Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Over a year ago I asked Lazyweb: I wonder why nobody tried to rebuild SLES like RHEL...Yesterday .. Dag responded. It indeed seems that the community around Fedora and CentOS is much bigger than the community around openSUSE
The comment from Leo to his posting is confirming that. Luc makes an observation regarding the use of any Suse based product .. namely that people who are using it are stripping Yast from it .. sounds like something I could have said :)

Fred just pointed me to these tasty penguins I`m getting hungry

Barcamp Brussels 4 is comming

It’s decided! Barcamp Brussels #4 will take place on Saturday Dec 1st, in the mVillage business center in Schaarbeek, close to the Koninginneplein, Kruidtuin/Botanique and the Brussels North station (thanks for the help, Simon).

According to Kristof Willen I`m a ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST type of Unix Sysadmin . If you don't know why .. you'll figure it out one day.

Dag, we can't blame you for being brainwashed by IBM and still looking back at AIX tools, afterall you worked there twice already and who knows how may more times to come :)

But .. before you start to reinvent the wheel, or mksysb have a look at the following tools.
There's 2 tools that come to mind when looking at your requirements.

A tool I used a lot about 5-6 years ago is Mondo Rescue :
Mondo Rescue is a GPL disaster recovery solution. It supports Linux (i386, x86_64, ia64) and FreeBSD (i386). It's packaged for multiple distributions (RedHat, RHEL, SuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo). It supports tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware Raid.

I haven't used it for a while since my current preference off course goes to the SystemImager Framework. Apart from using it for automating installations off course you can use it to create a golden image of your running environment and restore that image any way you like, over network, from CD (with si_mkautoinstallcd) etc.

SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines.

On the other hand , if you manage your systems in an Infrastructures.org way , and you have good backups of your data. You don't need to restore a system from some media, as you will just be able to rebootstrap the failing machine in an identical way as you have been managing it and the only thing needed to do is restore your data.

PS. if you don't know what I don't want to maintain, skip the first result

The next edition of Profoss scheduled late january will tackle one of my favourite topics. Virtualization ..

Raph just posted a Call for Papers he says :
If you have deployed a Free or Open Source virtualisation technology in a demanding professional environment, if you're a services company with extended expertise with virtualisation, or if you have developed a virtualisation software under an open source license, or built a product based on open source technology, and want to share your experience with your peers, please don't hesitate to submit your proposals.

Henning Sprang seems to have a different view on the concept of a Vendor LockIn than I do

On his blog The daily laziness: OpenQRM vs. vendor lock in??? , he describes how openQRM Locks into using .. openQRM.

Well, not really .. at least not in my opinion, although openQRM still has a long way to go and the proposals for a meaner and leaner Henning gives are certainly valid,

openQRM however does not force you to do anything you don't like. The source is available and free, you can modify its behaviour , you yourselve can spend time on in, learn and modify the platform no one .
(given the complexity I agree you won't dive into it in just 5 minutes but you nothing (b)locks you)

Certainly in the virtualization field openQRM gives you the freedom to migrate your machines from one virtualization technology to another, Today VMWare, tomorrow KVM, the week after Xen
or all 3 or them from one management console (can come handy after a merger) all with the same interface. None of the commercial products out there will even think about giving you a GUI to manage their competition.

On top of that when you go out and buy VMWare , you can only manage VMWare instances and you get a framework that will also force you to work in a way you can't change. You have only one company to talk to, VMWare, (maybe via its integrators but they can't fix issues , they don't have the source) with openQRM you can hire other people besides Qlusters , you can change to another organisation to support you.

Try that with VMWare , I fear you are Locked In

For your viewing pleasure
Tech Humor and Tech Talk

So just when last weekend I started asking for a LinkedIn API , then ran into the Facebook API I ignored Google's OpenSocial announement.

And guess what .. the start for the OpenSocial Drupal is already there.. now when will the code show up ? :)

I wonder if I shouldn't totally switch careers and become an industry analyzer. Traveling to all the nice places , getting invited to all interesting parties just by predicting
what will happen in the future. And all that offcourse for a big fat paycheck

It's not like this is my first prediction coming true