Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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 "

So after breakfast it's time to figure out where the conference actually is..
Whee.. that's far .. and you have to cross a street .. dangerous .. at least compared to stepping out of the Dorint's doors in Karlsruhe :)
It's right across the street , but the conference entrance is around the corner..

Well hidden on the schedule is a talk about OpenVZ it's in one of the Community workshop rooms. It means I'll have to miss AGK's talk about LVM fun... tough choice ...

They go over a short overview of the different Virtualisation types etc interresting to see that they claim as the advantages compared to their collegues ..

One of the claims against Qemu and VMWare is the one by one management etc.Hello .Large Scale management anyone ?
As cons for Para Virtualisation the "Needs modified guest OS" is acceptable but "Static Resource Allocation , bad scalability and bad manageability.. they don't consider it different from vmware. and also one by one management..
According to them "ballooning" isn't a kind of real solution but just a hack.. works for me ;)
And the fact that I can add disks on the fly when I need to is also not really static for my needs.

Also I personally really prefer to have identical tools for my physical and virtual the fact that a collegue just doesn't need to know about wether this host is physical or virtual and use the same tools he is used to makes it a lot easier.

3rd kind is OS level virtualisation .. BSD Jails, VServer .. Solaris Zones , OpenVZ. no multiple kernels.. single kernel ...
Hmm.. this won't fix eg netfilter conflict issues .. Xen does .. I want to be able to runn different kernels in different environments. Say old and antique 2.4 kernels on a machine that is phyiscally only supported on a 2.6 kernel. because we have to keep an old legacy application around.. (yeah those already exist on Linux .. strange huh .. )

Nice viewpoint on the evolution from Multitask to MultiUser to multiple Execution envirnments ...
Open VZ has also checkpointing and Migration support altough according to their blog it is really recent.

The real fun part is how competing projects often don't know the correct facts aoubt their peers, "If the sshd on your xen box dies you have to reboot it because you can't access it ?" Huh .. strange .. I must have misheard but it certainly ain't true .... I definitely don't claim to know everytyhing about other projects.. but I won't make claims I do .. and I know it's difficult to catch up and keep track of what's happening as we are only humans..

Got in late into the Git/ Cogito talk , Gitk really really looks nice
It's really really time I set up that openMosix Git tree sometime...

I ran into Matt after that talk.. he just arrived ..with a small hmm.. not that small surprise .. Matt already mailed about doing a Aaron visits Europe and Matt the USA.. but I really didn't expect to meet him here... really great to finally meet him.. We had lunch downstairs (much better Food arrangements than Karlsruhe btw !) and then moved on to the Kerneltrack Keynote by Andrew Morton

The talk went over the which trees exist , what's the model for review, and how to get your code included...

Andrew wonders if kernels are getting les stable day by day , he thinks so but he doesn't have real data about it.. it's just an impression.
Maybe we should take all the kernel hackers after an event such as OLS and lock them in a room for 24 hours forcing them to do nothing else but fixing bugs

On to the questions then .. lots of them around ..

Q: USB is "slow" these days
A:...vfat is the actual problem ...
distributions implmented mounting usb sticks with a "stynk" option..
eheh :)

Q "Version numbers are marketing not technical stuff.. so where is 2.7 ? "
A "We have no plans on currently going to 2.7 or anything else..."

Q: why are the X drivers not in in kernelspace
A: because Linux isn't the only OS using X.

Q: What's the status of virtualisation in the kernel A: Andrew expect Xen to be in the linux tree within the next 12 months..
Xen people seem to be reluctant to talk to the general kernel people..
they talk more to the distro people ... Lets fix up Steve with Andrew tonight :)
Andrew doesn't want to choose between different virtualisation techniques.

Maybe rather than choosing there should be an API one way or another.. a common api that works for different types of virtualisation techniques.

There seems to be a need for a Meta Change log for the kernel rather than a great detailed changelog.. a quick 1-2 page overview where you can see in which compomponents stuff has drastically changed.

Isn't Kerneltrap and Zach's stuff enough summary ..

Matt's talk ...
ff course it didn't attract the huge public Andrew attracted but still fairly well attended , everyone who doesn't know what iSCSI is about , knows now.
Hmm.. so I wonder where my test setup has gone again .. I think I was exporting the USB disk at home via iSCSI. Maybe I should actually use iSCSI to export my MythTV and Music storage. Ah.. the lack of time..

Then on to the OCFS2 talk...It's extremely difficult to have to fly into a conference, give a talk, which you are not used to giving, didn't write yourselve but have to give since the marketing people planned.. annoying which explains why they guy presenting has .. some things on the slides he just doesnt know about.. so after about 25-30 minutes in the talk .. after the room has partly flooded the guy decides that rather than reading full parts of his notes he'd better start with a Q&A session. which was a really really good decision ...
but still .. We want Wim.. We want Wim .. We want Wim .. ..

Someone finally found the correct acronym for what some people tend to call DRM it's
C.R.A.P : Content Restriction Annulment and Protection.

We made it, Wiesbaden.. and even in a reasonable time slightly more than 3h30 minutes. Unlike our trip to Karlsruhe last year which took us trough every traffic jam in germany and changed our normal driving time from something like 4h20 to 9h. Time for a shower and breakfast.

Wrote up some guidelines for #openmosix on Freenode,

http://howto.x-tend.be/openMosixWiki/index.php/Guidelines

Kind of started to annoy me that we get the same "Can openMosix do HA?" and ":Can openMosix scale my apache ?" kind of questions daily ..

The short answer.. no openMosic won't work for you.

(Hm.. strange.. I posted this yesterday but something ate my posting... )

openMosixWiki - Guidelines

Liberie Cunha-Neto says "I need more time"

Me too! and for exactly the same thing ....

If only Whurley would send me that 60hourday2hoursleep patch.

Everything is a DNS Problem

Everything is a Fscking DNS Problem
No really, Everything is a Fscking DNS Problem
If it's not a fucking DNS Problem ..
It's an arp problem
If it's not an arp problem...
It's a Full Filesystem Problem
If youre filesystem isn't full
It's a Spanning Tree problem
If it's not a spanning Tree problem...
It's a USB problem
If it's not a USB Problem
It might be an ntp problem 
If it's not an ntp problem
It's a sharing IRQ Problem
If it's not a sharing IRQ Problem
But most often .. its a Freaking Dns Problem !

The speakers for Guadec have been notified about acceptance of their talk. Philip will be talking about
Building an e-mail client for mobile devices

I`m wondering how many .be people will be speaking at Guadec this year. Iirc last year we had 3 .be speakers ..

In Schwartz replaces McNealy: A tough comedy act to follow? lots of quotes from McNealy are listed.

"Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too."

"It's the good guys versus the bad guys, and the good guys are winning."

"W2K (Windows 2000) will be a bigger disaster than Y2K."

Now how comes that when a guy in Silicon Valley can give speaches and make these kinds of statements his quotes are being published and republished and when I make honest statements on how I won't trust certain technologies people call me anti something and advise me not to do that when talking to larger audiences because I might step on some toes.

Maybe I should change my name.. :)

Serge van Ginderachter made me think a bit more about quick link to Bait and Switch from yesterday He says :

It's al whole different matter when dual licensing comes with different products. You get one edition in open source, and need to buy a closing source license for another edition with more goodies. In this case you really have pieces of code that mandatorily remain closed source. That is not a good thing.

And indeed I have to elaborate :)
It's not the dual licensing as such which is the problem it's the wannabe open source companies that use their minimal open source product as a marketing feature to campaign their more featured commercial product with a similar name but with a totally different featureset. In these cases we are not talking about the same codebase at all. But to the untrained eye it might look as a dual licensed version of a the project.

Or even worse, companies that mention an opensource product in their brochures but when you take a closer look aren't even involved in that project at all . Or the ones that claim we are building such and such, it's going to be open source but for now it's still closed. Every market has its pioneers , it's honest people , and the ones that try to benefit from something by claiming they are part of it while in reality they are just in there for the money.

Just lets make clear that I`m not talking about the Xensource, MySQL, Suse, Qlusters, RedHat , Alfresco and Outerthoughts of this planet :)