Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

According to The IND-Network Cluster we are still in a race to deliver the first 2.6 SSI style cluster .. Hmm.. maybe I'd better try to catch up then .. I didn't know there was a race ..
what can we win ? Please don't tell me it's yet another iPod that everyone promises but noone delivers .. or is it just eternal f(l)ame(s) ? :)

Nuff said

It just showed up in my Myth TV upcoming recordings ! That's as of tomorrow folks !

I finally figured out what was wrong with my setup :)
I should have defined another VE with a Xen kernel to also be used in a partition, rather than expect openQRM to decide with kernel to use for a dom0.

I have to disagree with the hard-won wisdom Joseph documents in this blog entry. Altough I 100% support his idea of version control for config files. Both his "Use mapfiles" and "Avoid generating configuration files" are 2 practices that I have to disagree with.

Don't use map files, use actual subdirs and map multiple trees on top of eachother, Create trees such as ALL , HOSTNAME , HOSTNAME-X , etc and layer them on top of eachother for the final filesystem.
ALL is written first, then hostname and finally hostname-x, so if your CLUSTERNODE13 has a specific config file /etc/murphy that differs from all other nodes it sits in overrides/CLUSTERNODE13/etc/murphy.
In the original sugestion with map files.. how would you map different content based on a server to the same filenames ? You'd end up getting a big bunch of similarly named files in 1 directory, ready for the unattentive eye to edit the wrong file. This is the way how e.g. SystemImager deploys config files, the systemimager overrides mechanism uses rsync to accomplish this.

Do generate config files.
You don't want to spend time modifying config files that a computer can generate for you. If you have 200+ machines and you need to create or configure a service that includes a reference to
an ip address or a hostname based on the actual machine a script or template wil much easier calculate the n+k ip address or hostname-n-k and do it faultless , where as by the 123th config file you edit manually you will have run out of coffee and you'll start doing sloppy cut and pastes.

And yes modern configurations do include a .d mechanism, but not for all config files, yet. A

overrides/ALL/etc/logrotate.d/messages
overrides/DATABASE/etc/logrotate.d/mysql

will do just fine.

After a great social event spending some time talking to LMB about quagga and HA and other stuff we headed to a local Irish pub to finish the evening.
As some people had trouble finding their way to the hotel but were still on time for their own
talk I must conclude it was about time we hit the sheets ;)

Ted Tso gave us a nice overview of the Linux development model. After the break I headed for the Linux HAv2 session by Lars , One CRM to rule them all.. how can one possibly think this talk
would be about Customer Relationship Managers and not about Cluster Resource Managers :), had a
good laugh on that one.

Then Matt was up for the talk about openQRM, it must have been my bad Karma coz even tough he he had tested his laptop on the projector before his talk as I had suggested, the thing didn't work and broke down even with different laptops.
So Matt had to give his presentation with the audience watching his laptop screen.

As the projector troubles delayed the talk for about 20 minutes I quickly ran off to spagetti with Peter as we wanted to be in time for the next presentation
Ralph on SELinux vs Apparmor, his LinuxTag talk was in German, this one luckily in English ..
good summary ,, got to to read that paper again for a good summary, but the projector still was
broken and we had to move to s smaller room for the last couple of talks.

Marcel then treated us to an old skool hardware hacking with irda and other fun tools good for
some really good laugh with the lack of security in your average hotel room. By the time we recovered from the laughter Maddog lined up to close the conference and tell us more than we ever wanted to know about Finish Sauna habits.

Yet another great linuxkongress , and after a 6 hour drive home , I just arrived minutes away from saturday :)

Next conference stop LinuxWorldExpo Utrecht

It's my 6th LinuxKongress 2006 this year it's in Nurenberg, yesterday I had the joy of travelling via train from Antwerp to Nurenberg, nice trip , much more relaxing to do by train than to drive myselve. I actually got some work done on the trip while my battery lasted and got to finish reading some LinuxJournal and Linux Magazine

The Keynote by Alan Cox is titled "How To GPL a Chair", Alan threw a lot of questions at us , most of them which I had never tought of before. I kwew about the RepRap project etc since I met Victor at LCA2005 (Hmm.. Vic is heading for Paraflows in Vienna later this week giving a talk about RepRap actually) , but I never tought about the impact on licensing and copyright if we actually would end up with a device that would be capapble of replicating about anything. What would the value of antique stuff be if we could reproduce it identically ? What about copyright of logo's and objects when we get working Holodecks ?
More questions than answers ... the most important one being .. what about Free Beer !
Lots of answers coming down to .. the ingredients/resources still aren't free and probably will never be.

On to Jeff Dike of UML fame with a talk titled Linux as a hypervisor. While looking out of the window during Jeff's talk I see a cat looking exacly like one of ours (Scsi) sitting on the balcony of a nearby building. Has she been replicated already ? Hmm..
Jef mentions that no actual opensource virtualisation code currently implements a hypervisor in Linux , Xen is a Hypervisor that boots linux and VMWare doesn't seem to be contributing back. I question , if you really need one.
One of the arguments Jeff has is that from a management point of view you don't want to have to learn yet another platform to manage your virtual machines. You want to do that from Linux your usual platform. I`m lost here.. with Xen I manage the hypervisor from witin my first virtual guest , dom0 , works perfectly, scales, and I can actually still use the Linux platform that runs dom0 for other applications also. I don't see the problem here. I'm probably missing out om something here.

Next he goes on talking about using fuse to export a virtual machine filesystem or and even it's /proc filesystem to be mounted from your hypervisor for management persons .. to go on to mention he wants to be able to chroot into is running vhost. Thnx but no thnx, those are features that I really don't need. From a security point of view for one, from a management point of view on the other side. I want to be able to manage a machine physical or virtual identically , definitely not having to remember that I should chroot into an available filesystem to modify a lost password.

Still no Wifi :(

Smart Cards talk then ... How come that most of the stuff this guy is talking about seems really familiar to me eventough I`m not involved at all in smart card stuff these days. I did some research on the topic for a customer about 4-5 years ago, but it still sounds really familiar.

Ahh.. lunch time .. Matt arrived so we had a short chat on his trip to California , exploding batteries, cops, carcrashes , more cops and openQRM.

Volkert gives the usual Samba talk, I haven't been involved in any Samba projects lateley, Fred usually gets sent in on those , but each of his talks is always a nice status update so I don't loose track

I hop into File System (Ext2) Optimization for Compressed loopback device .. Ok, so they guy was reading litererally from his papers, at a really slow pace but at least he was understandable. We've had worse speakers... interresting stuff .. but still I read the paper before he was even half trough his talk.

root@mine2 ~# /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop
Stopping Bluetooth services:                                 OK  

Better shut it when heading for a talk by Marcel :)

Leaving in 10 minutes for Linux-Kongress 2006

Blonko! � intelligentie

The obvious number being 42, as everyone knows !

From the "You really didn't expect him to do this" department.
(Well I did since we shortly chatted about this on irc couple of weeks ago)

Thomas points us to his newest configuration management tool called Savon .

After some thinking, I decided I wanted to redo this tool from scratch, and also consider some other features that would help me use this tool for our platform deployment. The most important one I wanted was to have a concept of an overlay managing a part of the file system, using multiple layers. The layers would then combine as if they were stacked, which would be similar to how I understand things like UnionFS to work (I haven’t tried UnionFS myself, only read about it). The layering would allow me to have parts of the config checkout be related to the machine’s role, part to the specific host, and part to all hosts together.

Kind of like the overrides concept in systemimager, integrated with Subversion, sounds good .. got to look into it..

Too bad this fails..

 apt-get install more-time
 Reading Package Lists... Done
 Building Dependency Tree... Done
 E: Couldn't find package more-time

Otherwise I would have been playing with it already ... well.. it's on my todolist anyway ..