An exciting and interesting year has started for us at bytemine. There are many items on our agenda for this year, especially regarding our product development. Not only there is a list of products we will be releasing over the year, but also we’re going new ways on how we develope these. Bernd Ahlers will hopefully elaborate in another blogpost on how we introduce behaviour driven as well as test driven development. (BDD and TDD).

As a new years present to our customers, we’ve released the 1.4 version of our bytemine openbsd appliance software, bringing once again lots of new features. There is a Changelog available. Among the features, is also support for the uthum(4) USB temperature sensors, we’ve backported the driver from OpenBSD-current.

bytemine openbsd appliance - version: 1.4.5 [1209]

hanah $ sysctl | grep uthum
hw.sensors.uthum1.temp0=28.36 degC (temp)
hw.sensors.uthum1.percent0=11.50% (humidity)

Right after releasing 1.4 we’ve had some other things to keep us busy. Since the year also started with moving into new rooms. In order to have more space we’ve moved into the new building of the technology center, where we have our office since 2005.

Here are a couple of pictures of two of the new rooms. The developers office, with one of our mascots already up (while the rest is still pretty rough :)

For the first time, we have a meeting room on our own. Well, it is not supposed to be a solemnly meeting room, but furthermore space where one can relax, read and code in a relaxed environment.

Pictures of the other office will follow, once everything is in place.

The conference schedule is about to start with the 4. Linux-Informationstag which will happen in Oldenburg on the 13th of February. Next item on the conference schedule is then our first appearance at the world’s largest IT fair, CeBIT 2010. For CeBIT we have some nice new product announcements up our sleeve, so you should definitly stop by our booth there (Hall 6). Right after CeBIT, there will be the Chemnitzer Linuxtage, where we will have a booth, just like last year.

Of course a new year has also started in regards to the services and hosted solutions we provide. We’ve started to provide the groupware Zarafa as a hosted solution. Each setup gets a Xen (and possibly KVM) instance with the zarafa version best suited for their needs. We’re also looking into adding more types of databases to our hosting environment, considering at least CouchDB.

This only being a subset of what is planned for 2010, you can see this will be an interesting year!

As we just did a short remote-hands job in one of our server rooms, with me being in a remote location having to tell a Daniel (the newest addition to the bytemine team) when to disconnect and reconnect an external drive, I once again noticed how nice it is to have LC display on the bytemine openbsd appliances there. A quick demonstration:

hanah # lcdalert 10 "hey daniel" "" 
hanah # lcdalert 30 "please" "disconnect drive" 
hanah # lcdalert 30 "DONE" "THANKS" 

Nice, heh. A short extract from the manpage of lcdalert(8) to explain what it does:

Synopsis:

lcdalert duration line1 line2 [port]

Description:

The lcdalert utility submits two strings with alert priority 
to the server LCDd.  The line1 and line2 are the strings 
to be displayed by LCDd. Both strings are required.  
To omit one of the strings, quote an empty string.

I think, it is useful :)

Enjoy!

We thought, we give you a little visual impression on how cool the display of the bytemine openbsd appliance actually is. There is also a video available, that shows the display and the interaction with the menue as well as the bootloader.

The display is feed through the programm lcdssd(8) which has a set of configurable screens. Through the configuration file all screen can be turned on and off. By default the display shows the hostname and BOA-version screen, uptime and load average screen, physical interfaces as well as the clock screen.

For the physical interfaces the interface name, link-state and IP are displayed:

Additionally with the 1.2 version of the bytemine openbsd appliance we introduced screens for OpenVPN status information. These show the name give to the vpn service, number of connected users as well as the amount of traffic that has crossed the VPN.

I really recommend watching the video, to see all the other screen that are currently available with the 1.2 version of the appliance software. There is also an internal version of the video, but in order to get to see that, you need to contact us and we might share it ;)

We’re back from FrOSCon 2009 and had a fabulous time. Previously we have heard, that FrOSCon is a very well organized conference and we can definitely confirm that. Already prior to the event, the communication with the FrOSCon team went well.

We arrived Friday evening around half past eight and the whole FrOSCon team was in action to build up the event. This gave us the chance to have our booth set up by friday evening already. With each iteration of ‘bytemine on tour’ we worked on improving the presentation concept for our booth and yes, we came pretty far. The outcome of this can be seen in the picture. Wow!

We’ve presented the newest of our products, with software versions we’re releasing this and the next week. The visitors had a chance to take a peak at the upcoming bytemine openbsd appliance software version 1.2 as well as the beta version fo the bytemine manager 1.1. These will be covered here, once we released the software this and next week. Stay tuned for that!

Holger had the idea to use a table-top rack, usually used for music equipment. The rack is tilted by 15 degree, which gives the visitor the chance to take a look at the display and the appliance without having to bend down.

Both days were filled with lots of interesting conversations. The social event on saturday evening was nicely done and gave the chance to relax a bit.

One of side-effects of FrOSCon is that we will be exhibiting at OpenRheinRuhr this november. I will be talking with their organizers this week.

See you at FrOSCon 2010!

In the course of releasing version 1.1 of our bytemine openbsd appliance, we’d like to tell you about some details.

The bytemine openbsd appliance ships with a nice written manual which covers lots of configuration topics. Following OpenBSD’s good practices to write documentation for every file, we wrote man pages for every program and file we added on top of the OpenBSD default installation.

Let’s move on to the first boot of our new appliance.

The bytemine openbsd appliance comes with a pre-installed operating system, however there are certain details, we cannot decide for our users and customers during the installation. That’s where ba-firstboot(8) enters the stage.

The ba-firstboot(8) program will run during the very first boot and will ask you questions like the machine hostname, network interface configuration, nameserver configuration, smarthost for the MTA, timezone and some more stuff. After answering the questions and another reboot, your machine should be ready to be used.

Don’t panic. You can configure the bytemine openbsd appliance just like a regular OpenBSD system if you want. We just added some convenience to get the system up and running.

Learn about the bytemine openbsd appliance system.

A good starting point for learning about our additions to a regular OpenBSD system is the bytemine-appliance(8) manpage. It will explain the first boot configuration, the system startup options and will provide links to other man pages.

So far for the first steps. Following articles will highlight some more details and components.

Have fun!

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:

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.

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!

The Chemnitzer Linuxtage are in less than three days, so it is time for you to prepare your travels there. We will have a booth there (as well as running an OpenBSD booth) and will be showing off our bytemine appliance!

Hope to see you saturday!