Mark's blog

While I've been preparing an update to the 2.2.6 Blastwave packages of nessus, Teneable just released their new 3.0 package - offering a whole host of enhancements including a very funky looking RSS feed for plugin updating, and major performance improvements to name just two. Except this time, I'm not doing my usual w00t-dance, and I won't be packaging it, or even running it, for that matter. The reason being that Tenable chose to make this version closed source. Now, that's all well and good and they're obviously well within their rights to do so. But as with so many closed source products (Zend, I'm looking at you), it's released for Linux/x86 first (although FreeBSD packages are also available), and everything else takes a back seat until some unspecified time in the future. It it is this ramification of the license change that I find most infuriating. It wouldn't perhaps be so bad if Tenable could guarantee that all platforms would have binaries available for them - but this means they're leaving a large section of their userbase out in the cold. And woe betide you if you're running anything they consider really obscure or not worth supporting. Even something like Solaris/x86 is frequently ignored, and I can't begin to imagine what people running something like NetBSD on Alpha must have to contend with... With the open source model (take MySQL as an example), you can get the source code, and can be pretty sure that you can build it on pretty much any platform you want. MySQL runs on most platforms - from Unix to Windows, OpenVMS to Linux/S390. If it doesn't run on your chosen platform, or the developers don't have access to the relevant development environment, you can hack it yourself and contribute patches back to the community. Once the source is closed, that option is gone forever. You're then totally dependant on the developer to continue supporting your platform. You also, by extension, have to hope they never go out of business, especially if their product incorporates some sort of time-locked licensing! If they wake up one morning and decide that it's no longer economically viable to continue building their product for your platform, you're screwed. Never mind that you may have built your entire infrastructure around a certain technology, and it's not economically viable for you to jump ship to whatever the flavour of the month is; if you want to continue running closed source product X, you have to dance to the beat of the developers' drum. It's for precisely this reason that I was so glad to see Sun open up Solaris (SPARC has been an open architecture for a long while now, so that's never been an issue). Yeah, the community Sun has built up around it is fantastic, as is the ability to get a sneak preview of all the latest features and browse the code yourself. But it now means that whatever happens to Sun (although I seriously doubt they're going anywhere anytime soon), our investment is secure. So, I'm sorry that Tenable felt they had no other option than to close the source of Nessus - but I for one look forward to the continued development of the forked GPL version. As soon as there is code released, there will be Blastwave packages...

Yesterday, Sun announced the availability of their new CoolThreads powered servers. They're powered by the latest incarnation of the UltraSPARC range of processors - so naturally, you get all the full binary compatibility assurances that brings. Sun are making much of the efficiency and "greenness" of these new boxes; but while I'm all for saving penguins and polar bears, what really stands out is the sheer performance these boxes bring. Check out the entry-level T1000 , for instance. £2,200 (list price according to the Sun UK catalogue) gets you a 6-core system, which can run 4 threads per core, making a total of 24 simultaneous threads. This thing will absolutely make mincemeat of serving web pages, or pretty much anything else you can throw at it that doesn't require stellar floating point performance. According to their benchmarks using the industry standard SPECweb range of tests, The single CPU 1 GHz 8-core T1000 system was over two times as fast as a Dell system with dual 3.8 GHz Xeons. Read that again - a single processor clocked at nearly one fourth of the clock speed of a single Xeon beat a dual-Xeon system, and also soundly thrashed a IBM x346 with 2 dual-core processors. That is, by any metric, a stunning display of performance. And it only takes up 1-U of rack space. Or, there's the T2000 - which at £8,400 for a 8*4 core (32 simultaneous threads!), 8Gbs of RAM, Quad Gig-E, dual 10K RPM disks, PCI-X and a funky brushed metal case, stacks up very favourably against a similarly spec'd dual-processor UltraSparc IIIi V240 - at only a grand more. Interestingly, UltraSPARC IIIi based kit has just taken a drop in price! Whilst the AMD kit Sun have been pushing out represents fantastic value for money and great flexibility (one platform, multiple OS's - even Windows, if you so desired), this is the first time in a long while I've been excited at the launch of a new SPARC server. These things will collectively own the datacentre. It's a 64-bit SPARC processor, running Solaris - so there's no changes, no recompiling - just suddenly your applications will start to fly, and there's none of the costs involved in jumping to a different architecture. Can't wait to have a play on one of these...