If you feel like meeting with some of the byteminers – some of us will be in Berlin for Linuxtag 2009. Bernd will be there at least for Thursday and Friday, while I will be there Friday and Saturday. If you want to meet and exchange ideas or hear some inside chat about our products, this is a good chance. Just drop us a mail or leave a comment here.

The guys from Amoocon made videos from all the talks and lectures and now they’re available for download. If you want to checkout my talk, the video is linked from this page.

Enjoy!

We just released our first Redmine plugin on Github.

This plugin maintains a separate table for PureFTPD users. We need this because PureFTPD cannot handle the SHA1 passwords used by Redmine.

The plugin is really easy to install and use. Just run script/plugin install as documented in the README file and you’re done. Now every time a new user gets created or a user changes his password the plugin takes care of syncing the PureFTPD users table.

Please let us know if you like the plugin, if it’s useful to you and if there are any problems.

Github url: git://github.com/bytemine/redmine_pureftpd_user.git

It’s been couple months since we announced the bytemine appliance and back when we announced the hardware, we said, it is the building block for a new product line. Here comes the next step!

The bytemine openbsd appliance!

It is built on OpenBSD 4.5 and includes a whole lot of additions, such as:

• ba-update(8) – a software-updater to update your installation with security- and bugfix updates provided by bytemine
• an extended bootloader to support the LCD
• software to make use of the LCD from within the operating system
  • lcdssd(8) to display status information
  • lcdexec(8) to interact with the keypad and execute commands from the keypad
  • mlcd(8), lcdinfo(8) and lcdalert(8) to display various data on the display
• rescue.rd – a rescue system which can be booted via the keypad
• printed manual and documentation of all extensions in man-pages

Through the above mentioned “ba-update” command you can easily update the appliance to always have the latest updates we release.

And for the german folks, here is a poster we did for the bytemine openbsd appliance release bbq last thursday:

The last two days I spent at the amoocon 2009 in Rostock. Stefan Wintermeyer (Founder of Amooma GmbH and Author of the Asterisk Book) organized the conference and asked me to give an OpenBSD talk. It was a get-together of quite a few big names of the VoIP scene.

The conference started with a keynote by Marc Spencer (Original Author of Asterisk and head of Digium, Inc.. Throughout the day the talks were very well done. The conference took place at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Rostock and Stefan and his team from Amooma did an excellent job organizing it. The quality and level of talks was good and the sourrounding made it fun to be a speaker. I was a bit surprised that this was the first conference sind 2005 were I actually did not know anyone (well, except for the person that got me there), but I guess there is not a whole lot of crossover inbetween the OS and VoIP scenes.

I was quite happy to hear that John Todd, community manager at Digium, is a big OpenBSD user. He uses OpenBSD all around his house with asterisk trunk on it. nice. Lenz Grimmer from MySQL (I’ll spare you the obvoious jokes about the “renaming” of his employer) gave two very interesting talks. One on MySQL HA and the other on Securing and backing up MySQL.

Today I gave my talk on OpenBSD in VoIP environments (on german). Apparently they made videos of all the talks, so I will link to that at some point. The slides for my talk are available here.

Well, if you have not gotten the news by now, shame on you :) OpenBSD has released its new version, OpenBSD 4.5. All the new things that are part of this release are covered pretty well in the release announcement, which is also linked from the corresponding Undeadly article!

Of course, this release is available from ftp.bytemine.net.

Enjoy!

Yesterday we took our own AS live. We’ve moved in with NewColo in Frankfurt, being directly serviced by Antilo. Our AS is AS48991.

We’re currently evaluating the connectivity there, since we need a replacement for one of our racks that is currently co-located at Nacamar, the colo being formerly owned by Tiscali.

Us moving to our own PI-space with our own AS is a rather big, yet exciting step for us, as we will be able to provide even better housing and hosting services as before. With our own AS, we can directly peer with others, having more control about our connectivity. If all works out, we will be moving our frankfurt based services within the next three months to the new colocation.

Stay tuned, we will likely have more news regarding the connectivity of our AS soon.

Yesterday we’ve released our additions to LCDproc on github . The branch can be seen here. Holger, the newest addition to the bytemine team, wrote a driver for LCDproc to talk to the display in our bytemine appliance . Of course we will see about getting our additions to LCDproc to be incorporated into the mainline.

You might want to watch our github repo for more software in the future.

As you know we’re having a lot of fun doing what we do and we like to express that :) For this spring, we’ve started our first campaign, asking wether you are really sure about the safety of your network packets.

I have to apologize to the english speaking folks, this one is on german only. We’ve made a poster, displaying among other stuff this image.

You like this? The complete poster is available as a pdf.

And to make it even better:

The first ten people that e-mail us, will have it shipped to them for free :)

Last weekend we’ve spent in Chemnitz at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2009. We took the chance and presented the bytemine appliance for the first time to a broader audience. A few of our customers already had the chance to call one of these babies their own.

I have to say that the the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are a very well organized community conference. Not only they offer every help possible for exhibitors, but they also managed to put up a very interesting conference programm, that is targeted at the typical audience of such an event.

We arrived Friday night and as such had to put up our booth as well as the OpenBSD booth (which was located in the community area, and bravely guarded by Bernd) on Saturday morning. Our booth was right next to the Zarafa, which made it possible to even further establich our relationship with them (but more on that in a seperate blog post, I promise!)

As you can see from the picture, we even displayed our bytewear! We actually sell these hooded sweaters and t-shirts too :)

Saturday was finished up with a nice social event accompanied by a wonderful buffet! Here is a picture of 3/4 of the miners present in Chemnitz.

We’ve had many interesting talks with visitors as well as other exhibitors and I’m inclined to say:

See ya in Chemnitz 2010!

By the way, you should check out the list of “upcoming events” on our blog, we go many places and love to exchange ideas!