Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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 had half a rack of hardware ready to be redeployed, the default boot order of most machines is Disk, Network so we trigger a fresh network install by overwriting the MBR. So the one machine .. after doing a quick check to see if there was nothing relevant on it anymore we sent it to the reboot pool.

The host was supposed to boot of the network, but I didn't even see a dhcp request coming in. So off to the lab it was .. where was that machine.. none of the consoles I tried was the correct one... until I found one box.. with a really really old installation , a machine that had returned from a different office.

And then it all came clear ... unlike all the other machines this machine had a 2 disk raid setup, which we actually weren't using , we indeed hat cleared the bootsector of the first disk, but not the second disk .. and we never had really cleared the 2nd disk. So rather than booting of the network because the first disk failed it booted of the old copy on the second disk.

Scratching that 2nd disk solved the problem .. for once it wasn't a DNS problem, but the RAID setup wasn't really helpfull either :)

PS. Yes re-labeling the machines is still on the todolist .. maybe next year :)

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 ?

Pandora did a better job in teaching me about new music I'd like .. it gave me new music to listen to, but it got killed in Europe, heck even my I can only be bought in the US Chumby doesn't want to play from Pandora.

StuBru tells me about the new music etc , but it doesn't have a "Ban"/"Hate It" button so I only use it in my disconnected car, Oh it's not that Last.fm was perfect on the Hate part either.. I hate Filip kowlier's music , I told it a zillion times .. it keeps forgetting.

So when Last.fm eventually will close down for people istening from Belgium

I`ll probably move to listen.grooveshark.com. , till they decide I have to pay again for something I already own.

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 .. :)

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 :)

Similar Questions arise .. like indeed the future of MySQL, the future of Solaris etc ...

So regarding the future of MySQL , I don't worry at all, on the contrary ..
Oracle tried buying mysql before they already have Innodb .. they didn't kill it .. the MySQL offering is complementary to the Oracle offering, now they can tackle both markets.
And as already mentionned when writing my IBM letter ..

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that different prominent MySQL folks have left Sun will only push the MySQL development model towards more openness.
And towards an even more Redder RedHat alike model, we already have the first CentOS alike rebuilds of MySQL , so a distribution model based on the same kernel with different feature sets or focus indeed might be the future.

Further there's what Monty Said ... hang on ... nobody mentions the fact that some core PostgreSQL people are on Sun's payroll how's that going to turn out ?

A more interresting discussion is the future of Solaris one.. Oracle has always had an eye for Solaris.. one day it is their most important platform, the other day they tell the world Linux is their prime development platform, it often was a matter of who was quoted.

As for Unbreakable Oracle did a smart thing.. they learned that they should build a full operating system themselves but , so why should they want to do that with Solaris ?

LinuxWorld has an article where oracle states their idea about Linux :
"
What we are working to do in the data center ... is to make Linux the default for the data center OS," Screven said in a speech at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. "We want there to be no question"

They suggest a merger between Solaris and Linux is a potential alternative .. so what do we need to merge .. you'd say ZFS and DTrace ..,but do we really need ZFS ?
There has been a lot of writing already about BTRFS being the next big filesystem, maybe it could make ZFS obsolete, maybe it couldn't ..

I got no clue on what's going to happen with OO.org .. so I`m really going to keep an eye on that one ..

In my opinion the real loser in this deal .. HP .. they don't have a full stack to play with .. They have the hardware, some management and monitoring software soon to be obsolete but no Operating System, no Database, no Appserver, no Apps. So what's their next move going to be ?

Oh and if you really want to talk figures Larry Augustin has a good take on it ... the idea that Oracle could sell off some parts to Hitachi EMC etc, get MySQL and Sun for Free ... then quietly wait for RedHat .. to get Jboss who knows :)

PS. I already blogged about the impact of the acquistion on the Virtualization area over at Virtualization.com

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 :)

I think the message got through ...

Yes you get the,"he must be joking" feedback from some ,on one hand that accelerating the effect and on the other some people might think what an idiot , but that doesn't weigh up to the one person who realizes he should do integrity checks on OVF's too and other one that realizes he shouldn't randomly copy VM's back and forth while not checking where they come from ...

So for clarity sake I`m in favour of OVF as an open standard, assuming it is wiseley used :)

On a side note , One of the people commenting on Beaker's blog wondered if " he checks the signature of every piece of software he ever downloads" .. I let yum or apt-get do that for me..

It's not all black and white , Hope you enjoyed the show however :)

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.

A petabyte of storage weighs about as much as a small car, but a large physics experiment can fill that up in less than a week. The modern rate of data production and amount of data storage --and crucially also data search and retrieval-- have pushed the limits of computer storage and the traditional file system further and further back.

The NLUUG Spring Conference 2009 focuses on storage and the means to organise it: file systems, physical storage, connections and search. The keynote speaker at the conference will be Ted Ts'o, author of the ext4 file system in Linux and CTO of the Linux Foundation. Other subjects at the conference are DRBD, desktop search and ZFS.
The conference is in conference center 'De Reehorst' in Ede, The Netherlands. Information about the full programme and registration can be found at the conference website

As always members of NLUUG and sister organisations as well as students get a hefty discount.

(thnx Tarus

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 ..

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.

So the small/local system integrator has to order from his upstream reseller which often had to order from his country distributor, who then would order the box from the actual vendor, but in lots of cases contact between the vendor and the actual user is never made. With physical boxen to be shipped, often to locations where the actual vendor can't really have a presence this partly makes sense, however sometimes things get ridiculous, situations where a customer can talk to the vendor directly but can't order from him because of these channel partners wanting to have a piece of the cake are no expection.

When it comes down to last years' software there is no box to be shipped anymore .. yet still often 2-3 layers of boxmovers are in the channel between the vendor and the customer. So now all they do is forward the license keys , via email.

So how does a support call go ?
Yep.. sometimes it goes straight trough that same channel... slowly .. This was one of the reasons why back in 2000 I decided to drop any form of proprietary unix or proprietary software running on unix. (Back then : Solaris, Allaire Coldfusion , and the range of iPlanet products ..) I was fed up with their absolute lack of support .. never getting to speak with people that knew the product, mostly speaking with marketeers locally pushing the product .. having to call my reseller asking to put pressure on the country distributor who then might call the acutal vendor .. No thanks, not for me anymore
I wanted to talk to the people who actually created the product so Open Source was they only way forward.

So what happens when former VP's of proprietary vendors such as Citrix end up at startups such as XenSource for their next gig , what do you think happens... they want to reuse that giant network they've build over the years and have that network resell their products. So they call all their friends again and set up a channel, of higly incompetent resellers that have absolutely no clue what they are moving in side the box.

Selling a product from a product sheet, rather than helping a customer solving his problem is the typical IT Sales guy job.
He knows his spec sheets and when he doesn't know the answer he calls up on his upstream channel for more imput.
They organized roadshows and demo's for customers and try to push them the newest and latest release of a product. They are still thinking in terms of margins and uplift on a license rather than

Their "tech" staff is certified to know everything the vendor explained in the training (and nothing more) and will quickly escalate a problem they haven't seen before upstream .. (well .. not that quickly .. but you get my pain..)
Obviously this is the kind of partners the RedHat's and Open Core vendors of this world love, clueless system integrators that have to open tickets and upsell support to their customers as they can't solve the problems themselves.

So even with other companies joining the opensource channel alliance , this really isn't a good thing for the customers,

On the positive side ... more people will get offers including a limited set of Open Source, and obviously Open Core , alternatives as the channel salesdroid will add these solutions to his portofolio.

But will these people get the real benefits of Open Source ? Will they get the more suitable Open Source project for their needs ? Probaly not ...

I really don't see how any of this fits with an Open Source Philosophy , it just doesn't, it's still the Enterprise Software Vending model 1.0

Now where's my next channel partner golfday invitation ?

P.S.: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Inuits' positions, strategies, or opinions."

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 :)