Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Christophe just pointed me to Open Source Alternatives a site that allows you to find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software .

Good tool.. but it misses a key thing.. experience .. you don't know about how big the community around a project is .. you don't know how active development around .. you only can learn that yourselve. but it's a quick pointer to new stuff .. for some people ...

Now if you could add the Ohloh database to that and integrate them..
would be nice...

Here at Profoss Kristof is just announcing that Q-Layer will be opensourcing their Q-Store and Q-San technologies

From their site

Q-SAN is a hyperfast Infiniband or Gigabit ethernet enabled virtual SAN: it is a pure software solution that has all functionalities of the common hardware-based SANs. Q-SAN is available as an option of Q-Store; it provides virtual disks to servers provisioned on top of the Q-layer platform and to external consumers over the iSCSI protocol.

Q-store is a storage and volume management solution with an easy-to-use GUI and a SOAP API that allows full automation and integration. Q-store enables storage virtualization, the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into one single device that is managed from a central console. Storage virtualization can be applied for a wide range of purposes, such as high-end database storage, backup storage, virtual disks for virtual servers etc.

openMosix is dead.. but still this is the (update)4th time in 2 days that people start discussing the idea dynamically loadbalancing virtual machine instances around on a big HPC platform.

So , is openMosix really dead ?

As Nicolas already mentionned Profoss is going steady ..
with the Panel discussion going on right now ..

I just uploaded my presentation.

This one has been in my queue for ages .. well.. 3+ months or so .. but still..

Over at dev2ops an article was posted with as title Pacakge Centric Application Release Methodology.

And it's that Application Release part which is actually the focus point.
The Application being split up in different parts where different teams have responsibility over those parts and having isolated packages for these parts is a good thing.

But you can easily confuse that naming of a package with the way a systems person looks at a pacakge, a deb , or an rpm. And then the story changes a lot.

They list the contents as a packge as follows :

What belongs in a package?
* Code: Application files executed by the runtime system. This could be compiled objects or interpreted script.
* Platform: Files that comprise the runtime layer. This is generally server software like Apache, JBoss, Oracle, etc.
* Content: Non-executed files containing information. These could be media files or static text.
* Configuration: Files defining the structure and settings of an online service. These could be files for configuring the runtime system or the application.
* Data: Files containing data or procedures for defining data. These could be database schema dumps, SQL scripts, .csv files, etc.
* Control: Configuration and procedures consumed by management frameworks

Now I`m convinced that not all of this content belongs in an RPM or Deb.
Config , Content and Data don't belong there at all.
Yet they have to be delivered as a package by the development team, we need to know what the deliverables are they have to provide us with. But on a system, if you autorize change to content or config you don't want our package management system to keep telling you it's checksums have changed.

Within the package-centric paradigm, each type of change noted above is bundled, distributed and executed via a package.
Executed ? You don't want your package management system to do this .. that's exactly what your configuration management platform isi supposed to do isn't it ?
On a systems level you really want to separate code, data and config.

So dev2ops is talking about a package from a developer point of view, which is a totally different view as the one from a sysadmin ...

A couple of weeks ago there was some fuzz about Ohloh "publishing" information about developers that was open out on the web already hence taking away their privacy.

Imvho the moment you start writing open source code its obvious people will read that and you shouldn't be nagging about people creating statistics out of it.

But if you really don't like it .. as Ohloh just open sourced their code, so you can provide patches to
hide your contributins

Over at the fresh Open Management website , I launched the idea of having a European edition of Barcamp ESM.

Just lets make sure that Europe is also placed on the map in this area..!

Brussels will be the virtualization capital of Europe tomorrow and Wednesday

Russel points the world at a shell user looking for a partner to fork with

“There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as “shell users.” … Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix.“.

Over here in .be we have the perfect candidate .. she's currently taken however afaik

My good friend Fred just blogged about his favourite set of MySQL tools including Maatkit, Querysniffer , MyTop and other interresting tools.

Check them out..