Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Tarry has an overview of the commentaries about Oracles latest Virtualisation announcement.

Two things hit my brainwaves, First ,seemingly Larry is claiming that his Xen package is better than
the others since he supports Live Migration and all the others don't. I don't know where he gets the idea.. I have to admit I don't remember which year it was .. but it was somewhere in december that I first starting with Live Migratiion of Xen machines and it was also on a CentOS platform. No fancy gui, no hardcover manuals that had it all documented. But fast and seamlessly working live migration, ready for everybody to use.

Second one is he claming that since Xen was re-engineered by Oracle to be faster than the competition.
The way you read it there is that Oracle took Xen, modified it then started redistributing it.
Is that really what happened ? Are they redistributing the source, or are they violating the GPL ? Coz if they are
redistributing the source everybody just got a faster Xen and if they aren't ..
I don't know but there sure is room for rumour here. Or is this just a bunch of marketing people and IT journalist that are mispresenting the facts. Fact is that one needs to spend lots of time verifying the facts of stories one read on the internet today.

I`m also seeing people crying that Oracle is finally stepping to the open source side.. .. I`m wondering on which planet they have been living.. Oracle has been supporting different Open Source products for ages already and they even are the owners of core components of typical daily used packages, so where do those authors get the idea that Oracle is finally stepping over ?

Tonight I don't have time to go and hunt back the original sources and see who actually said what . Honestly I don't care that much about Unbreakable, Last time I tried caring was when one of my european customers was interested in it, and no one at Oracle.be could help me . It's Like Dell shipping Ubuntu.. not on this part of the world.. and sadly it's also like the OLPC .. Give one Get one only on the other side of the Ocean.

It's all good marketing .. until you actually want to get it .. :(

Just give me the source code .. then I don't have to sit trough presentations from marketing people that can only read from spec sheets for some product , but fail to read the fine print and leave me disappointed again ...

As a Drupal newbie I`m wondering about the new user creation process.

Is it just me or is there a part missing int he admin/user/settings form. When you as an admin require users to be approved first. Don't you want the user to recieve multiple mails. One when he registered, telling him that he is awaiting approval/.
Then one when you approved his membership giving him the details on how to log on to the site ? (Or a another one telling him he wasn't approved)

Or am I looking in the wrong places for this feature ?

I see the mail form that will send out a mail that the user iss awaiting approval. But I can't find a template that is being sent upon approval. Neither can I see a mail departing from my system.
I find it a bit weird to send out userinformation to a user that doesn't end up to be a user afterall.

Beste Frank

Too bad you spend some unneeded money.. what you should have done is build yourselve a nice MythTV box.
Has all the features you list.. and doesn't need a subscription .

John Quinn writes about Scaling Drupal he is taking a one step at a time approach and is still writing his 4th and 5 stages.

His first step obviously is separating the drupal from a separate database server, and he chooses mysql for this purpose, moving your DB to a different machine is a good thing to do.

However then he gets this crazy idea of using NFS to share his his drupal shared files :(
(he even dares to mention that the setup ease is good) Folks, we abandonned NFS in the late nineties. NFS is still a recipe for disaster, it has performance issues , it as stability issues (stale locks), and no security admin in his right mind will tolerate portmap to be running in his DMZ.
(Also think about the IO path that one has to follow to serve a static file to a surfer when the file is stored on a remote NFS volume)

On top of that he adds complexity in a phase where it isn't needed yet. Because of the fact he needs to manage and secure NFS and he is storing his critical files on the other side of the ethernet cable he did create a single point of failure he didn't need creating yet.
Yes as soon as you start to scale you need to look at a scalable and redundant way to share your files.
When those files are pretty static you'll start out with a set of rsync scripts or scripts that push them to different servers upon deploying your application. When they are changing often you start looking into filesystems or block devices that bring you replication, such as DRBD or Lustre
But if today his NFS server goes down he is screwed, much harder than when his database has a hickup.

One could discuss the order of scaling, but adding more webservers might not always be the first step to take, one might want to tackle the database first depending on the application.
He decides to share the load of his application over multiple Drupal instances using apache mod_proxy , then adds Linux-HA to make it highly available.
I`m interested in knowing why he chose for apache mod_proxy and not for LVS

Although using NFS for me belongs in a How NOT to scale tutorial, his other steps give you a good idea of the steps to take.

I`m looking forward to his next steps :) I hope that in part 4 he also removes NFS in favour of a solution with no performance and locking issues that really takes away a big fat single point of failure. In part 5 he discusses how to scale your database environment. The actual order of implementing step 2 and 5 will be different for each setup.

Anyway.. I`m following up on his next steps.. interesting reading

Yesterday during some presentation I got quite frustrated with the screensaver that constantly started fading out the screen even after only 30 seconds of non activity Why doesn't OO.org just disable the screensaver while in presentation mode .. or should I look harder for that option ?

Over a year ago I asked Lazyweb: I wonder why nobody tried to rebuild SLES like RHEL...Yesterday .. Dag responded. It indeed seems that the community around Fedora and CentOS is much bigger than the community around openSUSE
The comment from Leo to his posting is confirming that. Luc makes an observation regarding the use of any Suse based product .. namely that people who are using it are stripping Yast from it .. sounds like something I could have said :)

Fred just pointed me to these tasty penguins I`m getting hungry

Barcamp Brussels 4 is comming

It’s decided! Barcamp Brussels #4 will take place on Saturday Dec 1st, in the mVillage business center in Schaarbeek, close to the Koninginneplein, Kruidtuin/Botanique and the Brussels North station (thanks for the help, Simon).

According to Kristof Willen I`m a ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST type of Unix Sysadmin . If you don't know why .. you'll figure it out one day.

Dag, we can't blame you for being brainwashed by IBM and still looking back at AIX tools, afterall you worked there twice already and who knows how may more times to come :)

But .. before you start to reinvent the wheel, or mksysb have a look at the following tools.
There's 2 tools that come to mind when looking at your requirements.

A tool I used a lot about 5-6 years ago is Mondo Rescue :
Mondo Rescue is a GPL disaster recovery solution. It supports Linux (i386, x86_64, ia64) and FreeBSD (i386). It's packaged for multiple distributions (RedHat, RHEL, SuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo). It supports tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware Raid.

I haven't used it for a while since my current preference off course goes to the SystemImager Framework. Apart from using it for automating installations off course you can use it to create a golden image of your running environment and restore that image any way you like, over network, from CD (with si_mkautoinstallcd) etc.

SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines.

On the other hand , if you manage your systems in an Infrastructures.org way , and you have good backups of your data. You don't need to restore a system from some media, as you will just be able to rebootstrap the failing machine in an identical way as you have been managing it and the only thing needed to do is restore your data.

PS. if you don't know what I don't want to maintain, skip the first result