We are pleased to announce the latest NST release: "NST 30 SVN:11210". This release is based on Fedora 30 using Linux Kernel: "kernel-5.1.17-300.fc30.x86_64". This release brings the NST distribution on par with Fedora 30.

• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years older than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

  With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and IBM does not seem to be inclined whatsoever in ceasing development of the legacy operating system and middleware stacks embodied in the IBM i and System z lines.

  As Arvind Krishna, senior vice president in charge of IBM’s cloud and cognitive software products, put it bluntly in a call after the deal closed, IBM’s customers expect for Big Blue to maintain its own operating systems, middleware, storage, databases, and security software in the IBM i, AIX, and System z lines, and that is precisely what Big Blue is going to do. Krisha estimated that there is only about 5 percent overlap in products between Big Blue and Red Hat – something we talked about at length when the deal was announced last October – and added that in many enterprise accounts that use both Red Hat and IBM platforms, companies invest in both sets of software for different purposes – perhaps using JBoss in one case and WebSphere in another, for instance.

• Tech cos go for Edtech tie-ups to get that ready workforce

  Companies like Wipro, Accenture, IBM and others are tying up with edtech partners like upGrad, Simplilearn and Udacity to have a ready-trained workforce they can deploy on projects. Additional benefits include minimal training cost incurred post recruitment and a lesser churn as learners develop more ownership in their roles.

  The edtech firms provide campus recruits the required platform, content, assignments and project work in their last semester of college to ensure they are prepared with programming skills and emerging digital skills before they join.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 improves performance for modern workloads

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 can provide significant performance improvements over RHEL 7 across a range of modern workloads. To put this in context, we used RHEL 7.6 to execute multiple benchmarks with Intel's 2nd generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and our hardware partners set 35 new world record performance results using the same OS version. This post will highlight RHEL 8 performance gains over RHEL 7.

  How did we get here? The performance engineering team at Red Hat collaborates with software partners and hardware OEMs to measure and optimize performance across workloads that range from high-end databases, NoSQL databases packaged in RHEL, Java applications, and third party databases and applications from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAS, and SAP HANA ERP applications.

  We run multiple benchmarks and measure the performance of CPU, memory, disk I/O and networking. Testing includes the filesystems we ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, such as XFS, Ext4, GFS2, Gluster and Ceph.

• Federation V2 is now KubeFed

  Some time ago we talked about how Federation V2 on Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 enables users to spread their applications and services across multiple locales or clusters. As a fast moving project, lots of changes happened since our last blog post. Among those changes, Federation V2 has been renamed to KubeFed and we have released OpenShift 4.

  In today’s blog post we are going to look at KubeFed from an OpenShift 4 perspective, as well as show you a stateful demo application deployed across multiple clusters connected with KubeFed.

  There are still some unknowns around KubeFed; specifically in storage and networking. We are evaluating different solutions because we want to we deliver a top-notch product to manage your clusters across multiple regions/clouds in a clear and user-friendly way. Stay tuned for more information to come!

• Duplicity 0.8.01

  Duplicity 0.8.01 is now in rawhide. The big change here is that it now uses Python 3. I’ve tested it in my own environment, both on it’s own and with deja-dup, and both work.

  Please test and file bugs. I expect there will be more, but with Python 2 reaching EOL soon, it’s important to move everything we can to Python 3.

• OpenShift Commons Briefing: Quay v3 Release Update and Road Map

  In this briefing, Dirk Herrmann, Red Hat’s Quay Product Manager walks through Quay v3.0’s features, and discusses the road map for future Quay releases, including a progress update on the open sourcing of Quay.

  Built for storing container images, Quay offers visibility over images themselves, and can be integrated into your CI/CD pipelines and existing workflows using its API and other automation features. Quay was first released in 2013, as the first enterprise hosted registry. Six years later, we’ve celebrated the first major release of the container registry since it joined the Red Hat portfolio of products through the acquisition of CoreOS in 2018.

• FPgM report: 2019-28

  Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. I am on PTO the week of 15 July, so there will be no FPgM report or FPgM office hours next week.

  I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

As a system administrator, part of your responsibility is to help users manage their data. One of the vital aspects of doing that is to ensure your organization has a good backup plan, and that your users either make their backups regularly, or else don’t have to because you’ve automated the process.

However, sometimes the worst happens. A file gets deleted by mistake, a filesystem becomes corrupt, or a partition gets lost, and for whatever reason, the backups don’t contain what you need.

As we discussed in How to prevent and recover from accidental file deletion in Linux, before trying to recover lost data, you must find out why the data is missing in the first place. It’s possible that a user has simply misplaced the file, or that there is a backup that the user isn’t aware of. But if a user has indeed removed a file with no backups, then you know you need to recover a deleted file. If a partition table has become scrambled, though, then the files aren’t really lost at all, and you might want to consider using TestDisk to recover the partition table, or the partition itself.

What happens if your file or partition recovery isn’t successful, or is only in part? Then it’s time for Scalpel. Scalpel performs file carving operations based on patterns describing unique file types. It looks for these patterns based on binary strings and regular expressions, and then extracts the file accordingly.