Feb 10 2011

Ensure Running

Has anyone noticed that pretty much every puppet module one finds on the internet by default enables the service they try to configure in the module

When looking at it from a single machine point of view it makes sense to include the module , have it configure your service and directly enable it by default.

So I started wondering .. isn't there anybody out there who is building clusters ? Where services have to configured on multiple nodes but should NOT be running acitvely on all nodes by default because there is an external tool which manages that for you (Pacemaker framework eg.)

Agreed it's a small patch to get the functionality you want , but it brings an extra overhead when one upgrades the modules etc.

So if it doesn't bother you please split your puppet module in 2 parts.. one you call to configure the service, another which you call to enable the service , if you want to.

thnx !

Feb 06 2011

At Fosdem

  • on Friday evening , apparently having a confirmed reservation in a resto is not enough to actually be welcome at that restaurant.
  • at DrupalDevdays, only 2 laptops were open during our presentation
  • at DrupalDevdays, almost nobody in the room was already using CI
  • at Fosdem , the parking lot is full before 11:30 on a saturday
  • at Fosdem , much less Macs than last years .
  • at Fosdem , way too much rooms are already at full capacity so you need to have 2-3 backup alternatives ..
  • at Fosdem , people expect me to be in certain rooms, at the same time
  • at Fosdem , even with too much rooms already full one still misses a bunch of interresting talks
  • at Fosdem , one doesn't even realize friends are speaking there too ..
  • at Fosdem , Android is the standard ...
  • at Fosdem , you are confronted with the fact you probably forgot more names of people than you remember ;(
  • at Fosdem , you are surrounded by famous open source people, that aren't even on the schedule
  • at the MySQL Meetup Dinner, Monty brings Salmiakki
  • at Fosdem , you wonder how many other people have survived their 11th edition
  • at Fosdem , you can't get into any devroom on sunday morning
  • at Fosdem , begging on Twitter to get in to a devroom from the other side of the door works (at least for me :))
  • at Fosdem , netbooks are much less popular as opposed to 2-3 years ago ..
  • after fosdem ... you crash ..
  • Feb 05 2011

    Reservation Confirmed

    Apparently I don't understand french :(

    Copied from my inbox ...

    1. From: Info Falstaff <info@lefalstaff.be>
    2. To: 'Kris Buytaert' <Kris.Buytaert@youalreadyknowmyaddy.be>
    3. Subject: RE: Reservation Next Friday 4/2/2011
    4. Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:55:45 +0100
    5.  
    6. je confirme votre reservation pour le vendredi 04 02 2011
    7.  
    8. vous trouverez ci-joint nos differentes formules
    9.  
    10. bien à vous
    11.  
    12. guy Lommen chef de cuisine

    Feb 01 2011

    MySQL & Friends Meetup at Fosdem 2011

    I admit .. I`m lazy ... unlike last year I did not organize MySQL and Friends meetup at Fosdem.

    I outsourced it to Kenny

    More info and registration here

    Jan 24 2011

    Upcoming 2011 Speaking Engagements

    Lenz gave the good example so I`ll follow :)

    Next weekend saturday I`ll be giving a talk about devops at StartUp Weekend Brussels, from what I've read so far it promises to be an audience that needs the talk,

    The week after I`ll be speaking at the DrupalDevDays, again about devops , however this time with a touch of Drupal , giving a devops talk at Devoxx last year to a Java audience learned me that the devops evangelist need to go outside of their usual conference audiences and als talk to the people that are usually in the other silos.

    Next march I`ll be speaking at the UKUUG spring conference in Leeds this time about my experiences on High Availability with Pacemaker

    And who knows I might squeeze in a talk at Load this year also ..

    If you are around at one of these confs and you want to talk Devops, Clustering, sipx or just have a beer .. don't hesitate ! There's already plenty of people promising me beers , and some even sushi :)

    Jan 16 2011

    Devops Meetups before Fosdem , 2011 Edition

    Just last last year we'll have a Devops meetup just before Fosdem,
    I've setup a page for registrations , that way we'll know how many people to make reservations for.

    If possible we'll go to the same place as last year .. walking distance from the Fosdem Beer event.

    Feel free to spread the news !

    Jan 12 2011

    Appliance or Not Appliance

    That's the question Xavier asks in his blog entry titled
    Security: DIY or Plug’n'Play

    To me the answer is simple, most of the appliances I ran into so far have no way of configuring them apart from the ugly webgui they ship with their device. That means that I can't integrate them with the configuration management framework I have in place for the rest of the infrastructure. There is no way to automatically modify e.g firewall rules together with the relocation of a service which does happen automatically, and there is always some kind of manual interaction required. Applicances tend to sit on a island, either stay un managed ( be honest when's the last time you upgraded the firmware of that terminal server ? ) , or take a lot of additional efort to manage manually. They require yet another set of tools than the set you are already using to manage your network.
    They don't integrate with your backup strategy, and don't tell me they all come with perfect MIB's.

    There's other arguments one could bring up against appliances, obviously people can spread fud about some organisation alledgedly paying people to put backdoors in certain operation systems.. so why would they not pay people to put backdoors in appliances , they don't even need to hide them in there .. but my main concern is manageability .. and only a web gui to manage the box to me just means that the vendor hates me and dooesn't want my business

    A good Appliance (either security or other type) needs to provide me an API that I can use to configure it, in all other cases I prefer a DIY platform, as I can keep it in line with all my other tools, config mgmtn, deployment, upgrade strategies etc.

    Mabye a last question for Xavier to finish my reply ... I`m wondering how Xavier thinks he kan achieve High-availability by using a Virtual environment for Virtual Appliances that are not cluster aware using the virtual environment. A fake comfortable feeling of higher availability , maybe.. but High Availability that I'd like to see.

    Jan 07 2011

    Fedora Annoyancies Resolved (Hopefully)

    A couple of weeks ago I ranted about being able to crash about any available music player on Fedora, and the gazillion bugs I filed for that ..

    At last the the problem is solved, as mentioned in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657971#c17
    this is most probably a bug in ffmpeg which is provided by rpmfusion. and which is solved by installing gstreamer-plugins-ugly

    At least it works for me :)

    Dec 21 2010

    The New devops Audience, Drupalistas !

    When I first started out giving talks about devops , I realized that I was preaching to the choir, some Barcamps, the Keynote at Loadays , the Dutch Unix Usergroup etc .. lots of people in the audiences knew about the pains we were trying to solve, lots of them already knew some of the tools we use and lots of them already talk a lot with their developers or are part of the deveoplment teams

    With our Devoxx talk, Patrick and I started to talk to a different audience , the Java devs , and it was great, we all learned from it. With that experience in mind I submitted a variation of the talk to an audience that is also very important to me ... the Drupal Community .

    Devops is gaining importance , while we been practicing devops methodologies since ever, now even the big analyst companies etc are writing and talking about the movement, the drupal community really should also get involved.

    So if you care about devops, about devs and ops working together, about continuous integration, continuous deployment, configuration mangement, automation, monitoring and scale, if you've heard about all of the above but have no clue what Puppet, Hudson or Fabric can do for you , vote here for my proposed talk at Drupalcon Chicago,

    Dec 18 2010

    Guest Post Season

    Apparently December is the month where everybody starts writing guest posts for other blogs.

    Earlier this month I wrote an article with the title of this blog for Sysadvent ,

    It's a sysadmin relative of the Perl Advent Calendar: One article for each day of December, ending on the 25th article. With the goals of of sharing, openness, and mentoring, we aim to provide great articles about systems administration topics written by fellow sysadmins

    My article is here, but there's plenty more other articles written about a variety of topics, such as chef, tcpdump , how ls works, cucumber and Devops.

    On the other side, Matthias over at Agile Web Development and Operations is hosting a series on Devops where lots of Devops Advocates and Evangelists are having their say about Devops ...

    My entry about the Challenges the Devops Crowd faces was put online yesterday