This post will be short...
I'm not a big fan of systemd and honestly I can't understand how this disease (which became an epidemy) could have happened to Linux. Sometimes I wish an eternal insomnia to person who is responsible for this (I am joking of course). Anyway systemd is (unfortunately) part of my OS and (despite numerous benefits) it often offers me surprising moments.

[root@ol7-01 ~]# reboot
Failed to start reboot.target: Connection timed out
See system logs and 'systemctl status reboot.target' for details.
Failed to open /dev/initctl: No such device or address
Failed to talk to init daemon.

Of course the same result was produced by systemctl reboot, init 6, reboot -f -r now or even systemctl -f reboot

Last resort has been in using the deadly force in order to reboot the system:

[root@ol7-01 ~]# systemctl -ff reboot
Rebooting.

I used the "deadly force" term for "-ff" (you can use --force --force, or -f -f) because it's appropriate for logic behind this directive. Take a look what man page for systemd says:

"When used with halt, poweroff, reboot or kexec, execute the selected operation without shutting down all units. However, all processes will be killed forcibly and all file systems are unmounted or remounted read-only. This is hence a drastic but relatively safe option to request an immediate reboot. If --force is specified twice for these operations, they will be executed immediately without terminating any processes or unmounting any file systems. Warning: specifying --force twice with any of these operations might result in data loss."

So use this option as a last resort.

Just one week after RHEL 7.3 release Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 7.3 as well.

There is lot of improvements and features but the most notable fact about OL 7.3 is that comes with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 4 (UEK4) and older UEK3 is not shipped in distribution while it still supported. Starting with 7.3 version OL supports UEFI Secure Boot. The bad news is that kpatch package has been removed from the distribution.

For more information about new version see the release notes at: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E52668_01/E79987/html/index.html

You can download the ISOs either from MOS site or Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (aka edelivery.oracle.com).

Redhat has announced general availability of RHEL 7.2 version. For complete list of new features refer to Changelog.

Also Oracle has announced general availability of it's OEL 7.2 shipped with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 3.

Few days ago I received e-mail with question how to setup Yum on OpenSuse 11.2 as yum package is missing in official repository. Instead of reply I'm posting the solution here. So in case you don't like the Yast utility (many people I know hates the Yast), missing some function that yum provides or you simply prefer installing/uninstalling packages using the Yum utility then here are the simple steps how to install and configure it on OpenSuse distribution (note OpenSuse 11.0 contains Yum package but it does not work on newer releases which contains python-2.6).

Download required packages: From official OpenSuse repository: python-gpgme python-urlgrabber rpm-python yum-metadata-parser

Note: I you have registered package repository in Yast you can install it using:

yast -i python-gpgme python-urlgrabber rpm-python yum-metadata-parser

These packages are not available for Open Suse 11.1 and 11.2 so you need to download and install them manually: python-sqlite2 yum-3.2.34-2

Yum package was built from source package shipped with Fedora 11 using this (just little modified) .spec file Install downloaded packages:

# rpm -i python-sqlite2-2.4.1-2.1.x86_64.rpm yum-3.2.34-2-suse.noarch.rpm

Configure YUM: Add folowing line to "[main]" section of /etc/yum.conf file:

distroverpkg=openSUSE-release

Create source repositories files Create file OpenSUSE-inet.repo and OpenSUSE-local.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

# touch /etc/yum.repos.d/OpenSUSE-inet.repo
# touch /etc/yum.repos.d/OpenSUSE-local.repo

Contents of OpenSUSE-inet.repo

[base]
name=OpenSUSE-$releasever - Base
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/$releasever/repo/oss/suse/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/path/to/file

[updates]
name=OpenSUSE-$releasever - Updates
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/update/$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///path/to/file

Contents of OpenSUSE-local.repo (Optional and disabled by default - For installation using local repository/DVD):

[cd-media]
name=OpenSUSE-$releasever - Local
baseurl=file:///media/cdrom/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=0

Now the installation is done.

If you are working with Linux or you are just Linux fan you will be probably interested in new Free eBook named "Linux 101 Hacks" released on The Geek Stuff server. The book contains 12 chapter which brings 101 tips and tricks for beginers but also experienced users could find some useful things there. Use this link http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/02/linux-101-hacks-download-free-ebook/ to download this free eBook.

Oracle released Enterprise Linux as part of "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" program. In fact Enterprise Linux is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux distribution. There are two versions to download x86 (32 bit) and x86_64 (64 bit) and download is free. The interesting fact is Oracle is also providing technical support to this distribution - Network, Basic and Premier support. Enterprise Linux could be downloaded at http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux. More informations about Enteprise Linux and Oracle Unbreakable Linux program you can find at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/. I'll try install it soon and post the first feelings here. Stay tuned! :-)

Update: You can read the response from Redhat aka "Unfakeable Linux" :-) http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/