Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Cfgmgmtcamp 2027

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:06:23 +0200

We are halfway 2026 already so it is time to think about what you will be doing next February.

Start with blocking your calendar for 1-3 February . As usual we’ll be meeting in Ghent for 3 days of Infrastructure Automation Geekery. It will be a fun mix of 2 days of conference with new and old communities, followed by a day of workshops hackathons and tutorials. You know you can’t mis this.

Opensearch Cli

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been busy doing some OpenSearch upgrades and migrations the past couple of months, and I was tired of running curl with different parameters to get the default health and other OpenSearch statuses. Apart from that my muscle memory failed to get the right variety of parameters once in a while so I figured I just write a wrapper around curl that would do a bunch of these things easier for me.

Mattx Brings Back Openmosix Vibes

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some weeks ago Matt Rechenburg posted about MattX , A Modern openMosix Re-Implementation for Linux 6.x
he tagged me in the post and obviously I was triggered, having spent years in the openMosix community , first writing the Howto, then later being the release manager , testing and getting rid of the openMosixFS , I wanted to see how things would work again today.

My first attempts at getting things to work were a quick failure, Matt had been bitten by the Works on My machine bug … it worked on his Debian setup, but not on my Fedora testbed, and while there is nothing wrong with Debian, that’s kinda a really small scope, so obviously I reached out , we’ve been chatting on and off. And I`m happy to see that I have now seen the first processes migrate in my Lab setup on my AlmaLinux boxen :)

CDF Top Ambassador 2026

Thu, 21 May 2026 18:15:05 +0200

Last year in San Diego I was invited to join the CD Foundation Ambassador program Once you get involved in this kind of community you start to realize how much work there is left to be done for organisations to really start doing Continuous Delivery.

I was however quite surprised to actually be nominated for the 2026 Top Ambassador, (thnx to Yair Etziony for nominating me., and therefore even more surprised to learn that I actually won the 2026 Top Ambassador Award.

Welcome to the Revival

Wed, 20 May 2026 09:00:32 +0200

6 years ago I wrote my my last blog post here. I had my Drupal running in a container and generated static content that was published here.

I had some ideas on blogging left and right .. but most of my content was presented as a talk at a conference. I struggled with the decline of RSS and the downfall of most other Social platforms , I didn’t want to post my content on one of the proprietary walled gardens.

The return of the Dull Stack Engineer.

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 22:13:00 +0100

Every day we get emails from recruiters who are looking for a devops engineer to help their customer.

When we ask them if they are looking for a developer or an operations person they have no clue what to answer. Because a devops engineer doesn’t exist.

DevOps Engineer is not a title

The DevOps community has a long time ago established that DevOps is not a job title, it’s not a Java developer running production, and it’s not an Ops girl patching java code. Neither is it the person in charge of tooling. And it certainly isn’t an engineer working in a DevOps team.

11.5 Factor apps

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 21:50:00 +0100

Each time someone talks about the 12 Factor Application a weird feeling overcomes me .. Because I like the concept .. but it feels awkward .. it feels as if someone with 0 operational experience wrote it. And this devil is in a really small detail.

And that is Part III. Config … For me (and a lot of other folks I’ve talked to about this topic) , using environment variables (as in real environment variables) are just one of the worst ideas ever. Environment variables are typically set manually , or from a script that is being executed and there’s little or trace to see fast how a specific config is set.

Decomissioning my Drupal blog

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 21:02:00 +0100

If you are looking at this blog post right now… my live Drupal site has finally been decommissioned.. or not .. well these pages are served statically but the content is still generated by an ancient aging Drupal 6, which is hiding somewhere in a container that I only start when I need it.

Given my current low blog volume .. and the lack of time to actually migrate all the content to something like Jekyll or Webby I took the middle road and pulled the internet facing Drupal offline. My main concern was that I want to keep a number of articles that people frequently point to in the exact same location as before. So that was my main requirement, but with no more public facing drupal I have no more worrying about the fact that it really needed updating, no more worrying about potential issues on wednesday evenings etc

Will containers take over ?

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 16:57:00 +0100

and if so why haven’t they done so yet ?

Unlike many people think, containers are not new, they have been around for more than a decade, they however just became popular for a larger part of our ecosystem. Some people think containers will eventually take over.

Imvho It is all about application workloads, when 8 years ago I wrote about a decade of open source virtualization, we looked at containers as the solution for running a large number of isolated instances of something on a machine. And with large we meant hundreds or more instances of apache, this was one of the example use cases for an ISP that wanted to give a secure but isolated platform to his users. One container per user.

Jenkins DSL and Heisenbugs

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 21:04:00 +0100

I`m working on getting even more moving parts automated, those who use Jenkins frequently probably also have Love - Hate relationship with it.

The love coming from the flexibility , stability and the power you get from it, the hate from it’s UI. If you’ve ever had to create a new Jenkins job or even pipeline based on one that already existed you’ve gone trough the horror of click and paste errors , and you know where the hate breeds.

Linux Troubleshooting 101 , 2016 Edition

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 09:00:00 +0100

Back in 2006 I wrote a blog post about linux troubleshoooting. Bert Van Vreckem pointed out that it might be time for an update ..

There’s not that much that has changed .. however :)

Everything is a DNS Problem

Everything is a Fscking DNS Problem
No really, Everything is a Fscking DNS Problem
If it’s not a fucking DNS Problem ..
It’s a Full Filesystem Problem
If your filesystem isn’t full
It is a SELinux problem
If you have SELinux disabled
It might be an ntp problem
If it’s not an ntp problem
It’s an arp problem
If it’s not an arp problem…
It is a Java Garbage Collection problem
If you ain’t running Java
It’s a natting problem
If you are already on IPv6
It’s a Spanning Tree problem
If it’s not a spanning Tree problem…
It’s a USB problem
If it’s not a USB Problem
It’s a sharing IRQ Problem
If it’s not a sharing IRQ Problem
But most often .. its a Freaking Dns Problem !

Docker and volumes hell

Sat, 28 May 2016 13:16:00 +0100

We’re increasingly using Docker to build packages, a fresh chroot in which we prepare a number of packages, builds typically for ruby (rvm) , or python (virtualenv) or node stuf where the language ecosystem fails on us … and fpm the whole tree as a working artifact.

An example of such a build is my work on packaging Dashing. https://github.com/KrisBuytaert/build-dashing

Now part of that build is running the actual build script in docker with a local volume mounted inside the container This is your typical -v=/home/src/dashing-docker/package-scripts:/scripts param.

It's just rubber , with some air in it.

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 23:38:00 +0100

A child balloon
you inflate it, play with it for a while, then it explodes, you throw it away you inflate another one, maybe even a different color. the kid plays with it .. till it breaks, then you throw it away…
An inflatable castle.
you inflate it, play with it for a while, deflate it, move it around, inflate it again, if it has a hole in it, you patch the hole.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, 2016 Edition

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 23:28:00 +0100

When people sign up for Configuration Management Camp, we ask them what community room they are mostly interested in.
We ask this question because we have rooms in different sizes and we don’t want to put communities with 20 people showing interest in a 120 seat room and we don’t want to put a community with 200 people in a 60 seat room.

But it also gives us to opportunity to build some very interesting graph over the potential evolution of the communities.

Recent and Upcoming Talks

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 22:58:00 +0100

I gave a couple of new and updated talks the last couple of months.

At Fosdem, I opened up the Distributions Devroom with a talk on how we could improve the collaboration between the developers of a distro, and their users, the ops folks. I seemed to not be the only person with similar ideas as the smart folks over at the CentOS project were already actively talking about their efforts into making some my ideas become reality the day before at the CentOS Dojo.

Bimodal IT , redefined

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 10:48:00 +0100

There’s been a lot of discussion about the sillynes of the term BiModal IT, aka the next big thing for IT-organisations that don’t dare to change, but still want to sound cool.

So here is my idea to reuse that term for something relevant.

BiModal IT, is the idea where you take a fully automated infrastructure which has been build on the principles of Infrastructure as Code. Which gets periodic idempodent updates (e.g every 15 or 30 minutes, or when you orchestrate it), and consistency checks , where the source code for that infrastructure is versioned , tested and delivered trough a traditional Continuous Delivery pipeline for the majority of your services. and add realtime reconfiguration capacities based on service discovery for the other services that really change fast, or in a real elastic way, using tools like Consul, Consul_template, etcd etc..

The power of packaging software, package all the things

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 08:35:00 +0100

Software delivery is hard, plenty of people all over this planet are struggling with delivering software in their own controlled environment. They have invented great patterns that will build an artifact, then do some magic and the application is up and running.

When talking about continuous delivery, people invariably discus their delivery pipeline and the different components that need to be in that pipeline.
Often, the focus on getting the application deployed or upgraded from that pipeline is so strong that teams
forget how to deploy their environment from scratch.

On the importance of idempotence.

Mon, 11 May 2015 20:06:00 +0100

A couple of months ago we were seeing weird behaviour with consul not knowing all it’s members at a customer where we had deployed Consul for service registration as a POC
The first couple of weeks we hadn’t noticed any difficulties but after a while we had the impression that the number of nodes in the cluster wasn’t stable.

Obviously the first thought is that such a new tool probably isn’t stable enough so it’s expected behaviour , but rest asured that was not the case.

What done REALLY looks like in devops

Sun, 03 May 2015 19:05:00 +0100

Steve Ropa blogged about What done looks like in devops , I must say I respecfullly , but fully disagree with Steve here.

For those of you that remember I gave an Ignite about my views on the use of the Definition of Done back ad #deovpsdays 2013 in Amsterdam.

In the early days we talked about the #devops movement partly being a reaction against the late friday night deployments where the ops people got a tarball with some minimalistic notes and were supposed to put stuff in production. The work of the development team was Done, but the operations team work just started.

2014 vs 2015 interest in Open Source Configuration Management

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 22:05:00 +0100

A couple of people asked me to results of the survey of the 2015 vs 2014 Configuration Management Camp room interrests.

This is a bunch of 350 last year and 420 people telling us what tools they are interested in so we can map the right roomsizes to the communities.

2014 :

2015:

Enjoy.. but remember there’s Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics ..
PS. this is a mostly European Audience .

On Systemd and devops

Sat, 20 Sep 2014 19:52:00 +0100

If it’s not broken , don’t fix it.
Those who don’t understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly
Complexity is the enemy of reliability.

Are some of the more frequently heard arguments in the systemd discussion. Indeed I see and hear a lot of senior Linux people react openly and probably way to late against the introduction of systemd in a lot of our favorite Linux distributions.

To me this is a typical example of the devops gap. The gap between developers writing code and operations needing to manage that code on production platforms at scale.
Often developers writing code that they think is useful and relevant while they are not listening to their target audience , in this case not the end users of the systems but the people that are maintaining the platforms. The people that work on a daily base with these tools.

Upcoming Conferences

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:23:00 +0100

After not being able to give my planned Ignite at #devopsdays Amsterdam because I was down with the flu here’s some fresh opportunities to listen to my rants :)

In September I`ll be talking at PuppetConf 2014, San Francisco , USA about some of the horror stories we went trough over the past couple of years when deploying infrastructure the automated fasion.

Just one week later I`ll be opening the #devops track at DrupalCon Amsterdam together with @cyberswat (Kevin Bridges) where we’ll talk about the current state of #drupal and #devops , We’ll be reopening the #drupal and #devops survey shortly, more info about that later here..

Fedora 20 Annoyancies

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:18:00 +0100

1. yum install docker

3. docker run --rm -i -t -e "FLAPJACK_BUILD_REF=6ba5794" \
4. >   -e "FLAPJACK_PACKAGE_VERSION=1.0.0~rc3~20140729T232100-6ba5794-1" \
5. >   flapjack/omnibus-ubuntu bash -c \
6. >   "cd omnibus-flapjack ; \
7. >   git pull ; \
8. >   bundle install --binstubs ; \
9. >   bin/omnibus build --log-level=info flapjack ; \
10. >   bash"
11. docker - version 1.5
12. Copyright 2003, Ben Jansens <ben@orodu.net>

14. Usage: docker [OPTIONS]

16. Options:
17. -help             Show this help.
18. -display DISLPAY  The X display to connect to.
19. -border           The width of the border to put around the
20. system tray icons. Defaults to 1.
21. -vertical         Line up the icons vertically. Defaults to
22. horizontally.
23. -wmaker           WindowMaker mode. This makes docker a
24. fixed size (64x64) to appear nicely in
25. in WindowMaker.
26. Note: In this mode, you have a fixed
27. number of icons that docker can hold.
28. -iconsize SIZE    The size (width and height) to display
29. icons as in the system tray. Defaults to
30. 24.


33. [root@mine ~]# rpm -qf /bin/docker
34. docker-1.5-10.fc20.x86_64
35. [root@mine ~]# rpm -qi docker
36. Name        : docker
37. Version     : 1.5
38. Release     : 10.fc20
39. Architecture: x86_64
40. Install Date: Sun 03 Aug 2014 12:41:57 PM CEST
41. Group       : User Interface/X
42. Size        : 40691
43. License     : GPL+
44. Signature   : RSA/SHA256, Wed 07 Aug 2013 10:02:56 AM CEST, Key ID 2eb161fa246110c1
45. Source RPM  : docker-1.5-10.fc20.src.rpm
46. Build Date  : Sat 03 Aug 2013 10:30:23 AM CEST
47. Build Host  : buildvm-07.phx2.fedoraproject.org
48. Relocations : (not relocatable)
49. Packager    : Fedora Project
50. Vendor      : Fedora Project
51. URL         : <a href="http://icculus.org/openbox/2/docker/<br />
52. Summary" title="http://icculus.org/openbox/2/docker/<br />
53. Summary">http://icculus.org/openbox/2/docker/<br />
54. Summary</a>     : KDE and GNOME2 system tray replacement docking application
55. Description :
56. Docker is a docking application (WindowMaker dock app) which acts as a system
57. tray for KDE and GNOME2. It can be used to replace the panel in either
58. environment, allowing you to have a system tray without running the KDE/GNOME
59. panel or environment.
60. [root@mine ~]# yum remove docker
61. [root@mine ~]# yum install docker-io

63. Installed:
64. docker-io.x86_64 0:1.0.0-9.fc20

66. Complete!

Ubuntu 14.04 on an Dell XPS 15 9530

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:17:00 +0100

So I had the chance to unbox and install a fresh Dell XPS-15 9530
Dell ships the XPS13’s with Ubuntu, but for some crazy reason it does not do the same with the XPS15 which imvho is much more
appropriate for a developer as it actually has a usable size screen.

That means they also force you to boot into some proprietary OS the very first time before you can even try get into the boot options menu.
which is where you need to be.

Jenkins, Puppet, Graphite, Logstash and YOU

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:55:00 +0100

This is a repost of an article I wrote for the Acquia Blog some time ago.

As mentioned before, devops can be summarized by talking about culture, automation, monitoring metrics and sharing. Although devops is not about tooling, there are a number of open source tools out there that will be able to help you achieve your goals. Some of those tools will also enable better communication between your development and operations teams.

Why Does DevOps Matter?

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:54:00 +0100

This is a repost of an article I wrote for the Acquia Blog some time ago.

People often ask, why does DevOps matter?

The honest answer to that question is…because having the development and operations team work together is the only way IT is successful.

Over the past few decades I’ve worked in different environments that include: small web start ups, big pharmaceutical companies, hardware engineering shops and large software companies and banks. All were trying different approaches to deliver quality software to their end users, customers, but most of them were failing badly.

The Rise of the DevOps movement

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:49:00 +0100

This is a repost of an article I wrote for the Acquia Blog some time ago.

DevOps, DevOps, DevOps … the whole world is talking about DevOps, but what is DevOps?

Since Munich 2012, DrupalCon had a dedicated devops track. After talking to
a lot of people in Prague last month, I realized that the concept of DevOps is still very unclear to a lot of developers. To a large part of the development community, DevOps development still means folks working on ’the infrastructure part’ of the development life cycle and for some it just means simply deploying Drupal, being concerned about purely keeping the site alive etc.

FOSDEM 2014 is coming

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 22:04:00 +0100

and with that almost a full week of side events.
For those who don’t know FOSDEM, (where have you been hiding for the past 13 years ? ) Fosdem is the annual Free and Open Source Developers European meeting. If you are into open source , you just can’t mis this event where thousands of likeminded people will meet.

And if 2 days of FOSDEM madness isn’t enough people organise events around it.

IPv4 Shortage can make you a billionaire

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 22:42:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I had this mail conversation…

I just had to share it ..

From: sales@ipaddressconsultancy.com
To: Kris Buytaert
Subject: IPaddress Requirement
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:50:41 -0600 (11/05/2013 06:50:41 PM)

Hi Kris,

Thanks for your response. Please share your contact details including
skype ID so we can discuss further.

Regards

On 05.11.2013 08:26, Kris Buytaert wrote:\

On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 04:28 +0000, Sales wrote:\

Hello,

We are looking for IP addresses as we are growing Internet Solutions
Provider.

We are looking for Ip addresses(Ipv4) anywhere from /22 to /16 Ipv4
to
host it. We look forward for your response to discuss further on the
pricing terms to take this forward.

If you are not the concerned person to discuss about this, please
forward it to the appropriate department of your company .

Please get back to us as soon as possible.

Regards,

Hi there,

we can offer you a whole range of IP addresses..

We can provide you with 127.0.0.1/24 , 192.168.0.0/16 ,172.16.0.0/12 and 10.0.0.0/8

Please send us your best offer.

greetings

Kris Buytaert

Docker vs Reality , 0 - 1

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 23:36:00 +0100

(aka the opinionated summary of the #devopsdays London November OpenSpace on , Containers and the new flood of Image Sprawl)

There’s a bunch of people out there that think I don’t like docker, they are wrong.

I just never understood the hype about it since I didn’t see, (and still don’t) see it being used at large and people seem to understand that as being against it.

So let me put a couple of things straight :

Apache CloudStack Collaboration Summit Slides

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:16:00 +0100

The Future of System Administration from Kris Buytaert

Velocity 2013 Slides

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:15:00 +0100

The Journey of devops and continuous delivery in a Large Financial Institution from Kris Buytaert

DrupalCon 2013 Slides

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 22:53:00 +0100

Monitoring Drupal In an Infrastructure as Code Age from Kris Buytaert

PuppetConf 2013 Slides

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 22:52:00 +0100

Monitoring in an Infrastructure as Code Age from Kris Buytaert

Robomow vs iRobot·

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 09:32:00 +0100

(aka the follow up to http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/testing-robomow-510)
Lennert was really helpful in dropping by and providing us with some extra isolaters for the cable… the RoboMow is now doing it’s work nicely again.

Yet we ran into another hickup. for some reason the Robomow stopped. The bleeping sound indicated yet another cable cut .. but I couldn’t find it …until I opened the the docking station … where I saw the cable had loosened , after fixing that … everything started working fine again ..

Open Business Models

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 22:27:00 +0100

When I started writing this I wrote “Last week Opscode came” obviously now that is “A couple of months ago Opscode came with a bunch of announcements … one of them being that they are also going to support the Open Source Chef .. rather than only their own platform.

I’d love to see more companies formally do this .. Over the past couple of years I’ve had numerous situations where organizations where happy to pay for support to an commercial backer of Open Source software… but they were not interested in , software updates, fancy dashboards , unneeded features.

Using broken development frameworks , or why we don't use Zurmo

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 22:08:00 +0100

People often wonder why DBA’s used to hate developers, and with DBA’s also the System Engineers,
(note that I just expanded devops by adding dba’s to the picture..)

So let me tell you a story ..

A couple of weeks ago one of our customers wanted to start experimenting with a new type of CRM. A gamified CRM.
Zurmo …

So we set this thing up in a dev environment and started playing with it , while at first it looks nice ..
the application actually felt pretty slow.. however given that is a low resource development environment we looked no further.

Done Ignite

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 00:05:00 +0100

Last month I gave an 5 minute Ignite talk at #devopsdays Amsterdam.

To summarize .. it was a rant against people that think that the end of a sprint their work is done, an idea they might have gotten from a broken definition of done.

Both the video recording and the slides are embedded below.

Dod is not done from Kris Buytaert

Why you shouldn't hire a devops

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:11:00 +0100

Lately there have been a lot of organisations trying to hire a devops engineer.
I myselve have been asked to fill in devops roles ..

There’s a number of issues with that.

The biggest problem is that I always have to ask what exactly the organisation is looking for.

So you want a devops engineer with experience in Linux, MongoDB, MySQL and Java , does that mean you want a Java developer who is familiar with MySQL and Linux and breaths a devops Culture.
Or a Linux expert who understands Java developers and knows how to tune Mongo and MySQL ?

Testing the RoboMow 510

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:33:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I noted fellow geek Peter Vanwelkenhuysen was talking about his #robomowtest experiences. obviously I wanted to know how he got to test one.

Some tweets and mails later I was making arrangements with Lennert van der Pols from Friendly Robotics too.
I’ve been thinking about buying a RoboMower for years . always have been delaying the purchase since we were planning to move
Since we moved, my wife has been a bit sceptic

Evolution Woes and yum magic

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:54:00 +0100

I`m an oldschool guy .. I still love pop3(s) to get my mails locally and read them with my fat email client. Evolution.

So when gmail breaks their pop/imap infra I`m screwed for a while. I hate reading mail from a web gui and the collapsed threading model gmail uses makes me nauseus.

So I fiddled with my config .. disabled it.. deleted the account.. created it again. But even after gmail was up again . I couldn’t access my mail from my favourite client. Yet from other clients it seemed to work.

Initial loadays speakers announced

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:28:00 +0100

Loadays is coming up soon .. 6 and 7 april ..
Loadays is the Linux and Open Administration conference of the low lands , held in Antwerp, Belgium

We’ve just published the initial batch of speakers

Being a Sysadmin at a company full of Sysadmins (Cody Herriges)
OpenNebula Fundamentals (Jaime Melis)
Integrate UEFI into REAR (Gratien D’haese)
Puppet v3 and Hiera (Garrett Honeycutt)
Integrating Linux into an Active Directory domain (Gábor Nyers)
Normalised instance provisioning for dev, on-premise and public clouds (Karanbir Singh)
C.R.E.A.M : Cache Rules Everything Around Me (Thijs Feryn)
OpenLDAP’s Lightning Memory-Mapped DB (Howard Chu)
What’s new in syslog-ng (Peter Czanik)
Introduction to Ansible (Jan Piet Mens)
Network Block Device: network-based block storage for Linux systems (Wouter Verhelst)

Tutorials

Love, MonitoringLove

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:10:00 +0100

Last year we were pretty negative about Monitoring, We shouted out that MonitoringSucked … A year has passed and a lot has changed … most importantly our new found love for monitoring, thanks to an inspirational Ignite talk by Ulf Mansson at devopsdays Rome.

Right after Fosdem about 20 people showed up at the #monitoringlove hacksessions hosted at the Inuits.eu offices to work on Open Source monitoring projects and exchange ideas. Some completely new people, some people with already a lot of experience.

check_graphite

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:10:00 +0100

During my Puppetcamp Gent talk last week, I explained how to get alerts based on trends from graphite. A number of people asked ,e how to do that.

First lets quickly explain why you might want to do that .
Sometimes you don’t care about the current value of a metric..as an example take a Queing system .. there is no problem if there are messages added to the queue, not even if there are a lot of messages on the queue, there might however be a problem if over a certain period the number of messages on a queue stays to high.

#devops Conference Season heating up...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 12:21:00 +0100

My last post has been a while … in that I announced that there would be another event right before FOSDEM … I totally forgot to announce it here but I`m sure that most of you already know. Yes. PuppetCamp Europe is coming back to it’s roots… it’s coming back to the city where we hosted it for the first time on this side of the ocean.. Gent. (that’s 31/1 and 1/2 )

#monitoringlove hackfest

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:54:00 +0100

The age of #monitoringsucks is over, we’re now transitioning into a #monitoringlove period.

That however doesn’t mean al the work is done, we still need to do a lot of work and a lot of people are working on a lot of stuff.

Therefore like last year we are opening up our offices again right after Fosdem for a #monitoringlove hackfest

That’s right on february 4 and 5 a bunch of people interrested to fix the problem will be meeting , discussing and hacking stuff together in Antwerp. In short a #monitoringlove hackathon

Linuxcon Europe, Barcelona

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:12:00 +0100

Im in Barcelona this week for LinuxCon Europe ..\ Ill be hosting 3 sessions this week.

Today Ill be helping [Sebastien Goasguen](https://twitter.com/sebgoa) with his session [Building Foss Clouds](http://linuxconeurope2012.sched.org/event/8816c31538f6278779459b3337a45559#.UJi--tHtBrc), Ill be talking about how to use tools such as Puppet, Graphite and Icinga to monitor your clouds. Sebastian inherited the Building FOSS Clouds tutorial last week and asked me to help out.

Tomorrow I`ll be giving my 11 Open Source Tools for your Devops Stack talking.

Gentwerpen Devops Meetup & Conference Season Update

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 22:27:00 +0100

A couple of us have been taking about it a lot already .. we wanted to host a one day #devops event in .be already last year.. then talks about starting a meetup group started again with @wonko_be but it was @fs111 pushing the final button and calling the rest of the .be community to order, we’ve set a date
and the first session will take place (agenda still needs to be detirmined)

Vagrant and Drupal, a winning team

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 23:51:00 +0100

While heading back home from DrupalCon Munich after 4 days of good interaction with lots of Drupal folks.
I realized to my big suprise that there are a lot of people using Vagrant to make sure that developers are not working on platforms they invented their own. Lots of people have realized that “It works on my computer” is not something they want to hear from a developer and are reaching out to give them viable solutions to work on shared and reproducible solutions.

Open Source Certification , Friend or Foe

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:53:00 +0100

With 2 of the bigger Open Source projects I care about talking about certifications programs questions pop up again …

Should we certify ourselves ?

So let me tell you about my experiences in getting Open Source related Certifications ..

Over a decade ago, (2001) when RedHat was still Redhat and not yet Fedora the company I was working for was about to partner with RedHat and needed to get a number of people certified for that.

Devops Meeting Munich

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:28:00 +0100

Quick Note :

With Drupalcon going on next week in Munich , the nice folks of the local Devops Meetup are organising an evening event

Next tuesday at 1900 at Skoobe Gmbh

More details on the Meetup page !

Our #monitoringsucks rpm is repository available

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 21:49:00 +0100

Not only our Rubygems Builds have changed, but also my internal #monitoringsucks repository.

You might have noticed a variety of vagrant- projects on my github acount

http://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-ganglia
http://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-graphite
http://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-puppet-logstash,
Being the #monitoringsucks part of them. All of those Vagrant projects are basically my test setups to play with those new tools.

They contain a bunch of puppet modules that install and configure these tools. (Note that they mostly consist of
of git submodules to other puppet module repositories.

Ruby Gems Yum Repo

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:28:00 +0100

For those of you that are looking for my old build-gems Github repo, given that lots of other Inuits collegues are using it too I’ve transferred ownership of that repo to the Inuits group.

It can now be found on https://github.com/Inuits/build-gems/ (Yes directory indexes are disabled on purpose..)

The build result has also been moved. We’ve replaced our static repo.inuits.be with a Pulp powered yum repo.

The new location of the rubygems rpm repo now is at http://pulp.inuits.eu/pulp/repos/rubygems/

Breaking the Silence.

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:51:00 +0100

3+ months is probably the biggest timeout I’ve taken from blogging in a while..
Not that I didn’t have anything to write ..but more that I was prioritizing writing different content over
over writing blogposts.

Blogging tech snippets and contributing documentation used to be one now all of that has evolved.
Anyhow ..

So to get things going here’s my preliminary Conference schedule for the next couple of months.

First up, in about one week (august 20-24) Ill be chairing the #devops track at [DrupalCon Munich](http://munich2012.drupal.org/)\ Next to talking there myselve explaining the [Drupal Crowd what devops is](http://munich2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/whats-devops-thing-anyhow)\ Plenty of interresting content there ranging from culture over to tooling and back. Im really looking forward to this one.

Devops in Munich

Tue, 01 May 2012 21:02:00 +0100

Devopsdays Mountainview sold out in a short 3 hours .. but there’s other events that will breath devops this summer.
DrupalCon in Munich will be one of them ..

Some of you might have noticed that I`m cochairing the devops track for DrupalCon Munich,
The CFP is open till the 11th of this month and we are still actively looking for speakers.

We’re trying to bridge the gap between drupal developers and the people that put their code to production, at scale.
But also enhancing the knowledge of infrastructure components Drupal developers depend on.

FlossUK and Puppetcamp Edinburgh

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:49:00 +0100

I’ve just finished presenting my talk on how I currently work on Puppet modules at Puppetcamp here in Edinburgh where I’ve been for the week talking on both FlossUK 2012 and Puppetcamp.

7 tools for your devops stack \

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert

Earlier this week I opened FlossUK 2012 with my talk on 7 tools for your devops stack

How I hack on puppet modules \

Devops and Drupal, the Survey, the Results

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:51:00 +0100

I’ve just finished presenting the results of our Drupal and Devops survey at the Belgian Drupal User Group meetup at our office

and I’ve uploaded the slides to slideshare for the rest of the world to ~~cry~~ read.

Drupal and Devops , the Survey Results

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert.

Honestly I was hoping for the audience to prove me wrong and I was expecting all of them to claim they were doing automated and repeatable deployments.

Logstash and ElasticSearch

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:27:00 +0100

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”
Niels Bohr

When I setup Logstash for the very first time I got bitten by an empty search, aparently no logs were indexed. Reading the log files indeed told me about\

1. WARN: org.elasticsearch.discovery.zen.ping.unicast: [Blaire, Allison] failed to send ping to [[#zen_unicast_1#][inet[/127.0.0.1:9300]]]
2. INFO   | jvm 1    | 2012/02/06 22:45:55 | org.elasticsearch.transport.RemoteTransportException: [Page, Karen][inet[/127 .0.0.1:9300]][discovery/zen/unicast]
3. INFO   | jvm 1    | 2012/02/06 22:45:55 | Caused by: java.io.EOFException

The above is the typical error when the ElasticSearch version you are using externally is not in sync with the one Logstash is using, yes those versions need to match.

The ultimate 2012 open source and devops conference

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:15:00 +0100

Kent Skaar pinged me last week , asking for feedback on Lisa'11 and input for Lisa 2012.

Thought I should share my advise to him with the rest of the world

So If I were to host an event similar to Lisa I’d had either
Jordan Sissel or Mitchell Hashimoto give the keynote because over the past 24 months those people have written more relevant tools for me than anyone else :)

We didn't fix it

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:03:00 +0100

MonitoringSucks and we didn’t fix it.

Earlier this week Inuits hosted a 2 day hackfest titled #MonitoringSucks. A good number of people with a variety of backgrounds showed up on monday morning. I don’t know why but people had high expectations for this event , did they really expect us to fix the #monitoringsucks problem in a mere 2 days ?

Next to myselve we had Patrick Debois , Grégory Karékinian, Stefan Jourdan, Colin Humphreys, Andrew Crump, Ohad Levy , Frank Marien, Toshaan Bharvani, Devdas Bhagat, Maciej Pasternacki Axel Beckert Jelle Smet, Noa Resare @blippie , John John Tedro @udoprog, Christian Trabold @ctrabold and obviously some people I missed
A good mixture of Fosdem visitors that stayed a litte longer in our cold country and locals with ideas. We had people from TomTom, RedHat , Spotify, Booking.com, Inuits, Atlassian, coming from Belgium, The Netherlands France, Israel, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Switzerland if I`m not mistaken.

#monitoringsucks hackathon 6&7 february Practical details:

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:48:00 +0100

As announced earlier next monday and tuesday we’re opening up the Inuits offices for everybody working on monitoring problems.

There’s already a good number of people that have confirmed their presence and some people have asked

As for practical details .. the plan is simple.
I`m going to be at the place somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 on monday. ( Hey .. it’s the day after Fosdem you know :))

The only thing I’ve planned is to do a get to know eachother round around 10:30 after that I`m expecting the hackathon to be self organising,

Graphite, JMXTrans, Ganglia, Logster, Collectd, say what ?

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:46:00 +0100

Given that @patrickdebois is working on improving data collection I thought it would be a good idea to describe the setup I currently have hacked together.

(Something which can be used as a starting point to improve stuff, and I have to write documentation anyhow)

I currently have 3 sources , and one target, which will eventually expand to at least another target and most probably more sources too.

#monitoringsucks and we'll fix it !

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:23:00 +0100

If you are hacking on monitoring solutions, and want to talk to your peers solving the problem
Block the monday and tuesday after fosdem in your calendar !

That’s right on february 6 and 7 a bunch of people interrested to fix the problem will be meeting , discussing and hacking stuff together in Antwerp

In short a #monitoringsucks hackathon

Inuits is opening up their offices for everybody who wants to join the effort Please let us (@KrisBuytaert and @patrickdebois) know if you want to join us in Antwerp

What is devops ?

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:59:00 +0100

I`m parsing the responses of the Deploying Drupal survey I started a couple of months ago (more on that later)

One of the questions in the survey is “What is devops” , apparently when you ask a zillion people (ok ok, just a large bunch of Tweeps..), you get a large amount of different answers ranging from totally wrong to spot on.

So let’s go over them and see what we can learn from them ..

Installing Vagrant, on Ubuntu Natty

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:31:00 +0100

(Warning some Ubuntu ranting ahead)

1. apt-get install virtualbox-ose
2. apt-get install rubygems
3. gem install vagrant

That’s what I assumed it would take me to install vagrant on a spare Ubuntu (Natty) laptop.

Well it’s not. after that I was greeted with some weirdness.

1. $vagrant
2. vagrant: command not found...

Yet gem list –local showed the vagrant gem installed.

1. $ruby
2. ruby:  command not found

I looked twice, checked again and indeed it seems you can install rubygems on natty with no ruby installed #dazedandconfused

How I like my Java

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:06:00 +0100

This is a repost of my article earlier posted at Jordan Sissel’s awesome SysAdvent

After years of working in Java-based environments, there are a number of things that I like to implement together with the teams I`m working with - the application doesn’t matter much, whether it’s plain java, Tomcat, JBoss, etc, these deployment strategies will help your ops and dev teams build more managable services.

Packaging

The first step is to have the native operating system packages as build artifacts rolling out of your continuous integration server - No .ear, .war or .jar files: I want to have rpms or debs. With things like fpm or the maven rpm plugin this should not be an extra hassle, and the advantages you get from doing this are priceless.

Lisa 2011

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:10:00 +0100

Last week I was in Boston for my 1st and their 25th Edition of the Large Infrastructure System Administration Conferences
Lisa was pretty much all I expected from it. Old Unix wizards with long hair and white beards, the usual suspects, and a mix of devops practitioners on a devops themed conference with on one side awesome and well positioned content and on the other side absolutely basic stuff.

On tuesday I had a devops bof scheduled for 2 hours.

QR Encode

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:31:00 +0100

For further reference .. and preventing me from googling it a 3rd time

1. qrencode "http://www.krisbuytaert.be/"  -o qrcode.png  -s 10

or\

1. cat Kris_Buytaert.vcf  | qrencode  -o vcf.png -s 5

A different shade of green

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:51:00 +0100

Back in late 1997 I had spent way too much time helping people to build websites and was fed up with customers wanting a different shade of green for the background of their website. I was fed up with the graphic artists that didn’t want to understand the concept of a color pallet and browser safe colors and didn’t understand the differences between print and web. So I decided to try not to work for the wannabe webexperts anymore and doing some real software.

Fall , Winter and Spring Conference Season 2011 - 2012

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 14:53:00 +0100

Patrick posted his upcoming conference schedule for the next couple of months.
as you can see there are a comple of overlapping conferences :)

Conferences I’m speaking at or likely to attend are:

The first week of October Ill be in the Valley , Ill be late for Jenkinsconf but I hope to pick up some events while Im there.. suggestions are welcome , Im also heading back to Europe earlier than planned so I will miss BadCamp :( …
Devopsdays Goteborg, Sweden : October 14,15 - The yearly Europe devops event is happening in Goteborg this time. It’s going to be really exciting this time , as the theme is inclusive. Eploring the boundaries of devops, I`m once again in the organization of this conference.
T-Dose 2011, The Technical Dutch Open Source Event, on 5 and 6 november 2011 , I will be talking again about my experiences with complex Puppet setups
~~Citconf , London: November 11-12 - All you ever wanted to know about Continuous Integration. Period, registered, haven’t booked flights yet.~~
Cloudcamp Belgium: November 21 - I’m looking forward to this year’s event, as there will likely more practioners and less marketing folks.
Lisa 2011, Boston, US, Im giving an Invited talk titled , Devops: The past and futre are here, It's just not evenly distributed (yet), and Ill be on a panel titled What Will Be HOt Next Year, really looking forward to this one :)
Fosdem.org will take place on 4 and 5 February 2012 , and as every year since it inception I’ll be there
The UKUUG rebranded to FlossUK , they are hosting their Annual Spring conference from 20th to 22nd March in Edinburgh , given their refound focus it will be even more interresting !
And as announced earlier this week Loadays.org will take place in Antwerp again this year on 31/3/2012 and 1/4/2012 , as the previous years I`m co organizing this conference

And yes, I do work from time to time. Just that these conferences are a great way to capture and share new ideas. All worth it!

Using Veewee

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:41:00 +0100

With @dancarley and @patrickebois just discussing the origin of the name of Veewee I figured I still had that piece of documentation I wrote up for myselve flying around …

So with no other reason than having my docs mirrored on the internet .

1. gem install veewee

1. veewee templates

shows you what templates we have around ..

1. $veewee init natty ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64
2. Init a new box natty, starting from template ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64
3. The basebox 'natty' has been successfully created from the template ''ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64'
4. You can now edit the definition files stored in definitions/natty
5. or build the box with:
6. vagrant basebox build 'natty'

As noted this will generate the definition for your natty box,
It will create a definition.rb file which describes your box.
A preseed (or kickstart or similar file) and a postinstall file

Devops for Drupal, the survey,

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:55:00 +0100

Devops is gaining momentum, the idea that developers and operations should work much closer together , the idea that one should automate as much as possible in both their infrastructure and their release process brings along a lot of questions, ideas and tools that need to be integrated in your daily way of working.

Drupal has one of the biggest development communities in the open source world, being part of both communities We are trying to bridge the gap,

Back from opendbcamp and Froscon

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:53:00 +0100

I`m back from my second opendbcamp this year, and my first Froscon :)

With Sankt Augustin being only a 2.5 hour drive , it was one of the only conferences in Europe so close to home that I hadn’t visited yet. Overall it’s a good conference, it’s a good sized, not too crowded event which attracted a bunch of interesting speakers.

Sadly they managed to do way to much changes to the schedule last minute which were not updated in their Android app.. so I ended up arriving in the wrong room multiple times .. Also Sadly German conferences still tend to have way to much German language presentations, for foreign speakers from different parts of the world that limits the choice of talks they can visit.

Drupal and Configuration Mgmt, we're getting there ...

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:39:00 +0100

For those who haven’t noticed yet .. Im into devops .. Im also a little bit into Drupal, (blame my last name..) , so one of the frustrations I’ve been having with Drupal (an much other software) is the automation of deployment and upgrades of Drupal sites …

So for the past couple of days I’ve been trying to catch up to the ongoing discussion regarding the results of the configuration mgmt sprint , I’ve been looking at it mainly from a systems point of view , being with the use of Puppet/ Chef or similar tools in mind .. I know I`m late to the discussion but hey , some people take holidays in this season :) So below you can read a bunch of my comments … and thoughts on the topic ..

The case for Augeas

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:26:00 +0100

Ever since I met David Lutterkort over steaks at OLS 2007 augeas was this tool in the back of my mind that I couldn’t place… I never saw the need for it… or it seemed to be huge overkill for the problem that needed solving .

Till I ran into sipxecs rewriting XML files on the fly .. and putting values in their XML that I could not trace back to an original source. As of Augeas 0.8.x there’s an XML lens out there.

Killing VirtualBox

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:29:00 +0100

Note to self :
when virtualbox acts up again .

1. [sdog@stillmine ~]$  VBoxManage list runningvms
2. "vagrant-etherpad_1307533136" {60697a54-35fc-44e7-96b6-008cde6995a6}
3. [sdog@stillmine ~]$ VBoxManage controlvm vagrant-etherpad_1307533136 poweroff
4. 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

Beyond Configuration Mgmt

Wed, 25 May 2011 23:18:00 +0100

(This post has been sitting in the drafts folder for way to long, I decided to push the publish button anyhow .. some people might get ideas from it..)

We’ve all run in to the problem, you’ve puppetized, or euh .. cooked , about every part of your infrastructure and then there’s this one service which has no config files, a broken api that doesn’t allow you to configure antyhing, but a magnificent web gui to configure all aspects of the service. Magnificent for the eye , full of AJAX and other fancy stuff which wget isn’t really keen on. Off course before it even starts working you need to set it’s password , from that webgui.

And then vagrant gave up ... for a while

Mon, 02 May 2011 22:31:00 +0100

Don’t you just love Ruby errors … like the one below ?

Don’t they almost make Java stack traces look readable ?
57 lines of jibberish … where all I wanted to read was “VirtualBox in error state, check gui”

People like Randall Hanssen deserve much more visibility .. they do understand how to write a good error message and there are lots of projects that need improvement there.

Anywhow… vagrant had suddenly stopped working on me with the error below

The 4158 second catalog run.

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 22:36:00 +0100

Two of my tweets , sorry dents, earlier today caused some people to ask me what on earth I was doing :)

You don’t exist, go away!

Was the first one, indeed .. it was a long time since I had actually seen that one.. this actually happens when you delete the user you are logged in with on a host, when the host notices you don’t exist anymore it will tell you.

Vagrant & Rubylibs

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:11:00 +0100

I was testing some MySQL puppet modules on my Vagrant box earlier this week and one of them required augeas.
I kept running into “Could not find a default provider for augeas”, however all the appropriate augeas , augeas-lib and ruby-augeas packages were installed. I inspected the different ruby directories and the files were perfectly in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 where I expected them.

With all the files seemd to be in the right place, my next option was to strace a small ruby script that included augeas, guess what that showed ..

Watching the Guards

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:44:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a weird drop in web usage stats on the site you are browsing now. Kinda weird as the drop was right around Fosdem when usually there is a spike in traffic.

So before you start.. no I don’t preach on practice on my own blog, it’s a blog dammit, so I do the occasional upgrades on the actual platform , with backups available, do some sanity tests and move on, yes I break the theme pretty often but ya’ll reading this trough RSS anyhow.

24 hours of Puppet Drama

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:42:00 +0100

Over the past couple of days I’ve been fighting with a weird puppet problem , we eventually cracked it , but I promised a bunch of you to fully explain it here ;)

So we were deploying 2 Blade chassis at a pretty remote location with a mix of phyisical and virtual machines, some 48 instances in total. This is a pretty standard rollout, we’ve got a bunch of similar platforms in our lab , so we knew about a couple of glitches, what to expect etc.

dhcpd on Shared Networks

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:12:00 +0100

And as I always forget (getting old remember) how to have dhcpd configured to serve for multiple networks on one interface (e.g with aliases)
(as in test setups eg. ) I`ll write it down here, So next time google can point right back to me

1. shared-network thisismessy {
2. subnet 10.8.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
3. option routers 10.8.0.1;
4. }
5. subnet 10.12.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
6. option routers 10.12.0.1;
7. }
8. subnet 10.16.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
9. option routers 10.16.0.1;
10. }
11. }

Converting KVM to VirtualBox

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:01:00 +0100

I have had most of my test environment, aka puppetmasters, test mysql setups etc running in KVM for the past couple of years .. (yes I`m still using a lot of Xen in production environments, but we’ve also been using KVM for a while already .. it’s a good mix) , Virtual box has always been the lesser loved Virtualization platform , however while playing more and more with Vagrant Up I realized I needed to convirt some boxen (e.g my PuppetMaster) to Virtualbox, and google was really no good help(most people seem to go the other way , or want to use some proprietary tools )

Ensure Running

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:20:00 +0100

Has anyone noticed that pretty much every puppet module one finds on the internet by default enables the service they try to configure in the module

When looking at it from a single machine point of view it makes sense to include the module , have it configure your service and directly enable it by default.

So I started wondering .. isn’t there anybody out there who is building clusters ? Where services have to configured on multiple nodes but should NOT be running acitvely on all nodes by default because there is an external tool which manages that for you (Pacemaker framework eg.)

At Fosdem

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 22:06:00 +0100

on Friday evening , apparently having a confirmed reservation in a resto is not enough to actually be welcome at that restaurant.
at DrupalDevdays, only 2 laptops were open during our presentation
at DrupalDevdays, almost nobody in the room was already using CI
at Fosdem , the parking lot is full before 11:30 on a saturday
at Fosdem , much less Macs than last years .
at Fosdem , way too much rooms are already at full capacity so you need to have 2-3 backup alternatives ..
at Fosdem , people expect me to be in certain rooms, at the same time
at Fosdem , even with too much rooms already full one still misses a bunch of interresting talks
at Fosdem , one doesn’t even realize friends are speaking there too ..
at Fosdem , Android is the standard …
at Fosdem , you are confronted with the fact you probably forgot more names of people than you remember ;(
at Fosdem , you are surrounded by famous open source people, that aren’t even on the schedule
at the MySQL Meetup Dinner, Monty brings Salmiakki
at Fosdem , you wonder how many other people have survived their 11th edition
at Fosdem , you can’t get into any devroom on sunday morning
at Fosdem , begging on Twitter to get in to a devroom from the other side of the door works (at least for me :))
at Fosdem , netbooks are much less popular as opposed to 2-3 years ago ..
after fosdem … you crash ..\

Reservation Confirmed

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:23:00 +0100

Apparently I don’t understand french :(

Copied from my inbox …

1. From: 	Info Falstaff <info@lefalstaff.be>
2. To: 	'Kris Buytaert' <Kris.Buytaert@youalreadyknowmyaddy.be>
3. Subject: 	RE: Reservation Next Friday 4/2/2011
4. Date: 	Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:55:45 +0100

6. je confirme votre  reservation pour le vendredi 04 02 2011

8. vous trouverez ci-joint nos differentes formules

10. bien à vous

12. guy Lommen chef de cuisine

MySQL & Friends Meetup at Fosdem 2011

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:28:00 +0100

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

Upcoming 2011 Speaking Engagements

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:04:00 +0100

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.

Devops Meetups before Fosdem , 2011 Edition

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:45:00 +0100

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 !

Appliance or Not Appliance

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:28:00 +0100

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.

Fedora Annoyancies Resolved (Hopefully)

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:39:00 +0100

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 :)

The New devops Audience, Drupalistas !

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:35:00 +0100

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

Guest Post Season

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 23:23:00 +0100

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\

Musical Fedora Annoyancies.

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:01:00 +0100

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 ..

High Availability MySQL Cookbook , the review

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 01:07:00 +0100

When I read on the internetz that Alex Davies was about the publish a Packt book on MySQL HA I pinged my contacts at Packt and suggested that I’d review the book .

I’ve ran into Alex at some UKUUG conferences before and he’s got a solid background on MySQL Cluster and other HA alternatives so I was looking forward to reading the book.

Alex starts of with a couple of indepth chapters on MySQL Cluster, he does mention that it’s not a fit for all problems, but I’d hoped he did it a bit more prominently … an upfront chapter outlining the different approaches and when which approach is a match could have been better. The avid reader now might be 80 pages into MySQL cluster before he realizes it’s not going to be a match for his problem.

Bug Zapper

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:46:00 +0100

Dear Fedoracommunity,

Over the course of the day I recieved 22^H3 mails from your friendly Bug Zapper.

Most of those bugs where bugs I had reported upon crashes using bug-buddy. Bugs on different desktop tools such as .. synergy, evolution, gwibber , gnome-settings and probably some others

I do understand that I development goes on and on .. and your fancy devs don’t care anymore about bugs I reported on Fedora 12 as they are all hacking on Fedora 15 and that I should update more frequently …

To Package, and what to package

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:20:00 +0100

One of the open sessions last week (corr: last month) at Devopsdays 2010 Hamburg was the one on packaging software. It’s always a big question on wether you package the software that runs in your infrastructure or not. And if you package it .. what do you package ..

The general consensus of the open space was pretty much that you always package the software you deploy, unless you have some very good reasons not to. Pretty much the way I’ve been doing for ages ..

Puppet broke my Xen

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:35:00 +0100

Actually it didn’t , but now I got your attention.
We just adopted the use of adding headers to all of our files that are managed by puppet so people will know not to touch it

1. file {
2. "/etc/xen/scripts/network-custom-vlan-bridges":
3. owner => "root",
4. group => "root",
5. mode => "0755",
6. content => template(
7. "headers/header-hash.erb',
8. "xen/co-mmx-network-custom-vlan-bridges.erb");
9. }

All worked nice however upon bootstrapping our Xen host the bridges stopped working .. running the network-custom-vlan-bridges script manually solved everything and created the appropriate bridges. But at boottime it didn’t..

Le Tablet nouveau est arrivee

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:57:00 +0100

So I bought myselve a new gadget, a tablet. I wanted a couple of things, first of all I love the mythdroid app as a remote control for my MythTV, but as it runs on my phone and kids don’t have a phone it was pretty much a blocking issue when I wasn’t at home.
The second thing I wanted was a device for the kids to play small games on … and I also want to use it for the kids to watch some movies while we travel. On top of that it would be handy if I could use it to surf the web from my couch while not having to open up my laptop.

Busy weeks coming up ..

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 21:11:00 +0100

The next 2 months promise to be the more busier of the year for me .

On october 11th I`ll be giving a presentation ab out Linux and High Availability at the KAHO Sint Lieven in Gent

Just 2 days later I`ll be leaving to Hamburg for the next European version of DevopsDays 2010.

Between Devopsdays Hamburg and Leaving for Malaga I`ll visit CloudCamp Ghent om October 20th.

I’ll be in Malaga for the Software Libre Open Source World Conference which will take place on 27 and 28 october

Pidgin and OAUth

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:53:00 +0100

So earlier today the nice folks over at twitter figured it was a good time to change all the authentication to oauth … they might have announced it all over the place .. but it never catched my attention

The onlything that did catch my attention was that after not having ued pidgin for about 2 weeks I didn’t have access to twitter anymore.

I`m using the purple-microblog plugin and the default version of that plugin in Fedora 12 wasn’t really up2date. The plugin supports OAuth as of 3.0 which was released ages ago.

Mollom and Views

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:06:00 +0100

You might have noticed that this blog stopped accepting comments about a month ago.. well. stopped accepting is a big word.. I was still accepting comments, only they were never submitted to the database and after entering a comment to my blog people ended up on a white page.

So upon returning from holliday I set out to debug the issue together with one of our Inuits Drupal geeks and quickly ran into the following error.\

yum install mariadb

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:55:00 +0100

I`m not the biggest fan of openSUSE but this weeks post by Colin Charles makes me happy ..

openSUSE users can now do a mariadb install from their default repositories.

With all the fuzz about Snoracle and MySQL’s future last year to me it became clear that we would end up having different MySQL based distributions, probably with different names, and that it would be up to the Linux distributions to provide the users with what they preferred, working with those Linux distributions
therefore would be very important for the MySQL distributions.

A parallel universe

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:19:00 +0100

What happens when you mention Open Office and Firewall in once sentence, in public ?

People start actually building it (French Article)

Then add to that list that there’s also people out there that think that running MySQL over NFS is providing them High Availability, or that using DNS Round Robin will provide them a scalable setup,

So yes .. apparently there is indeed a parallel universe out there.

And no .. I don’t want to see Webmin in any Appliance .. that is a joke…, or rather a rant ..

Inuits Day

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:14:00 +0100

Couple of Fridays ago we had one of our @Inuits days again. Rather than having some people give talks and presentations about what they have been doing for the past couple of months this time we set out to research, test, and build stuff.

We split up in 3 different groups, one focusing on CI and testing freshly build stuff with cucumber, a second one setup and tested Galera

We setup a 3 node Galera cluster , not really as smooth as we’d like to ..

HTC Hero Upgrade

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:50:00 +0100

This morning my HTC Hero told me it had an upgrade available.
It wasn’t really the moment to do the upgrade.

So when tonight I wanted to perform the upgrade I couldn’t really find out how to initiate it again .

Apparently the trick is to put the date of your phone one month forward and you get the update request again.

So my phone has been updated … so let’s hope this indeed was the preparation for a real upgrade ..

Giving Devs a Dev platform

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:51:00 +0100

It’s a typical situation, the developers develop on their own boxen, they only start to integrate their code on on the production platform 3 hours before the deadline. And then the problems start, the typical “But it works on my system” , “its your problem now” is something nobody really likes to hear .

So how do you tackle this problem ? As Christian already mentions Talking is the first step of the solution,

FAQ:

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:32:00 +0100

Q: Is Dries your Brother ?
A: No he isn’t.

Q: Are you related to Dries ?
A: No we aren’t (as far as we know)

Q: Do you know Dries ?
A: Yeah .. I’ve known him since before he started his work on Drupal, now can you stop asking about Dries and refocus on me ?

Q: Are you related to Thomas Buytaert
A: No.

Q: Why are you sdog on irc ?
A: Back in my DemoScene days my nick was Sleeping Dog , whch was too long for a unix account name , sleeping didn’t feel like a good choice and neither did dog, so the abbrev became sdog

@Beaker on #Devops

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:10:00 +0100

Yesterday @beaker posted his ideas on the #devops movement …

Apparently we haven’t been stressing enough on the fact that it isn’t just about Devs and Ops,
So let me repeat it’s not just about Devs and Ops, it’s about breaking silo’s , about being good at our jobs, about getting conversation started, about talking to different stakeholders in the processes . We are absolutely trying to include all groups, not exclude some.

PuppetCamp Europe 2010

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:59:00 +0100

Last week was pretty heavy on conferences for me. On wednesday I had to give my Building Virtual Appliances talk at the at the Sizing Server event on Advanced Virtualization and Hybrid Cloud Computing , but the most important part of the week was the first edition of Puppetcamp Europe.

When the first ideas about PuppetCamp Europe started I asked Luke when and where it’d be held. He replied that I should know as I was supposed to organise it… I thanked for the honour , he went on to ask Patrick , he accepted … I hope I helped him out enough :) I even handed out a personal invitation to some of the most famous configuration mgmt people on this planet and Inuits sponsored the event too

Call For Abstracts : NLUUG Fall Conference on Security

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:53:00 +0100

For all the security experts : the NLUUG has published it’s Call For Abstracts for it’s Fall conference.. as you might have guessed the topic is Security, we welcome all abstracts tackling security in a broad sense.

Possible topics include:

* cloud security
* online privacy
* rfid hacking
* secure programming
* programma-analysis-tools
* web services security
* web browser security
* embedded hardware hacking
* incident response and forensics
* malware and rootkits
* responsible disclosure
* legal response
* fighting spam
* patch policies
* identity management
* central point of administration
* DNSsec
* VPN based WANs
* etc.

Building Virtual Appliances

Thu, 27 May 2010 10:03:00 +0100

Johan from Sizing Servers asked me if I could talk about my experiences on building (virtual) appliances at their Advanced Virtualization and Hybrid Cloud seminar . Off course I said yes ..

Slides are below … Enjoy ..

Building appliances

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert.

Over 2 years of #mollom satisfaction

Sat, 22 May 2010 20:53:00 +0100

Following up on Wim’s example

NLUUG Spring Conference 2010

Tue, 11 May 2010 22:52:00 +0100

Last week the NLUUG Spring Conference was held in Ede, this years topic was System Administration in general.. which means there was a pretty wide range of talks … some of the talks were extremely interesting and gathered a lot of people , others really shouldn’t have been put in the main room.. Frequenly organising them myselve it’s always a difficult choice for a conference organiser.

Must say this was one of my better talks .. it all went smooth and nicely fit within time. Probably the promise of drinks and food after my talk helped some.

Today everything could have been a freaking dnssec problem

Wed, 05 May 2010 19:28:00 +0100

You might have read about it .. al over the internets. but today a big step for the implementation of global DnsSec implementation is being made .

You might want to read up about the impact.

And test here if you are unsure about your situation.

MySQL HA , an alternative approach

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:17:00 +0100

For those who’ve seen my presentation on MySQL HA, you already know that I often use a multimaster setup with a meta OCF resource that groups my favoured MySQL instance with the service ip , using a meta resource means that pacemaker monitors mysql, but it doesn’t actually manage it. It’s an approach that works for us.

One of the other approaches I will be looking at soon is the freshly released OCF resource that Florian announced last week.

Devops and Cloud

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:15:00 +0100

Whenever I give my Cloud security talk there’s a slide in there talking about the most scary idea about Cloud and Security, the fact that Marketing people will build things on their own while IT, or any other departement isn’t involved, and as we all know marketing people have no clue about security, it’s not on their mind they won’t even think about adding some sort of security to their application.

Zabbix, the book

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:14:00 +0100

Ages ago the folks over at Packt asked me if I was interested in writing a book about Zabbix, I kindly declined, I didn’t have time to write a book ,

Months later we got back in touch and I got involved in reviewing the book

It just arrived in the mail .

There’s a couple of things I’d have done different , but overall it’s a good read if you are interrested in Zabbix.

Linux Open Administration Days 2010

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:43:00 +0100

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.

UKUUG Spring Conference 2010

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:16:00 +0100

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.

Starting a Collection

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:38:00 +0100

Apparently I started a collection ..
Of DNS books signed by their author …

As already mentioned on twitter, Jan-Piet Mens kindly gave me a signed copy of his alternative DNS Servers book, last week at the UKUUG 2010 Spring Conference

When I got that book I didn’t even know yet that this morning I was going to be at a seminar on DNS sec by Cricket Liu
and because of having registered so late for the event I certainly wasn’t expecting to get one of the books that were going to be handed out to the first 50 people that signed up … but I was lucky ..

11 days till Loadays

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:59:00 +0100

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 ..

#Devops / Ruby Meetup , Antwerp, April 8, 2010

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:57:00 +0100

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 :)

Dear @SonyEricssonBE

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:17:00 +0100

I`m very sad, I won’t be able to make it to the @AndroidPartybe tonight, and neither will I be making it to @plugg tomorrow :(

I have to sit back and watch you hand out Xperia X10’s to people that plan on selling it to buy a new iPad or a Nexus, people that don’t realize what a great piece of technolgy Sony Ericsson usually delivers or just kids that want any cool phone and all that while being forced to use an HTC Hero

DevOPS, SecOPS, DBAOps, NetOps

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:39:00 +0100

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.

Better days Arrive when Dev Meet Ops

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:03:00 +0100

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 ! ;)

Apparently Devops is not a JobTitle

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:55:00 +0100

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)

Did anyone not blog about Devops today ?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:33:00 +0100

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

Packaging Drupal Modules or not ?

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:20:00 +0100

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.

To not yum or to not apt-get, that's NOT the question.

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:13:00 +0100

Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro’s indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.

However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?

First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don’t have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.

Irc vs Twitter err.. Identi.ca

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:15:00 +0100

Over 1.5 decade ago, a bunch of us were addicted to irc, I lived on channels such as #coders, #nlcoders, #demoscene, sneaked in on #vlaanderen to see when the Leuven locals were heading to the pub, then started joining multiple Linux and Open Source related channels around 94…

Then some weirdos had an alternative way of chatting ICQ, then the folks from Redmond reinvented the wheel… Luckily XMPP arrived and Jabber became the open alternative, but still all of this time irc stayed

Loadays CFP

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:55:00 +0100

I would like to point the crowd to the Call For Presentaions of Loadays. , the Linux Open Administration Days .

The Linux Open Administration days 2010 will be the first edition of a new conference focusing on Linux and Open Administration, we are trying to fill a gap for System Engineers and Administrators using Open Source technologies"

More details on the Linux Open Administration Days site

I’ll probably be there .. given the fact that the event will be 5 minutes from where I live .

Fosdem 2010

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:30:00 +0100

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 .

Upcoming Conference Talks

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:04:00 +0100

I know the biggest part of my fanclub already booked tickets for my upcoming presentations, but the other 2 might want to check their calendars to see if they aren’t missing out on the good stuff :)

Next Sunday I`ll giving a shortish overview of MySQL HA alternatives in the MySQL and Friends devroom at Fosdem.

March will bring me to Manchester again for the UKUUG Spring conference where I`ll be giving a longer version of that presentation with a strong focus on integrating with PaceMaker, and automating the whole boostrap procedure of a HA setup.

Implementing Raid Monitoring on a 3Ware 3w-9xxx based controller.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:41:00 +0100

When you pull out a disk from your Raid setup it shows a warning in syslog

1. Jan 27 10:18:22 EL860 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING (0x04:0x0019): Drive
2. removed:port=1.
3. Jan 27 10:18:22 EL860 kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: ERROR (0x04:0x0002): Degraded
4. unit:unit=0, port=1.

However if no one is looking at syslog that won’t really be helpfull.

3Ware provides a tool from their site called tw_cli which can be used to manage
the raid setup from the command line.

F12 Dependency failure

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:34:00 +0100

Fresh laptop arrived, obviously the first thing to do is to install the latest fedora. then do a full yum update.

However that failed with the following failed dependency\

1. mesa-libGL-7.7-2.fc12.i686 from updates has depsolving problems
2. --> Missing Dependency: libdrm >= 2.4.17-1 is needed by package mesa-libGL-7.7-2.fc12.i686 (updates)
3. Error: Missing Dependency: libdrm >= 2.4.17-1 is needed by package mesa-libGL-7.7-2.fc12.i686 (updates)
4. You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
5. You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
6. package-cleanup --dupes
7. rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Now I don’t really use all the fancy compiz stuff so for now I can just solve it by running

MySQL & Friends Meetup @ Fosdem

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:38:00 +0100

Fosdem is coming up again .. It’s going to be the 10th edition already So it’s going to be 2 days and nights of fun, tech and geek stuff

Lenz already posted the announcement , but allow me to recapitulate.

The MySQL & Friends meetup is on saturday evening , we’ll meet around 1900 in front of the under the big tree in front of the AW building…

~~As with the Devops Meetup you can once again vote for your preferred food~~

Devops Meetup @ Fosdem

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:05:00 +0100

The Devops crowd does not have it’s own devroom at Fosdem but will be meeting on Friday evening for food in a location close to the BeerEvent.

~~If you want to join us please let us know by voting on your favourite choice of Food. Using this doodle.~~

There’s already about 15 people that are voting for the food selection ….

Plan is to meet outside of the BeerEvent around 2000 and
then move to a preferred food location.

Planet , Drupal Style

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:02:00 +0100

So when you setup an aggregator there’s this one thing you miss from a regular planet …the list of blogs with their individual Feeds.

I wanted to use this for planet.loadays.org again and realized I don’t know where I got this snippet from or if I wrote it myselve or whatever .. but I do realize that unless I document it here I won’t be able to point other people to it again :) So just create a block like this one :

IntoDns

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:00:00 +0100

So a couple of weeks ago I blogged about DNS Knife late last year I ran into an even better tool.

Enter IntoDNS

Apparently IntoDNS.com finds more issues like the zone file listing different nameservers from the ones you defined …etc..

So change your bookmarks, browse that page :)

Drupal6 in EPEL

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:48:00 +0100

Dear Drupal Community,

If any of you are interrested in getting a packaged version of Drupal 6 into Fedora’s EPEL repository (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) and therefore usable in RHEL and Centos,
please comment on the Bug I filed to get it’s introduction started.

Any pitfalls, benefits etc are welcome ..

thnx in advance !

Packaging Djagios

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:42:00 +0100

After all the politics involved in getting a package in a distro, or not it was time for a nice small and clean package of a fresh and promising open source project. Djagios was an easy choice.

I’ve uploade the rpm and Source RPM to repo.inuits.be and getting the SPEC file in the upstream repo was 10 minutes work.

Next step is to get it into Fedora , and EPEL :)

Packaging Drush

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:41:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I was once again manually installing Drush as there were no packages for CentOS / EPEL or whatever, apart from the needed patch to get it running on a 5.1.X RHEL php

I had found this thread on Drupal.org mentioning that a package already exists
however David had not answered the exact location yet
So I created a drush package with a with the above mentionned patch and sent it to Jon Ciesla again he gave some suprising feedback ;)

Drupal 6 for EPEL

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:39:00 +0100

Some of you might have noticed that Fedora 11 and up already have an up to date Drupal6 version, but EPEL , which is what a lot of people are using on their CentOS or RHEL builds only has a Drupal5. I asked Jon Ciesla, who is maintaing the Drupal packages in Fedora why :

Because when Drupal was initially built for EL-5 and EL-5, the 5.x
branch was the current release. It’s up to date, 5.20 is the most
recent release, and is still supported upstream in terms of security
fixes. 6 is out, and has been for awhile, but we have the following:

Barcamp Gent 3

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:38:00 +0100

Barcamp Gent 3, the one that took place yesterday is probably going to be my last Barcamp in Belgium. I already had my doubts upfront when looking at the suggested talks, but once there I realized it was much worse than I expected.

Lemme repoint you folks to what I wrote about the first Barcamp in Belgium back in 2006
Maybe my expectations on what kind of people / talks to meet and see there were a bit wrong.. when looking at other barcamps where people such as whurley and Moshe were present, I was maybe hoping for a bit more of system level innovation etc. or at least more technology innovation rather than Bloggers meet and talk about Blogging tools. I wasn’t sure on what I should talk about as most of the topics I usually speak about would have been so out of scope and probably wouldn’t have reached any potientiel audience.\

Devops , a Barcamp Gent 3 Talk

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:24:00 +0100

Devops

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert.

Too bad the majority of the audience already knew what I was a bout to say ….

Option D

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:30:00 +0100

Lots of people writing about Snorkle again today ,Monty Says, help saving MySQL

He gives us different options, a , b or c .. but I , and some others, want an option d

No I don’t trust Oracle, it’s not like they have been a very good Open Source Citizen, yes they contribute to the kernel and other projects but my feeling says it’s only because they have to (Kernel, Xen and others ) not because they Want to (thinking about Unfakable etc) , if they would really want to they probably would work with the CentOS community more etc, and as Monty mentions their InnoDB track record could be better.

Fosdem 2010 is getting closer

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:52:00 +0100

The 10th edition of Fosdem is getting closer, yes .. I said 10 ,10 decimal that means ten, not two :)

It’s kinda hard to imagine that this is actually going to be my 10th fosdem , it feels weird ..

Anyhow.. Lenz just announced a call for participation for the MySQL and Friends devroom.

I`m guessing a talk on .LolSQL might be a good fit for the “and Friends” part.

Disabling DHCP on a LibVirt setup

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:43:00 +0100

So you have this libvirt setup and you want to have a dhcp server on the virtual machines you are playing with , or you want to have all static IP’s.

Libvirt uses dnsmasq to provide dhcp services etc and when you generate a config from the gui it will look like\

1. <network>
2. <name>piponet</name>
3. <uuid>e87d3bf1-a2e7-96ca-e131-7ae51ac033f9</uuid>
4. <bridge name='virbr2' stp='on' delay='0' />
5. <ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
6. <dhcp>
7. <range start='192.168.100.128' end='192.168.100.254' />
8. </dhcp>
9. </ip>
10. </network>

If you fully remove the dhcp section, then restart libvirt you’ll notice dnsmasq running with no dhcpd on that subnet so you’ll have full control again :)

Drupal 6 , Social Networking

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:09:00 +0100

As posted earlier Packt was so kind to send me their Drupal 6 , Social Networking for review.

My hopes were high, I was hoping for some info on how to integrate with different existing networks, content about existing frameworks, maybe some mentioning of openAtrium or so, or integrating with Twitter or other existing platforms.

Sadly the book only briefly touches similar content, the Google API , in Chapter 7

While a good read, and a good introduction to Drupal for new users I didn’t learn anything till chapter 7 and anything after Chapter 7 ;( And I don’t consider myselve as a Drupal Expert

Changing the title of my Blog

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:39:00 +0100

After what google announced today it’s pretty clear who to blame as of now, no it’s not Dim0 anymore,, it’s not a Freaking DNS Problem anymore its just plain old google.

Yep Google announced they will be providing a public open DNS server . So rather than claiming that Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem, now everything is a Freaking Google Problem.

Google tracking which sites you visits while not using earch, it’s a DNS Problem , Google tracking different Google Profiles you have and matching them together indeed, another Fine DNS Proble, Google tracking what different users are working the same computer and mapping them it’s a DNS Problem,

Fedora 12 Release Party

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:37:00 +0100

I have a confession to make, Im a Fedora user, have been since before it existed , I remember running RedHat 4.2 on my Multia and Im pretty sur that wasn’t my first RedHat install

I`m running Fedora on my laptop and corporate desktop for the simple reason that it will provide me with a preview of what CentOS might look like in the future.

So when my inbox started to show invites of a Fedora 12 release party at walking distance from my home , I replied I’d join the party afer I had put the kids to bed.

The Serial typo

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:16:00 +0100

Serge pinged me today over Jabber asking hot to tackle an accidental typo in the serial number of a zonefile.

1. dig +short SOA ibbt.be
2. dns1.ibbt.be. admin.ibbt.be. 2009141017 7200 3600 1209600 432000

No really we don’t need no 13th and 14th month. Given the fact that lots of us use the YYYYMMDDID format That would mean that we’d have to wait for 20100101 to happen before we can update in a readable fashion again ..

NoSQL vs MySQL

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:17:00 +0100

No I did NOT post the following comment
This is ridiculous. You didn’t test MySQL, you tested a failing DNS lookup on authentication.

resulting in the follow up post :

My previous post Redis, Memcache, Tokyp Tyrant, MySQL comparison had a flaw as pointed out by this comment. The MySQL was taking a huge time for doing a reverse DNS lookup.\

But as always … Everything is just a Freaking dns problem :)

Tom Limoncelli is wrong

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:09:00 +0100

Tom Limoncelli is so wrong , he list DNS problem only as nr 33 on his dumb-things to check list.

And obviously it should be the very First thing you check !

Got Interviewed

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:05:00 +0100

by @botchagalupe
on Virtualization, Open Source tools and DNS Problems

Dear Mollom,

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:33:00 +0100

What I would like as a feature from Santa,

I would like to be able to report a comment as URL Spam , you know the case where the content of a comment is perfectly OK, but the URL the commenter uses is a link to a NSF, pure spamming or absolutely unrelated site.

There’s nofollow etc , but to keep my site clean I’d have to report these commen
ts as spam, however when you start analysing the content of the message and comparing that content to other posts you will eventually get false positives.

Yet Another DNS Issue

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:01:00 +0100

While browsing trough my enormous mailinglist backlog I ran into the following message from Gianluca Cecchi on the DRBD-user mailing list

guess I`ll have to give Lars a T-Shirt when we next meet ;)

1. From: Gianluca Cecchi
2. To: drbd-user@lists.linbit.com
3. Subject: [DRBD-user] notes on 8.3.2


6. - drbdadm create-md r0 segfaults when the command "hostname" on the
7. server contains the fully qualified domain name but you have put only
8. the hostname part in drbd.conf
9. Instead, the command "drbdadm dump" correctly gives you a warning in
10. this case (suggesting how to correct the error you made....):

12. suppose complete hostname is virtfed.domainname.com and you put
13. virtfed alone in drbd.conf
14. [root@virtfed ~]# drbdadm dump
15. WARN: no normal resources defined for this host (virtfed.domainname.com)!?

17. while
18. [root@virtfed ~]# drbdadm create-md r0
19. Segmentation fault

Guess I`ll have to give the Linbit crowd a T-Shirt when we next meet ;)

What DNS is Not

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:40:00 +0100

This article by Paul Vixie is a must read if you want to know what DNS is not about .. and how people abuse it for the sake of extorting money from morons.

Ah well.. nothing we didn’t already know.. just more proof that
Everything is a Freaking DNS problem.

Not sure on which layer the problem is.. must be on a layer even above the religious one.. the “Greed” one.

Funambol on Android

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:13:00 +0100

So we have a Zimbra, and a Funambol and I have an Android, so what would you think I want to test .. exactly .. run the Android Funambol client on my phone.

On forge.funambol.org it looks great .. nice screenshot .. then you look closer ..
Contacts OK, Calendar Not supported (yet) .. apparently it has been like that sincs it got released which is over a year ago.

So I`m looking for other ideas on how to sync my Zimbra Calendar with my Android

A long overdue report of DevopsDays

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:32:00 +0100

Here’s how it started :

So I used to be a software developer, writing perl for the web, then C, then Java, then PHP, till I realized nobody ever configured my servers correctly and I changed trades becoming a system engineer, while teaching new developers the basics of their trade, whom grew into doing Infrastructure Architecture .. familiar story for much of the crowd at DevopsDays … a crowd that wants to stopping the war between developers and system engineering , a crowd that wants to automate builds, integrate testing, deploy, deploy on very large scale, deploy in the cloud and much more.

Life with an Android

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:06:00 +0100

I’ve have never been a really an HTC fan, because of the platform they used before, I have been a Ericsson GA628, SH888, then Sony Ericsson fanboy for all my life T39m, K700, K800i , so this is my first attempt into using a different brand of phone , I’ve been wanting an Open Phone for ages.. but I’ve been waiting for Godot, er the openMoko, for way to long now so with the introduction of the HTC and my K800i being long overdue for a replacement.

DNS Tools

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:52:00 +0100

In my latest DNS Problem related post I mentionned that don’t know all the answers, I however know about some good tools to help you setup a clean DNS server.

Ages ago via Planet Fedora I ran into an article from Steven Moix about a tool he and his fellow students build for a summer project.

The tool is DNSKnife and it’s really interresting.

DNS Knife is a good tool to check if your DNS setup is ok, it checks the parent servers, it checks for if your nameservers are listed on the parent server, checks if all your nameservers are reachable and are authorative .
And so on and so on …

Apparently there are Borders

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:22:00 +0100

And therefore, sometimes you need to register domains in different countries.
So how does one proceed, one takes the zone file of the existing domain e.g. .be and creates a symlink for the different countries to the original zonefile e.g .nl and .eu . Afterall, you want to have te same hosts available in every country and you want to keep the hassle down when you update a host.

You tell your registrar, to reg the same domain for the other tld’s with the usueal Nameservers , you know . the one that are listed in your original zonefile

Nines , Damn Nines and More Nines

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:46:00 +0100

Funny how different experiences lead to different evaluations of tools. The MySQL HA solutions the MySQL Performanceblog list, are almost listed in the complete opposited order of what my impressions are.

Ok agreed, I should probably not put my MySQL NDB experiences from 2-3 years ago with multiple Query of deaths and more problems than you into account anymore , but back then went in the list Less stable than a single node. I’ve had NDB POC setups going down for much more than 05:16 minutes
Ndb comes with a lot of restrictions, there are

Heartbeat 2 OpenAIS

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:53:00 +0100

While upgrading a pretty recent Heartbeat cluster to OpenAis earlier today I ran into the following weird situation\

1. Last updated: Fri Oct 16 08:50:03 2009
2. Stack: openais
3. Current DC: CO_NMS-1 - partition with quorum
4. Version: 1.0.5-462f1569a43740667daf7b0f6b521742e9eb8fa7
5. 4 Nodes configured, 2 expected votes
6. 1 Resources configured.
7. ============

9. Online: [ CO_NMS-1 CO_NMS-2 ]
10. OFFLINE: [ co_nms-1 co_nms-2 ]

1. crm(live)node# show
2. co_nms-1(5c48ab4f-767f-e2dc-20ec-5969cddad152): normal
3. co_nms-2(922ff786-eca9-bed0-d79d-8222727a2c5b): normal
4. CO_NMS-1: normal
5. CO_NMS-2: normal

Whohoo.. OpenAIS must have realized I have upperase and lowercase cores :)

Open Source, Open Core, Open ScoreCards

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:06:00 +0100

There is this constant discussion about Open Core vs Open Source vs Proprietary Software , Fauxpen Source, Open Source Business models etc.. you probably know all the usual suspects involved, first up lets agree that nobody will ever agree on what’s best, (off course it’s pure open source.. ) , but one of the important aspects is to know what values are important for you and your customers

Simon Phipps thinks we should build a scorecard that lists the different values we attach to a certain level of openness

Everything is a Swedish dot Problem

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:25:00 +0100

Via @frank_be

.se goes down after a dns config issue
We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating “.” to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that “.se” is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down.

Enterprise Open Source Adoption at BT, London

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:24:00 +0100

Repost from our corporate blog

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark “I`m from outer space” Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown … ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of “people close to you” for supporting solutions .

What Kind of Open Source Fanboy are you ?

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:23:00 +0100

James Dixon has some polls on his blog, they let you choose between being a free software junkie, an open source hacker or what I’d call a an incompetent moron ;)

I had mostly 2’s , no 3 in case you’d wonder.

Monitoring MySQL

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:18:00 +0100

Ronald Bradford wants to know what kind of Monitoring you use..
He specifically wants to know about Alerting tools

There’s different cases , looking at it from a full infrastructure point my current favourite is Zabbix or good old Nagios,

But when looking at it from a debugging perspective you have MySQLAR or Hyperic, but those aren’t in the alerting list.

However, when you are building HA clusters, you have custom scripts running either from mon or from pacemaker ..

Why learn to type ?

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:06:00 +0100

When your machine knows what you mean ..

1. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]# crm configure
2. crm(live)configure# bye
3. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]# crm confiure
4. crm(live)configure# bye
5. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]# crm confiture
6. crm(live)configure# bye
7. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]#

I’d better\

1. apt-get install coffee

T-Dose 2009

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:28:00 +0100

As every year in october a small crowd navigated to Eindhoven to spend 2 days discussing Open Source , Free Software and Beer

The good part about T-Dose is the fact that it is so small, you actually get the chance to talk to a lot of people, you get the chance to sit down with them and play with the code they have been working on ,

T-Dose had talks on IPv6, Bind10 , Linux Auto Update USB, eTokens on Linux , VirtSec, Django , Puppet and other topics.
I actually missed talks that I had wanted to see.. just because I was in the middel of interresting discussions with people. That’s totally different from some other conferences where I don’t even make it to the talks because of the smalltalk :)

It's the solutions you build with it !

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:50:00 +0100

I`m gonna have to quote Tarus once again :

For years now I’ve been struggling to educate the market on the fact that the business around open source software is not about software. It’s about solutions.

Let me repeat that .. it’s not about selling software …

It’s about solutions

And obviously FLOSS is the Ideal platform to build value for your customers

Racketeering in 2009

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:59:00 +0100

With the fresh launch of inuits.be this long overdue post popped up again , Earlier this year we got this very nice letter from the BSA That’s right the Business Software Alliance.

The letter pictured below is in dutch, so allow me to translate
some parts :) (Although I`m pretty sure you’ve seen variations of this letter in different languages before..)

In short they are warning us about using software with no licenses.

"Idle"

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:25:00 +0100

For those who wonder why my blogging is so low these days (apart from today) .. I`m actually writing more Lines of Code than Blog Entries the last couple of weeks:)

And when Im not writing code Im reading :) Either proofreading an upcoming book on Zabbix or reading some of the other books Packt sent me.

Next to that I`m busy preparing my T-Dose presentation

Oh and did I mention a 40 something questions questionnaire about some merger ?

MonitoringForge

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:20:00 +0100

I found the initial announcement in my Spambox, thats where I send all the mails from GroundWork as unsubscribing from their marketing lists doesn’t seem to work ..

Tarus pointed it out.. he already mentionned Marketing, low community imput etc..

Nevertheles I had a look, and my first and last impression was, NagiosForge, no active community, and empty pages on other imvho more relevant Monitoring Projects created by GroundWork employees.

Open Source Business Models

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:17:00 +0100

There is once again a lot of fuzz going on about Open Source Business models,

First on my eyballs was the article that Customers don’t seem to like openCore what a big surprise ..

So that’s not the one that makes the customers happy ,

Then there is the other side of the coin, the people that create open source
Authors realize the dual licensing model comes hunting back at you after a merger or a hostile acquisition, yes they still have the source code to build on but they can’t sell commercial licenses to their customers anymore they way they used to.

Some people just don't get it

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:14:00 +0100

I mean, we are heading towards 2010 , some of us have been using Open Source for decades, the Open Source vs Free Software discussion was like last millenium, and we’ve been doing open source consultancy for over a decade, yet today companies still think their customers are stupid,

Fancy this story on ZDNet today .. there’s actually companies out there claiming that “Bind” because of it’s FreeWare nature , yes that’s right you’ve Read FREEWARE , (hadn’t heard that word for over 5 years..) , is less secure than their proprietary offering in the Cloud. So the very nature of their Secure product is offering Security by Obscurity in an insecure environment .

Dual Battery Support

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:31:00 +0100

About 2.5 months ago while I was on a highspeed Belnet connection at UZA after Amber got born I ran in to some annoyancies with my fresh Fedora 11 and multiple batteries, upon replacing the CD drive with an empty battery (to be charged) while I was on AC power the machine shut down.

I filed a bug , while going trough my post holliday inbox backlog I noticed it got fixed . Thnx Richard !

On Conferences

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:52:00 +0100

Somehow this year my schedule really isn’t going to get filled with conferences,unlike my 13 speaking engagements last year this year I decided to go for a lot less :)

Froscon together with OpenSQLCamp is convienently scheduled during an already long planned family weekend .. but I really hope to go there nex year

I’ve been wanting to go south for conferences for ages, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy , Greece are all places I’d love to go and see how the different Open Sourcen conferences play out there. This summer there actually were some different conferences tha took place in Spain, Gran Canaria etc . but I coouldn’t make it there for the obvious reasons..

T-Dose 2009 CFP,

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:44:00 +0100

Dear MySQL and Drupal , Plone and other Open Source folks, you might want to be interrested in giving a talk at T-Dose 2009 ,

Jean Paul pinged me with the following mail :

Maybe it escaped your attention that the Call For Papers for T-DOSE 2009 is already out. It has been announced on 12th of June 2009. Below you will find the original announcement.

Call for Papers and Projects
Fri, 06/12/2009 - 13:57 — jpsaman

Centos, a fine DNS problem

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:14:00 +0100

You must have noticed the fuzz around CentOS, the open Letter , and luckily Lance showing up again ..

I’ve been a long time CentOS user , so this kind of events are pretty close to my heart, I never really worried about the future of the project , the CentOS community is was standing behind their message as one group. If Lance wouldn’t have shown up again quoting Arrfab:
“The worst would be to switch to another domain name .. but you already know that everything is a fscking DNS problem”

Oracle, MySQL and the EU

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:54:00 +0100

Jan Wildeboer pointed us to the Mayflower post about their letter from the European Commission.

It seems like the the European Commision , more specifically the Directorate General for Competition , really is interested in our input regarding the matter, I mailed them and also got a questionnaire to fill in.

So if you have something interesting to tell them don’t hesitate to contact them too.

RiverMuse on RHEL/Centos 5

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:23:00 +0100

My yesterday post about RiverMuse only being available on Fedora Core 9 wasn’t even cold yet and today Rivermuse already announced the availability of their RHEL5 binaries.

Awesome Open Source !

Djagios

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:01:00 +0100

Probably every day there’s a new Open Source project popping up left or right, sometimes they dissapear quickly , others are here to stay.

Enter Djagios, a Nagios configuration tool written in Django. At this time it’s in development phase but development is going pretty good now, Djagios has been incepted by fellow Inuit Jochen Maes

It aims at filling the gap between the vi and emacs Nagios guru’s and the manegerial type who just wants to and make Nagios usable for them.

Rivermuse First Impressions

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:37:00 +0100

First of all, I don’t come from a Tivoli, OpenView background , I have never touched the commercial network monitoring tools and I`m not a network guy . I’m an infrastructure guy whith a focus on Open Source platforms so I have been using Nagios and more recently Zabbix, Zenoss etc for the better part of the last 2 decades in large to very large environments.
My syslogs go to a central (r)syslog)-ng) server where I frequently abuse grep. So If my experience with RiverMuse is not what it should be , there’s work to be done on both sides ;)

KVM vs Virtualbox

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:33:00 +0100

So you need that old FC9 instance on your fresh F11 install.

Obviously I started a KVM instance on my desktop and installed FC9 in a Virtual Machine,
It took long to install, too long, so I looked if KVM was working correctly
Kvm was loaded but not in use ..
And then you remember why you had VirtualBox on that machine before it’s upgrade . indeed, this machine was to old it was not a VT Capable machine . VirtualBox performs much better there ..

RiverMuse

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:31:00 +0100

Rivermuse is the new Fault Management platform tool on the market, their initial relase was lurking around the corner for a while now but since earlier this week it finally arrived

Eager to see what all the fuzz was about I jumped to their dowload page to find an yum repository for Fedora Core 9, that’s right .. it’s july 2009 and RiverMuse released their platform for a Linux distribution that got it’s End Of Life notice last month.

KVM or Xen

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:47:00 +0100

Over at Virtualization.com I asked the crowd what they planned to do when RedHat plans on finally migrating from Xen to KVM .. you can have your say too . :

Will you migrate from Xen to KVM(poll)\

SquashFS errors during FC11 install

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:08:00 +0100

My FC10 to FC11 yum upgrade got stuck on a zillion dependencies .. well actually libssl and mysql from Remi .. but from there it’s a whole chain of other things. So I had the great idea to go for the F11 Live CD, the LiveCD works like a charm,, only upon trying to install the live CD to my OS partition it started failing on me with a bunch of squashfs errors ,

Webbased Administration Interfaces

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:07:00 +0100

Dear Hardware / Appliance and any other kind of being that creates web interfaces to manage devices remotely. Pleaze keep in mind that plenty of these kind of machines are being managed from behind a ssh tunnel so people often connect to them using http://localhost:8080/ where 8080 locally is mapped e.g. via ssh to the port 80 on the remote port.

If your application does anything closely to rewriting the localhost:8080 part to localhost it will fail and I as a potential purchaser of your device wil vote against buying your stuff.
(This is specifically annoying if I want to tunnel 16 KVM/IP boxen to my localhost 8001:8016)

DRBD2, OCFS2, Unexplained crashes

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:01:00 +0100

I was trying to setup a dual-primary DRBD environment, with a shared disk with either OCFS2 or GFS. The environment is a Centos 5.3 with DRBD82 (but also tried with DRBD83 from testing) .

Setting up a single primary disk and running bonnie++ on it worked Setting up a dual-primary disk, only mounting it on one node (ext3) and running bonnie++ worked

When setting up ocfs2 on the /dev/drbd0 disk and mounting it on both nodes, basic functionality seemed in place but usually less than 5-10 minutes after I start bonnie++ as a test on one of the nodes , both nodes power cycle with no errors in the logfiles, just a crash.

Diaper Needs Service Problem

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:53:00 +0100

Last Saturday late, Sandy gave birth to our 2nd daughter
Amber, pics etc are on her own site

So we’ll be changing diapers of 2 little Buytaert kids for a while )

PS. Craig from O’ReillyGMT gets the credit for inventing the new DNS acronym,

Weird Scenes inside the Tarball, Midnight Commander woes

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:32:00 +0100

I was transferring an apt repository to a remote site using the tarbal I created locally. When the first machines tried to do an apt-get update from that repository they failed to getthe package list.

1. Jun 24 11:01:28 10.99.2.253 root: Failed to fetch <a href="http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro" title="http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro">http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro</a>  404 Not Found
2. Jun 24 11:09:29 10.99.2.253 root: Err <a href="http://10.99.0.1" title="http://10.99.0.1">http://10.99.0.1</a> i386/CentOsDistro pkglist

However at first sight the appropriate files were in place

Twitter Woes

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:30:00 +0100

This one has been sitting in the drafts for too long, but frankly there’s not much I have to add.
Twitter is acting weird , we all know that .. but the following movie really beats everything.

Yes that’s right what you are seeing is me logging into my twitter account, checking my @krisbuytaert
messages and seeing the @vti messages and then even taking full control of their (in the mean while deleted) account.

resolv.conf problem

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:19:00 +0100

Collegue troubleshooting a machine that he couldn’t log into anymore

root@Validation_Radio3_Ku_VN1:~# cat /etc/shadow\

/etc/resolv.conf generated on 20090604022133 by\

/etc-ro/rc.d/resolvdotconf.pl
nameserver 192.168.104.1\

Really folks .. Everything is a fine dns problem :)

PS. Yeah yeah .. the real problem was a filesystem corrupted

Told Ya sooo

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:36:00 +0100

By now everybody and their neigbour has realized that indeed Everything is a funky dns problem, Frank is giving talks about it at ZooCamp, and Serge figured out the hard way the downtime of planet.geekdinner.be was due to a dns problem :)

But I told you different things before … and some of you listened others are still reinventing the wheel as we go …

Matt A. points out that the OpenBravo folks realized that one should try to build on top of Open Source projects rather than modify core code ..

ZooCamp

Tue, 26 May 2009 22:57:00 +0100

Last saturday was ZooCamp , also known as Barcamp Antwerp II

The location , the Antwerp Zoo, was the same as for the last CloudCamp Antwerp edition, so I was already pretty familiar with the location.

Lots of new people at ZooCamp and also a bunch of regulars..

My 4th barcamp and the 2nd where I didn’t do a presentation, I hope the fact that Inuits was sponsoring ZooCamp made up for that.. contributions can be done in different forms, and you can’t always keep coming up with new topics.

Puppet Meetup Leuven

Tue, 19 May 2009 12:33:00 +0100

As Teyo will be in Leuven (Belgium) next week for the training , some folks had the idea to meetup after the training for a Puppet Users Meetup.

So the plan is to meet for Drinks and Puppettalk, next week wednesday as of 20u00 in the Domus in Leuven

http://www.domusleuven.be/

I hope to meet a bunch of you there !

PS. Feel free to spread the news.
PPS. There is a chances I won’t make it myselve which shouldn’t keep you folks back :)

ZooCamp

Tue, 19 May 2009 12:06:00 +0100

Less than 1 week till ZooCamp, you know .. Barcamp Antwerp 2, but then in the Antwerp Zoo.

Fun with Google Docs Urls

Fri, 15 May 2009 20:16:00 +0100

I`m not a big user of docs.google.com , but occasionally I use it sharing a public document to work on with friends or collegues.

So we have this spreadsheet we’re sharing with some family and friends to swap Disney stickers. Google Docs has the option to publish that document publicly as html for others to view.

So I tried , and it generated me a very nice url

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rtlvf2-JSU1Pw-oPtuIZBPg&output=ht…

My sleepy eye catched the A1:C300 ending part .. which was generated by the friendly popup that asked me if I wanted to show all Sheets, or just a range of the page.

The machine that vanished.

Fri, 15 May 2009 20:12:00 +0100

Today I lost a machine, a physical one, I couldn’t find it back in my rack anymore. One moment I was logged on to it, and when I instructed it to boot off the network again for a fresh installation I couldn’t find it back anymore, it was gone.

When you have different ad hoc build development environments, you often grab whatever hardware is available to add to your pool and hope it doesn’t kick you back, time always works against you when you have to build a fresh platform from a pool of hardware ready to be reused.

I love Last.fm

Tue, 05 May 2009 22:36:00 +0100

But I won’t become a paid subscriber when they close down access for some countries

Last.fm is awesome .. it learned about my music habits, and it got really good at streaming me My Music, yes.. you read that correctly .. about 85% of the music it sends to my rhythmbox also lives in /home/MyMusic , that’s like the CD’s I bought and ripped to play anywhere I go.. I already paid for those, so why would I want to pay for them again ?

Sushi and DNS Problems

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:02:00 +0100

There seem to be different repeating topics within the Open Source and Geek community.

Koen did a good job explaining how the Great Belgian Firewall reall can’t be solved using DNS tricks.

And Giuseppe tackles the ever recurring Sushi. It has to be said … Geeks love Sushi and not just the MySQl geeks , every conference we go to we try to squeeze in at least 1 Sushi visit.. sometimes more ….. Nurenberg, Manchester, Cambridge, Ottawa , … and there’s more to come .. :)

Dear Oracle,

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled Dear IBM , I was too late .. I was on holliday last week when people started sending me text messages , such as .. “Game Over MySQL , Long live Ingress” or “No Eclipse for IBM”, etc …

I had ideas regarding the future of certain Sun products at IBM, now the game has changed .. it’ss how they will live on at Oracle :)

To exaggerate , or not ...

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:32:00 +0100

Sometimes you have to step out of line to get a message through just write a viewpoint down in totally black, ignoring the white parts.

Earlier examples of these tricks were my rants on raid :)

The original work title of the Virtualization.com post actually was “VMWare, the New Microsoft, they gave us point and click and no clue for the user” But I selfmoderated that down to a more gentle title, not attacking a vendor :)

Bits and Bytes .. on a disk

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:31:00 +0100

Armijn asked me to spread the news about the upcoming NLUUG Voorjaarsconference that will as usually take place in EDE.

Every bit counts. From a single byte to billions of images, from one line of text to a gigantic tangled semantic web of documents, from clay tablets to 3D holographic memory, storage and the means to organize storage have always been important to humanity. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, it was said; a sailboat crossing the Atlantic still manages rates of a little over 1GB/s end-to-end.\

The Way it is !

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:41:00 +0100

(thnx Tarus

Upcoming Training opportunities

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:45:00 +0100

Next month I`ll be teaching a course on Virtualization at the KULAK.

Apart from my training there is also a Puppet training planned in Belgium.

As I assisted Luke in finding a location for the training I tought it might be a good idea to have a Puppet Users meetup while some people are already gathering in Leuven

Current plan is to meet up somewhere in Leuven on the evening of the 25th , more announcements later ..

The Open Source "Channel"

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:55:00 +0100

RedHat announced the launch of the Open Source Channel Alliance, and different folks already commented on it ..

Frankly I think the Open Source “Channel” shouldn’t exist ..

So let’s take a step back and see what the “Channel” actually means.

It used to mean that a vendor didn’t want to manage the logistics of shipping and delivering his product to the end user, you know .. like the big boxen used 3rd parties to provide the logistics, often that “enduser” being a local system integrator that wasn’t allowed, and still isn’t, to order his stuff from the actual vendor, either because he is ordering in too small quantities or any other reasons. Logistics became marketing support , offering training and sometimes presales support.

On ugly clothing :)

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:50:00 +0100

Tarus , when at the UKUUG conference a member of the order of the Green Polo was presenting last month , I was wondering why he wasn’t wearing his Green Polo.

Now I know… it’s just like these ugly Green Jackets at the Masters, you have to return them to Augusta after one year :)

CloudCamp Antwerp

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:21:00 +0100

So yesterday a 100+ crowd met in the Antwerp Zoo.
I heard different comments from that crowd… some of them liked the event, good networking, interresting topics , a broad overview, meeting new vendors active in the Cloud, others of them didn’t .. it wasn’t a real camp , just some vendors pitching, they didn’t hear any new stuff , or we didn’t touch the real stuff.

So different opinions from different expectations…

Dear IBM

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:48:00 +0100

When you eventually will buy Sun ..

Oh nooos.. I started this post last week and now it al seems in vain :(

Steven has some clues on what could have happened, I think he is right on the spot on with his Solaris prediction ..

He wonders why IBM would spend even another dime on Solaris, actually even today I can’t even see why Sun is spending any more money on developing Solaris. But even with no acquisition his prediction of the future of Open Solaris imvho is spot on:

April Fools

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:09:00 +0100

In case you hadn’t noticed.. the previous post was an Aprils Fool joke ..

We had a good laugh at different people actually believing that we planned on rebranding to Pinuits, but we’ll stay Inuits , But maybe next year we’ll rebrand to Linuits :)

We are rebranding !

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:27:00 +0100

So the cat is out of the bag,

As of today Inuits is rebranding to Pinuits,
The press release is here

We’ve had good feedback on the new name so far. Different people told me the name matched better to what we are doing . Actually my wife thinks our new name is much better as at least the Pin in Pinuits refers to our favourite Tux again ..

Finding an appropriate name for an Open Source consultancy company, with focus on Linux, Open Source Monitoring, MySQL, Open Source Virtualization , Large Scale Deployments , High Availability and Drupal, isn’t easy .. you want to show both community involvement and professionality. And find a domain that’s still available.

Slides updated

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:04:00 +0100

I’ve updated the slidedeck of my Open Source Virtualization talk, with the 2009 edition as I gave it last week at the UKUUG Spring conference.

Talk is up, both on my page as on SlideShare

open source virtualization

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert.

Tom also updated our set of Open Source Monitoring Tool Shootout slides .
They are also on SlideShare

Open Source Monitoring Tools Shootout

View more presentations from tomdc.

UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference, the after post

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:02:00 +0100

Last week the UKUUG Spring , Large Scale Infrastructure conference took place in London,

Altough only 1 track was scheduled, the content was very good, some talks were a bit short, others were a bit too long. And luckily the talks that didn’t really bring me new content were entertaining :) Also the after conf chatter in the pub across the street was so much fun we almost failed to catch our plane back to Antwerp.

Open Conference Organizing

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:23:00 +0100

There are a lot of great Open Source conferences out there, some of them organized by volunteers, some of them oranized by user groups, some by commecial entities, but none of them is so open as the last DrupalCon,

In all its awesomeness the DrupalCon DC organization actually
published it’s internal financial details for everybody to view.

Try beating that :)

Oh and while we are talking about conferences .. Fosdem has a YouTube channel with a lot of recorded fosdem talks available.

UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference , here we come

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:11:00 +0100

I`ll be heading to bed early today as tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get up early to catch my flight to London where
Tom and I will be representing Inuits at the UKUUG 2009 Spring Conference.

Tom will be giving an updated version of our Open Source Monitoring Shootout talk again, I`ll probably be skipping a couple of his slides as right after that Jane Curry will be covering Zenoss in depth and on thursday there will be an OpenNMS talk too.

Identi.ca

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:11:00 +0100

Alexandre urges us too microblog on Identica rather than on Twitter

As an opensource evangelist I probably should do so .. Crossposting from Identi.ca to Twitter works… but there is one big thing that’s blocking me to do this by default and that’s a bug in microblog-purple which currently blocks me from using Identi.ca in Pidgin. Which is what I use to Tweet ..

As afteral .. Twitter is nothing more than world wide searchable irc , isn’t it ? And I want them all from 1 interface, irc, jabber, twitter, …

Learning Nagios 3.0

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0100

Late last year Packt send me yet another book to review
the The Learning Nagios 3 book, a bit more in my field of expertise than the Drupal Multimedia one which I also appreciated,
I already posted I wasn’t going to have time to review it before Fosdem but I finally managed.
Having used Nagios on and of for the better part of the decade but not really having touched ground with Nagios 3 yet I had mixed feelings, generally the book gives a good beginner targeted overview of Nagios, with the usual What is, installing and getting started chapters.

CloudCamp Antwerp

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:28:00 +0100

After CloudCamp London , having approx 5-600 visitors according to certain blog posts

One of the next up is line is CloudCamp Antwerp , I`m pretty sure there won’t be 500-600 showing up at the Zoo to watch the penguins , great location …

For those of you travelling from abroad, note that London City Airport is less than an hour from Antwerp , so no excuses there.. that and we have much better beer !

Happy 15th Birthday Linux ??

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:12:00 +0100

Last Friday that’s march 13th, Gizmodo wanted us to celebrated the 15th birthday of Linux. Kinda weird… as about 15 years ago I was already using Linux ….

Fact is that the 1.0 release of Linux just had it’s 15th birthday , but Linux itself is heading towards its 18th in september.

Getting old ..both of us :)

So when trying to catch up on my Linux Journal reading I ran into the 15 years of Linux Journal article, which makes a lot more sense than 15 year of Linux.

Security in Belgium

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:14:00 +0100

With reports about Belgium being the 3rd most insecure country in the world, only being beaten by Russia and China and our nice country featuring in Wired with what could be the plot for Oceans 17 …

Maybe it’s time to refocus my career a bit more on security again …

Just maybe …

VirtSec, and Open Source

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:51:00 +0100

The slides from the presentation I gave last friday at Lsec are now online, both at My Site and on Slideshare

VirtSec, and the Open Source impact

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert.

I learned a lot last friday , I`ll be talking to some more people about the technical details , but be expecting some of my findings on Virtualization.com soon :)

Conspiracy Theory

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:13:00 +0100

<conspiracy mode>
Claudio , Isn’t it obvious, Sun doesn’t want you to use Linux, they will do everything in their power to prevent that , such as slowing down releases of software for our preferred platform, so that you might even start to consider choosing for Slowaris
</conspiracy mode>

FAT

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:02:00 +0100

Harald has a nice overview of the FUD that is being spread again by some company from RedMond ..

Now why are they targeting TomTom ? Surely because Canon and Sony and different others are to big to sue, Both my EOS400D, Ixus400 and K800i , are using a way to FAT filesystem to store files on,
I tried putting ext2 formatted disks in them but that failed :)
(Not running Linux or already having paid up might be another reason)

Conference Time

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:22:00 +0100

Grab your calendars and mark the following dates :

T-Dose 2009 will be held on 3 and 4 october in Eindhoven again.

Last year we had a nice Drupal track, some great MySQL talks and , a great unplanned Cloud talk , and different other interesting talks, so this year promises also to be very interesting.
(PS. Drupal Themers.. you might want to propose a new theme for the T-Dose site, who knows you’ll even win something)

Geekdinner Antwerp Edition 2

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:14:00 +0100

Last Wednesday after the LSec event with Bruce Schneier and the R ans S from RSA , we already had a mini AdHoc GeekDinner in Leuven, one that pretty would have matched Philips requirements for having it called Geek dinner

Philip has been ranting this week about different events titled “Geek” not attrackting real geeks. that know hex and binary is but merely atrackting the Startup/Web crowd, now there’s nothing wrong with both crowds, and I happen to be part of both but it can cause strange situations
Geekdinner.beTom K arranged a nice deal with De Troubadour so foodwise it promises to be great.

Dear Windows Admin, you have now been replaced by a Cat

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:41:00 +0100

I`m one of those guys that really doesn’t like to agree with certain EULA’s

While it’s sad enough that Dell still fails to sell an Ubuntu based laptop in Belgium and claims they have to charge extra for removing the irrelevant software from Redmond hence trying to trick you into paying more money for freedom there are things you can work around easily, I won’t be accepting the EULA that comes with those new boxen.

My Social Network “Friend” Policy (Updated again)

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:54:00 +0100

Over the past few years I have joined several social networking sites and continue to use a few of them regularly. These sites serve different purposes for me and I have started to come up with strategies of whom to connect with where. Here are the general guidelines that I have developed (subject to spontaneous change and arbitrary override).

On LinkedIn I only link with people that I know in person , worked with in real life or have worked with online intensively in different open source projects. , have communicated with over different media. there are couple of exceptions in my connections from my early days when I didn’t have my own set of rules yet. (Some of them have been unlinked now actually)

My Social Network “Friend” Policy (Updated again)

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:54:00 +0100

On LinkedIn I only link with people that I know in person , worked with in real life or have worked with online intensively in different open source projects. , have communicated with over different media. there are couple of exceptions in my connections from my early days when I didn’t have my own set of rules yet. (Some of them have been unlinked now actually)

Tarus for president !

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:12:00 +0100

Just read it !

The only unrealistic part about the scenario is that I fear that most purchasers within a government agency won’t be asking these questions, yet.

Open Source does not mean Customization Heaven..

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:09:00 +0100

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don’t redistribute their code , but they aren’t contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn’t be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn’t look so bad , at second sight ..

Codebreakers

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:38:00 +0100

@fredegre sent me a mail to tell me about the L-SEC Codebreakers and Enigmas’s - Special Event , given the lineup I couldn’t resist to register for the event ..

Security heroes like Bruce Schneier , Adi Shamir , Ron Rivest and off course our local experts…

Should be interresting

Cya there ..

Ulitzer

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:01:00 +0100

I ran into this page yesterday. Yep that’s my name, with an obsolete affiliation and the only content on the page is the abstract I sent in for a conference Sys-con organized back in 2006, needless to say they never got back to me with any information regarding that conference, no positive or negative news.

Ulitzer seems to plan on launching 6,000 new author sites for the leading technology authors and software industry rock stars. Yeah , I bet they can find 6000 old profiles from people online …

The Story Repeats

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:55:00 +0100

I covered this one before .. but as it struck twiced today .. I think it’s worth repeating. Both my collegue Karl and Trent ran into the same problem , within hours hours of eachother, a missing or failing reverse dns mapping that caused performance issues .. and a lot of log entries..

Karl denies having a second life in Perth but I`m not really sure about that …

But I guess they both have to agree… Everything is a fscking DNS problem.
(I noticed other people using that spelling this weekend, on stage in the Janson)

MySQL Presentation on Slideshare

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:04:00 +0100

I just got mail that my presentation on MySQL Monitoring ShootOut is currently being showcased on the ‘Technology’ page by the slideshare editorial team.

It’s likely to be there for the next 16-20 hours…

Thnx folks !

Monitoring MySQL

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:16:00 +0100

The slides for my Monitoring MySQL talk , which I gave earlier today in an overcrowded MySQl Developersroom at Fosdem are now online, both at my site and at Slideshare

As of now I actually expect people to use those slides for schoolwork or next year in a main Fosdem track :)
As afterall that is the goal of Open Source and spreading the word ..

MySQL Monitoring Shoot Out

Free Beer

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:55:00 +0100

It’s a fact .. I suck at handing out Free beer, last december we managed to meet in a pub that was closed , and yesterday at the
Fosdem beer event when Philip asked me to hand out some plates of beer I managed getting them out then started wondering why peo
ple didn’t grab them till I started shouting FREE BEER … that worked .. ..

As usual the Beer event was lots of fun bumping into people you iknow but whose name you need to think about for over a minute beo
fre you can remember it.

Image Sprawl , and the new cure ..

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:24:00 +0100

When I tell people that the concept of copying VM’s around as frequently done in the VMWare world is one of the most stupid ideas on this planet, I get the weirdest looks.

In my world it is, I want my infrastructure to be reproducible , I want to be able to throw any machine in my infrastructure out of the 10th floor of a building and be up and running again in no time. If I spread a bunch of VM copies around who knows what kind of life they start leading. Some will get upgrades, some won’t ..
If I get an image from someone, how did he get there ? Nobody knows ..

On Monty Leaving Sun

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:19:00 +0100

When I read Monty’s post on leaving this passage struck me the most.

The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.

Everything is a fine whitespace problem ...

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:00:00 +0100

Couple of days ago I was working on a Linux Heartbeat v2 setup.
Upon inserting an XML snippet into the cib cib-adm started eating memory fast until the oom killer kicked in.

The environment was running a fairly old heartbeat-2.0.8 version so I upgraded to heartbeat-2.1.4-2.1 and there I got a nice warning that my XML sintax wasn’t correct.

There was a whitespace in the XML syntax.

1. <expression attribute="#replicationvalue" id="is_lagged" operation ="gt"  ... ><

Removing the whitespace solves the problem, also on the older version. So the problem is already fixed upstream.. but you might run into it anyhow.

Open Source Database Poll

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:52:00 +0100

So Fred and I were wondering what people were planning to use as a Database the next couple of months / years or now.

We mostly see MySQL deployments and a little PostgreSQL

But there’s other stuff around ..

So what are you using, , or planning on using ?

Vote Here !

What does your BOFH want ? :)

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:29:00 +0100

Larry, I`m glad you asked ..

With the risk of receiving a flood of comments pointing me to already existing tools here’s my go at what I as a sysadmin of often large deployments am looking for in Drupalland .

You suggest LDAP and syslog integration .. guess we already have that don’t we ?

But what I haven’t found yet ..
An rpm/deb repository of Drupal modules So we can do an apt-get install drupal-package , yes I know about Drush, but I want the files on my system to be in a package and clearly identified, it helps me keeping my system uncluttered.

Will Poken catch on ?

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:29:00 +0100

Poken is the new gadget in town. Some people called it the future of social networking.

The idea of exchanging data at the click of a button , or less has been here fore ages. The problem always is that the tool needs to gain Critical Mass before it becomes useful.

I remember transferring my VCard from my Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor to other people’s Palm Pilot , or using different IrDA protocols to transfer my details between different phones, that worked fine, for the happy few that had similar devices. These days we transfer details over SMS’ messages or Bluetooth, but then they are stuck in the mobile phone, with the Palm I at least imported them in my PIM.

Stop stupid Software Patents

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:25:00 +0100

If you read this blog, you should probably sign the petition !

Oldskool, Fuck the Cloud

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:56:00 +0100

This comment by Jim Leonard, Trixter/Hornet for those who still remember our previous lives , is right on the spot.

“This is the longest post I’ve ever seen that says “do not put your only copy of data on a site you do not pay for or trust.”

Weird, how you suddenly bump online into someone you haven’t heard from for over a decade, and even weirder how they still seem to have similar ideas to yours :-)

This week in DNS problems

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:29:00 +0100

SANS notes a weird DOS atack on different namesevers. People quering for “.” a lot.

Ward wondering what’s going on with the .org nameservers

And Dries migrating his site.
\

Is anybody else confused about Chef ?

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:08:00 +0100

Chef absolutely confuses me..

Luke is confused too ..
I’m clearly disappointed that someone who has been a high-profile user of Puppet but has never contributed much in the way of code (Ohloh claims 2 commits) would decide to start a whole new project rather than attempt to contribute to Puppet

Now , if you know me a bit you know that reinventing the wheel, or creating identical projects with no clear reasons is something I dislike .

New interesting open Source releases

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:08:00 +0100

In case you haven’t noticed them yet ..
MySQL Proxy has a new release and moved it’s public repo to Launchpad.

(Still Launchpad isn’t open source yet .. a matter of time .. but in the meanwhile Jira and Confluence are sadly gaining adoption in the market)

In the devministration area there is a new Puppet module that automagically populates puppet managed machines in Zenoss , I’ve seen different people using Puppet to populate their Nagios configs, but adding Zenoss to the list is new.. so when will we see the Zabbix and Hyperic plugins ?

How to suck at Security

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:05:00 +0100

There is this great post over at sans.org Teaching people how to to suck at Security, (actually a reprint of this post

Especially the remarks about security tools ..
On how not to implement them or how to neglect configuring, afterall the default values must be secure enough.

However My favorite
Hire somebody just because he or she has a lot of certifications.
I’d write Vendor Certifications however .. as independent certifications might have some use.. but if I`m looking for a security guy and he starts talking to me about his product certificatins, something is wrong..

On Filesystem Layouts

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:04:00 +0100

Wouter blogged about his favourite Laptop filesystem layout , just one filesystem , and some geeks think that’s a bad idea.

Actually I can understand Wouter not wanting to have different /usr/ /var or other partitions on his laptop , the 20Mb left and 300Mb right you loose on different partitions are exactly what you want to use on your laptop, however isolating partitions also has it’s benefits

My setup looks similar to this :\

Zenoss, "mail" problem ?

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:53:00 +0100

Funny how people call clear and obvious DNS problems a
“mail” problem.

Drupal Multimedia .. reviewed.

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:37:00 +0100

After reviewing the Zenoss book , Packt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing one of their fresh Drupal books, they first suggested a book on Theming but but I opted for the [MultiMedia by Aaron Winborn one as Theming really isn’t my cup of tee](http://www.packtpub.com/create-multimedia-website-with-drupal/book)

It took me a while to get the book finished , mostly because of other priorities that kept popping up and being ill for the first week of the year .. but I finally managed

Tux is Tasty

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:28:00 +0100

Found in a local bakery …

Drupal Twitter module

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:52:00 +0100

As I don’t really use twitter apart to microblog but rather as an Instatn Messaging tool (why those people don’t use IRC or Jabber remains a mistery to me wheel.reinvent :( )

I figured I could abuse it to announce posts on my blog, lots of people seem to be doing this so there had to be an easy way to auto publish them ..

The wonderful Drupal community seemed to have the same idea and therefore created the Twitter Module

How popular is an Open Source project ?

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:36:00 +0100

There is a really easy way to figure out …

Look at the size of of the devrooms , if at all , a project gets at Fosdem
It’s really interresting to see the Embedded room move to a 500 seat room which it really needed when the first openMoko talk was held there in a previous edition.

The FDO , Drupal, Mozilla, Centos/Fedora and Suse rooms stay in similar size rooms as last year.. But it seems lik the BSD and PostgreSQL room which was pretty crowded moved to a bigger location.

Contributing Back

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:02:00 +0100

A while ago Dries wondered about Contributing back to Drupal .

Now Inuits is not a Webshop, we are an Open Source shop, so you won’t see a zillion Drupal modules being contributed by us in the near future (albeit there are a couple) , we are company assisting other organisations in their adoption of Open Source, and Drupal is amongst the projects we care for. You’ll notice code from us in the different other Open Source projects, including the Linux Kernel and other core infrastructure. And not all of it was code, there is a lot of published documentation, methodologies, bughunting and also spreading the words, or talking about our experiences around different topics such as MySQL Cluster and Drupal, or different alternatives to Monitor , or to Monitor MySQL etc ..

ShareoMatic Drupal6

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:54:00 +0100

As asked long time ago by different users I finally ported the Shareomatic module to Drupal6 .

Bug reports are welcome. as is an affordable bigger house.

Anyhow Enjoy !

Crazy stuff over DNS

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:44:00 +0100

Pascal tweeted me te following link.

From the site :

I had written some code to take wikipedia articles and summarise them. I wanted to offer this for use in various places, now the obvious way to offer it is just a web service (via REST, SOAP, etc), but that’s boring and I had a cunning plan. Why not offer it over DNS - it is basically a huge associative array and DNS is designed for this stuff.\

Buddylist, Buddlist2, Friendlist

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:45:00 +0100

Dear LazyWeb

Buddylist is aimed at Drupal 5, so when porting to a site to Drupal 6, you need Buddylist2. However the BuddyList page mentions one should look at FriendList as that project is supposed finished ..

At first sight it seems like FriendList indeed most advanced in its efforts
As I was also using Invite, which also is still under development for 6,
I was assuming that upon installing it the dependencies would tell me which one to use.. however it seems none of them already hooks into Invite

Everything is a Funky DNS problem.

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:27:00 +0100

Nils has a good writeup of what Dan Kaminsky talked about at 25C3 Interesting read as after al.. Everything is a funky DNS problem.

Should send him a T-Shirt one day .. he seems to appreciate my site slogan :)

Everything is a funky Twitter problem ..

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:30:00 +0100

When your favourite ex yahoo employee and mysql guru blogs about a “dns problem” and how he solved it using Twitter you can only smile ;) At last some useful use for Twitter .. when it’s up at least ..

Oops, Free beer for some ..

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:41:00 +0100

So yesterday around 2010 a bunch of us arrived at the Kulminator,

To our surprise it was closed :(
We opted to move to the closest available place , the Zeppos and
I called pretty much everybody who’s phonenr I had handy that I knew could come. (much voicemails) I hope not too much people ended up standing in front of a closed door with no idea where to go (my phonenr is easy to find) but the ones that made it to the new place benefitted from Free Beer sponsored by Inuits

Joke of the Day

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:10:00 +0100

Overheard today in our technical workshop.

Q: Does anyone have a stable Debian with him ?
A: Yes
Q: Can you pass me the floppy.

Planet Grep.be meetup

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:06:00 +0100

As I got a lot of positive reactions for the idea I posted last week, here is some more detail for the beerdrinking next monday.
29 december 2008 that is ..

The plan is to meet from 20:00 onwards in the Kulminator in Antwerpen.

I already got feedback from over a dozen PGB readers and posters that they will show up !

But feel free to abuse the comments to let us know you are coming too !

MythTV recover Lost+Found

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:41:00 +0100

My MythTV store lives on an LVM volume that is spread over 2 disks, one of them is an external USB disk. So the cleaninglady seems to have touched a cable and after coming back from holiday I had a read-only filesystem that afer a remount had about 350Gb in lost+found with irrelevant filenames.

1. total 337407844
2. drwx------   2 tv   tv         4096 Dec 17 22:47 .
3. drwxrwxrwx  15 tv   tv         4096 Dec 17 22:44 ..
4. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  423343556 Dec 14 07:10 I303109.RCN
5. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 2990538924 Dec 13 19:05 I303107.RCN
6. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023691768 Dec 13 08:10 I319494.RCN
7. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023622348 Dec 13 07:45 I327684.RCN
8. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  423735892 Dec 13 07:10 I327682.RCN
9. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  466749476 Dec 12 15:43 I135169.RCN
10. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023314212 Dec 12 07:45 I098309.RCN
11. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 1022459928 Dec 12 06:35 I098306.RCN
12. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 2458822948 Dec  9 22:50 I139264.RCN
13. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 2129683736 Dec  9 21:30 I323592.RCN
14. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  466735992 Dec  9 15:43 I323590.RCN
15. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 1022747296 Dec  9 07:45 I323588.RCN

Obviously I wanted to recover my data.
So I had files with a wrong filename on a filesystem but with a correct timestamp and probably the right filesize.
Luckily the mythconverg.recorded table also gives me lots of information about the files that mythtv had originally stored the content in.

MySQL 5.1 on Fedora 10

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:38:00 +0100

So I wanted a fresh MySQL 5.1 release on my Fedora 10 box.
Fedora comes with a mysql 5.0 package and the MySQL community packages for 5.1 conflict with that in different ways. (to start with MySQL vs mysql)

For some weird reason libmysqlclient (in mysql-libs) is required by redland, which is required by openoffice.org-core. I probaly never need the RDF funtionalities that redland provides me but I`m stuck with them anyhow.

JoliCloud

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:36:00 +0100

Am I the only one who thinks the JoliCloud screenshot on TechCrunch really really looks like a default eeebuntu setup ?

So True

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:35:00 +0100

So True

Free Beer, planet.grep.be Meetup

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:14:00 +0100

planet.grep.be today has a lot of active open source users and contributors.
The weird thing is that we never meet apart from Fosdem.
Yes, we occasionally run into eachother at other events but there’s not enough beer involved.

I’ve had different people ask me what and where are the Open Source gatherings in Belgium, and we must admit that apart
from Fosdem there isn’t that much in our little country.

CCK & Views, My First Experiences

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:44:00 +0100

and probably my last one ..

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was looking into a way of converting my static page with published papers, articles and presentations in a more dynamic page where I could create RSS feeds from the updates and feed them into another site for everybody to use.

Some people suggested that I’d have a look at CCK & Views for this. While up till now when creating an app I had usually written my own Drupal module with my own database schema and manually written SQL Queries. This indeed looked like the perfect opportunity to dig into the CCK and Views thingie.

Puppy FUD

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:13:00 +0100

Dries commented on Seth reporting about the puppyfud some proprietary company not understanding open source was uttering.

It was a pretty lousy comparison actually .. they compared Open Source software to a Free Puppy.. it looks nice and cheap at first but it will cost you anyhow as it needs food and shots etc so it isn’t really free after all.

Now the fact is that with the proprietary stuff they are trying to shove down their customers throats, their CMS’s also need configuration, updates, and styling left and right, probably just as much as the Open Source alternative out there.
Now as they have a proprietary platform the chance that they have an equally big expert group around their product is small, people don’t just buy software to learn it, however they will download a piece of interesting open source software to get aquanted with it.. There probably won’t be that much free examples and tips and hints a round, or even free themes to base a site on ..

The Eclipse of Sun

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:42:00 +0100

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that
for the past decade I’ve had a love-hate relation ship with Sun.

Sun has done a lot of good things in their open source journey such as MySQL, openOffice , Virtualbox and opensourcing Java. But on the other hand they had troubles with creating really organic opensource.

I’ve always wondered why a company that bought StarDivision because it was cheaper than buying the MS Office license keeps wasting money on building it’s own operating systems, albeit in a pretty open model, but with zero to no relevant community.

Wordpress is Slow !

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:13:00 +0100

because of a fine DNS problem

So it can obviously happen to other platforms as well :)

Ripped of at RestaurantWeek.be

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:01:00 +0100

My mother suggested that she would babysit while the 2 of us went out to eat yesterday. The idea was to have a good dinner in one of the restaurants that took part of the Restaurantweek.be action.

The idea is that you get a 3 course dinner for 25 Euro a person in a good quality restaurant .. therefore no brasserie or pubfood. With different of the top restaurants of antwerp taking part of the action we decided to pic a new one we didn’t know yet.

Tab Dump , Drupal Performance

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:55:00 +0100

Have to close some tabs .. what more can I say ..

2 interresting articles about Drupal and MySQL performance tuning

here and here

Enjoy

Next Step, Done

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:40:00 +0100

I just blogged that I wanted the skype plugin to work in my pidgin, only to have 1 central chat window.

Guess what .. this really works. it’s that simple .. copy the 2 files, then setup the account .. I just had to disable the annoying skype sounds :)

Upgrading to Fedora 10

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:14:00 +0100

As some of you know I run Fedora on my main Laptop, and Ubuntu on my EEE and my office Desktop. My Ubuntu installs were pretty fresh, but my fedora was long due for an upgrade. As after years of abuse (–force –nodeps) it usually is impossible to do a regular upgrade, so my best way out was a quick and fresh install on an isolated root partition. (my /home/ etc live on separate volumes)

! Barcamp Gent II :(

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:12:00 +0100

I predicted it to some people and it actually became true :(

I just removed myselve from tomorrows BarcampGent 2 subscription list.

It seems I can make it to most of the “odd” issues of Belgian Barcamps, I made it to BarcampBrussels, BarcampBrussels3 and the first BarcampGent, but for the Even Barcamps , Brussels2 and 4 and now Gent2 there always seems to be something that eventually blocks me from going. Just like with the BXL edition family priorities kicked in.

Santa Came Early

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:52:00 +0100

Santa delivered his goods early at Inuits this year

Sorry John, but we figured the Girls in Your shirt trick would be better than the tags on your Fedora one :)

Bort has another pic, and Dieter suddenly wants to test Zenoss too :)

openQRM.com

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:27:00 +0100

Last weekend I blogged about openQRM 4.2 being released.

This morning Matt finally let me know the long waiting fresh and new Drupal based openQRM.com is live !

Feed Added!

Do we want an Open Source MySQL Monitoring tool ?

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:44:00 +0100

Matt Reid wants to know what we want in an Open Source MySQL monitoring solution ?

He is working on the second incarnation of Monolith and wants input from the MySQL community.

Now for me the bigger question is if we want an isolated tool that runs stand alone, or a tool which we can integrate it in something we already have.

To me there is a difference between a tool that I want to use to debug my environment, such as Mytop or MySQL Activity Report, in that case I need some tool that quickly installs with little dependencies and little impact.

Migrate, MultiSite and Restyle

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:56:00 +0100

Done

Some of my lower traffic sites were still on an old Drupal 5, others were at 6.4 and lots of modules were outdated. So I set out to migrate all the sites to a multisite setup. I now have a set of shared modules , shared themes and some specific ones .. just as it is meant to be. And I only have 1 central Drupal instance to upgrade. Next step is figuring out how to trigger the database upgrades from 1 central place.

Technorati RRD

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:50:00 +0100

Bort is in to graphs and stats these days, so he was interested in my little Technorati hack.

Lots of us bloggers are using Technorati to track who’s joining the discussion on articles we posts. Technorati gives you details on how many blogs link to you, and how much they link to you and translate that into an Authority rank. Now what they don’t give you is an idea on how that rank evolves.

DNS FAIL

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:36:00 +0100

Seen over at Failblog, you could call it OS fail also actually .. maybe one day people will realize that AVG correctly identified the Trojan

Phrase from nearest book meme

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:53:00 +0100

Meme from codeblog

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

“We’ll cover more on where to place your name servers in Chapter 8, Growing Your Domains.” - DNS and BIND , 2nd Edition , Paul Albitz & Cricket Liu

CloudCafe !

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:31:00 +0100

I`m in John’s Cloud Cafe !

Everything is a Funky DNS Problem

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:11:00 +0100

Tom dropped me a mail today letting me know that all the links to my RSS feed were broken.
I tested, and tested again and failed to reproduce the problem.

The only things I had changed recently where the administrator menu module and Pathauto module, apart from that I had not made any changes. So I tried uninstalling the modules to see if that helped, it didn’t. There was no difference between the 2 setups.

Defining Open Source

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:45:00 +0100

Bart wonders why my definition of Open Source is.

The Open Source Definition pretty much defines what Open Source is to me.

But it’s mostly because of that definition that you get a lot of other things for free.

It gives you freedom to learn, to improve, it gives you an ecosystem in which you can solve problems rather than having to tell your customer that your hands are tied and you can’t help them

The Want to be Social Network

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:00:00 +0100

Kaj wrote about using Dopplr to keep track of where colegues and friends are traveling and finding out about accidental meetups. (I even use it to track where one of the Inuits collegues work plans)
Now I have never met Giuseppe , but we shared slides before so I’d love to meet him one day .. connecting to him via Dopplr gives me that opportunity .. who knows one day Dopplr will tell me we have matching travel schedules.

Bug in ifconfig ?

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:27:00 +0100

So earlier this week I ran into the weirdest problem with Linux-HA. Heartbeat was happily adding an IP address as an active resource so one of my nodes when needed, but upon removal it failed to remove the IP from the stack. Further debugging learned that the Heartbeat scripts claimed the ip wasn’t on the actual stack.

It was.. but it the output from ifconfig was different from what it expected it to be.

The new comment spam :(

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:25:00 +0100

The past couple of weeks my blog is being annoyed by different comment spams, the content of the comment seems perfectly relevant, often even correctly tackling the topic, or sometimes even almost insightful follow up questions.

However the link to the author site is totally bogus.

If talking about drupal and high availability , a question on GFS or OCFS2 is obviously on topic. However I don’t want my blog to link to lot of irrelevant sites.

Time vs Time

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:13:00 +0100

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 :)

MySQL and DRBD, Often say NO :)

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:33:00 +0100

Florian is replying to James on the subject of using DRBD for MySQL HA. A discussion started earlier by Eric Florian is refuting most of the arguments that James has against using MySQL and DRBD together.

I`m also saying NO to MySQL and DRBD in most of the cases.. but not for any of the reasons James mentions.

I must say upfront I love DRBD and I have been using it in production for a long time but not for MySQL HA.

Getting rid of Blogger

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:02:00 +0100

So time had come to move all my other blogs to drupal and move them away from blogger.
When I migrated this blog from dotclear to Drupal I found a php script that grabbed all the content from my dotclear setup and migrated it to a fresly installed drupal. I was hoping to find a similar tool for Blogger .

Well no such luck .. most of the links I found instructed me to first install wordpress, use the import functionality of wordpress then migrate from wordpress to Drupal.

Scaling Drupal

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:54:00 +0100

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 the Future of Lustre

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:53:00 +0100

So Sun bought ClusterFS. Im wondering what their focus will be now. What will be the prime platform on which Lustre will be developed Solaris or Linux ? Will other efforts in the open source cluster filesystem area react on this ? Will Lustre development speed up ? Will management become less complex ?\ Time will tell .. Im keeping an eye on it