Julian C. Dunn

I’ve decided to give up my consulting practice. It’s too hard to do consulting and hold down a full-time job, so I’ve decided that for now, the full-time job trumps consulting. OpenTrend will still continue to exist, as my business partner Rob has bought me out, and I think he’s bringing additional people on board. So I would continue to recommend OpenTrend for your open-source consulting needs. My last day with OpenTrend is October 31st, 2005.

The latest project I’ve been working on at $DAYJOB is rolling out an implementation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, all managed with ZENworks Linux Management (ZLM). Originally, we were sold ZLM 6.6.1, which is partly cobbled together from some stuff that SUSE AG did, and also partly cobbled together from Ximian’s Red Carpet. Sadly, this shows; there are a few things that don’t work quite right, bundled with some serious show-stopper bugs.

We’re a Novell shop, though, so I’m currently evaluating ZENworks Linux Management 7, which is a complete rewrite. I’ll keep you all posted on how that pans out!

I attended BSDCan 2004 last month
and I’ve been remiss in not speaking about it. In my view it is an example of
a conference “done right”. Here’s why:

• Inexpensive (registration fees were $150)
• Excellent speakers
• Good crowd, from developers to administrators to plain old users and students

There’s really not much more than that to ask for at a conference. Lots of
FreeBSD developers attended; among them,
Wes Peters, Robert Watson, Poul-Henning Kamp, Jacques Vidrine, and so on. It
just proves that you don’t need to charge an arm and a leg to demonstrate how
"professional" your conferences are, or to attract quality speakers.

The full text of all the papers presented is here.

I decided today that I don’t always want to sound like a crusty old coot in this journal, so I thought I should write a quick journal entry about what I consider to be fantastic pieces of software. So briefly, here are my top five nominations. Continue reading…