Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Ostatic interviews my good friend Matt Rechenburg of openQRM fame

There is one part however where I think we need to elaborate ..
In the Question about the closest alternatives Matt replies "There are some projects like Virtual Iron and Zenoss which are focusing on the same tasks as openQRM. Now I have to disagree about Zenoss being in the same area as openQRM , But Zenoss.. totally different product , not even remotely close to what openQRM does. Zenoss is a competitor to Nagios, HypericHQ , Zabbix etc. You could have an Zenoss plugin in openQRM , just as you can have a Nagios or Hyperic HQ plugin for it . We have presented about these different technologies earlier this year at OLS. And you can still vote for your favorite tool.

Competition for openQRM to me is Enomalism, openNebula, Eucalyptus , with that difference that they don't do Physcial machines.
All of the Enomalsm, Nimbus , openNebula, OS Circular etc projects are focussing on managing Virtual Machines deploying them over the network . with that difference that they have or support an API to talk to and they are al rebranding to the overhyped Cloud terminology. They are all focussing on just a subset of wat openQRM is doing and that's where openQRM has the edge.. OpenQRM does more than just one type of Virtualization and it does more than just virtual machines. Because of the fact that it supports more than 1 Virtualization platform it also comes with a complementary P2V and V2V migration toolkit. Apart from that it integrates (Virtual) Machine Management with other tools and gives you a dashboard to work from .

The 451 group has some more insights about the growth of openQRM since Qlusters set it free , seems like both the downloads and the traffic for at SF.net since the changes are up. Obviously the community likes the new openQRM approach, and so do I ;)

JP just wrote in to let me know that the T-Dose 2008 CFP has been extended. So there is still time to send in your abstracts

Oh right .. I was expecting to much from you folks.

So lemme translate, Jean-Paul Saman, one of the T-Dose organizers, wrote me this morning to let the world know that he is still accepting proposals for talks at T-Dose , The Technical Dutch Open Source Event which will take place on 25 and 26 October 2008 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

Zennoss has announced the entries for their zenpack contest . What strikes me is that there is not a single entry that plans on monitoring Xen, KVM, VirtualBox or any of the other Open Source virtualization technologies .. Not in the contest entries and not in the existing community packs .

This sounds like a big opportunity to me :)

No really it isn't but so isn't AppArmor, altough Russel claims it is. Weird how he totally rewords the OpenSuse statements

From "While our customer experience shows that AppArmor is the best solution for the vast majority of users, applications, and use cases, we want to give all of our users the ability to choose the security framework that’s appropriate for their respective environments and needs. We continue to enable AppArmor as our default Host Intrusion Prevention System......"

To "The next step will be to make SE Linux the default and AppArmor the one that exists in a repository, and the step after that will be to remove AppArmor."

Given Ubuntu's AppArmor adoption I don't see it die that fast ...

The real problem is who uses AppArmor or SELinux, sadly most of the installations I run into have none of both technologies enabled. Most Admins overrule their favourite distro's default config. The reason is pretty obvious as I've heard a lot of intelligent people say "Life Is Too short For SELinux"

So I wonder, how can you die if you never were really alive ?

In a lot of environments.

Peter gives a nice overview why you don't always need to invest in big fat redundant hardware.

We've tackled the topic last year already ..

Now I often get weird looks when I dare to mention that Raid is obsolete ..people fail to hear the "in a lot of environments"

Obviously the catch is in the second part, you won't be doing this for your small shop around the corner with just one machine. You'll only be doing this in an environment where you can work with a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Not with a server that has to sit in a remote and isolated location.

Next to that there are situations where you will be using raid, but not for redundancy, but for disk throughput.

Over at OReilly GMT I listed lots of upcoming European conferences .. lots of interresting ones but I can't go to all of them .. well not till someone starts paying me for that ;)

So I won't go to Drupalcon , and Tom will be presenting at the Nagios Conference

I will however be talking about Open Source Virtualization at OpenExpo in Zurich , and one week later at OpenDays in Copenhagen. The talk will be based on my series of Articles on the History and Future of Open Source virtualization earlier this year at Virtualization.com

Given that those 2 conferences are week after week and LinuxKongress Hamburg being exactly a week later , this year will be the first since many that I'll have to miss LinuxKongress. I had a topic in mind, but time just didn't allow me.

T-Dose is also on my list and there is some talk about an upcoming CloudCamp in Berlin , but no final plans there yet.

While playing with unixbench there was a small note that you need /usr/bin/time ,
As my system by default didn't have /usr/bin/time I assumed it was ok to modify the script and just let it run time . My First run came up with a 0 score.
Bad idea .. so it seems you really meed /usr/bin/time which is in the time rpm.

One day I`ll figure out the small differences :)

Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.

Lots of other companies are innovating on top of Open Source, they are using the LAMP stack or just Linux as an OS to build their products on they need the stability and the features an Open Source stack provides them with and only in this way they can deliver their customers with a stable and cost effective platform. Lots of these companies contribute back to the open source community (sadly some don't ..yet) .

But at the end of the day there is much more money involved in the Opensource world than the money the Open Source product vendors like RedHat, Alfresco, Zimbra, Zenoss and are getting from selling their products.

And that's what counts !!

You obviously know these viral marketing schemes, where you create a social network that will try to establish a brand via referrals and other people discussing it.
A brand will become more popular because lots of people will be pointing to the new products or features.

Microsoft also seems to have figured out this method. They demoed one of the most interesting features of their product at the Olympics

And according to Matt it seems like the FrankFurt airport also is showing off this feature. Obviously this isn't the first time this virus pops up but it seems to become popular again

:))

Bart, this is not a poor man's ntp. This is a stupid man's Unix management :)

Do you plan on running that script from cron each day ? Or do you plan on eventually configuring ntp for the boxen ?

Your poor man's configuration management solution would be to use a tool such as dssh or Cluster SSH

However what you really want to do is look into a tool like Puppet and instruct puppet to "Configure NTP on host X-Y-Z"

There's a great article from chromatic about Puppet and Luke over at O'Reilly, you might want to check it out .