But Wait, There's More

City of Munich Opts for Open Enterprise Server NetWare-Linux Hybrid on Servers

Last week, we told you how the city of Munich, Germany, had chosen to create a variant of the Debian Linux implementation for its 14,000 desktops, and this week, the city says it has chosen to use Novell's Open Enterprise Server on the servers that feed those desktops and provide network services for them.

Munich went with a customized version of Debian, which it will call LiMux, to gain the most vendor independence and to get exactly the features it needs for its desktop machines. So why not create its own version of Linux on its servers, too? Well, as it turns out, the city had Windows on its desktops and NetWare on its servers, and Open Enterprise Server, which allows NetWare services and Linux services to run side-by-side on a Linux kernel, is exactly the kind of product that organizations like the city of Munich need to gradually move to Linux without disrupting its whole operation. Exactly what pieces of Open Enterprise Server the city will use and how many servers it will affect remains a secret. The operating system includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0 and NetWare 7.0, plus support for shared print, file, and identity services; the software also includes clustering for high availability and storage management software for allowing multiple NetWare and Linux servers to share files across a network.

IBM Buys Open Source Middleware Supplier Gluecode Software

Having seen the writing on the wall now that the open source JBoss Web application server is J2EE compliant and growing rapidly in popularity and its WebSphere software is overkill for many small and mid-sized businesses, IBM made an interesting move last week when it acquired privately held Gluecode Software, a provider of support for the Apache Geronimo Java application server based in El Segundo, California.

Within the next few weeks, Gluecode is getting ready to launch an enterprise-class version of its Joe application server, which is based on the Apache Geronimo server, which is itself an open source alternative to JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic, and other J2EE-compliant Web application servers. Like other companies trying to make money on open source projects, Gluecode offers packaging, support, and other services for Apache Geronimo. IBM needed a less sophisticated and less costly Web application server, and Gluecode is peddling one that offers support that costs from $500 to $2,500 a year. How IBM will integrate Gluecode with the iSeries remains to be seen, but in keeping with its eServer philosophy, it is hard to imagine the Joe app server won't eventually be an option on the iSeries. IBM has been using the Apache Web server at the heart of WebSphere for years, and recently contributed its Cloudscape database (written in Java) to the Apache Foundation's Derby Project. IBM plans to contribute to the Geronimo project and to make Gluecode's software available for free. Gluecode will be integrated into IBM's Software Group.

Novell Acquires Linux Security Vendor Immunix

Novell announced last week it acquired Portland, Oregon-based Immunix for its AppArmor patch management and security software for Linux. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Immunix was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the U.S. government agency that spawned the creation of the Internet several decades ago) in order to harden Linux and make it more secure.

AppArmor is basically an engine for keeping the core services in a Linux environment, and it essentially provides firewall capability at the application level instead of at the IP address or physical server level using a technology called subdomains. These subdomains are isolated sandboxes, which means that a compromised application, such as an Apache Web server, cannot be used to launch an attack on other services running on the Linux server, such as a MySQL database. However, unlike the sandboxing used in Linux with the chroot feature, subdomains allow communication and interaction between sandboxed items and only shuts down that communication when something goes wrong; chroot is an all or nothing proposition, and considering that most distributed applications needs to access multiple services, making a Linux server secure also can mean making it somewhat useless.

Novell had already been selling a version of the Immunix software under the AppArmor name, and it seems likely it will tightly integrate it with SUSE Linux and not sell it as a generic solution for other Linuxes. Crispin Cowan, the co-founder of Immunix and the company's chief technology officer, was the key architect of the Linux Security Modules (LSM) interface in the Linux 2.6 kernel.

Michael Dell Invests Nearly $100 Million in Red Hat

MSD Capital, the investment arm of chairman and founder of Dell, Michael Dell, has pumped just under $100 million into the $600 million bond issue made by Red Hat earlier this year. The investment came to light in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Red Hat filed a few weeks ago. MSD Capital has control of approximately $10 billion of assets that Dell, the man, has socked away as his company has gradually taken the pole position in the global PC racket. Whether or not Dell actually cares if he is invested in Red Hat or not, he obviously cannot and will not say. MSD probably owns a lot of other things, too, but won't say anything other than that it invests in both public and private equities as well as real estate and partnerships.

Carmony Takes Over as Linspire CEO, Robertson Becomes Chairman

Desktop Linux maker Linspire has a new CEO, and it is the same guy who has been president and chief operating officer since the company was founded in July 2001. That would be Kevin Carmony, who was quietly named CEO of the company at the end of April. Linspire's founder, Michael Robertson, has relinquished the role of CEO and will probably spend more time evangelizing for Linux on the desktop and running SIPphone.com, a venture he launched in August 2003 to do Internet telephony.

MontaVista Launches Carrier Grade Linux 4.0

MontaVista Software this week said it has completed work on its latest release candidate for the commercialized version of the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) project based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, which will be sold as MontaVista's Carrier Grade Edition 4.0. CGE 4.0 includes the Linux 2.6.10 kernel, to be precise, and adheres to the Open Source Development Labs Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 specification. MontaVista has also added in its own secret sauce, including real-time extensions to the kernel that allow it to handle real-time data streams in a manner that is smoother and faster than the standard Linux kernel. The new Linux implementation, which is aimed at network equipment providers that use hardware that is manufactured under the AdvancedTCA standards as well as other real-time workloads such as in embedded systems. It is unclear when MontaVista will release the final version of the software; company executives were unavailable at press time.

IBM Creates Security Appliance from OpenPower Linux Boxes

IBM has created a turnkey solution for network security based on its Power5-based OpenPower 710 server, which is a single-core or dual-core server running Novell SUSE Linux or Red Hat Linux. The solution has the unbearable name of the IBM eServer OpenPower Network E-Mail Security Express. On top of the OpenPower server, IBM has loaded a piece of security middleware called the Message Processing Platform, from Message Partners, which allows customers to put antivirus, spam filtering, intrusion detection, and other software on the box. No big deal, right? The neat thing about MPP is that it allows security and network administrators to change or add a new antivirus program or spam filter on the fly, without leaving the network exposed. The price of this turnkey solution, which IBM will sell through its business partner network, ranges from $4,995 for a server with a single processor core activated, 1 GB of main memory and a single disk drive to $7,950 a machine with 4 GB of main memory and four disk drives. IBM says that customers can, if their workloads require it, have partners drop the MPP software onto a four-core OpenPower 720 machine.