Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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 ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending on the first one also can't be integrated anymore

Some projects are prepared for local contributions, they have a modular framework that allows you to build on top of the project while not having to touch the core of a project, Drupal and openQRM are great examples of those, but not all projects are that smart. Needless to say that when you have such a modular framework you really shouldn't be modifying the core part of the platform, unless you are fixing a real bug.

But the general rule of thumb is that when you fix bugs, make sure they are inserted upstream , or implement new features.

Now sometimes there is no easy way to get your code accepted upstream, in which case you should announce clearly that you want to contribute but you are blocked and publish the patches somewhere else ...

Don't let the community work for you, but work with the community !

@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 ..

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 ...

Tweeted them to ask how this could happen as I don't really find a working contact page on their site .. no feedback yet .

Let's see how this will work out ..

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)

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 !

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 ..

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.

Anyway .. In case you didn't realize yet it's Fosdem time

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 ..

To me Image Sprawl is more than not being able to to manage your Virtual Machines, it also matters for physical machines that are being deployed using a golden image.

Now rewind back about 4 something years.. back then I wrote a paper for LinuxKongress titled Automating Xen Virtual Machine Deployment which described a Hybrid way of Bootstrapping an infrastructure.
Quicly summarized, you use the benefits of images to quickly deploy a minimal image which
Luke today calls a Stem Cell then go on using centralized package management and a configuration management tool to keep them up to par. There are 2 things that changed in between,
we replaced CFEngine with Puppet , and the fact that today some people do care a bit more about the infrastructure side of the web, guess we have to thank Amazon and the Cloud Hype for that

But fundamentally .. not that much changed :)

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.

In short, Sun isn't open enough. I think I've said that enough, it's typically more Open Core than Open Source .. and for a growing amount of people.. that isn't good enough.

Reacting on that post we see Matt Asay trying to convince his CNet Audience that Open Source Ideals don't translate well into a big sofware business.

I think Tarus view I see it as just the opposite. Open source spells the end of big software, if big software is defined as companies that make billions of dollars from selling software licenses. is much more to the point.

And the way Sun has been working, with MySQL, Virtualbox and different others doesn't seem to work that well either.
I stopped counting the P companies but I think I`m allmost a point where I know mere ex-Sun/MySQL employees than current Sun/MySQL employees and it's not just on the MySQL side that this happens.

Maybe Monty leaving Sun will wake up the powers that be, maybe it won't.

Finishing off with another quote from Tarus

In my mind Monty is a role model and I wish him all the best.

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.

<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.