The physical server hosting the virtual machine that MontanaLinux.org was running on had a complete hardware failure.  It appears the motherboard failed.  While we believe the original hard disks are intact (even if they aren't, we have a fairly recent complete backup) getting everything back up will be a bit time consuming.  This site is mostly back up but the files directory will take a while to sync so some of the videos may not be available for a while.

I'm temporarily running the site on a Digital Ocean droplet until we get another physical host in place.  I have a spare in Belgrade but I have to get it to Warren in Billings.  If we can just transplant the RAM and drives, that'll be great.  If we have to setup a new system from scratch and then restore from backup, that's going to be a bit more work.  old.montanalinux.org and mail.montanalinux.org (Zimbra) will probably remain down until we get the physical system fully migrated.  Yeah, that sucks.  Sorry.

Update:  The site is fully syned now.
Update 2:  old.montanalinux.org and mail.montanalinux.org were up as of late last night (Wednesday, 3/13/19).
Update 3: Got everything moved to BudgetVM.  It's a KVM VM running OpenVZ Legacy with a handful containers each with their own IP address.  I had it all setup and they accidentally reinstalled the OS on top of it... so I got three months free.  Yeah.

Richard Stallman paid a visit to Montana State University, Bozeman on Monday, Feb. 11th, 2019 and gave a talk entitled, "Free Software and Your Freedom".   I recorded the following video of his presentation with his permission.

RMS-Free_Software_and_Your_Freedom-20190211.webm (~1hr 47min, 590MB)

I haven't watched it yet but I bet it's yet another good one from Jon.

Brian May.  You should recognize that name.  He's the guitarist from Queen and an astrophysicist.  While I'm not exactly sure what role he has played in the overall New Horizons mission, I at least enjoy the official Music Video / Song he made for it.  Enjoy.

Cockpit has been in development for a few years now and it appears it is going to be default in the upcoming RHEL8 release.  I've recently started using it for managing and accessing KVM virtual machines via the cockpit-machines package.  I made a short screencast showing the basics.  Enjoy.

Red Hat's Dan (Mr. SELinux) Walsh gave a talk about Container Security at the USENIX LISA 2018 conference.

Another LISA 2018 presentation... but this one about one of our favorite topics... Sysadmins!

This is from USENIX LISA 2018... just appeared minutes ago.  Enjoy!

I haven't done much reading on it so I haven't formed an opinion yet... about what I think about IBM buying Red Hat.  Will it be good for IBM.  Definitely.  Will it be good for Red Hat?  I hope so.  IBM is well known for investing in Linux and FOSS technologies.

Anyone remember the various commercials they've run over the years?  I remember one specific one from... I don't recall the year... but yeah, it is dated now.  It shows a pre-teen boy.  Years have passed.  If they were to update the commercial, who should play that character?  The commercial ends with "The Future is Open".  Let's hope it still is.

Question:  If IBM had bought Canonical instead of Red Hat, how would you feel knowing Ubuntu was going to be the Linux distro deployed for the vast majority of IBM's customers including those in the cloud?  Kind of clarifies it now doesn't it?

UPDATE: Here's the Red Hat CEO's blog post on the subject:
A monumental day for open source and Red Hat