Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

So about 4 monts ago there was the crazy idea to start a new FOSS event in Belgium targeted at sysadmins.

What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

We had a book raffle where we handed out O'Reilly's .. we had a great free pizza party (got the idea from the saturday pizza event at LCA 2005) , and we had some free beer. Sounds like a good combination for a geeky weekend.

Apart from the regular talks there were plenty of Open Spaces where interesting topics were discussed ... we had spaces on Open Source vs Open Core , strong voices were heard when we discussed what we should do with the Open Core companies that claim to value Open Source , some people think we should actually list the fauxpensource ones somewhere and make sure the world knows about them

We had an awesome configuration management discussion session discussing Chef vs Puppet vs CFengine . And much much more ...

Some people owe me plenty of Sushi as I had to do my MySQL HA talk before their Managing MySQL talk , but other than that .. things just went fine..

Last week I was in Manchester for the 2010 UKUUG Spring Conference, right .. make that 2 weeks ago , :)

The UKUUG usually hosts the more interesting conferences around ... , it's not just the schedule that attrackts me , yes there's the strong focus towards Larger Scale Unix (and mostly Linux) deployments and how to manage them, but there's also the opportunity to chat in real life with the Devops from across the chunnel.

Spending time with R.I.Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Simon Wilkinson , Alex Davies , Simon Riggs , Josette, and many others is always fun .

As I was in town early I went to the preconference beer meetup and met with a lot of people and chatted about config management, virtualization and lots of other stuff ... after the pub the plan was to go for curries nearby .. and while walking to the , ahem Bus stop, I managed to recognise Ben Martin from meeting him back ages ago in Hamburg for LinuxKongress , always fun ..

Apart from having to jump on a bus and our group being split at the curry place , rather than being able to tell the latecomers where to walk to and being seeted upstairs with the whole group , the curries were interesting and fun.

As I had been pushing Simon Wardley on Twitter to submit a talk for the conference it was really great to finally see him present .. His talk was the perfect soft introduction to the conference ...

Simon's talk was followed by a talk on Security for the virtual datacenters, after I questionned the speaker if anyone actualy uses TPM outside an academic lab the talk suddenly changed into a commercial presentation for a Quack, nuff said.

The Ever energetic Matt S Trout talked about 21st century perl before Simon "Life is to short for SELinux" Wilkinson talked about his experiences in getting the openAFS crowd on Git.

Bummer Thierry Carrez didn't show us the real juice of UEC and just the installations of a Cloud Controller and a Node Controller , but he managed to do so in approx 30 minutes as promised .

A talk titled Coherent and Integrated Configuration of Virtual Infrastructures always cathces my eye.. however when that talk turns out to be a Coherent and Integrated configuration only within the Univerity of Edinborough (aka lcfg2) talk I`m dissapointed, specially since it pretty much didn't introduce any new concepts from the ones I introduced back in my Durham UKUUG presentation

Luckily Andrew Stribblehill gave a very interesting talk on MySQL scalability, in which I promised him some answers to his questions for the next day :)

The Conference dinner was without a doubt the best UKUUG dinner so far , no typical english "food", no weird location (Old Trafford, an abandoned warship) , but just a big chinese place and plenty of food !

I started thurday morning in the wrong track, I assumed to be in the Virtualization track, but I ended up in the Sun thinclient and Abusing Linux to serve weird desktops under the Green computing umbrella track, not my favourites ..

When Patrick and Julian started their Hudson hit my Puppet with a Cucumber talk (which featured some aweseom #devops content) I was a afraid that we'd had to look for a replacment PostgreSQL talk as Simon hadn't arrived yet .. Luckily he arrived in time for his presentation and he explained us about the new replication features that are slowly making it into PostgreSQL, one way ... log shipping ... not really up to par with other alternatives yet :(

So with no further ado .. here's the presentation I gave

PS. If at a Ukuug event and not sure about a person's name ... try Simon.. pretty good chance you're correct :)

That's right .. only 11 more ...
The schedule looks promising, there will be some devops juice, some open spaces, some tutorials, som regular talks .. it really looks promising ... the schedule is packed ,

Apart from the talks, tutorials and open spaces there's also the
Pizza party and the Beer event on saturday ...

No need to register .. just show up ..

Joshua Timberman will be in town, (Antwerpen) that is, for Loadays as he is arriving on thursday Botchagalupe suggested we should have a Devops / Ruby get together.

So I'm dutyfully announcing the Devops/Ruby meetup next thursday april 8th, in Antwerp

The plan is to meet up for beers and chatter in our favourite Antwerp geek pub in , Kulminator , Vleminckveld 32 , Antwerp , around 20h00 ish..

Topics will be devops, ruby and much more :)

No need to register .. just show up ..

If for some reason the Kulminator is to crowdy, smokey, closedy you should be able to find us next door in the Zeppos :)

This post is long overdue, as the idea struck me when dicussing with Lefred while preparing his Fosdem talk on Maintaining too big tables

I got triggered finishing this post by Mr BuidlDoctor

Fred has been struggling with a typical DevOps problem resulting in the most unmanageable database setup possible, there's little room for him to move but he managed is way out .. because he is good at his job

It set the mark for me that because in different organisations even the Opsteam is fragmented `in different groups that there also we need to get the Devops idea going.

Typical setups here are the Network guys vs the Platform guys , specially with the growth of virtualization where the network stack doesn't stop at the physcial switchport anymore but the vlan trunks go deep in to the VM's a lot of discussion happens. There where traditionally the story for the network engineer stopped at the switch they now want control much deeper in the infrastructure.

But an even bigger group that needs integration are the security folks, it's no secret that in some organisations the security guys job is to be the bad guy, their default reply to something is NO. Specially to people wanting to drill holes in their architecture .

Patrick wonders if its the specialist vs generalist dillemma, I think it's the Web vs Enterprise IT way of thinking ..
DevOps first gained ground in Web environments , the battle has only started ..

We still have a long way to go before in say a banking environment the Devs and SecOffs' and the DBA's and the Ops are on the same line ... they all need to break the walls of confusion, they all need to come out of their silos. And when you are a generalist in charge of a bunch of these things you have to make sure your tuesday afernoon security persona talks with his other persona's from time to time ... otherwise you are really gonna need those meds :)

A couple of weeks a go Brian Profitt pinged me for a chat about Devops , the result of that chat , his article can now be found on the Zenoss blog, it's titled Datacenter Barometer: Better days arrive when dev meets ops

It's a very nice read with some pointers to places regular readers of my blog should already know ;)
So with lots of leading Open Source infrastructure companies on different levels, such as config management (OpsCode and Reductive Labs) , monitoring (Zenoss) , deployment (openQRM, RPath, and obviously Consultancy companies , the upcoming Devops conferences around the planet promise to be a lot of fun ! ;)

Oh, and apparently there is some more on the story on /.

Devops, Devops, Devops, everybody talks about it but we're still defining it ...

There's so many different interpretations possible for the term Devops , It's automated infrastructure, it's agile infrastucture, it's getting devs and ops closer to eachother, it's briding the gap between devs and ops , it's agile system administration, it's the movement , it's the mindset , it's the spirit.

Lots of people, lots of opinions .. Indeed some people have been doing this kind of work for ages, some claim the cloud is what makes devops become visible (but we've been doing cloud since before the cloud marketeers called it cloud)

Some define the devop as a European based , open source backgrounded , thirtysomething senior sysadmin , or should I say infrastructure architect , originated concept . Others claim it's developers gone sysadmin gone partly developer again ..

But it seems like lots of people claim that Devops is more about the team, not about the unique individual doing a job.

You'll have to agree however that our jobs are significantly different from the system adminstration type jobs you'll find at the average IT department. With that in mind: How shall we call this breed of people cooking up chef stuff, playing the puppeteer or cranking up the CFEngines ?

And no I don't like Devministrator :)

No really .. it seems like everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon ...Or just let us know they were already on the pulling the train ..

Brian Moon weighs in that it isn't anything new. Hey .. it's not like we've been claiming that Devops is new ..

The dev2ops guys give their views on stuff ..

The rPath crowd weighs in

And if that wasn't enough ... you really should have a listen to what Jono Bacon and his pall have to say about it

Oh and there's more stuff on the way .. given people being interviewed etc ..

So John wrote down his experiences on deploying Drupal sites with Puppet .

It's not a secret that I've been thinking about similar stuff and how I could get to the best possible setup.

John starts of with using Puppet to download Drush... while I want to use rpm for that ...

I want my core infrastructure to be fully packaged... not downloaded and untarred. I want to be able to reproduce my platform in a couple of months , with the exact same versions I`m using now .. not with the version that happens to be on ftp.drupal.org at that point in time, or with ftp.drupal.org being down.

Now the next question off course is what's the core infrastructure.
Where does the infrastructure end and does the application start. There's little discussion about having a puppet created vhost , an apache conf.d file, a matching .htaccess file if wanted , and the appropriate settings.php for a multisite drupal config.

There's also little doubt to me on using drush to run the updates, manage the drupal site etc . Reading John's article made me think some further about what and when I want things packaged.

John's post lead to a discussion on #infra-talk on getting all drupal modules packaged for Centos with Karan and some others

In a development environment I probably want to have periodic drush updates getting the latest modules from the interwebs and potentially breaking my devs code. But making sure that when you put a site in production it will be on a fairly up to date platform, and not on the platform you started developing on 24 months ago.

In a production environment however you only want tested updates of your modules as indeed they will break code.

It's probably going to be a mix and match setup having a local rpm/deb repo with packaged modules that have been tested and validated in your setup and using drush to enable or configure them for that production setup.

But also having a CI environment wher Drush will get the new modules from the interwebs when needed. and package them for you.

To me that sounds beter than getting all the available Drupal modules and packaging them, even automated, and preparing a repository of those modules of which only a small percentage will actually be used by people.

But I need to think about it some more :)

Fosdem 2010 was my 10th fosdem Edition (including the first OSDEM)
As every year Fosdem suffered even more from it's own success.

On Friday evening ther was the obligatory Beer event... however as people need to eat to .. the Devops crowd fled the scene

I had made reservations for a 20 something group and with the CentOS crowd joining us (as there was some overlap anyhow) we were 25 when we arrived in the restaurant .

Dinner and Discussions were great .. I learned about some new projects and we had some insightfull dicussions on how fat your thin foil should be ...

After dinner we went back to the Beer Event were lots of Free Beer was tasted ...

Saturday was the first full day of Fosdem, as usual Fosdem was the victim of it's own success , too much interresting stuff to see .. too little time.

Lots of Devrooms had the "FULL" sign put up more than you want as a visitor ...
I never even made it into the Drupal or NoSQL rooms :(

Sadly I had to correct Ploum's first law but for a lot of people .. Fosdem each time means the battle choosing which presentation you'll go to ... If you can even make it to the talk .. as usually the the hallway track is much more interresting :)

The MySQL devroom was on sunday but on saturday the crowd met in an Italian place nearby the Fosdem campus to get to know each other and chat a lot ..
The discussions ranged from French vs Canadaian and the future of Forks

During Saturday afternoon @patrickdebois suggested a Devops Meetup for Breakfast ... and some how that also happened ...

When I arrived at Fosdem on sunday morning they were still there :)

I spent the biggest part of Sunday in and around the MySQL devroom listening to a bunch of interresting talks

My own talk went fairly well given the time constraint .. sqeezing content for an hour in 20 minutes means you can't really go deep into the topics ...
My initial plan was to only focus on Pacemaker integration however the community had voted for the overview talk :)

After my own talk it was almost time to head to the Janson auditorium for the Footnote of Greg Kroah-Hartman, and as on any Fosdem .. there once again had to be Beer