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Article posted on Apr 1

April Fools

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on April 1, 2012, 10:45 pm

Yes, yesterday's announcement was an April Fools joke, but I am humbled that enough people were convinced I could sell my company to a Fortune 500 company.

For background, the funny part is Finnix really is a product of Velociraptor Aerospace Dynamics, a sole proprietorship consulting company I set up in 2011. This is mainly to make taxes easier; VAD owns the Finnix domains, pays the bills and takes the donations, at least on paper. But organizationally, it's still mostly a personal project of mine.

(The company name is an in-joke, with a secondary goal of eventually getting Department of Defense contracts based on the name alone. The company logo is a raptor riding a bomb, Slim Pickens style.)

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• Posted in Finnix

Article posted on Mar 31

Boeing acquires Finnix, VAD

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on March 31, 2012, 5:00 pm

(April Fools!)

### PR EMBARGO ... DO NOT DISSEMINATE PRIOR TO MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012 ###
### RELEASE:BA_VAD_FINNIX ###

Seattle, Wash., April 2, 2012 -- The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA) today announced an agreement to acquire Velociraptor Aerospace Dynamics, the parent company of Finnix, a LiveCD Linux operating system distribution. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

"Boeing and VAD are perfect for each other," said Ryan Finnie, president of Velociraptor Aerospace Dynamics. "The acquisition of the Finnix operating system brings a wealth of opportunities to Boeing, and the resources available from Boeing are an invaluable complement to VAD's mission to bring open source system administration tools to the aerospace industry."

With the acquisition, Finnie will be retained and will head the Strategic Aeronautics and Open Source (SAOS) division of Boeing, a group focused on open source implementations of firmware for turbine and missile nose cone circuitry. Finnix will continue to be maintained as an open source product, but will benefit from the Boeing acquisition with support contracts available to leading corporations and governments. No employee reductions are anticipated.

The Boeing Company, founded in 1916, is a leading multinational aerospace and defense corporation. Velociraptor Aerospace Dynamics, formed in 2011 as the parent company of Finnix, is a rising defense contractor and technology consulting company. Finnix was created in 2000 as a Linux LiveCD designed for system administrators, with a small size and low system requirements.

Resources:

• The Boeing Company
• Velociraptor Aerospace Dynamics
• Finnix

###

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Article posted on Mar 14

BitTorrent RSS feeds now available

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on March 14, 2012, 12:48 am

RSS feeds of Finnix ISO BitTorrent releases are now available. These feeds allow you to (with supported clients) automatically download and seed the latest versions of Finnix. There are several feeds available, but the recommended feed is here:

• http://www.finnix.org/rss/bittorrent/seeder.rss

This feed contains the last two releases in both x86 and PPC flavors. The approximate download size is 450MB for the 4 ISOs. Additionally, before Finnix releases are made, this feed will be updated with the unreleased version, usually at least a few days before release. This way, you automatically help build the seeds in preparation for a release, and you can get new Finnix releases before they are officially released!

For more information, see the BitTorrent page on finnix.org.

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Article posted on Feb 14

Finnix 104 released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on February 14, 2012, 12:00 am

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of Finnix 104, the twentieth release of Finnix. Since the first public release of Finnix 0.03 in March 2000, there have been twenty releases and 37 ISOs released to the public, totalling 4.5GB . (All releases have included x86 and PowerPC ISOs, with the exception of Finnix 0.03, 86.0, and 100.)

Finnix 104 is a maintenance and rollup release, including updated upstream Debian software, Linux kernel 3.2, small functionality updates and a large number of bug fixes.

(Finnix 104 is being released on Valentine's Day, and while Finnix releases are sometimes timed to specific dates, today is otherwise a coincidence. However, rest assured that Finnix does love you.)

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_104_release_notes
• Free stickers! http://www.finnix.org/Free_stickers

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Feb 5

Finnix participating in World IPv6 Launch

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on February 5, 2012, 1:57 pm

Finnix will be participating in the World IPv6 Launch, a commitment by sites, ISPs and hardware manufacturers to be ready for IPv6 on or before June 6, 2012. This is a continuation of World IPv6 Day, a test launch of sites' IPv6 services on June 8, 2011.

Nothing will actually be done to Finnix on June 6. All Finnix sites (including this blog) have been IPv6 enabled for several years, and many Finnix mirrors are IPv6 enabled. Finnix is proud to be in this standing, and welcomes World IPv6 Launch to help push the internet forward into the IPv6 era.

For more information on Finnix and IPv6, please see www.finnix.org/IPv6.

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Article posted on Jan 22

Working at Canonical, and how it relates to Finnix

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 22, 2012, 9:34 pm

Well-worn Ubuntu stickers on my ThinkPad X200s

I have accepted an IS Operations position with Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, and just got back from a week of orientation. This is a great opportunity, and I'm really looking forward to the coming months as I get settled in to operations at Canonical.

I wanted to let Finnix users know what this means for the future of Finnix and how it will change. Namely, nothing should change. Finnix will continue to be my personal project. From my initial talks during the interview process, Canonical management is supportive of Finnix, but will not try to exert any control over it. Conversely, I am joining as an operations sysadmin, not as an Ubuntu developer, so I have no direct control of Ubuntu development over any other member of the Ubuntu user community.

Finnix will continue to be based on Debian; I currently use a mix of Ubuntu and Debian for my workstations and servers, and while I love Ubuntu, Debian's development process is a closer fit as a base for Finnix's development process. I will also continue to be a Debian Maintainer, and will continue representing Finnix as a Debian derivative.

The decision to use Launchpad for Finnix bug tracking was unrelated (but has been working well so far), and actually began before I started interviewing with Canonical.

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• Posted in Finnix

Article posted on Dec 12

Finnix development on Launchpad

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 12, 2011, 10:56 pm

I am experimenting with tracking development on Launchpad, specifically bug tracking and new features. A number of bugs have already been filed for the Finnix 104 milestone. If you have a bug or a feature request not already listed, please file a bug through the Launchpad interface.

The mailing list will continue to be the focal point of Finnix discussions, and Launchpad will not be used for things like package management. Still, it's already proving to be a decent bug tracking interface, and beats the method used for the previous 12 years (namely, a text file in a screen session on a development machine).

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Oct 23

Finnix 103 released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on October 23, 2011, 12:00 am

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of Finnix 103, the nineteenth release of Finnix, and marks three months since the release of Finnix 102, and six years since the relaunch of Finnix 86.0 in 2005. Finnix 103 includes a new forensic mode, RNG entropy gathering, a minor kernel update, a large number of bug fixes, new packages and new minor features.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_103_release_notes
• Free stickers! http://www.finnix.org/Free_stickers

Forensic mode

Finnix 103 includes a new forensic mode. When booted with the "forensic" or "forensics" boot flags, Finnix changes its behavior to minimize the chance of loading suspect code or writing to suspect media. These changes include cryptographic hash verification of discovered Finnix CD media, locking block devices, and avoiding swap, LVM, RAID, crypt and network autodetection. For more information, see the Forensics page on finnix.org.

Entropy generation added

Modern Linux distributions add to their random number generator (RNG) entropy pool by saving some random data before shutdown, and adding it back into the pool during startup. A LiveCD cannot normally do this, so Finnix includes a new feature to generate random data to be fed into the pool via a method that relies on the separation of a computer's CPU and RTC. By default 8 bytes are generated during each Finnix startup (due to the time it takes to generate data via this method), but a new utility wrapper, "finnix-generate-entropy" is included to generate a full pool's worth of entropy (currently 4096 bytes). For more information, see this blog post on finnie.org.

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Oct 19

Finnix mirror status site now available

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on October 19, 2011, 10:36 pm

If you're the type who is delighted by tables and number and maps with markers on them (and hey, who isn't?), there is now a Finnix mirror status site at mirrors.finnix.org. There you can see the current status of Finnix mirrors, see when they were last synced, and test GeoIP functionality.

One thing that is immediately evident by the global mirror map is that it isn't very global. Most of the mirrors are located in the eastern half of North America. The remaining are one in Idaho, one in California (temporarily provided by me through Colobox Networks to service the west coast), and one in Greece. If your organization can provided mirror services for Finnix and are particularly located in one of the following regions, I'd like to hear from you:

• Europe and the United Kingdom
• Asia/Pacific region
• West coast North America

Any new mirrors would be appreciated, but I would like to especially focus on those regions. More information for mirror providers is available at the main mirrors site. Thank you.

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Article posted on Sep 18

GeoIP support added to mirror redirector

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 18, 2011, 2:36 am

All direct links to ISOs (on the home page for example; URLs that begin with http://www.finnix.org/releases/) redirect the user to a mirror. In the past, this redirector was purely random, with a weight added to the randomness to prefer larger capacity mirrors to smaller mirrors.

The redirector now takes GeoIP location information into consideration when possible. It increases the chances that the user is redirected to a geographically close mirror. Weighted randomness is still a consideration, so you will not be redirected to the closest mirror every time, but the GeoIP distance adds weight to closer mirrors.

A full list of Finnix mirrors is available here.

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• Posted in Finnix