I chose to use a fairly formal cycle through various stages, this is appropriate for disaster recovery software:

2005:2006 research/design/testing
2007 – prototype
2008 – alpha-development
2009 – alpha
2010 – beta-1
2010 – beta-2 <– currently
2010 Dec – beta-3
2011 Feb – Release candidate
2011 March – Production (Stable)
…
2011 April -> new versions

Currently DIASER is beta-2. beta-3 milestone is planned for December 2010. See here for more details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle

The Current ROADMAP – or burn-down in AGILE speak, projects a production release early 2011. http://diaser.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/diaser/ROADMAP_DEV

June – November 2010 (beta 3)
==============================
main application
—————-
node migrate adjustments for sudo
network availability checks and reports
option to change node role identity
XMPP(SNMP) interface
prune archives
optional delete volumes from source that have been replicated
sponsored addition to community Linux distributions
listing, upload to: http://perlisalive.com http://pause.perl.org
mixed non sudo and sudo node install, currently either/or
security audit and enhancements: restrict uid command execution
re-factoring – checks against Perl::Critic
more and consistent error handling
tool for filling and auto-replicating retrospective data slots

*diaser_webgui_1
————————
request location and name of conf file
configuration tool
–stats pie chart
–list formatted output
–logs
–retrieve
package as dist, rpm and deb

For later versions
=============
detailed backup software integration study, docs/code?
self healing functionality – if transfers failed or were missed
enhanced archive validation
S3/Google/RackSpace API descriptors for volumes (with price/storage limiter)
automatic node fail-over i.e. a->c if b is down (using node identity
change)

– Damian

1) Accumulates
2) Geo-Duplicates
3) Manages

• Engineered storage architecture
• Exists and operates in dedicated user accounts
• Flat, human readable storage structure
• Highly resilient and robust
• Large volume capacity (TB’s)
• Low operational and maintenance overheads
• Manage independently from a Perl enabled workstation
• Manage long-term archives
• Migratable nodes
• Multiple configuration files for multiple installations
• Perl installer and configurator
• Powered by rsync and OpenSSH
• Repair tool
• Scalable
• Secure design
• Simple configuration file and format
• Standards compliant
• Stats and analysis tools built-in
• Straightforward upgrade procedure
• Use commodity disks for robust storage
• UTC Time Zone compensation mechanism
• Works with existing backup infrastructures
• 3 replicating storage nodes

No, not much. See the whole picture here. From the news you will know that on Tuesday 12th January 2010 a massive earthquake hit Haiti. On 20th April 2010 the BP oil rig explosion occurred. Both locations of these disasters are near, or within, the Bermuda triangle region. The exact location of the Bermuda triangle is open to interpretation. Take a look at the Wikipedia page. Statistics are just statistics and open to misinterpretation; however the graphs above display distinct rise in user activity by March 2010 and now the BP oil disaster has occurred there is a massive drop. Furthermore there was a huge drop in activity in September 2009 shortly after a significant vulnerability in the Linux kernel was discovered on the 13th September 2009. Am I seeing what is not there? Of course, there are many more variables to take into account, so quite possibly. However, it is very possible that the world news affects how different types of software are consumed at any given time. The main point of this is the mind bending, reality law breaking, thought that my life may well have been affected, indirectly, by the Bermuda triangle without even leaving my cosy rural UK based office. The Franco-Bulgarian philosopher; Tzvetan Todorov, states how the breach of our laws of reality might be described in literature, I like it.

– Damian

I recently decided to take the opportunity to work for my company, Interlinux Ltd, full time after a three year employment contract within academia. The summit presentations have been of a very high standard and relevant to the Interlinux Ltd business strategy; to primarily provide consultancy and services to UK Higher Education. This summit has been the ideal opportunity to undertake some business development, networking and product awareness; I look forward to seeing the results of my attendance over the coming weeks.

The combination of talking with other attendees and the presentations, has left me with an optimistic picture of the current state of the open source industry and a clearer view of its relationship with academia and open source development communities. I am left picturing a triangle; with academia, the open source business model and open source development communities at each of the corners with a strong relationship along the lines. The Red Hat speaker, Phil Andrews, spoke of the fine balance between generating commercial revenue and investing in the creative and innovative non-commercial communities that are so vital to the generation of open source code. Too much commercial focus then the community can become disenfranchised, too much investment in the community and shareholders become concerned. After talking with academics I can see that academia faces a similar challenge. This summit will assist with the adoption and general acceptance of open source as a viable tool to satisfy many of the immediate and long-term technology requirements within academia and serve as a reference for business. It is apparent, after experiencing the commercial talks and sponsorship, that many of the jagged edges around commercial open source are naturally smoothing out as time progresses.

It is clear to me now, that the open source business, academic and community triangle, mentioned above, has overlapped in history but it is not quite apparent on the surface. Apache httpd server has academic grass roots, commercial application and a strong community with governance provided by the Apache Software Foundation. The president of ASF, Justin Erenkrantz delivered an enthusiastic talk about the foundation. A member of an open source development community could also be delivering commercial open source services and be an academic! Certainly I talked to a number of attendees who resided at two corners of the triangle. The future of continued and more widespread adoption of open source technologies partly depends on finding and building upon common ground between open source service providers and academia. I have experienced plenty of evidence there is common ground the past two days.

– Damian

The manual and other documentation, including images and diagrams, have been updated. The retrieve function now reads zero or more hyphens when used in a volume naming policy.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/diaser/files

26/05/10 – This release features updated documentation; including man page, manual and quick-start guide. SELinux warnings have been removed after further installation and operation tests. A sudo –lock option functionality has now been implemented. Template files for a web GUI tool, which will be released separately, have been added to SVN.

OS files available:

diaser-1.0.2.tar.gz
diaser-1.0.2-1.noarch.rpm
diaser_1.0.2_i386.deb
diaser-dist-1.0.2.tar.gz
diaser-1.0.2-1.src.rpm

http://sourceforge.net/projects/diaser/files/

http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=258272&id=286943

Latest flash configure demo for v1.0.2b2:

http://diaser.org.uk/about.html#configure

– Damian

New features;

stop, pause, resume operations, log parser to condense-display selectable amount of logs from each node. Better stats reporting; disk usage, average diff size, archive storage and list of volumes archived. Time-extend operation adding extra storage structure. Bandwidth calcs can retrieve and build a utility to assisting storage calculations. Makefile, spec and Debian packaging structure; rpm, deb or dist-tarball. Significant documentation updates including a man page and flash configure demo. More bugs have been resolved; time-zone compensation and other minor fixes.

OS files available:
diaser-1.0.1-1.noarch.rpm
diaser_1.0.1_i386.deb
diaser-1.0.1.tar.gz
diaser-1.0.1-1.src.rpm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/diaser/files/
http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=258272&id=286943

New flash configure demo:
http://diaser.org.uk/about.html#configure

--Damian

My wife and I are taking a holiday soon then I will attend the Open Source Watch Transfer Summit. This will be the perfect opportunity to share information, ideas and experience as well as an excellent networking opportunity, attending in my capacity as a freelance cloud engineer and developer. Other networking events July onwards include BCS Hampshire and of course the next Hampshire Linux Users Group meeting to be held at IBM Hursley. We, Interlinux Ltd partners, are now considering the options to step up the marketing of an ebook Interlinux Ltd self-published earlier this year in January; Walking With the Elephants – a short ebook designed give the reader deeper insight into a small scale, technical Open Source software development and collaboration. The ebook is not technical, pitched at the lay man as well as more experienced open source readers.

Talking of clouds, I recently signed up the Rack Space cloud service and am very impressed with the speed at which a pay-as-you-go virtual server could be created; from initial contact to setting up apache on CentOS happened in under an hour. Super. Cloud Files API Rack Space use for storage in context of DIASER is significant, this will be as well as the Amazon S3 API. These interfaces are planned for beta3. DSI Space Invaders is moving forward quickly, now at version 1 beta2 and available as an rpm or deb package and windows MSI installer. D.Jensen from the US has been providing some great patches; next in the pipeline is an options page, I’m working on the game action; bonus scores, another baddie as well as extra lives for reaching higher levels. Still have not beaten my high score of 9,980! DSI was blogged by Lee Schlesinger of SourceForge in April. Now back to the main priority of DIASER version 1 beta2 then some weekend time-out.

– Damian

After nearly three years working for ECS, School of Electronics and Computer Science, I decided last week to peruse and expand business consultancy and development activities with Interlinux Ltd and partnerships. I resigned from the University of Southampton on Friday and agreed to work a period of notice during this time focussing on existing business opportunities. I have had many exciting, challenging and rewarding moments working for the University of Southampton within ECS. I realise that financially it is a difficult time, but small business is the bread and butter of the British economy, so I won’t be shying away from facing new challenges and finding support where needed. I want to build on existing intellectual property mainly owned and developed by Interlinux Ltd and will commercially exploit them. The ‘clouds’ beckon…

Damian LinkedIn profile.

To explain the anti-reasoning behind ‘like everlasting tape’ DIASER advertising slogan; this post touches on some mathematics and computer science concepts starting with a small advertising campaign. I needed a way to quickly and cleanly communicate to systems engineers and scientists the purpose of DIASER. I drew a sketch of a strip of tape, that which DIASER is designed to replace, leading into three nodes from a larger data store. The sketch became the image below and the banner logo for www.diaser.org.uk.

never ending tape sketch

I was investigating the deterministic and non-deterministic properties of the DIASER algorithm. My systems analyst studies with Red Hat, an architect course, had been teaching me some stochastic, non-deterministic analysis techniques. To help, a truth table exists to improve DIASER analysis on this blog-site called Data Vitality. In computer science and mathematics the Turing Machine describes a model where extremely complex calculations are theoretically possible. Systems can be modelled and can incorporate random elements or processes and are therefore non-deterministic stochastic models otherwise they are deterministic. I am a systems administrator / programmer learning about stochastic analysis, building models which cope with random variations over time. You know how random computer systems can appear sometimes. The weather is complex in Britain due to many random variable values depending on which variables you know of, can or choose to measure and so is the queue at the local super market, seemingly unrelated systems. Perhaps painting a picture is a stochastic activity, an attempt to incorporate and communicate the unknowns of the artist’s vision, an abstraction.

Computer language scientists work with finite instructions sets. The other part of Turing’s model includes an infinite tape consisting of cells to read and write to. Like DIASER can store an infinite amount of data given infinite time. I double checked the Turing machine definition some weeks after I created the DIASER slogan. But given the stochastic nature of my work the, systems administrator / engineering “para-logic” probably works, doesn’t it?

DLB

http://walkingwiththeelephants.co.uk/

Free chapters for review http://bit.ly/d4kWxc

Excerpt: “This ebook is designed to help you gain some deeper insight into a small scale, technical Open Source software development collaboration. Perhaps you, the reader, have started, or are part way through, a project; or you are a manager or investor wanting to dig a little deeper into the inner workings of Open Source software development. As the designer, developer and author of a project I recently completed a stage of collaboration that took the software from a prototype to a beta-1 evaluation product. I’ll be talking you through the stages of development from initial conception to beta-1.” – Damian

Walking With the Elephants – Out now.

£53,500 DIASER http://www.diaser.org.uk before code tidy and optimisation.

£27,000 DSI http://interlinux.co.uk/wordpress/?p=371

C is a more expensive low-level language, Perl is high level. Of course this does not take in to account the relative success of, or design value to the commercial Open Source communities, Interlinux Ltd and HE partners of the code bases.

The JISC funded component of DIASER, minus administration time, approx 11% of the total DIASER code base at the time of writing. The JISC are among a set of very good development catalysts – see this ebook to find out more.

References:

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount [latest version used]
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO

Damian

Features
========
Smooth scrolling
High scores
5 Levels
Simple controls
Sound effects
Strategic game play
Linux, Windows and Mac OSX
Customisable graphics out of the box, no re-compile required
Customisable simple definition file for coders
Tiny foot print

Download the Linux rpm / deb, Windows installer or source DSI from SourceForge (Source also available from SF SVN)

View this README for binary installation, run and source code instructions.

See this link CUSTOMISE_DSI to make your own graphics.

If you like this please visit Geo-data replication long-term archive system (WAN vault)

The game over 2K lines of C is based on Sam Latinga’s Aliens 1.0.2, part of the SDL library projects released under GPLv2. http://www.libsdl.org/projects/aliens/

Contact me and ABOUT

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