Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Jorrit Tyberghein made it to Cromatic's blog , who still remembers the first edition of OSDEM where he gave a presentation ?

Want More F/OSS Games on Open Platforms? Help Them! by chromatic -- Jorrit Tyberghein from Crystal Space and CEL recently announced that the Linux port needs more attention. The project is soliciting donations to buy a new Linux machine with decent 3D capabilities. I'm sure the project would welcome interested developers with their own hardware too. If you'd like to see Linux (and other free Unix platforms) have more game support, here's one place where you can make a difference.

Before I start.. I have no preferences for any hardware vendor , I mostly work with IBM/HP/Dell material, and all of them ocassionaly have good and bad material.
But this month they all seem to screw up :(

We have a simple need , we need machines 1U with SCSI and a Free PCI slot and be easy to deploy with 2.4 based. kernels.
One hardware vendor got the idea to add 20 cm's to his devices when upgrading to a newer version, The machine worked flawless on a 2.4.25 (SystemImager's standard), however didn't fit in
most of our customers racks. So we asked for an alternative. The Alternative they came up with was aimed directly at the HPC market, so I was really interrested in testing it. It requires SATA. But non of the libata patches I tried seem to work. Works fine in 2.6 but still didn't get the SATA working on 2.4.X. So let's try with the SCSI version. hmm.. oops you need to sacrifice your PCI slot, now that's not an alternative.

So I started contacting other vendors, one vendor shipped me a Demo Unit that looked interresting but not available anymore so all our test were in vain since the new machine might be totally different.
Another told us that there was no need to test the machine since his technical people were 100% sure it would work. When I finally received the machine the network drivers weren't functioning. I still need to test if more recent driver versions work ..

Our roadmap has an upgrade to 2.6, but we need to have 2.4 supported for deployments today. We test and test again before we place machines at clients , the timeframe now is to short to upgrade.

I see a trend where Hardware Vendors that wan't to place equipment in a HPC market don't realise what software will run on that platform.Lots of SSI style clustering environments are still on 2.4 and working on 2.6 releases, which means that a hughe part of the market these vendors are aiming at simply can't use their hardware yet. Now how's that for knowing your clients :(

I just read on /. "Microsoft has decided to drop the "my" prefixes for Longhorn. Instead of "My Computer," it will be just just plain simple "Computer". "
They must have finally realised that a typical Microsoft machine everything but "My" for the average user, so this must all be a part of the marketing campain to prove that Microsoft really has a lower TC0 than other platforms

I've uploaded the first beat of openMosix 2.4.26-om2 , thats the version with migSHM patched into the openMosix three.
http://www.x-tend.be/~buytaert/downloads/openmosix-2.4.26-openmosix2-pre/
migSHM is not enabled by default however. We'll be testing this release for a couple of stress tests during the next couple of days/weeks.
Feedback is appreciated. Please note that this build is based on the vanilla 2.4.26 kernel. You might run into problems with SATA based devices.
We also plan on providing RPM's with libata support available, and RPM's with MigSHM enabled.

Please send us feedback on your experiences !

Even while I`m not in Stuttgart this weekend, a couple of collegues are, I`m not missing anything from Guadec, most of the talks are being streamed from http://stream.fluendo.com/guadec/
We have at least 3 belgian speakers there .. Wim Taymans (GStreamer), Thomas Vander stichele (Flumotion) and Damien Sandras (GNOME Meeting - VoIP).. Streaming quality is superb :)

I have to thank Miguel and Wim to be the first ones to prove that my iMac is fully capable of playing realtime fullscreen video at normal speed ! :)

While working on the 2.6 testing and building I upgraded my Build environment to a Fedora Core III server.
Since the 2.4.26-om2 release wasn't building on that platform anymore I had to recreated a new old build machine with RH9.
This basically means tht 2.4.26-om2 with MighSHM is just around the corner :)

I`m slowly settling in my new home office. the paint is dry since about 5 months now , the rack is fully operational and my cluster test environment is almost up and running.
My TuxScreen is finally being used for what it was designed, making phonecalls. And my Imac has been turned into an Ubuntu machine. But I needed some new equipment , Jacke could spare me an old Cisco 2945 swich that could replacy my old 16 port 10Mb hub and another temporary 8port 100Mb switch and he also had a spare KVM.
Altough I`m used working with a 2950 on my desk at the office, having a 2945 in my rack at home is different, it makes a hell of a noise. I`m wondering if I can just pull out 3 of the 4 fans in there , anyone experience on that ?

I've also finally ordered my new HTPC machine, should be arriving next week, more fun time coming up.

At the office our Asterix Developers Kit has also arrived , so more fun time there also :0

Filip Sneppe just pointed me to TCP over WAN Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting in that document it is claimed that the three most
common causes for TCP performance problems, are
Too small TCP window size; Fast Ethernet duplex mismatch; Bad patch cable.
If those those 3 togehter really are responsible for about 80% of the TCP performance problems it's an - educated guess, going out on a limp here - that as the other 20% will be fscking dns problems we will shortly solve all the tcp/ip related network problems around. Still we'll have to solve al the UDP problems. :)))

I just got the strangest phonecall, An older woman (I guess) looking for contact information , a phonenumber of one of my old bosses (Rudy Hageman).
Apart from the fact that I used to be listed as dns contact for RealSoftware nothing could actually lead to my mobile phone number as the primary point of contact.

She first asked me if I knew him , off course , but I haven't seen the man since I left his company about 5 year ago. Then she asked if I had his phone number , but even if I had one it would have been an old one. I suggested she called 1207 to get his phonenumber telling her she should look around Edegem/Kontich since that where he lived. I know his private address but I wasn't going to give that to anyone. She then asked me If I could give her contact information for RealSoftware, I replied that since he doesn't work there anymore , she should rather try to contact him at his new company.

She was surprised that I knew all those things, to me they were general knowledge, everyone who follows our local IT economy even from a large distance knows these things. Anyway I told her the name of the new company and had a look at it's homepage while spelling it. And guess what I found in the contact section .. exactly , a mobile phone number and an address. I made a woman really really happy :) Little does she know that I now have her name, address , phonenumber

Wasted 2 minutes of my time, and had a good laugh afterwards Afterall, it probably was just a fscking DNS problem :)

But far from a complete one :(

Looking at the Linux Kernel, who doesn't know people such as Peter p2-mate De Schrijver and
Geert Compu Uytterhoeven who are both active in different area's of kerneldevelopment

Looking at webapplication frameworks we have both Drupal and Dokeos that are the most used applications in their areas.

Destkop wise we have both Gstreamer and Gnomemeeting

Clusterknoppix was made in Leuven and is the nr 1 openMosix instant Cluster CD around.

Early work on porting Java to Linux was indeed done by people that live in our country
I haven't even started mentionning all of the other Java stuff , that would probably take me at least a week to list everything :)

Last one for today is the world's favourite LDAP Gui, GQ was even menttionned by Tridge it during his LCA2005 talk .

I only spend 5 minutes writing this down .. so I really must have missed a lot of them :)
Do you know others ?