Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Barcamp Gent 3, the one that took place yesterday is probably going to be my last Barcamp in Belgium. I already had my doubts upfront when looking at the suggested talks, but once there I realized it was much worse than I expected.

Lemme repoint you folks to what I wrote about the first Barcamp in Belgium back in 2006

Maybe my expectations on what kind of people / talks to meet and see there were a bit wrong.. when looking at other barcamps where people such as whurley and Moshe were present, I was maybe hoping for a bit more of system level innovation etc. or at least more technology innovation rather than Bloggers meet and talk about Blogging tools. I wasn't sure on what I should talk about as most of the topics I usually speak about would have been so out of scope and probably wouldn't have reached any potientiel audience.

So for 3+ years I kept hoping for change, there's always an amount of interesting people that show up that make the day interesting, but yesterday there were timeslots with no relevant topics for me at all. Don't get me wrong ... I really liked Ine's presentation preparing to travel and work for a year, but that's not why I go to Barcamp. Maybe it was because people that normally wouldn't give a presentation were forced to give a presentation and came up with these kind of topics, or maybe it's because Barcamps have changed, luckily there were different other talks tackling the Semantic Web, Hackerspaces etc that did catch my attention.

But maybe the majority of Belgian Barcampers needs to realize that what they want is not a Barcamp but TwitCamp, Blogcamp or maybe even LifeCamp, For me topics such as Pension Plans, Makeup, Beer, Travel Advice, etc don't belong on a Barcamp. I`m not part or the Belgian Twitter and Bloggers community, I`m part the Belgian Tech community, blogging on Open Source and new technologies . But when someone tells me "Hey there the Paris Hilton of the Belgian Bloggers" my reaction is ,wtf is Paris Hilton and why should I care

The best talk of Barcamp this year was a talk titled "Where are my Keys" , Elise was running around with a problem, and a partial solution, the discussion and input during that talk could have lead to actuall building something and nferis nferis
I'm not alone with this opinion, Some people already gave their opinion about the Belgian Barcamps buy just not showing up anymore ... and in other parts of the world other barcamps seem to have the same problems.

Barcamp has had his different spinoffs. There's GovCamp, MobileCamps, CaseCamp, NoSQLCamp, SQLCamp, CloudCamp, DemoCamp, LAMPCamp , WordCamps, DrupalCamps and many more ... and you'll probably bump into me on the more specialized ones .. given enough Android topics you'll see me at a MobileCamp, you'll see me at LoadAys (a new conf on Linux and Open Source Administration topics), DevopsDays . I hope to be able to go to the new and upcoming Hackerspaces a bit more

Unless the next Barcamp heads back in another direction :)

But until then...so long thnx for al the fish

Too bad the majority of the audience already knew what I was a bout to say ....

Lots of people writing about Snorkle again today ,Monty Says, help saving MySQL

He gives us different options, a , b or c .. but I , and some others, want an option d

No I don't trust Oracle, it's not like they have been a very good Open Source Citizen, yes they contribute to the kernel and other projects but my feeling says it's only because they have to (Kernel, Xen and others ) not because they Want to (thinking about Unfakable etc) , if they would really want to they probably would work with the CentOS community more etc, and as Monty mentions their InnoDB track record could be better.

But on the other hand I don't think the EU should block the deal because Monty wants his baby back , cheap , as honestly imvho that's what they really want, be able to buy MySQL back for a nice price, either beceause Oracle is being forced by the EU to split up Sun, or eventually the deal doesn't come trough and they can buy MySQL back when Sun really goes belly up (which is what probably happens when option a) is chosen.

According to CNN , Oracle has made some pledges about MySQL earlier today.
My main question there however is about the Opposite of option 5. which is exactly what created the problem.

5. Support not mandatory. Customers will not be required to purchase support services from Oracle as a condition to obtaining a commercial license to MySQL.

Yes we want support, but no we don't want a commercial license with it, we want support on the GPL version, which is a problem lots of Open Source vendors struggle with , some of them
force people wanting to buy support to go for the commercial license. And it is exaclty that upselling that got MySQL in the troubles it has today .

Josh Berkus has a point declaring
Dual Licensing dead, just as I he sees much more future in the Percona like model than in the Dual License model MySQL used to have ..

Dries points to one of the comments on
Lukas Kahwe Smith 's Come On Money er Monty article stating
Monty walks away with several millions in hard cash, while [PHP +] MySQL cheerleaders who bet on "MySQL" franchise only walk away with a cute dolphin T-shirt

Which makes me wonder when I`ll be getting a nice Acquia T-shirt :)

The 10th edition of Fosdem is getting closer, yes .. I said 10 ,10 decimal that means ten, not two :)

It's kinda hard to imagine that this is actually going to be my 10th fosdem , it feels weird ..

Anyhow.. Lenz just announced a call for participation for the MySQL and Friends devroom.

I`m guessing a talk on .LolSQL might be a good fit for the "and Friends" part.

58 days to Fosdem ... !

So you have this libvirt setup and you want to have a dhcp server on the virtual machines you are playing with , or you want to have all static IP's.

Libvirt uses dnsmasq to provide dhcp services etc and when you generate a config from the gui it will look like

<network>
  <name>piponet</name>
  <uuid>e87d3bf1-a2e7-96ca-e131-7ae51ac033f9</uuid>
  <bridge name='virbr2' stp='on' delay='0' />
  <ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
    <dhcp>
      <range start='192.168.100.128' end='192.168.100.254' />
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

<network>
  <name>piponet</name>
  <uuid>e87d3bf1-a2e7-96ca-e131-7ae51ac033f9</uuid>
  <bridge name='virbr2' stp='on' delay='0' />
  <ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
     </ip>
</network>

As posted earlier Packt was so kind to send me their Drupal 6 , Social Networking for review.

My hopes were high, I was hoping for some info on how to integrate with different existing networks, content about existing frameworks, maybe some mentioning of openAtrium or so, or integrating with Twitter or other existing platforms.

Sadly the book only briefly touches similar content, the Google API , in Chapter 7

While a good read, and a good introduction to Drupal for new users I didn't learn anything till chapter 7 and anything after Chapter 7 ;( And I don't consider myselve as a Drupal Expert

So would I advise the book to anyone, it depends, on who's asking. Personally I'd title the book different, it's a good introduction to Drupal with guidelines on getting userinteraction on your site, but to call that a Social network .. no....

I'd advise the book to an enduser new at Drupal, not to a developer with experience in other frameworks, or even Drupal

After what google announced today it's pretty clear who to blame as of now, no it's not Dim0 anymore,, it's not a Freaking DNS Problem anymore its just plain old google.

Yep Google announced they will be providing a public open DNS server . So rather than claiming that Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem, now everything is a Freaking Google Problem.

Google tracking which sites you visits while not using earch, it's a DNS Problem , Google tracking different Google Profiles you have and matching them together indeed, another Fine DNS Proble, Google tracking what different users are working the same computer and mapping them it's a DNS Problem,

Face it.. there is no need for a Porn mode in your browser anymore, google will be able to log every query you make .

And serve you adds cross profile ..

So the best DNS servers to use as of now are located at 127.0.0.1

I have a confession to make, I`m a Fedora user, have been since before it existed , I remember running RedHat 4.2 on my Multia and I`m pretty sur that wasn't my first RedHat install

I`m running Fedora on my laptop and corporate desktop for the simple reason that it will provide me with a preview of what CentOS might look like in the future.

So when my inbox started to show invites of a Fedora 12 release party at walking distance from my home , I replied I'd join the party afer I had put the kids to bed.

Saturday came and I realized that given the short distance to the events place it might be a good idea to get the good old RedHat bike from the garage and check it's tires. Just after I had put Margot to bed the crowd already wondered where I stayed.

I grabbed my Fedora and jumped on my bike, only to realize it's lights weren't working :( The only remaining option was to drive by car. A full 3 minutes later I was at the venue.

.Apparently nobody in the audience had seen a real Fedora before as Bert promplty stopped his presentation.

After the presentation we tried to create an OpenSpace and started introducing ourselves, we used the Fedora as a talking stick, on a regular day my Big Tux wears the Fedora, but apparently our cats had been playing with it a bit too much ... :)

More reports from Vincent, Tosh and Bert

Oh, and I`m a Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS user too :)

Serge pinged me today over Jabber asking hot to tackle an accidental typo in the serial number of a zonefile.

dig +short SOA ibbt.be
dns1.ibbt.be. admin.ibbt.be. 2009141017 7200 3600 1209600 432000

Serge then looked some further and found this article which documents a nice solution for a quick fix of the problem

First, add 2147483647 to the erroneous value, for example, 2008022800 + 2147483647 = 4155506447, restart BIND or reload the zone, and make absolutely sure the zone has transferred to all the slave servers. Second, set the SOA serial number for the zone to the correct value and restart BIND or reload the zone again. The zone will transfer to the slave because the serial number has wrapped through zero and is therefore greater that the previous value of 4155506447!

Oh and the twitter hashtag is #dnsproblem fwiw :)

No I did NOT post the following comment

This is ridiculous. You didn't test MySQL, you tested a failing DNS lookup on authentication.

resulting in the follow up post :

My previous post Redis, Memcache, Tokyp Tyrant, MySQL comparison had a flaw as pointed out by this comment. The MySQL was taking a huge time for doing a reverse DNS lookup.

But as always ... Everything is just a Freaking dns problem :)