Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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!

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.

On the other side I want a tool that is constantly there, that tells me about trends and performance history. But there I don't want an isolated toool, I want something fully integrated where I can correlate different measurements from disk io, memory usage etc , that tool should also tell me about the things that go
wrong.

We did some research earlier this year to figure out the current state of Open Source monitoring tools. Different tools have a different audience.. some go for the network layer, others take the os level and other even try to go deep inside the applications.

Given that knowledge we even had the idea to refocus that research comparing different monitoring tools such as Zabbix, Zenoss, Hyperic and Nagios again but this time with a focus on monitoring MySQL and submit that as an abstract for the upcoming MySQL conference, we didn't .. maybe next time.

There's plenty of frameworks already that will allow you to send alerts on all of the occasions you list, or allow you to graph all the values you want. And yes we want to see those values too.

But do we want yet another tool , yet another URL to browse to or do we want those alerts and graphs integrated in an existing tool such as Zabbix, Zenoss or
Hyperic .. I guess I prefer the integrated approach.

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Some of my lower traffic sites were still on an old Drupal 5, others were at 6.4 and lots of modules were outdated.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.

Well 2 , ny personal stuff and our corporate sites, that's the idea. Personal site is on plain old Drupal 6.6 and for the corporate one we are thinking to go with Acquia Drupal, but we're not sure yet

I've added a new theme, however I can imagine most of you never saw the old one as most of you read this feed in an RSS readers, yet some people nagged me about my lack of style, and as over a decade ago I even won web design contests , something had to be done :)

I moved some blocks left and right and the performance of the site has improved drastically now, mainly slow technorati loading widgets in the left column often blocked loading, that's all gone now.

Also , as some of the commenters on earlier posts complained the main page has no CSS as it isn't in the CMS. So my next step is trying to find out a way that I can replace the now manually maintained files build from different includes into a more dynamical setup where I can also have feeds for my Publications and Presentations.

I`m wondering if there is any microformat or so out there for Presentations and Publications that I could use so other people could use that information in other sites.

After that there's just one site left to migrate.. but that migration won't be for next month as there is some custom modules involved that need to be ported.

Well.. off to some more content then :)

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.

Technorati also as an API which allows you to get that same information.
As I was explaining the concept of RRDTool to someone a couple of months ago I thought it was a good idea to track a Technorati rank and grab that with RRDTool.

So I wrote a small script that gets the bloginfo data for my blog from Technorati,
parses out the number of inboundblogs , writes that info to an RRD file and creates a graph from it

wget -O $NOW.html  "http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?key=getyourown&url=www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/"
VALUE=`cat $NOW.html   | grep inboundblogs  | head -n 1  | sed -e "s/<//g"  | sed -e "s/inboundblogs//g"  | sed -e "s/\///g" | sed -e "s/>//g" | sed -e "s/ //g" `
rrdtool update technorati.rrd $UNIXNOW:$VALUE
rrdtool  graph /blog/public_html/images/technorati.png --start 1218548820  --vertical-label TechnoratiRank DEF
:myrank=technorati.rrd:rank:AVERAGE   LINE2:myrank#FF0000 -m 2

The result looks like

As you can see somewhere in week 37 Technorati was pretty much not working. And 180 days before week 42 my blog got a lot of fresh , but non recurring inbound links.

Now I have a couple of more ideas to build on this.. just no time.. but if you are interested lemme know ..

Anyhow it's all lies, damn lies and statistics ;)

Seen over at Failblog, you could call it OS fail also actually .. maybe one day people will realize that AVG correctly identified the Trojan

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

No really it really was the closest one .. someone just brought it back to my desk

I`m in John's Cloud Cafe !

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.

When I replied to Tom that I couldn't reproduce the problemm he told me he only had the problem on http://krisbuytaert.be/ and not on http://www.krisbuytaert.be/

So I verified the apache vhost config and it turned out that the problem, as usual, was a frigging DNS problem.
Both Apache vhost config files had a different setup, so depending on how you arrived at this site you got a different config.

Annoying .. but I guess I owe Tom a beer for figuring this out and pointing me to my own DNS problem.

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

It also gives you a platform on which you can continue to build rather than having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

A couple of months ago there was a big discussion about Organic vs Non Organic Open Source, and I strongly believe that the better projects out there need to have a big user and contributing community.

And all of that means open source to me.

But when it comes down to defining Open Source, OSI did a pretty good job for us already.

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.

Earlier this week LinkedIn announced Tripit as one of their first integrated applications, I was a bit dissapointed I use Tripit to let Dopplr learn about my trips , but I really prefer Dopplr over Tripit.

Now there are 2 things I would like to acoomplish with these kind of tools.
First of all I don't mind giving all of my LinkedIn contacts, so my whole addresbook, access to my upcoming travel plans so I can meet up with them again if our plans happen to match. On the other hand I use LinkedIn as my addressbook, so it only contains people I've met, or collaborated with (sometimes even over a decade ago) . And there are a bunch of people out there that I haven't met yet but that I'd love to meet one day and buy some beers or even dinner/lunch. I'd love to connect to them on Dopplr to make that happen but I don't want to have them connected on LinkedIn (yet).

So when Dopplr integrates with LinkedIn I hope they think about this kind of scenario ..

Oh and btw.. Xaprb rocks !