Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Tim just explained that Easynet is suffering from a routing loop. Causing dns.be to be unreachable for some folks. So sometimes the cause is not a dns problem, only the result is :)

So while shopping for a new Timesheet application, last month we tried to use eHour. We tried, and have already stopped our evaluation.

Our requirements are pretty simple. A bunch of consultants need to be able to book their time on different projects. We need to be able to print out these timesheets for a customer to be able to sign and our financial department needs to be able to print invoices based on the time we spend for the different customers.

Apart from a rather itchy user interface, a really non straightforward way to add projects or even try to modify them it were mainly
little annoyancies such as not being able to print a timesheet if you only have 1 project you worked on that month, made us look again for alternatives.

Then we ran into this posting on the eHour blog. eHour indeed had fixed some of the annoyancies we had but decided to close their source again. Right end of story for us there.

So rather than being able to help out and contribute to a better product, we are now once again in the market to try our next Open Source timesheet app.

Over at CNet , Matt Assay found out about SimpleTicket.

SimpleTicket was developed by Architel in 2005 for internal use. We looked at Heat, Remedy and hosted solutions like Parature, but most of them were too complicated and expensive for our needs. Next we looked at lowend solutions like Intuit?s TrackIt and found it lacking in several ways. We needed a simple to use system that was flexible enough for us to add features on the fly. We decided to build it ourselves. SimpleTicket was the result....

So I don't know the guys over at Architel and I can't comment on their background or their real experience, so I`m a bit abusing this case as a worst case scenario.
But when I read something like that I wonder. Why didn't those people look at the existing Open Source alternatives in the first place ? I think we have been using OTRS since before 2003 (don't know the exact year) and there are other alternatives out there such as RT. And even if you don't like the features or you need some more.. that's wha open source is all about .. you should improve the product , add the functionality you need and contribute it back to the community.

When I read a n article like the one above to me it translates as Back in 2005 we were idiots not knowing about the whole other software world that was called Open Source, we were shopping
for a (proprietary) ticketing system and we couldn't find one that had a correct price tag. We decided to build ourselves, SimpleTicket was the restult.
Now 2 years later we realise that a ticketing system is not our core business and we decided to Open Source it. Doing so will not only free our time as we don't need to develop it ourselve anymore but it will also give us visibility on the market
I exaggerate a bit .. and while SimpleTicket might not be like this others are.. and it's just not the way opensource works.

I see too much people reinventing the wheel these days... maybe if we could all have a look at what's out there first, improve on that so we can use the time we have available to build something that really needs to be build ?

Like a good multilayer calendaring solution. Or a working Timesheet application ?

Dunno if the term is new.. or who coined it .. but Matt just used it

Build once, Charge everywhere

Hate the concept .. love the terminology .. makes it pretty clear for the abused people.

fine DNS problem
Actually not Alfreso but 123-reg

Tarry has an overview of the commentaries about Oracles latest Virtualisation announcement.

Two things hit my brainwaves, First ,seemingly Larry is claiming that his Xen package is better than
the others since he supports Live Migration and all the others don't. I don't know where he gets the idea.. I have to admit I don't remember which year it was .. but it was somewhere in december that I first starting with Live Migratiion of Xen machines and it was also on a CentOS platform. No fancy gui, no hardcover manuals that had it all documented. But fast and seamlessly working live migration, ready for everybody to use.

Second one is he claming that since Xen was re-engineered by Oracle to be faster than the competition.
The way you read it there is that Oracle took Xen, modified it then started redistributing it.
Is that really what happened ? Are they redistributing the source, or are they violating the GPL ? Coz if they are
redistributing the source everybody just got a faster Xen and if they aren't ..
I don't know but there sure is room for rumour here. Or is this just a bunch of marketing people and IT journalist that are mispresenting the facts. Fact is that one needs to spend lots of time verifying the facts of stories one read on the internet today.

I`m also seeing people crying that Oracle is finally stepping to the open source side.. .. I`m wondering on which planet they have been living.. Oracle has been supporting different Open Source products for ages already and they even are the owners of core components of typical daily used packages, so where do those authors get the idea that Oracle is finally stepping over ?

Tonight I don't have time to go and hunt back the original sources and see who actually said what . Honestly I don't care that much about Unbreakable, Last time I tried caring was when one of my european customers was interested in it, and no one at Oracle.be could help me . It's Like Dell shipping Ubuntu.. not on this part of the world.. and sadly it's also like the OLPC .. Give one Get one only on the other side of the Ocean.

It's all good marketing .. until you actually want to get it .. :(

Just give me the source code .. then I don't have to sit trough presentations from marketing people that can only read from spec sheets for some product , but fail to read the fine print and leave me disappointed again ...

As a Drupal newbie I`m wondering about the new user creation process.

Is it just me or is there a part missing int he admin/user/settings form. When you as an admin require users to be approved first. Don't you want the user to recieve multiple mails. One when he registered, telling him that he is awaiting approval/.
Then one when you approved his membership giving him the details on how to log on to the site ? (Or a another one telling him he wasn't approved)

Or am I looking in the wrong places for this feature ?

I see the mail form that will send out a mail that the user iss awaiting approval. But I can't find a template that is being sent upon approval. Neither can I see a mail departing from my system.
I find it a bit weird to send out userinformation to a user that doesn't end up to be a user afterall.

Beste Frank

Too bad you spend some unneeded money.. what you should have done is build yourselve a nice MythTV box.
Has all the features you list.. and doesn't need a subscription .

John Quinn writes about Scaling Drupal he is taking a one step at a time approach and is still writing his 4th and 5 stages.

His first step obviously is separating the drupal from a separate database server, and he chooses mysql for this purpose, moving your DB to a different machine is a good thing to do.

However then he gets this crazy idea of using NFS to share his his drupal shared files :(
(he even dares to mention that the setup ease is good) Folks, we abandonned NFS in the late nineties. NFS is still a recipe for disaster, it has performance issues , it as stability issues (stale locks), and no security admin in his right mind will tolerate portmap to be running in his DMZ.
(Also think about the IO path that one has to follow to serve a static file to a surfer when the file is stored on a remote NFS volume)

On top of that he adds complexity in a phase where it isn't needed yet. Because of the fact he needs to manage and secure NFS and he is storing his critical files on the other side of the ethernet cable he did create a single point of failure he didn't need creating yet.
Yes as soon as you start to scale you need to look at a scalable and redundant way to share your files.
When those files are pretty static you'll start out with a set of rsync scripts or scripts that push them to different servers upon deploying your application. When they are changing often you start looking into filesystems or block devices that bring you replication, such as DRBD or Lustre
But if today his NFS server goes down he is screwed, much harder than when his database has a hickup.

One could discuss the order of scaling, but adding more webservers might not always be the first step to take, one might want to tackle the database first depending on the application.
He decides to share the load of his application over multiple Drupal instances using apache mod_proxy , then adds Linux-HA to make it highly available.
I`m interested in knowing why he chose for apache mod_proxy and not for LVS

Although using NFS for me belongs in a How NOT to scale tutorial, his other steps give you a good idea of the steps to take.

I`m looking forward to his next steps :) I hope that in part 4 he also removes NFS in favour of a solution with no performance and locking issues that really takes away a big fat single point of failure. In part 5 he discusses how to scale your database environment. The actual order of implementing step 2 and 5 will be different for each setup.

Anyway.. I`m following up on his next steps.. interesting reading

Yesterday during some presentation I got quite frustrated with the screensaver that constantly started fading out the screen even after only 30 seconds of non activity Why doesn't OO.org just disable the screensaver while in presentation mode .. or should I look harder for that option ?