Last updated on:
Sunday, July 06, 2008

Software

• Linux/390 Distributions
• Linux/390 Patches
• Hercules - An S/390 Hardware Emulator

Information

• Large numbers of links
• Linux/390 HOWTOs
• IBM's Linux/390 pages
• Distribution Contents
• IBM VM and Linux Resources
• Linux man pages
• Notes & Observations
• Top 10 reasons to run Linux on VM
• Linux/390 at Princeton University
• i/370 Port, aka Bigfoot
• linuxvm.org Archives

Community

• Community Members
• Linux-390 Listserv
• Linux/390 Presentations
• Linux/390 Subscribers
• Linux/390 Survey Results

News

• Enterprise Linux Today
• Linux Journal
• Linux Today
• Linux World
• Kernel Traffic

Fun

• Ubersoft
• User Friendly

Credits

• Cast of characters

Archives of linuxvm.org

11/01/2002 - Mark Post reported two articles from The Register. The first was about the European Commission awarding a contract to study "the issues of migrating government computers in member states to a Linux/Open Source environment." The second article was about a pilot program to replace desktop systems for police departments throughout England and Wales with Linux-based systems.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27853.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27692.html

11/04/2002 - Barton Robinson of Velocity Software announced the beta program for a new product named zMON. "zMON is the real time component of ESAMON without the historical functions normally provided with ESAMON." Velocity Software is positioning it as "a lower cost performance monitor that is current and well supported."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31279
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/zmon.html

11/04/2002 - Barton Robinson of Velocity Software announced that the Velocity Software web site had been updated with his most recent VM and Linux performance presentations. He also commented "In addition, the newsletter articles are now available to all without restriction."
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/present.html
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/qrterly.html

11/05/2002 - Neale Ferguson announced that he had contributed the necessary code to the "mono" project (an Open Source implementation of the .NET Development Framework) so that C# could be used on Linux/390. He gave URLs for downloading the software and instructions for creating executables. He also commented that he is "attempting to build an RPM that will contain a ready-to-run version. The project is only at the 0.16 level so there's still a lot of work to do."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31311
http://www.go-mono.com/download
http://www.gnome-db.org/~gonzalo/mono/README.building

11/07/2002 - Neale Ferguson contributed a link to an eWeek article about Sistina Software and Mainline Information Systems porting the Global File System (GFS) to Linux/390, specifically for SuSE's SLES distribution. Sistina has taken GFS proprietary, but an Open Source project, OpenGFS, has taken the last GPL version and is enhancing and maintaining it.
http://www.nyq.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,669483,00.asp
http://opengfs.sourceforge.net/

11/07/2002 - Adam Thornton announced that he has "built Linux-2.4.19 with NSS support and the notimer patch, and made it into a series of Debian kernel packages." Adam explains how to build the software from source, if desired. He also commented "Contrary to the IBM recommendation, I recommend you set your virtual machine size as low as possible before building the NSS..." His reasoning was "The smaller it is when you gen it, the more flexibility you have in your memory size later on." He also had one caution: "24MB is the smallest I've been able to make reliably boot when using the qeth drivers."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31387
http://www.sinenomine.net/download

11/08/2002 - Dave Rivers of Dignus announced the new versions of their Systems/C, Systems/C++ and Systems/ASM products. Dave also commented "What makes this pertinent to this mailing list is the new 64-bit support, including z/Linux. All of the Dignus tools now run on z/Linux, as well as generating code for z/Linux."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31418
http://www.dignus.com/

11/08/2002 - In a follow up note to his original announcement, Neale Ferguson reported that Linux/390 RPMs for the C# Open Source package "mono" are now available. They can be found under the "Older Releases" header for version 0.16. Neale also commented "I don't think you need the -devel RPMs if you just want to play. You will need to do the following as root:"
ln -s /usr/bin/mint /usr/bin/mono
http://www.go-mono.com/download

11/11/2002 - Mark Post reported finding a new IBM Redbook titled "Experiences with Oracle for Linux on zSeries." The abstract page reads:
"This IBM Redbook describes experiences gained while installing and testing Oracle9i for Linux on zSeries, such as:

• Setting up the development systems at Oracle for the Linux on zSeries environment
• Installing the Oracle9i instances for Linux/390 on zSeries
• Performing basic monitoring and tuning exercises

• The IBM Oracle EMEA Joint Solution Center, Montpellier, France
• The IBM Oracle International Competency Center, San Mateo, California
• Early customer installations
• Development systems at Oracle in Redwood Shores, California

11/11/2002 - In response to someone who was having problems "trying to get the alien-converted rpm's running on a Debian/390 system," Matt Zimmerman recommended trying the native Debian packages at debianplanet.org. As it turns out, that site doesn't have binary packages for Debian/390, yet, so the other two options available were "to build the latest snapshot-tarball from the mono CVS-repository," or to "apply the Debian packaging diff from the debianplanet.org packages to the latest mono release or snapshot."
http://www.debianplanet.org/mono/
http://www.go-mono.com/snapshots/

11/13/2002 - Matthias Hein recommended taking a look at section 3.5.4 of the "SAP on DB2 UDB for OS/390 and z/OS: Implementing Application Servers on Linux for zSeries" Redbook for someone who was having problems building zebra from source on SuSE SLES7. He stated that "we describe a way to compile standard zebra sources using the configuration file of an older source RPM on SuSE sles7."
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246847.html

11/13/2002 - Mark Post wasn't sure if he was the only person who had missed the announcement of the Red Hat 64-bit Linux for zSeries being Generally Available. Just to make sure, he sent a note to the mailing list about it. He quoted Florian La Roche of Red Hat who said:
"Red Hat has two released products, Red Hat Linux 7.2 for S/390 (31bit) and Red Hat Linux 7.1 for zSeries (64bit)." The links for the new release have been added to the "Binary distributions" on the left.
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.2/en/os/s390/
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.1/en/os/s390x/

11/14/2002 - In a series of postings, Adam Thornton made available a number of screen shots of various things running on Linux/390 that wouldn't normally be thought of, let alone attempted:

• Windows® NT
• The game Pitfall
• z/VM in 64-bit mode (on a 31-bit H70 machine)
• a Macintosh desktop

11/15/2002 - In response to a question about network and system tracing tools, John Summerfield mentioned dsniff, strace (which is included on all the major distributions) and ltrace. The ltrace program, which "tracks runtime library calls in dynamically-linked programs," is included with SuSE and Debian. The dsniff suite is included with Debian.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/ltrace.html
http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/

11/15/2002 - Mark Post contributed the link to a CRN article that talked about SCO group being the first member of the UnitedLinux group to formally roll out a UnitedLinux-based distribution.
http://www.crn.com/components/Nl/direct/article.asp?ArticleID=38519

11/16/2002 - Neale Ferguson reported an IBM press release that announced IBM had been "awarded a contract by Mobil Travel Guide to provide the company with large-scale computing infrastructure on-demand over the Internet." The service is based on Linux/390 virtual servers.
http://www.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/2B195F83C8E5C05285256C480054A81F

11/16/2002 - Mark Post requested that companies that provide commercial support for Linux/390 to state that in the mailing list. He was interested in adding that information to the web site.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31655
http://linuxvm.org/Info/support.html

11/18/2002 - Jim Rich asked if anyone was using the new Linux "NFS over TCP/IP" code yet. No one responded that they were, but he got several recommendations to look into OpenAFS instead. Mark Post pointed out the OpenAFS patches that are available from the Sine Nomine web site, but Adam Thornton said they were for a fairly old version of the code. A recent version should be used from the OpenAFS web site unless there is some reason to stay with an older version.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31679
http://www.openafs.org/

11/18/2002 - Jim Silbley posted a link to the current list of LSB (Linux Standard Base) certifications, and to an article on IBM's DeveloperWorks site on how to write LSB-compliant applications.
http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/register.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lsb.html

11/18/2002 - Michael Morgan responded to a report of a problem with NFS putting out a "can't get a request slot" message. He said he wasn't able to resolve the problem, but worked around it by mounting NFS file systems with these parms:
rsize=1024,wsize=1024,retrans=3,timeo=40,vers=2.
He commented that performance was "really bad" but "at least we don't get the request slot errors with the large number of processes attempting to access file systems in a sleep state."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31708

11/20/2002 - Jim Sibley was the first to report the SuSE press release about their SLES8 distribution. The announcement said that all versions, including the one for Linux/390 would be available in December.
http://www.suse.com/us/company/press/press_releases/archive02/sles_8.html

11/21/2002 - Mark Post forwarded on a security alert regarding Samba. The alert was from Slackware, but pertained to all distributions. The alert described a security exposure in "versions 2.2.2 through 2.2.6 of Samba that could potentially allow an attacker to gain root access on the target machine. The word "potentially" is used because there is no known exploit of this bug, and the Samba Team has not been able to craft one ourselves. However, the seriousness of the problem warrants this immediate 2.2.7 release." Mark suggested that everyone "either upgrade on your own, or be looking for a new package from your Linux distributor."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31841
http://www.samba.org/samba/whatsnew/samba-2.2.7.html

11/25/2002 - Richard Hirst reported a problem with the CMS file system driver/utilities. According to Richard "for 4K blocks of zeros, CMS does allocate any disk space - it just sets the corresponding indirect pointer on disk to zero. Attached patch fixes userland cmsfs; havn't looked at the kernel module."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31903
http://linuxvm.org/Patches/S390/cmsfs-nulls.diff

11/25/2002 - David Boyes mentioned that he had some anti-spam meaures implemented on his email server. A number of people pleaded with him to post the details to the list, which he did. David had some strong warnings about who should and should not try to modify their mail configuration file:
"WARNING: NOT FOR SENDMAIL AMATEURS. If you rely on YaST (or such programs) to do your system administration, DON'T TRY THIS. Your gun, your foot, your decision."
The details are included in the full text of his post to the mailing list, as well as some further things to look for on SuSE systems. I have created a machine-readable copy of his host.mc snippet and put it on the patches page.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31917
http://linuxvm.org/Patches/S390/antispam.host.mc

11/25/2002 - Jim Elliott recommended reading a new book on Linux and Open Source. He said "The book is NOT technical, but is oriented towards managers and give a great overview of the business benefits, legal issues, costs/benefits, etc. It also covers "governance" and the support structure in words management can understand." The book is "The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source" by Martin Fink of HP (ISBN 0-13-047677-3).
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.31936

11/25/2002 - Dave O'Neill and Jim Elliott both provided the URL to the online version of eServer magazine. The current issue has an article in it by Alan Altmark on "Understanding z/VM Integrity and Security."
http://www.eservercomputing.com/mainframe/

11/26/2002 - During a discussion about Hercules versus Flex-ES, Peter Ward posted a URL that gives some more information about IBM's discounted Partnerworld for Development offering of Flex-ES based systems.
http://www.developer.ibm.com/welcome/s390/netfefs.html

11/26/2002 - Gerhard Hiller of IBM reported the following updates to the DeveloperWorks web site:

• "August 2001 stream"
  Bug-fixes for
  • kernel 2.4.7
  • kernel 2.4.17
• "May 2002 stream"
  Bug-fixes for
  • kernel 2.4.19
• Note that the OCOs for SuSE page has been reworked for clarification.

11/27/2002 - David Boyes helped out someone who was in the unenviable position of trying to use telnet on a 3270 terminal. As a short term fix, he recommended that the person get a copy of Arty Eckock's TNVT100 program which makes that situation a little more bearable. That, and other "goodies" are discussed in the URL below.
http://www.naspa.com/PDF/96/T9608014.pdf
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32019

11/28/2002 - David Boyes of Sine Nomine Associates announced that beginning December 2nd, 2002, Sine Nomine Associates would "begin providing a low-cost CD media creation service for Debian/390 which will deliver a complete Debian/390 Linux distribution and applications package installable via CMS tools with no obligation to purchase a support contract, and also a commercial service and support offering for Debian/390 at a price which is not sensitive to the number of engines or number of installed copies." He also commented that "The intent of both offerings is to provide a stable, well-supported Linux distribution for the 390 and zSeries that can begin as an experimental or development system without incurring large startup costs, and grow seamlessly into an environment that can support production environments as your skills and confidence with Linux on System/390 and zSeries grows."
http://sinenomine.net/debian
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32033