Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I'm expecting different people not using Dopplr to come back to me next week and tell me they were in Denmark also , as Copenhagen is the place to be this week(end)

I was late for the first talk on how to automate a large scale school environment with gentoo. So I missed the rationale for the development of DIPO, and I didn't want to bother the speaker with questions he had already explained in his earlier slides, however .. it spelled "reinventing the wheel" all over again.

The second speaker apologised for being late on schedule as the first speaker had to compile everything. Nigel Kersten from from Google talked about Puppet, need I say more.. it was great :)

So lunch is really really early here as from 11u30 on , however I didn't mind as I was up since 5 , so I actually was pretty hungry :)

After lunch 3 talks and a Keynote were scheduled. In order not to be late for my own talk I headed into the Open Solaris Storage talk ... , not really interesting :(

Funny quote from the talk however "The clients are still Linux, but the server is already solaris"...funny thing to say ... certainly for a dying breed.

My own talk was fairly well attended, people were sitting on the stairs in the Auditorium and there was a lot of Q&A after.

As said in my talk last week in Zurich I don't think
Sun has a really clear message with what they are doing with xVM etc
So the talk aftermine should have cleared that out shouldn't it.
Well it didn't , all I got back from it was .. "We ported Xen to Solaris" , and "Our demo doesn't work because of a funky dns problem."

So Robin Rowe is keynoting about about Linux at the Movies.. and tonight it's off to the Social event .. well one of them :)

Seth is having the same problems I have, sharing your calendar with different groups of people. Where some of these groups have their own system in place already.

Only he has a partial solution for it.

I'm looking for a step further.. it could probably be called Calendar Delegation.
I kind of would like to have 1 calendar that I manage and based on from where you see that calendar you get detailed information or just free busy. So my favorite customer would see if I`m at their office or not
and if I`m having meetings at their office, however whem I`m not at their office they would just see a busy.

My collegues should however be able to see that I`m at a customer but not having any meetings there.

And I should only have to manage everything in one place while for my customers they should just be able to see it in their calendar solution flavor of the week.

A man can dream right ? :)

As mentioned earlier , Packt sent me their Zenos Core Network and Systems Monitoring by Michael Badger to review.

So I spend the past couple of weeks trying to crawl my way trough it. Not that there was any problem with the book, more with my schedule :) I was hoping to finish it some time ago but time was working against me, even last week when my flight back from Zurich was a bit shorter than planned I couldn't finish reading the book.

But yesterday I managed, Michael managed to write a good book on a hot topic during what was probably one of the most busy of his life.

In 8 chapters Michael manages to explain the different aspects of Zenoss fairly well, he even touches the creation of ZenPacks and extending Zenoss in general also.

It was a fairly good read and showed me a couple of new insights into Zenoss.

However although Zenoss is heavily SNMP based there is little information on SNMP in general and MIB more in detail ? People really new to systems monitoring might want to have a couple of more pages on these topics.

For those not familiar to Zope the mentioning of TALES expressions might also raise some eyebrows, luckily there has been a full Appendix dedicated to it.

Time permitting I would have hoped he could of gone a bit more in detail on creating a ZenPack that did a bit more than checking the status of a page. Looking into the status of an Apache or MySQL or other relevant daemon , or the Squid internal statistics

But if you are new to Zenoss and you want to have a quick headstart into monitoring your infrastructure with it this book is a really really good start.

There's a free preview Chapter at Scribd.com and also at Packt

I misplaced my notes, but I must say that day 2 of the openExpo was pretty interresting.. some talks that when first looking at them weren't that interresting turned out to be extremely timely.

I however got a couple of nice pictures from the container that Harald already mentioned

Tarry pointed us to an article questioning if the internet is ready for cloud computing.

The short summary,
the biggest challenge is DNS.

Is DNS going to be secure enough, scalable enough etc.

Don't say I didn't warn you .. "Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem !"

Yesterday apart from Free Beer, the social event also featured a couple of 5 minute lightning talks.
Tobias Oetiker took the first slot, his 5 minute talk was incredible. In 5 minutes he went trough 80 something slides , really remined me of the St Peter talk about Jabber and Security a couple of years ago at Fosdem. I after 2 talks I realised that I could strip down my OLS openQRM talk and give it in 5 minutes too .. so I did :) Awesome.. 5 minutes is really really really short :)
But I managed .. I even got questions at the end :)

Definitely a good concept to let people decide on giving a talk at such a short notice :)

Everybody is in Zwitserland these days .. even the Userfriendly crowd , so am I :)

I'm in Winterthur for the OpenExpo Zurich, a less eventfull flight than my last conference trip brought me to my hotell where I crashed and after a short walk to the conference site I managed to catcht the last part of Bruce Perens talk

He talked about Spies using Open Source, he talked about Casinos in
Vegas wanting interoperability and asking him for help.

Bummer the Mozilla talk was in German, so I left ..

Altough asked to give the Open Source in the Telco industry talk in English it was in German too .I tried to follow ..failed .. to bad as most of the work I do is in the Telco industry .

Enrico Zini talked about Debian Diveristy and the clear conclusion is that
Debian people are weirdos :) Some of them insist in wearing Kilts a bit more thatn the average male on this planet. Some of them meet their wife at Debian Conferencesm others go to debconf on honeymoon.. they go on holiday to space..
start contributing less, build their own meta distro and take away a lot of the less experienced people, which was a good thing.

After Enrico Max Spevack took the floor to talk about Fedora, he was the second in line to apologise for not doing his talk in German. Weird..
I'm in doubt in which language I'll give mine . Dutch of French .
There are significantly less people in this talk compared to the Debian talk

No real info on the recent security hickup however, I got a Fedora T-Shirt for asking though :)

So earlier this week I ran into the weirdest problem with Linux-HA. Heartbeat was happily adding an IP address as an active resource so one of my nodes when needed, but upon removal it failed to remove the IP from the stack. Further debugging learned that the Heartbeat scripts claimed the ip wasn't on the actual stack.

It was.. but it the output from ifconfig was different from what it expected it to be.

Heartbeat checks the output of ifconfig and expects to find the IP address it added itselve to be on a :0 or similar interface. Now ifconfig only seems output 8 characters for the interface name Which means that when you have an interface called eth0:0 the output perfectly lists it and heartbea
t is smart enough to remove the ip again when the node goes to standby. If however you have a vlan with 3 digits on a bond interface Heartbeat will add :0 to bond0.129 , the Heartbeat resource will add the ip address perfectly but opon checking all the :0 interfaces the bond0.129:0 interface won't be parsed as ifconfig outputs it as bond0.129 , hence resulting in a potential painfull situation where 2 nodes still share an IP address.

So where's the actual problem ifconfig, or heartbeat, I'd say both, but the easiest fix will be in Heartbeat, afterall there are other preferred ways of adding an ip addres to an interface. ip addr add comes to mind :)

So I filed a bug report :)

Tarus is happy not to have VC's on his back. He doesn't want to be responsible for turning a 15 Milj investment into a 150 Milj cashout. Others chose to go that way.

Back when he wrote the article the chances were small that he already knew that Qlusters was going to be shut down with still sooo much money in the bank, but the VC's wanted it back.

So how do open source companies plan on making those tenfold roi reality.
Apart from selling out to a bigger company I think thats a very difficult task.
Especially when you keep in mind how to manage both the Open Source community and your customers. The figures he mentions that VC's require surely start pushing vendors into violating Fabrizio Capobianco rules.

Now the story changes when indeed you cn go to a model where you are selling a large scalable service to your customers, even with microsized payments it becomes a possibility, but that's a totally different business model from what e.g. the Open source systems management shops are doing .

So will the Zenoss, Hyperics or the Groundworks of this world survive the demands of their VC

Luckily these projects are Open Source, so when the company dissapears, the project can continue, and grow even better. Like openQRM did

The past couple of weeks my blog is being annoyed by different comment spams, the content of the comment seems perfectly relevant, often even correctly tackling the topic, or sometimes even almost insightful follow up questions.

However the link to the author site is totally bogus.

If talking about drupal and high availability , a question on GFS or OCFS2 is obviously on topic. However I don't want my blog to link to lot of irrelevant sites.

On the other hand I can't tell Mollom the content of the article is crap. I do want to tell Mollom the "author" of the comment is crap. I even might want to have the comment visible but not link back to the author.

Anyone got good ideas on that ?