I recently upgraded my phone from a 4 year old flip phone to the HTC Evo. One of the selling points for me was the Android operating system and tethering. While taking my turn on call, I have wanted the ability to go mobile and have an Internet connection anywhere I go. The built in Sprint tethering costs $30 per month. That's too expensive so I looked at other options. I found a program called EasyTether.
This program is free for HTTP use or a one-time cost of $10 for all other ports. I installed the app and have been able to get it working for Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I duel boot my work machine but use Ubuntu 90% of the time. Here is my instruction sheet for making EasyTether work
On Phone
EVO should be set to charge only and connected to the machine
Go to Applications -> Development -> Make sure USB debugging is enabled
Go to EasyTetherPro -> Enabled USB Tethering
On Computer (Ubuntu)
sudo easytether connect - keep the terminal open and open another terminal window
sudo dhclient easytether0
On Computer (Windows)
Open the app and connect
This is great for road trips or during a thunderstorm and the power is out at home and its the middle of the night and somebody from India is calling to tell you a site is down and they need help. That's a killer run-on sentence but it's true.
And keep these instructions on your local computer because you will need them at 2AM when you can't think straight.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Patching
A big difference between Windows and Linux in an enterprise environment is how each operating system handles patching. Microsoft has a month patch day on the second Tuesday of each month. We update development machines on Friday or 3 days after they are released. If patches go well and there are no reported issues during the next 7 days, patches are applied to production systems on the following Friday.
I have heard many horror stories about Windows patching and the problems it has caused. There are also hundreds of third party solutions available to perform Windows patching. We use WSUS and proper group policy. A member of our security team approves the patches and the boxes automatically restart during a maintenance window. The GPO makes sure domain controllers do not reboot at the same time. This solution takes about 30 minutes twice a week. It is dependable, reliable, consistent, and easy.
CentOS patching is more complicated. We utilized Spacewalk to manage our Linux servers. Spacewalk has the capability to push patches, but we have had little success making it work. Spacewalk controls the repos and which patches each server should receive. We do utilize a handy app that is essential to managing more than 1 Linux server, ClusterSSH. To update boxes, we do a yum update on each box. Then Spacewalk is able to schedule a restart of the systems in necessary for a kernel update.
The process is not consistent. Linux takes 2-4 hours for development and 6-8 hours for production. There is the potential for package conflicts, access issues, or a variety of other errors. Problems have to be investigated and fixed during each patching cycle. Also, CentOS does not have an established patching scheduled. So a patch could be potentially applied to production before development unless precautions are taken.
The cost of patching Linux should be factored into the decision to choose Linux as an operating system. System administrator time going to a mundane patching task could be used elsewhere.
I have heard many horror stories about Windows patching and the problems it has caused. There are also hundreds of third party solutions available to perform Windows patching. We use WSUS and proper group policy. A member of our security team approves the patches and the boxes automatically restart during a maintenance window. The GPO makes sure domain controllers do not reboot at the same time. This solution takes about 30 minutes twice a week. It is dependable, reliable, consistent, and easy.
CentOS patching is more complicated. We utilized Spacewalk to manage our Linux servers. Spacewalk has the capability to push patches, but we have had little success making it work. Spacewalk controls the repos and which patches each server should receive. We do utilize a handy app that is essential to managing more than 1 Linux server, ClusterSSH. To update boxes, we do a yum update on each box. Then Spacewalk is able to schedule a restart of the systems in necessary for a kernel update.
The process is not consistent. Linux takes 2-4 hours for development and 6-8 hours for production. There is the potential for package conflicts, access issues, or a variety of other errors. Problems have to be investigated and fixed during each patching cycle. Also, CentOS does not have an established patching scheduled. So a patch could be potentially applied to production before development unless precautions are taken.
The cost of patching Linux should be factored into the decision to choose Linux as an operating system. System administrator time going to a mundane patching task could be used elsewhere.
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