Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

According to DigHole I`ll endup somewhere "close" to New Zealand :)

On one hand I`m wondering what Olaf Kirch is doing at Oracle these days,
on the otherhand I`m wondering why he left Novell.

At least that's what LinkedIn tells me

Just sent in my paper for the NLUUG Virtualisation conference. Up to the next item on my todolist.

I know.. Fosdem is already over for almost 2 weeks. But I was busy writing other stuff , so I`m catching up now.

Sounds weird, but somehow eventhough fosdem is getting crowdier every year it also seems to be better organised.
The focus is moving away from the main conference track and into the hallway and devroom tracks. That's where the people meet.

Matt and I arrived rather early at Fosdem on saturday , for once that RMS wasn't giving a keynote I took the opportunity to actually go there and catch parts of both the OLPC and the Java talk. Nothing new about the first one, Sun marketing in the second one. I`m not used to the kind of talks Simon Phipps gave, this was more a commercial or a TV show trying to entertain the audience rather than actually teach them stuff. hmm.. probably that's why they call it a KeyNote. The Puppet community kind of arranged to meet at 1400 at the entrance of the Centos/Fedora room , so I tried to catch a glimp of Luke there and succeeded. Karanbir had kindly offered his timeslot for Puppet talk on sunday.
After lots of other hallway encounters, pointing me to a really nice NLUUG Virtualisation Conference Schedule and the new dates for T-Dose, I managed to see the LinuxBios talk, I really should spend some time looking at this .. some day ..

After this talk I headed back to the CentOS room to see Fabian talk about eID, then Federic about OpenVZ , realised that I really should spend time looking at Fedora Directory Server, it should be really familiar, as in august it will only be 7 years since I took the IPlanet Directory Service training in London :) , auch .. time flies when you're having fun at the open side ;) Things I wrote down from FedoraDS were the multimaster replication , the Virtual Views you can use when organisations realise they should have paid you for the formal LDAP analysis , Chaining of directories and much more.

After the last talk from Dab about RPMForge we had a photoop :)

Yes, that's the whole RPMforge team for you.

A bunch of us headed out to De Appel in Leuven for Drinks an Food.
I drove back Luke and Karanbir to their hotels only to get stuck in traffic in Brussels.

I was looking forward to Pete Herzog's talk on OSSTMM on Sunday morning, it feels like ages ago since I was closely involved in the OSSTMM project , I had a 2 minute chat with Pete before he flew back to Barcelona but it was worth getting up early . If I could find that 26hoursaday patch I'd probably jump back into it.

Max Spevack finished his Future of Fedora talk early so I could still catch the end of the Drupal talk While hurrying back to Jeff Johnsons talk on the current state of RPM , I bumped into Roland, JJ talked a lot about xar , also something to look into.

Before Lance could start his CentOS roadmap talk I ran into Lenz and Roland but couldn't find them again after I finished my sandwich :(

One of the talks that I will be remembering was stpeter's 1 slide per second talk. Great stuff.. really kept you focussed and meaningful content also, not just marketing crap. Only too bad he didn't provide a ful solution yet. Time wil..

Fosdem kept the best for last, Luke's Puppet talk, I've mentoinned puppet before in this blog, so you kind of know why I keep mentionning this.
I taped his whole talk with my mobile. The video quality isn't really good, but the sound is reasonable. I should probably check with Luke to put it online somewhere in a usable format ;)

After Luke's talk I went home and started the recovery process , which took till .. well.. now :)

So a couple of weeks ago I sat down with the QLayer folks and just recently again.

It was great meeting Jan again after all those years, they are doing cool stuff with Xen and Storage .. but you can read all about that on their website.

On one hand it's kind of weird how altough people might be involved in similar technologies and with similar interrests, living only 50 Km away from eachothe yet still don't know from eachother. On the other hand , eventually you'll meet :)

Keep watching that Qlayer site as I`m sure that there will be good stuff coming from there soon.

Couple of weeks ago Filip pointed us again to OpenChange on our internal mailinglist.

As after 42 seconds their website I wasn't sure if they were working on a client or a server
application. I asked him for more

Here's his (partial) reply

no, serieously, they are essentially working on reverse engineering the MAPI
protocol and providing proof-of-concept code & libraries, so that
any other project (evolution, all oss mail server projects, ...) can offer
exchange & outlook compatibility.

wrt zimbra, ... all fine&dandy and all that, but completely useless in
99% of corporate
environments as you need to have something with calendering/colaboration
features that is completely compatible with a out-of-the box outlook client.

I fully agree with him regarding to converting braindead people who
don't realise the fact that Outlook is their major reason for Viri this
is a good step.

I however hope to be able to convince people that they should give up
their old habits because they are causing them nothing but problems.

It's like getting people to stop smoking, yes smoking kills, everybody
knows it but still people continue to do so at the cost of the
community and the governement.
Sometimes people try to stop and use patches , for me OpenChange is
such a patch , I don't get to smell their smoke anymore.. but they are
still killing themselves softly.

So Zimbra, OpenXchange, and recently also the freed Scalix are better alternatives !

Will be the virtualisation capital of Europe today.

So a couple of weeks ago I asked myselve .. To Write or not To Write

So took the To Write option and somehow managed to make a crazy deadline.
I`m curious to see what the final result will look like.
I`m not 300% satisfied with the work I did but given the short timeframe It should be rather OK. I however would have wanted much more content in there for which I obviously had not enough time.

Who knows next decade I`ll have more time :)

In other Conference news , T-DOSE
the Dutch Technical Open Source Event will be held again in 2007, this tim e on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 october 2007 again in Eindhoven.

For all those that couldn't get a devroom or a speaking slot anymore at Fosdem , this is your chance ;)

The schedule for the NLUUG Najaarsconferentie 2007 about Virtualisation is online.

It sure looks interresting, this time we'll be hearing talks from Anil Madhavapeddy about the State of Xen and Avi Kivity from Qumranet will be talking about KVM , the native Linux Virtual Machine monitor.

I`m also scheduled to talk about my experiences with openQRM and Xen.