts on a network, oVirt is built to make virtualization easy and expand to meet your needs. oVirt is small host image that provides libvirt and hosts virtual machines and provides a Web-based virtual machine management console.

Another notable project is Cobbler. Cobbler is a Linux provisioning server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments. With a simple series of commands, network installs can be configured for PXE, reinstallations, and virtualized installs using Xen or KVM. Cobbler uses a helper program called ‘Koan’ (which interacts with Cobbler) for reinstallation and virtualization support.

Red Hat’s actions speak for itself. It really is a truly Open Source focused company that puts its money where its mouth is. Respect.