Enterprise Unix Roundup: Is FooNix Enterprise Ready? – page 2

In Other News

» IDC's 2004 server stats came out late last week. Unix server revenue was $5.2 billion for the quarter, increasing 2.7 percent year-over-year and $1 billion quarter-to-quarter. The number of Unix servers shipped also grew. As for vendor ranking, top honors went to IBM, which captured 36.3 percent of total factory revenue. HP took the No. 2 spot with 27.6 percent market share, and Sun had 25.3 percent share.

Sales of Linux servers were again strong, generating $1.3 billion in quarterly revenue — 9.0 percent of total worldwide server revenue. Fourth quarter was the second sequential quarter of $1 billion-plus revenue for that period. Overall, Linux server revenue grew 35.6 percent year-over-year, and unit shipments grew 29.1 percent year-over-year. Here, HP led the market with 26 percent revenue share, followed by IBM and Dell with 23.5 percent and 15.8 percent, respectively.

» Nanjing, China-based Sun Wah Linux and Tokyo-based VA Linux Systems Japan inked a deal to promote and jointly develop Debian Linux for the Chinese and Japanese markets. The vendors have almost five years of experience in their respective markets. Collectively, they boast of at least eight official Debian developers. The distro will target telecom and enterprise markets in Japan and government customers in China.

» Mac developers who want to get under the hood of Tiger, the next-generation Mac OS X, will have a chance to at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in early June. Apple Developers Connection members will get a preview of versions of 10.4 via a slew of "hands-on and expert-led coding sessions." No official release date is set for Tiger at this time.

» JBoss kicked off its first JBoss World 2005 conference in Atlanta with the launch of two programs designed to provide support for enterprises using open source software. The JBoss Network and JBoss Open Source Federation are built on the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) platform. The Open Source Federation plans to develop more open source projects and get them to integrate with the JEMS platform. The JBoss Network is a portal that will provide information about JBoss applications.

» Happy birthday to the Apache Project, which turned 10 this week. According to the Netcraft monthly survey, the Apache Web server currently powers 69 percent of Web sites.

» Last week's Roundup, "Updating iSeries," caused a bit of a stir. We apologize for any confusion our main article may have caused. The focus of Enterprise Unix Roundup, as our name implies, is Unix and Linux. Sometimes, unfortunately, we neglect to see the forest for the trees, as was the case last week. Although IBM's iSeries line currently runs a wide variety of operating systems — AIX, i5, OS/400, V5R2, Windows, and Linux — its roots and much of its customer base extends back to OS/400.

Recent Updates

• The Zeus Web server was updated to version 4.3r1. Quite a few changes are listed, including additional support for Linux PPC 64bit, Solaris 10 x86_64, and FreeBSD 5 x86, along with the removal of support for a Linux PPC 32-bit version. Also listed are an upgrade to PHP 4.3.10, the use of Perl 5.8.6 for the server's Perl Extensions, and improvements to SSL performance and certificate authentication.

• The Kerio mail server was updated to version 6.0.8. The short changelog notes fixes to the occasional corruption of search.fld files, a repair of some memory leaks, and correction of compatibility problems between Kerio Outlook Connector and Outlook 2000.

• A buffer overflow in the Cyrus IMAP daemon could allow a remote attacker to run arbitrary code with the privileges of the daemon. Patches are in from SUSE, Ubuntu, and Gentoo.

Tips of the Trade

System and network administrators know that they should be generating extensive documentation, especially howto-type documents: network and system configurations, and howtos specific to their infrastructure, such as procedures, policies, and local customization. Software developers, for obvious reasons, also need to write howtos. But writing documentation is one of those easy-to-ignore chores until it creates problems; finding good tools to ease the hassle of creating documentation goes a long ways toward staving off doom.

Man pages are the universal Linux/Unix help documents. When you and your users know the command name, calling up help is as easy as typing "man <command name>." Man pages are formatted in groff, and must follow precise conventions. Learning to format help documentation in man format is not terribly difficult, but the idea behind man pages is to make life easier for the user, not necessarily the man page author.

This is what the raw code looks like in a man page:

$ zless /usr/man/man1/finger.1.gz

Options are:

.Bl -tag -width flag

.It Fl s

.Nm Finger

displays the user's login name, real name, terminal name and write status

That's from man finger, which is a nice short man page to study.

Coming to the rescue of man page authors everywhere is ManEdit. ManEdit is a dandy man page editor that allows you to write documentation without having to struggle with groff. ManEdit comes with a viewer and excellent templates, so you can concentrate on the content rather than the formatting tags. It is customizable and has a good search function for finding text in any man page on the system.

You'll find ManEdit here, and in your usual Linux package repositories. To learn to use ManEdit, simply type man manedit. The Linux Man Page Howto steps through how to create a man page.

Carla Schroder writes the Tips of the Trade section of Enterprise Unix Roundup. She also appears on Enterprise Networking Planet and Linux Planet, covering Linux from the desktop to the server room.

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