May 20 2006

Gallery :: LinuxTag 2006 Wiesbaden

Finally found time to upload the pictures I took at LinuxTag this year in Wiesbaden not much but some people might be interrested :)
Gallery :: LinuxTag 2006 Wiesbaden ::

May 19 2006

Attacks to our DNS system, how vulnerable is the internet ?

Most of you already know that one of my default replies to a question is "It's a DNS Problem" , and lots of you already came back afterwards confirming that I indeed was right.
Apart from configuration errors and performance issues , there are more issues on the internet that are DNS related.

Spam is one of them .. one of the main reasons behind spam is that other than an MX record to send mail to, the original mail architecture did not provide us with a way to guarantee that mails were actually coming from
the domain they claim to come from. Luckily today we have openSPF and other techniques that are helping us , however not widespread enough ..
Think about the bad things that can happen when someone can take over your DNS server... yep.. that kind of stuff...

Or even worse .. think about what happens if you ask for the IP address for a server and get no reply... do you still know the IP address of your mailserver, default gateway, or even DNS server ?
So what happens when the idiots that think we are interrested in their spam feel attacked by a company that tries to help us fight spam start fighting the company by attacking their ISP's DNS servers ?
Indeed they get caught and are forced to manually reply to DNS requests for the rest of their lives .. oh no.. that's not reality :( They actually bring some DNS servers down by sending it more traffic than the ISP's network can ever handle.

The dns system is one of the most important parts of todays internet .. yet it is broken as ...
I spend lots of time thinking how we could fix it... and I`m probably not the only one .. so what are your ideas ?

Anyway... if you want to read on about an actually story with this sad story line go
here

May 17 2006

Enomalism: No More Vapourware

Just got the mail.. it's there .. it's no more vapourware .. dunno if it works though.. SourceForge.net: Enomalism Virtualized Management Console I`ll need to shedule some testing time..
Feel free to share your feedback !

May 17 2006

Open Management Consortium - Open Source and Open Standards based Enterprise Systems Management

What do you get when the best of breed opensource infrastructure management tools, and companies start working together.
Exactly the Open Management Consortium

Now just plug in some other tools ... and provide migration paths out of proprietary lock-in.

May 17 2006

Troubleshooting 102

If Wouter's had read my post on Linux Trouble Shooting he would probably have spend less hours figuring out that indeed DNS and NTP are amongst the top issues one runs into. :)
Maybe I should start categorizing per type of issue.,

Dag, any plans on updating your Problem Solving Howto ? :)

May 14 2006

Clifford Stoll bought a Mac Mini!

Stories like this
Bored of Cowards - It's okay to remind me what I'm doing here, just don't happen that often in Europe :( Most of our oldskool heroes don't live on this continent.

But selling your Mac Mini to Clifford Stoll really is cool stuff .. :)

Anyway ..If I was selling it he had to sign the receipt in one of his books :)
Or maybe I should start putting some hardware up for sale :)

So which hero lives next door to you ? :)

May 08 2006

debian xen

Lots of people seem to be looking at debian xen stuff, rather than looking at more general method
This however looks like one of the better ways of doing it in Debian.
More alternatives are being discussed here however.

May 08 2006

Bugs in the Kernel

So Andrew mentionned he thinks kernels are getting buggier last week at LinuxTag, yet he has no realdata except his inbox to confirm that.

Dave thinks

I think a more likely explanation is just the fact that we're getting better at finding bugs, and getting better (and more) reports from end-users.

Kernels aren't getting buggier.. we just find more bugs.. How many of these bugs are life threatening. ?
Some other questions ... What is growing faster .. the number of contributors, the size of the code , or the number of bugs.
As we don't have exact figures yet... how can we be sure that this is a bad trend ?
It would indeed be bad if the number of bugs is growing at a faster rate than the code base. But given the growth of the code base it might as well be otherwise. We just don't know. It is perfectly possible that eventhough Andrew is getting more bugs reported on a day by day base , the overall stability of the Linux kernel is increasing.

Afterall .. there's Lies, damn Lies and Statistics !

May 07 2006

LinuxTag 2006 Report Continued

The after party... somehow we ended up sitting at the same terrace having dinner as some of the other Linuxtag people ..
The result being that our tables eventually merged into a fun talk with Philip Copeland (Bryce) the ocfs2 guy ..and some late night open air irc session with seklos
who apologised for having to send someone else to actually give a talk. Philip tried his best to give a good talk.. but as posted earlier.. it is difficult to do so when it's not your talk.
I hope to see him give one of his own talks one day .. promises to be really good.

On saturday morning Ruediger was so kind to fill in the open spot we had which saved the audience from a 4th rerun of my Xen Deployments talk , I managed to miss half of his talk however.. kind of annoying...

Then time to introduce Werner.. who really is giving a talk I have been proposing to different conferences lately.. except that I was focussing on GFS and Xen where he takes a more general approach. Should be really interresting... As Werner mentions a problem with virtualisation .. when you consolidate.. and one machine fails it's actually more machines that fail.. therefore the need for ha becomes important. which is also one of the reasons why I am looking at the topic.. that and many-2-one ha setups which I think can save us a lot of idle hardware.

Werner mentions 5 possible setup .. he wonders why people would want to failover from virtual to physical, the only reason I can come up with for now is someone who has a lot of old machines and buys one new bigger machine where he consolidates his apps. Some different virtual machines might have a physical failover on an older left over machine. Looking at it from a budget point of view it makes sense.

Werner is doing his storage mirroring on his physical host , I've been looking at mirroring storage between virtual machines or between physical and virtual machines (certainly in a many 2 one setup) , this definitely needs more thinking, and more work to be done on testing integration between Xen and different clusterfilesystems ocfs2, gfs etc.

Time for me to check out of the hotel and do some small shopping (food) before heading back to the Xen talk ... not by Ian this time... but by Steve Hand, a nice change to see this presentation given by someone else who's equally skilled and involved into the stuff. I sneaked out for 5 minutes to see how crowded the other talks are... Mark's talk was crowded... you couldn't get into the room.. As the Xen talk is also rather crowded one can only assume that this last day at Linuxtag is really crowded ..

After the Xen talk I took some time to talk to Aaron about our ideas on openQRM and SystemImager, talked some more with Werner Fisher about Virtual Clusters tried to get back into the talks but sat down with Steve Hand for some Xen chat instead (I really got to look into buying a new Laptop :))
But luckily I got into last talk by Klaus Rabbertz on Software Deployment in Grids. Problem sounds familiar... solution doesn't.. it's really grid specific. Juliux really needs to take off soon :) Some interresting tought on using different RPM databases on one machine however. I need to buy some time somehwere to have a look at how stuff they have been building can be used in a broader area.

LinuxTag 2006 is over now.. I`m satisfied with it.. met some interresting people and learned some new stuff .. after all that's why you go to conferences isn't it.
I've seen LinuxTag from different viewpoints already.. as a regular visitor, as a speaker and this year as a programcomitee member. Depending on location and time I assume this 6th linuxtag I visited certainly won't be the last.

May 05 2006

LinuxTag 2006 20060505 Kernel Questioning

This is the time of the day I`m happy I never have really committed code to the Linux Kernel... I've only removed code from openMosix and the fact that my nickname is still somewhere in the tree really doesn't count.. (hmm.. yep still there.. just verified.. weird..)

Nils called everyone who raised his hand and they are all on stage now :)

I didn't catch all the names but AGK, Heinz, Jan Blunck, Jorg Engel, Christophe "I got a new Haircut so I can attack unsuspecting speakers with questions again" Andrew Morton, Marcel Holzmann

The award for the most funny introduction goes to
"I`m Andrew Morton .. I maintain the 3Com network driver "