Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I don't know on which planet I have been for the past couple of years , days or hours but since when do
VMware’s Vmotion, XenSource’s Xenmotion or Virtual Iron’s Virtual Iron support Replication ?

Live Migration yes, but Replication , No.

I discussed this kind of technologies with Mark and Vincent , Moshe and others already a zillion times.. Continuously mirroring or realtime replication of a virtual machine is really difficult to do. And I haven't heard from a working scalable solution yet .. (Shared Memory issues such as we had with openMosix still are amongst the issue to be tackled)

Live Replication would mean that you mirror the full state of your virtual machine realtime to another running virtual machine. Every piece of disk/memory and screen you are using has to be replicated to the other side of the wire realtime. Yes you can take snapshots of filesystems and checkpoints of virtual machines. But continuous checkpointing over the network , I'd love to see that.. (outside of a lab)

So with a promise like that .. our good friends the CIO will be dreaming and the vendors will be blamed for not delivering what was promised to them.

But on the subject of using just Live Migration features as an alternative for a real High Availability solution , I know different vendors are singing this song, but it's a bad one.

Using Live migration in your infrastructure will give you the opportunity to move your applications away from a bad behaving machine when you notice it starts behaving badly, hence giving you a better overall uptime. If however you don't notice the machine is failing, or if it just suddenly stops working, or if your application crashes you are out of luck.
Live migration won't work anymore since you are to late, you can't migrate a machine that's dead. The only thing you can do is quickly redeploy your virtual machine on another node, which for me doesn't really qualify as a Clustered or HA solution.

Real HA looks at all the aspects of an application, the state of the application, the state of the server it is running on and the state of the network it is connected to. It has an alternative ready if any of these aspects fail. Session data is replicated, data storage is done redundantly and your network has multiple paths. If your monitoring decides something went wrong another alternative should take over with no visible interruption for the end user. You don't have to wait till your application is restarted on the other side of the network, you don't have to wait till your virtual machine is rebooted, your filesystems are rechecked and your database has recovered no it happens right away .

But Virtual Machine Replication as an alternative for HA ? I'd call that wishfull thinking and vapourware today

I have to admit .. I prefer being called a good soul over other things :)

Barcamp Brussels 4th edition was just announced.

But if you really need to meet us earlier .. there's always the upcoming Geekdinner

Maty Asay points us to .. yet another incomplete list of Open Source events on this planet

Now if one could just make either an RSS feed of this or a create a calender out of it so we can integrated it in our favourite calendaring client. Or just create a group on upcoming and keep that group consistently filled up.

They probably should already add Fosdem.org and Linuxtag.org 2007
as the dates for those conferences are already announced.

They should also keep an eye on Sven Guckes page as he has some updates on events.
and als on Martin Schulzes page

Anyone else knows some locations where to find good conferences ?
And yes the more specific conferences such as the ones on MySQL , Drupal or OpenOffice also deserve a place in that list !

A big welcome to all new readers redirected to this feed from Planet Drupal ..

But before you all start wondering let's make this clear .. as far as we know Dries and I are not family .. so stop asking :)

Don't start bugging me about changes you want to be made in Drupal,
Yes you can try to bribe me by buying stuff from my Amazon Wishlist , but you will be talking to the wrong Buytaert. I`m just a humble Drupal newbie, using Drupal for my own blog and some small projects just a hobby, won't be big and professional like... well actually like Drupal .
You however won't be the first to buy stuff off my wishlist , given the fact that I`m not new to open source and Linux in general.

Last weekend was T-Dose I was looking forward to see Bert's drupal talk but I was way to late in Eindhoven , just in time to see his last 5 slides Too bad I couldn't find him anymore after his talk.

Just after his talk I ran into Matt and Tarry , Matt is always present at conferences , often giving good talks on stuff I care about such as openQRM this time.

It was great to finally meet Tarry in the physical world, and not just the virtual one, so the Irish Pub meetup in the late afternoon really should be repeated !

The Woman without a blog told me about her involvement in OpenDocsSociety and the 2 upcoming launche parties.

I arrived way to late at the social event because of the Eindhoven Marathon parking issues we about to have if we didn't move Matt's car , but that way I ended up a a table with the guy from
Gravity Zoo, great stuff those guys are working on .. Looking forward to see some of their demos.

The Irish pub threw us out at 0200 , which was kinda Early.. but the result was that I made it only 5 minutes late for the Open Embedded talk. Now I really really want to start looking closer at OpenEmbedded as I feel it would be a really good solution for lots of the stuff different people are doing wrong , but then I need to get some time slices from an altnerate Universe ..

As promised in Cambridge I went to Dag's talk on Dstat as I ran out of it in Cambridge coz of some urgent phonecalls.
As I already have a private presentation about mrepo , I can now safely skip his next presentations :)

I had to run out earlier and drop off Matt at his car in the middle of nowhere before heading home. But T-Dose is growing at good rate. It's not yet big and overcrowded as Fosdem so at least you can talk with lots of people !

Philip , I wanted to take pictures of the guy in the Blue shirt with the weird logo .. but you guys didn't let me..

I really wonder what he was doing there.. the only answer I can come up with is that he was spying on us and that Microsoft is creating files of which Open Source people to sue .. so laughing with his shirt might not have been our best bet.

I`m starting to be scared, the guy obviously had some friends and he was into what he called Business Intelligence .. that's like Microsofts Central Intelligence Agency right ?

Were there any other Slashdot parties invaded by the borg ?

UPDATE. There used to be a typo in this article, but honestly it was NOT on purpose ..
I had a good laugh upon noticing however ..

Before I forget again

Initrd for domU

mkinitrd --preload xennet --preload xenblk /boot/initrd-2.6-xen.img 2.6.18-8.1.8
.el5xen

Now at least I can google for it again :)

Aaahrr.. I can't find my /. T-shirts anymore :((

Zimbra has this nice feature to share calendars, you share a calendar with a group of people and they get a mail
The following share has been created:

Now when you read that mail in the Zimbra interface .. everything works fine.. there is another mime part with some XML info that Zimbra learns to create an Accept button from.

However lots of people use IMAP or POP3 rather than the webinterface to read their mail.
Non Zimbra clients don't parse that extra XML part, so they get a mail stating that a new share has been created but they never actually see that calendar in their webinterface.

The person who sent the invite also doesn't have an option to resend the invite it seems.
Luckily the receiver can resend the mail to his inbox and then the xml part gets parsed.

Ideally someone not using the webinterface could get a link to click on .

Anyway .. at least it works.. unlike some other groupware solutions.

UPDATE:
Ah the lovely ways of a community support.
Seems like my sender didn't look good enough .. there indeed is a resend function.
And it seems that in the upcoming 5 release the nodes provide you with an URL and a (cleartext) username and password combo