The CI-ROUTE course is a five-days class that is heavily loaded with A LOT of theory and background knowledge of Cisco’s proprietary EIGRP routing protocol and its open sibling OSPF. On the last day, you get to learn some basics of BGP as well. While I was mostly interested in BGP, this could have been disappointing. I’m still looking forward to a attend a pure Cisco BGP training, but in order to do so, Cisco expects that you have completed the CI-ROUTE course. Also, it’s difficult to even find a date for a BGP course in Germany. Not many people use or need BGP, and apparently even fewer want to go on a training for BGP.

I can strongly recommend the CI-ROUTE course. We were a small group of only four students and we had a great trainer with Frank Mertens with Fast Lane in Eschborn/Frankfurt, Germany. The guy is funny and he really knows his stuff. And what’s even more important, he also knows how to transfer his own knowledge into your head.

On the downside, the CI-ROUTE class is so packed with material, that in the afternoon (at the latest!) your brain will most likely shut down due to the input overload and reduce everything that you hear to white noise. That happened to me quite frequently, and I hope that the three thick printed course books will help me to recall the acquired (or filtered) information in the future. But since this is official Cisco training material which by definition is NOT meant to be useful without a trainer, I wouldn’t really want to rely on it.

The labs of this course are not really interesting; they mostly consist of basic routing implementations and using “show” commands to verify that the routing works. The labs are basically there so that you have used those commands instead of just reading about them. I think Cisco should do this differently: Make it four days of pure theory and on the last day throw a complex problem a the class that they have to solve AS A TEAM within eight hours and WITHOUT having a “hints” section at hand. Somehow, that would be more fun and the students would probably learn much more this way. Then again, maybe that’s just me and my way of thinking.

Of course, the more you learn about something, the more new questions arise and the more you understand how little you actually know.  This can be a bit frustrating, because in our daily job life, people simply expect networks to “just work” and they are completely oblivious to the immense complexity of the subject matter and how easily things can completely fall apart after the tiniest mistake. But that’s a general problem with IT professions: Our customers only see us when there is a problem. Nobody calls their IT people to clap on their shoulders when everything is fine. Basically, nobody wants to see us because we have PROBLEM written all over us – I doubt that anybody identifies us as part of the solution. But be that as it may.

In summary, it was a well invested week and it helped me to obtain a much better understanding our own network design and configuration. As Socrates said, “I know one thing, that I know nothing”. In my case, I now have a brand new set of question marks in my mind in areas that before the course were completely blank and uncharted. I guess that means progress.

I’m planning a few more important changes, but I’ll talk about that when the time arrives.

Although we’ve only moved to the new place last Friday, I unfortunately have to spend the entire week on a business trip to attend a Cisco CI-ROUTE training in Frankfurt. Funny thing is, the training place is only a few meters away from my old office in Eschborn where I worked for Alaska Software. It really is a small world, and somehow you always seem to cross the same road twice.

Anyway. Signing off for today. All the best to everyone out there who reads this.

I still think that Windows 8 is going for the worse and that Apple can no longer sell me vacations in iOS land – and OS X is turning into a castrated iOS derivative, that discussion is over for me.

I’ve been spending some time with Linux Mint, Fedora and daily builds of Precise Pangolin over the last days. I even briefly booted into Kubuntu and Mint KDE, just to see how KDE has changed. The thing is, I never was a KDE guy, and that hasn’t changed. KDE is too playful for my taste, too geeky. And its design looks like Windows 95 on steroids. The problem is, no matter how many visual effects they put on top of that Windows 95 color scheme, it still looks like a leftover from the last century. It’s not for me.

The arguments that brought me back to Ubuntu and its Unity desktop are simple: Beginning with 12.04, even the LTS desktop edition will get five years of support. And Ubuntu provides rather smooth upgrade paths to the next LTS versions. In a business environment, that alone is a killer argument.

The second point is that Unity runs even on old and weak graphics hardware. There is no need for a fallback to Gnome 2 – who looks and feels completely different than Gnome 3. And once you’ve used Gnome 3 for a few minutes, Gnome 2 feels hopelessly dated – and alien. Gnome 3 is a one way street. Once you got there, there’s no turning back.

And then I have to admit something else: Despite all its quirks and imperfections and the general feeling that Unity is far from being ready and polished, and even despite my initial rejection, I am getting used to it. There is so much space for improvement in Unity that you could squeeze an entire universe in it, but I’ve actually begun to acclimatize to the new concept.

Since today’s daily build, Precise Pangolin also stopped firing those weird “system failure” messages. It seems that Precise Pangolin is quickly approaching release quality.

I can even live with the “Radiance” theme for Unity, which is available as an alternative in the default system installation and which takes away most of Unity’s depressingly dark appearance.

All this simply means one thing: Ubuntu will remain my Linux distribution of choice, both on the server and the desktop. At this point, I think that Ubuntu still is the best alternative to the major players.

I also gave this machine to the Director Operations of my company, and as expected, he shared my opinion:

No, we will NOT upgrade to this version of Windows. “Everything is getting worse”, he agreed. The only problem is that this statement also includes almost all current Linux desktop distributions and also OS X. Lion already sucked, but Mountain Lion sucks even more. Unity sucks. Linux Mint does not have a clear and convincing design approach. And Windows 8′s “Metro” feels as wrong as it gets.

Do I have to spell it out again for the software industry? We. Use. Real. Computers. NOT TABLETS. And this is NOT going to change. Ever. When will the GUI designers in charge accept defeat and go back to designing something that would actually be useful for a system with a keyboard and a mouse?

It is my belief that Windows 8 will be another “Vista-disaster” for Microsoft. Nobody will want to use it. Just like Vista, this version of Windows will only gain market share through pre-installed OEM systems. Only a fistful of people who always want to have “the latest and greatest” will go and buy a Windows 8 upgrade DVD.

So, let’s all wait for Windows 9 which will hopefully correct most of the awful design choices that Microsoft is going to introduce with Windows 8.

Congratulations, Redmond. This will be the first version of Windows since Windows 3.0 that I will neither buy nor use.

While the distribution gets more polished and although this time even the desktop version will have a guaranteed support for five years, there still is one thing bothering me enormously: Unity. And the “HUD” project for Unity, which will replace application menus with… a search box where you can type in keywords to search for the application feature that you want to use.

I’ve already stated my opinion on Unity, and I still think this project is a wasted effort headed in a completely wrong direction. “HUD” only makes this more obvious and I wonder how anybody involved in this project can honestly believe that a search box will make using an application with a GRAPHICAL user interface more efficient. Even if one day voice recognition will become a part of HUD. The way I see it, HUD will make GUI apps even more difficult to use and slow advanced users significantly down.

The main advantage of graphical user interfaces was that they were VISUAL. Humans are visually-oriented beings, our other senses are not nearly as important for us as our eyes are. This is why graphical interfaces were such a huge leap ahead from the old command line interface and made using computers so much easier for everybody. I just don’t understand why Mark Shuttleworth now wants to turn back the wheel of time twenty years. Even with voice recognition, the HUD concept just feels wrong.

I could understand if the folks at Canonical were working on a feature like SpeakToIt, an assistant with a customizable avatar and voice recognition for Android, or something similar to Siri on the iPhone 4S. This stuff makes a lot more sense for me than a system-wide replacement for application menus.

Another thing that I don’t like about Unity is its dark default theme. It’s kind of depressing to look at and lowers my mood rather quickly. Can’t we have friendly colors? I think that Linux Mint looks A LOT friendlier than Ubuntu. The color scheme alone could be reason enough to use Mint instead of Ubuntu. And yes, I mean it.

One of the first things that I do on a Ubuntu Desktop installation is sudo apt-get install gnome-shell, log off and then log into a vanilla Gnome 3 session. I know that a lot of people also hate the Gnome 3 experience, but I find it still a lot better than the available alternatives. It’s still depressingly dark, but it feels a lot better than Unity.

Other than that, Ubuntu 12.04 feels more stable with each build that I look at and overall I think it will still be a very solid platform when it’s ready – even though they try to force Unity on us.

Now it’s time for me to have a look at an Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS build and decide whether it will be worth upgrading our 10.04 LTS servers to 12.04 LTS or if we’re better off by sitting this one out. 10.04 LTS was a great improvement over 8.04 LTS; almost everything worked  smoother, faster and more reliable in 10.04 LTS than in its predecessor. I hope 12.04 LTS will bring another positive boost for our preferred server platform.

I’d rather call this thing Dungeon Keeper, though. Because it is meant to keep users in the Apple ecosystem, not, as their marketing department wants us to believe, keep malicious software out and the system more secure.

Apparently, the default setting of Gatekeeper is to only allow the installation of software from Apple’s own Mac App Store and from software developers that have registered with Apple and who have obtained a certificate from them that they can use as a digital signature for their software. Software from such developers, although it has not been scrutinized by Apple or any other independent party for security and safety, is considered “safe” just because of the certificate and the developer registration – while in real life, of course, it is not any safer than software from an “unknown source”. After all, only the certificate is registered to an identified developer, but that alone does not magically provide additional safety. If the developer decides to do something that is not kosher, you will only learn about it after the harm is done. If ever.

What Apple in my opinion tries to achieve here is something different: They are preparing their OS X user and developer base for the same locked-down walled garden ecosystem that iOS is.

Registration for said certificate is free for developers, so there is no reason not to do it, right? And the default setting of Mountain Lion will be NOT to allow installation from unknown sources in order to “protect” the in Apple’s view clueless users. And I’m afraid that they are somehow right and that most Mac users won’t be able to change that setting to the “allow everything” option. If they were, most of them would not have bought a Mac in the first place, because system administration was the thing that scared them away from Windows and Linux and pushed them into the arms of the “it just works” company with the fruit logo.

So eventually most developers who want to stay in business on the Mac platform will have to choose the safe passage, register with Apple and use a digital signature in their software.

Once this migration phase is completed, it is only a small step to force all developers to either publish their products through the Mac App Store or to not publish for the Mac at all. In all likelihood, most Mac users will even welcome this final step that will take away the last freedom of choice that they had on the Mac platform, because, after all, the Mac App Store is so convenient and Apple is ah-so concerned about their safety and nobody will ever get a virus when buying software from or through Apple.

That from then on Apple is in total control of the choices that they have left is probably of no concern for the Apple fans. As you remember, Steve Jobs promised us freedom from malware and freedom from porn. Well, for Apple malware is everything that competes with their own products or which does not wash a 30% share into their pockets. And porn is not very compatible with owning Disney stocks.

For me, the mindset behind the “it will protect you” argument is in the same league as “we have to implement Internet filters to crush child pornography” or “all our customers are potential criminals and content pirates, let’s criminalize them by lobbying for ACTA, SOPA and PIPA and let’s pretend that the Internet is a lawless place where already existing laws allegedly don’t apply”.

In other words: Instead of doing real police work, using the laws that are already there or adjusting out-dated business models to the demands of today’s market, we rather implement some Nazi shit for the pleasure of power-mad control freaks.

Well, for Apple it does make economic sense to head into this direction. Those other things probably also make some abstruse sense for politicians and CEOs of the content industry. But for the average tax payer and consumer, the world won’t magically become a safer place, crime won’t stop, it all just becomes more expensive — both in terms of money AND freedom.

But I’m digressing. Or am I not?

In the case of Apple vs their users and developers, Apple is very clearly trying to turn OS X into the same Walled Garden that iOS is – with the old shallow argument that this is all in the user’s best interest. My bet is that in OS X 10.9 (if there will be another version of “classic” OS X after Mountain Lion), we will see that the option to install software from “unknown sources” will be gone. And maybe the option to install software from registered developers will only be available for… registered developers on their own machines.

Which would make sense. You would be protected. And Apple would get a 30% cut on anything that happens on “their” computers. An awesome, magical, revolutionary win-win situation for everybody. And idea is so great that Microsoft, of course, is going to do the same with the forthcoming ARM edition of Windows 8; Windows 8 for ARM CPUs will only be able to run software from Microsoft’s online store. Building digital prisons is very hip and trendy these days.

Since Apple describes Gatekeeper (and almost everything else that they release) as a revolutionary new feature, an old Soviet expression that became very popular during the communistic revolution in Russia puts into very nice words what I think about this development and what we all should say to comrade Apple:

Do svidanya, Towarischtsch!

[Update: Afterword]

I’ve actually had the opportunity to install the Mountain Lion Developer Preview on a spare hard disk and play with it on my 8GB 27″ iMac i5.

The good news:

Mountain Lion apparently fixes the USB problems that I’m experiencing since the Lion 10.7.3 update. That’s the only positive thing I have to say about Mountain Lion for now. And this is a fix that Apple should provide for Lion YESTERDAY.

The bad news:

Firstly, Mountain Lion refused to install on my main hard disk, which I found rather strange, to say the least. So I was forced to install it on a spare disk.

After the installation, the Developer Preview of Mountain Lion performed awful and the iMac responded sluggish to even the simplest interactions. The performance of the system was completely unacceptable. Since it’s only a Developer Preview, I am willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt and expect them to improve the performance until the official release. However, if they don’t manage to improve the responsiveness of Mountain Lion, or simply don’t care enough to make the system run well on my Late 2009 Mac that I bought in early 2010, then that alone would make the new cat dead on arrival and be reason enough to never touch another Apple product again. The planned obsolescence of their products is becoming a bit too aggressive for me to stomach.

The “native” full screen mode in Mountain Lion sucks even more than in Lion, I think. At least when you use VLC to play back video on a second screen. Even when the “native” full screen mode is turned off, the other screen no longer turns black. That sucks for watching movies. Big time. Maybe it’s an issue of the VLC implementation, maybe it’s a changed behavior of the new cat. In any case, it’s a change for the worse.

I didn’t bother to look at the new or modified toy apps that are bundled with Mountain Lion because I simply don’t care. When you have to market goodies like the “Reminders” app as new operating system features, you already have a problem as a company. I don’t regard such goodies as real OS features. They’re just goodies. AirPlay Mirroring counts as a OS feature (even though I don’t have the required additional devices to make use of it), a reworked file system would be a OS feature, a reworked Finder would be a changed feature. Toy applications are none of this. In the last seven years, except for Apple Mail and in the early days Safari (until the browser began to really suck), I’ve never used any of the toy apps that came bundled with OS X.

AirPlay Mirroring and “Dungeon Keeper” are the only two real NEW features of Mountain Lion so far. That’s hardly awesome, magical, beautiful and definitely not revolutionary. So I wiped the hard disk shortly after the installation experiment and remain skeptical about this new Californian cat.

So here are some rough notes about what I did. No guarantees that they will work for you, and certainly no warranty is included. If you kill your machine following those notes, that’s some tough luck for you and you can only hold yourself responsible for it.

There are also other, more detailed guides on the web. Feel free to ask Google if they can find them for you. I know that I did.

First, download and install rEFIt from http://refit.sourceforge.net/. Once rEFIt is installed, open a Terminal window and execute rEFIt’s enable.sh script as superuser. Reboot the Mac. You should now see the rEFIt boot menu on startup.

Back in OS X, launch Disk Utility and resize/shrink your OS X partition and create some free space. I used 216 Gig for this; 200 Gig were supposed to go to Ubuntu, 16 Gig to the swap area.

Get the 64-Bit AMD + Mac ISO image from the Ubuntu website. The URL is http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/11.10/release/.

Burn it on a CD or DVD, restart your Mac and press the Alt/Option key when you hear the system boot sound. The Mac will show the CD as “Windows” – select it and boot from it.

The trickiest part of getting Linux to run properly on an Apple iMac is the “black screen” problem during installation. Apple screwed up the ATI graphics somehow, so that whenever a non-Apple OS boots, it uses the Mini Displayport outlet as its primary display instead of the iMac’s own display. Which is total nonsense, but that’s how the iGods in Cupertino made it.

So you have to options here: Either connect a second display to your Mac (that’s what I actually did) or use the famous nomodeset xforcevesa boot loader parameters before you actually boot Linux.

The problem disappears once you’ve let Ubuntu download and install the proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers. But until then, either the second display or those parameters are your friends.

Ubuntu’s installer will ask whether you want to install Ubuntu alongside Mac OS X, wipe out the entire hard disk or if you want to do something different. Since we’re in the “Think Different” business here, we want to do something different and use Ubuntu’s partition editor to create two new partitions.

To do so, make sure that you have selected the free space of the hard disk and then add two new partitions. Like I’ve said before, I’ve added a 200 Gig partition with the mount point “/” and the ext4 file system and the remaining free space went away for the swap area. I also advised gparted to write the boot loader to this new ext4 partition, and NOT to the OS X partition or anywhere else.

The remaining installation is pretty much default. After the mandatory reboot, you can log into Ubuntu, open the System Preferences, select the “Install hardware” tool and there activate the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers. After another reboot, you can now open System Preferences/Display and de-activate the mirroring of the displays and change to proper resolutions.

From here on, you should be able to customize your Ubuntu in any way you like.

Just for the record, over the weekend I have also looked at an alpha version of the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I’ve tried Fedora 16 and Linux Mint 12. They all worked nice in Virtual Machines, but Ubuntu 12.04 always died quietly when I tried to boot it natively on my Mac and Mint 12 had serious graphics driver issues – all fonts looked somehow scrambled, rendering the system useless. As for Fedora, I never tried to install it natively. I want an OS that understands sudo apt-get out of the box. Hmm.

The most important thing for me here was to see that my system can have a life without the blessings from the fruit logo company. I’m still trying to fix some issues that I have with full screen video playback on the second/external display. I also still need to prove that Ubuntu does not suffer from the same USB problems that I experience under OS X Lion (the random hard disk ejects that I mentioned in my earlier post). If Ubuntu shows the same erratic behavior, then, oh my, it must be a hardware and not a software problem (and I really doubt that it is a hardware issue).

More some time later.