SUSEStudio as a tool for master thesis

My third semester as an associate teacher at UOC (Open University of Catalonia) has just finished. During this semesters, I've been helping students on doing their Bachelor thesis and Master thesis on the Free Software master and Computer Engineering.

In some of them we've used SUSEStudio in order to build LiveCDs as a demonstration of their work. It has been a very useful tool and I am sure we'll be using it on the next semesters.

This is the list of the projects that we've used susestudio:

Eucalyptus migration

This project deals with all life cycle phases in a migration project of a Data Center to IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service). The chosen solution was Eucalyptus, an open source software. In practice it involved the creation of a Live CD to display this technology, it was developed with SuseStudio and published in SuseGallery.

SLES securization

This project shows how to securize sles and how to create a livecd with suse studio with this securization.

Study and implementation of a cybercoffe with free software

This project shows how to build a cybercoffe by using free software. Different appliances are made with susestudio.


Next semester is about to start. Students will be choosing their projects during the first week of March. As I am responsible for proposing projects (that they may or may not choose), any ideas will be very welcome.

shutting down a iomega storcenter

For my backups I am using a iomega storcenter device.

All management is done by web interface and I needed a way to shut it down from a script.

Here is the script.


  1 COOKIE_FILE=/tmp/iomega-stor-center-cookie.txt
  2 IP=192.168.1.3
  3 curl -c $COOKIE_FILE -k --data "login=admin&passwordx=" https://$IP/index.html
  4 #curl -b $COOKIE_FILE -k --data "restart=identifyDevice" https://$IP/stg-device.html?t=6
  5 curl -b $COOKIE_FILE -k --data "restart=Poweroff" https://$IP/stg-device.html?t=6
  6 rm /tmp/iomega-stor-center-cookie.txt

wanna know how much a house will cost?

Never wonder how much will a new house will cost?

http://www.escalimetre.cat/calculadora-obra-nova

The calculator has been done using google gadgets technology and the web with google sites. Check out the lite calculator gadget, too:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&hl=ca&gl=ca&url=http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/113741165758947641218/calculadora-preu-obra-simple-14032001.xml

who owns your virtual identity

Just read this article:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/10/0039249/Who-Owns-Your-Social-Identity?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo


Technically speaking we could have an identity provider that provides our identity as a service to different services like google, yahoo, ... even to our University , or why not, to our bank... Well there is already openid, but also other technologies like shibboleth, opensso, ....

So the problem is not really technical, but more "ethical". Who should be the provider? Governments? I do not think so.... maybe we should do the same as we do with internet domains, maybe...

just a random thought

client authentication in applets

Just a tip. When working with applets, the key needs to be in the java keyring. Having that key in the mozilla keyring is not enough. At least not with the default configuration of java and mozilla.