Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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.

I started it of by showing the audience Patrick's opening Devopsdays'09 Video ...

I slightly modified the the slides for my NLUUG presentation, but they are based on the talks I gave on the same topic before

Please note that the Devops definition I give early in the
slides is there to misguide the audience ... :) Everybody knows drinking beer and eating sushi is just a start in the journey when you want to become a #Devops :)

The fun part about conferences often are the speakers dinners, you get to sit down with interesting people and talk about a variety of topics such as panacotta recipes and configuration management ..

It was fun ... too bad it took so long to drive there.. good thing we got back pretty quick..

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.

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.

Back in the days our approach meant we didn't have to use clone resources, which you might remember being pretty buggy in the v2 era, not wanting to use clons resources isn't really a valid reason anymore these days . I've also frequently mentioned the combination of using DRBD and MultiMaster replication, using this set of OCF resource makes that a lot more easy ..

Now all I need to do is find me some time to validate this setup.

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.

So IT isn't involved, Development isn't involved , and Operations isn't involved ...

Ages ago.. well.. about a decade I was working in those very marketing departments sitting there, writing code, hired by the marketeers, not by IT , the marketing PM did the talking to IT , we still had to go trough their IT department to get stuff deployed.

The marketing people had to deal with their impossible deadlines, a nationwide tv or radio campaign that was going to be launched , with a supporting website which meant that the website functionality needed to go live just before the first airing of the commercial. Obviously the website was lower priority than finding a famous voice or face to record the commercial with, so it became only late in the planning.. even more obvious was the fact that talking to IT about getting these new features deployed was even later on their planning .

Back then, part of my job was to smooth that process, my role was both creating the technical backend for the sites , putting them in production and doing the daily maintenance afterwards ...

Looking back at those days I realize the pains of both deployment and procurement, getting a new machine racked and then installed up to a bare os installations took up to 6 weeks, in a marketing driven world that meant that I'd often had to bypass the whole procurement process of expensive sunboxen and had to quickly deploy a linux box under my desk that could be used to move to production as plan B , and trust me .. we had to use plan B a lot ..

Letting nontechnical people deploy stuff in the cloud will only widen the gap, but getting involved early enough in the concept fase of a project with a good devops methodology/team in place will give the business people the opportunity to learn that things have changed , it doesn't take 6 weeks anymore to get an expensive Sun box racked and a Solaris instance installed after which a team of engineers needs to install an application server, then a different team needs to install the database etc .. these days it's a virtual machine instantiation and a couple of recipes ,in that way we can get manageable, reproducible and scalable deployments in no time.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ..

So which book should I try to get next ? :)

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

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

No need to register .. just show up ..

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

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

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

Topics will be devops, ruby and much more :)

No need to register .. just show up ..

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