Bitnami Bootcamp 2014

Earlier this summer, we announced the first Bitnami Cloud System Administration Bootcamp with the goal of sharing the know-how we have accumulated over the years at Bitnami to train the next generation of system administrators. Over the course of a few weeks, we received over a hundred applications, from which we invited 14 candidates to participate after an extensive selection process and one-on-one interviews.

Over a four week period that just wrapped up last week, we geeked out on Linux and the cloud. The mornings covered mostly theory (albeit with small interactive examples) while the afternoons were devoted to practical exercises. Each student managed their cloud servers using Bitnami Cloud Hosting (of course!) and we tracked and reviewed all assignments using a Bitnami-hosted Phabricator server. We started out learning about system internals, Git, bash scripting, networking and Unix build toolchains. We continued with the ins and outs of automating the deployment of apps written in a variety of languages and frameworks: PHP, Python, Java, Rails and Node.js. We invited guest speakers that covered in-depth a variety of topics, including Tomcat, OpenStack and configuration management tools. We explored the AWS, Azure and Google clouds, learning how to servers in each one of them both through the management console and their APIs/command line tools. We learned how to perform end to end deployment automation using Docker, Ansible and Bitnami tools. We ended with sessions on security and performance and built a project that brought together everything we covered in the course.

After the bootcamp, we invited six of the attendees to join the Bitnami team and they will start this Wednesday! We are excited to have these awesome engineers as part of the team and you can expect a significant increment in the number of apps we provide in the near future thanks to our expanded team.

We plan to repeat the experience early next year, expanding and improving the topics and materials. If this sounds interesting to you, consider applying and joining us next year in Seville!

Cloud System Administration Bootcamp 2015 early sign up

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Dave Page from PostgreSQL

Billing itself as the "world's most advanced open source database", PostgreSQL is bundled with many of our most popular Bitnami apps, including our LAPP stack, Dev Pack, OpenERP/Odoo, Discourse and more. To kick off our new Open Source Leaders podcast series, we interviewed Dave Page, the Director of PostgreSQL Europe, to learn more about the PosgreSQL database and what's to come from the project.

Here are just a few of the topics we covered:

How does the PostgreSQL community work?

Why should one be involved in the community?

What is next for PostgreSQL?  

How does PostgreSQL stack up next to no-SQL leaders?

Does PostgreSQL work on the cloud?

What level of experience do you need run PostgreSQL?

You can launch a PostgreSQL application or stack to the cloud with Bitnami for free, or download any of our free native installers or VMs to run the software locally. Get started in the cloud for free with a $200 credit from Microsoft Azure. You can browse a full list of Bitnami app stacks that contain PostgreSQL on the Bitnami site.

Stuart Langridge:        This is the Bitnami Open Source Leaders series of interviews.  I’m Stuart Lankridge and I’m here talking to Dave Page.  Dave is Director of PostgreSQL Europe, Vice Chair of the PostgreSQL Community of Canada, he’s chief architect of Tools and Installs at EnterpriseDB and he’s a core team member of the PostgreSQL project.  Hey Dave, welcome to the interview.

David Page:                Thank you, Stuart nice to talk to you.

Stuart Langridge:        So what is Postgres? 

David Page:                Postgres is an open source relational database management system. We compete mostly with the likes of Oracle and SQL Server.  It’s a completely open source permissive license.  We have a very large community that are both using Postgres and submitting patches on a regular basis.  So we’re pretty diverse in the things that Postgres supports because we have this large community of people from all sorts of different areas and different industries helping us build the product and add support for all sorts of useful features.

Stuart Langridge:        You talked there about the size and diversity of the community.  Is Postgres targeting a particular use case or does it do everything from small data storage up to huge data stores?

Critical bash security issue in all versions of Linux (CVE-2014-7169)

Two days ago we announced a critical vulnerability in the bash shell that is remotely exploitable (CVE-2014-6271) known as Shellshock.

The fix for CVE-2014-6271 was incomplete and command injection is possible even after the patch has been applied. The issue is being tracked as CVE-2014-7169 (Aftershock). Please log in to all of your Bitnami-based Linux VMs or cloud images and upgrade bash. If you are running an Ubuntu machine (and most likely you are) you can execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install bash

To test that you have successfully updated your installation, type:

env var='() {(a)=>\' bash -c "echo date"; cat echo; rm -f echo

If you get the following, you have successfully patched bash:

bash: var: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `='
bash: var: line 1: `'
bash: error importing function definition for `var'
date
cat: echo: No such file or directory

If you get the following (with the current date at the end), you are still vulnerable:

bash: var: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `='
bash: var: line 1: `'
bash: error importing function definition for `var'
Fri Sep 26 09:20:00 UTC 2014

If you have further questions, please refer to our community forums or contact the helpdesk if you are a commercial Bitnami customer.

More information and possible updates on our wiki.