Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Apparently I don't understand french :(

Copied from my inbox ...

From: 	Info Falstaff <info@lefalstaff.be>
To: 	'Kris Buytaert' <Kris.Buytaert@youalreadyknowmyaddy.be>
Subject: 	RE: Reservation Next Friday 4/2/2011
Date: 	Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:55:45 +0100
 
je confirme votre  reservation pour le vendredi 04 02 2011
 
vous trouverez ci-joint nos differentes formules
 
bien à vous
 
guy Lommen chef de cuisine

I admit .. I`m lazy ... unlike last year I did not organize MySQL and Friends meetup at Fosdem.

I outsourced it to Kenny

More info and registration here

Lenz gave the good example so I`ll follow :)

Next weekend saturday I`ll be giving a talk about devops at StartUp Weekend Brussels, from what I've read so far it promises to be an audience that needs the talk,

The week after I`ll be speaking at the DrupalDevDays, again about devops , however this time with a touch of Drupal , giving a devops talk at Devoxx last year to a Java audience learned me that the devops evangelist need to go outside of their usual conference audiences and als talk to the people that are usually in the other silos.

Next march I`ll be speaking at the UKUUG spring conference in Leeds this time about my experiences on High Availability with Pacemaker

And who knows I might squeeze in a talk at Load this year also ..

If you are around at one of these confs and you want to talk Devops, Clustering, sipx or just have a beer .. don't hesitate ! There's already plenty of people promising me beers , and some even sushi :)

Just last last year we'll have a Devops meetup just before Fosdem,
I've setup a page for registrations , that way we'll know how many people to make reservations for.

If possible we'll go to the same place as last year .. walking distance from the Fosdem Beer event.

Feel free to spread the news !

That's the question Xavier asks in his blog entry titled
Security: DIY or Plug’n'Play

To me the answer is simple, most of the appliances I ran into so far have no way of configuring them apart from the ugly webgui they ship with their device. That means that I can't integrate them with the configuration management framework I have in place for the rest of the infrastructure. There is no way to automatically modify e.g firewall rules together with the relocation of a service which does happen automatically, and there is always some kind of manual interaction required. Applicances tend to sit on a island, either stay un managed ( be honest when's the last time you upgraded the firmware of that terminal server ? ) , or take a lot of additional efort to manage manually. They require yet another set of tools than the set you are already using to manage your network.
They don't integrate with your backup strategy, and don't tell me they all come with perfect MIB's.

There's other arguments one could bring up against appliances, obviously people can spread fud about some organisation alledgedly paying people to put backdoors in certain operation systems.. so why would they not pay people to put backdoors in appliances , they don't even need to hide them in there .. but my main concern is manageability .. and only a web gui to manage the box to me just means that the vendor hates me and dooesn't want my business

A good Appliance (either security or other type) needs to provide me an API that I can use to configure it, in all other cases I prefer a DIY platform, as I can keep it in line with all my other tools, config mgmtn, deployment, upgrade strategies etc.

Mabye a last question for Xavier to finish my reply ... I`m wondering how Xavier thinks he kan achieve High-availability by using a Virtual environment for Virtual Appliances that are not cluster aware using the virtual environment. A fake comfortable feeling of higher availability , maybe.. but High Availability that I'd like to see.

A couple of weeks ago I ranted about being able to crash about any available music player on Fedora, and the gazillion bugs I filed for that ..

At last the the problem is solved, as mentioned in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657971#c17
this is most probably a bug in ffmpeg which is provided by rpmfusion. and which is solved by installing gstreamer-plugins-ugly

At least it works for me :)

When I first started out giving talks about devops , I realized that I was preaching to the choir, some Barcamps, the Keynote at Loadays , the Dutch Unix Usergroup etc .. lots of people in the audiences knew about the pains we were trying to solve, lots of them already knew some of the tools we use and lots of them already talk a lot with their developers or are part of the deveoplment teams

With our Devoxx talk, Patrick and I started to talk to a different audience , the Java devs , and it was great, we all learned from it. With that experience in mind I submitted a variation of the talk to an audience that is also very important to me ... the Drupal Community .

Devops is gaining importance , while we been practicing devops methodologies since ever, now even the big analyst companies etc are writing and talking about the movement, the drupal community really should also get involved.

So if you care about devops, about devs and ops working together, about continuous integration, continuous deployment, configuration mangement, automation, monitoring and scale, if you've heard about all of the above but have no clue what Puppet, Hudson or Fabric can do for you , vote here for my proposed talk at Drupalcon Chicago,

Apparently December is the month where everybody starts writing guest posts for other blogs.

Earlier this month I wrote an article with the title of this blog for Sysadvent ,

It's a sysadmin relative of the Perl Advent Calendar: One article for each day of December, ending on the 25th article. With the goals of of sharing, openness, and mentoring, we aim to provide great articles about systems administration topics written by fellow sysadmins

My article is here, but there's plenty more other articles written about a variety of topics, such as chef, tcpdump , how ls works, cucumber and Devops.

On the other side, Matthias over at Agile Web Development and Operations is hosting a series on Devops where lots of Devops Advocates and Evangelists are having their say about Devops ...

My entry about the Challenges the Devops Crowd faces was put online yesterday

Karl has been jokingly calling Fedora the Distribution if you don't want sound.
And I`m starting to believe him ..

Over the past 3 days that I'm using Fedora 14 I've had random crashes
Given that all my podcast feeds are configured in my favourite rhytmbox .. that's what I started out with.. On my F12 setup it used to be pretty stable... however it took me less than 15 minutes
for the first crash... and then another one .. and another one..
So I started looking at other clients ..

I have a mixed collection of Ogg and MP3's grabbed from my own cd's so there shouldn't be too much weird stuff in that collection. On my desktop there's only like 4G of music so parsing the data should not be an issue.

I remembered Amarok, installed it .. and the same happened .. after 5-10 minutes it crashed..
I tought about Banshee... however when seeing the dependencies I quickly aborted the installation.

People on twitter started suggesting me other tools
Like clementine which I never heard of ... sadly I managed to crash clementine within 10 minutes.

After clementine it was time for yet another tool Vincent suggested me Exaile .. guess what ... it crashed.

Yet still... Fedora doesn't want me to listen to my music ;)

So does anyone dare to suggest yet another music player that I should test for random crashes ?