Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

In case you hadn't noticed.. the previous post was an Aprils Fool joke ..

We had a good laugh at different people actually believing that we planned on rebranding to Pinuits, but we'll stay Inuits , But maybe next year we'll rebrand to Linuits :)

So the cat is out of the bag,

As of today Inuits is rebranding to Pinuits,
The press release is here

We've had good feedback on the new name so far. Different people told me the name matched better to what we are doing . Actually my wife thinks our new name is much better as at least the Pin in Pinuits refers to our favourite Tux again ..

Finding an appropriate name for an Open Source consultancy company, with focus on Linux, Open Source Monitoring, MySQL, Open Source Virtualization , Large Scale Deployments , High Availability and Drupal, isn't easy .. you want to show both community involvement and professionality. And find a domain that's still available.

I've updated the slidedeck of my Open Source Virtualization talk, with the 2009 edition as I gave it last week at the UKUUG Spring conference.

Talk is up, both on my page as on SlideShare

Tom also updated our set of Open Source Monitoring Tool Shootout slides .
They are also on SlideShare

Last week the UKUUG Spring , Large Scale Infrastructure conference took place in London,

Altough only 1 track was scheduled, the content was very good, some talks were a bit short, others were a bit too long. And luckily the talks that didn't really bring me new content were entertaining :) Also the after conf chatter in the pub across the street was so much fun we almost failed to catch our plane back to Antwerp.

However lots of people wondered where the real action is going. Not sure but maybe the fact that ApacheCon was scheduled around the same time might have pulled some people to Amsterdam. Truth is that there is a need for a real Unix Sysadmin conference on mainland Europe, sure we got Fosdem and different local Open Source events, but there isn't any focus on the sysadmin part of the job, or rather the devministration part , the large scale part, the automating part etc.

There is the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC) which looks interresting, but won't attrackt an international crowd as sadly a big part of the talks are in German , but it also
seems Sane hopes to be back in 2009 , so maybe there is some hope ..

There are a lot of great Open Source conferences out there, some of them organized by volunteers, some of them oranized by user groups, some by commecial entities, but none of them is so open as the last DrupalCon,

In all its awesomeness the DrupalCon DC organization actually
published it's internal financial details for everybody to view.

Try beating that :)

Oh and while we are talking about conferences .. Fosdem has a YouTube channel with a lot of recorded fosdem talks available.

I`ll be heading to bed early today as tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get up early to catch my flight to London where
Tom and I will be representing Inuits at the UKUUG 2009 Spring Conference.

Tom will be giving an updated version of our Open Source Monitoring Shootout talk again, I`ll probably be skipping a couple of his slides as right after that Jane Curry will be covering Zenoss in depth and on thursday there will be an OpenNMS talk too.

On Thursday I will be giving another session of my Open Source Virtualization overview talk .. and I also plan on skipping slides and referring to the next speaker, as Matt will be giving an openQRM talk right after me :)

See you there !

Alexandre urges us too microblog on Identica rather than on Twitter

As an opensource evangelist I probably should do so .. Crossposting from Identi.ca to Twitter works... but there is one big thing that's blocking me to do this by default and that's a bug in microblog-purple which currently blocks me from using Identi.ca in Pidgin. Which is what I use to Tweet ..

As afteral .. Twitter is nothing more than world wide searchable irc , isn't it ? And I want them all from 1 interface, irc, jabber, twitter, ...

I`m also wondering about how to mix following people on Twitter ,and replying to them via Laconi.ca and the fact that I`ll still need to have follow twitter feeds..

Late last year Packt send me yet another book to review
the The Learning Nagios 3 book, a bit more in my field of expertise than the Drupal Multimedia one which I also appreciated,
I already posted I wasn't going to have time to review it before Fosdem but I finally managed.
Having used Nagios on and of for the better part of the decade but not really having touched ground with Nagios 3 yet I had mixed feelings, generally the book gives a good beginner targeted overview of Nagios, with the usual What is, installing and getting started chapters.

Although not having used Nagios 3 yet in production the book didn't really point me out to the different new features which is what I'd expect in a Nagios 3 book.. or I must have overlooked them.

However when you are new to Nagios, I can imagine this is a good read, you'll get a good overview of the different possibilities of Nagios together with hints towards using Passive Checks, using NRPE and even SNMP.

Typo's on the backcover aside I probably would recommend this book to someone who never looked at Nag
ios and wants something in print, but I wouldn't point the experienced Nagios user to it... there are other more in depth works around. But as the title "Learning Nagios" states that wasn't the goal of the book and to get started with Nagios .. it does a good Job !

After CloudCamp London , having approx 5-600 visitors according to certain blog posts

One of the next up is line is CloudCamp Antwerp , I`m pretty sure there won't be 500-600 showing up at the Zoo to watch the penguins , great location ...

For those of you travelling from abroad, note that London City Airport is less than an hour from Antwerp , so no excuses there.. that and we have much better beer !

I hope to meet you folks there !

Last Friday that's march 13th, Gizmodo wanted us to celebrated the 15th birthday of Linux. Kinda weird... as about 15 years ago I was already using Linux ....

Fact is that the 1.0 release of Linux just had it's 15th birthday , but Linux itself is heading towards its 18th in september.

Getting old ..both of us :)

So when trying to catch up on my Linux Journal reading I ran into the 15 years of Linux Journal article, which makes a lot more sense than 15 year of Linux.

The fun part being Shawn's adapted Bio

In 1994, Shawn was attending his first year of college at Michigan Tech University. He skipped his engineering classes almost every day to sneak into the computer labs and play with Linux. At the time it seemed a waste of tuition, but looking back, he wouldn't change a thing.

Now pipe that trough s/Shawn/Kris/g and s/college at Michigan Tech University/KULeuven/g .. simlar story there ...

My LJ subscription is up for renewal... not sure what I`m going to do .. I haven't been reading it from front to back anymore as I used to, I`m usually running 3-4 issues behind on reading .. And by that time I can read everything online anyhow...