How many Linux distributions provide officially Openstack support

In the same time as Openstack gets more mature the number of Python code line increases and the software become more complex. The usual tasks like installation, support and operational maintenance start to get more complicated and require more advance skills.

Seeing the opportunities on the market companies like Rackspace, Red Hat and Ubuntu rolling out new processes for sales and support to address these needs. As a prove of evidence below is couple of screenshots from Openstack Ubuntu presentation The promise of the Open Cloud with further links in references section.

References

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/openstack/ 
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/8/red-hat-announces-preview-version-of-enterprise-ready-openstack-distribution
http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private-cloud/openstack 
Videos from 2012 Openstack Summit in San Diego

Easy of use and learning curve for Rackspace or Amazon Cloud

Even though Rackspace and Amazon provide similar tools and products they both are built on different principles and have a different agenda and mission.

As expected this is going to shape the company image, product and services offerings. As there are countless metrics and ways to compare I would like to take a look at the user experience and evaluate a easy of use only.

You can learn and experience this yourself when setting up a simple test infrastructural build of Apache Web Server, MySql Database and Tomcat Applicatin Server. Alternatively we can learn from other and these 2 blog posts representing a very interesting summary:

Amazon and Rackspace: A Comparison, Part 2
Amazon and Rackspace: A Comparison, Part 1

A short summary:
Rackspace cloud is easier to use when interacting with cloud for the first time. The emphasis is on simplicity rather then elasticity and richness of features.

Amazon is much more mature and feature full. Unfortunately this leads to a longer learning curve and requires more knowledge when building your own infrastructure.

Searching trick for the Linux less tool

Event after so many year of working on the command line I constantly find some trick ;). This is one of them for the less tool.

With the syntax bellow the less will do a normal search like using the '/' char, but will look for the 2th occurrence of our regex expression and once found will jump to it immediately to display.

$ man tune2fs | less -R  +2/-U -X
      -U UUID
              Set   the   universally   unique   identifier   (UUID)   of   the  filesystem  to  UUID.   The  format  of  the  UUID  is  a  series  of  hex  digits  separated  by  hyphens,  like  this:
              "c1b9d5a2-f162-11cf-9ece-0020afc76f16".  The UUID parameter may also be one of the following:

                   clear  clear the filesystem UUID

                   random generate a new randomly-generated UUID

                   time   generate a new time-based UUID

              The UUID may be used by mount(8), fsck(8), and /etc/fstab(5) (and possibly others) by specifying UUID=uuid instead of a block special device name like /dev/hda1.

              See uuidgen(8) for more information.  If the system does not have a good random number generator such as /dev/random or /dev/urandom, tune2fs will  automatically  use  a  time-based  UUID
              instead of a randomly-generated UUID.

The source of it can be found on the FAQ page of the less itself: Less FAQ