That’s the question Xavier asks in his blog entry titled
Security: DIY or Plug’n’Play
To me the answer is simple, most of the appliances I ran into so far have no way of configuring them apart from the ugly webgui they ship with their device. That means that I can’t integrate them with the configuration management framework I have in place for the rest of the infrastructure. There is no way to automatically modify e.g firewall rules together with the relocation of a service which does happen automatically, and there is always some kind of manual interaction required. Applicances tend to sit on a island, either stay un managed ( be honest when’s the last time you upgraded the firmware of that terminal server ? ) , or take a lot of additional efort to manage manually. They require yet another set of tools than the set you are already using to manage your network.
They don’t integrate with your backup strategy, and don’t tell me they all come with perfect MIB’s.
A couple of weeks ago I ranted about being able to crash about any available music player on Fedora, and the gazillion bugs I filed for that ..
At last the the problem is solved, as mentioned in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657971#c17
this is most probably a bug in ffmpeg which is provided by rpmfusion. and which is solved by installing gstreamer-plugins-ugly
When I first started out giving talks about devops , I realized that I was preaching to the choir, some Barcamps, the Keynote at Loadays , the Dutch Unix Usergroup etc .. lots of people in the audiences knew about the pains we were trying to solve, lots of them already knew some of the tools we use and lots of them already talk a lot with their developers or are part of the deveoplment teams
Apparently December is the month where everybody starts writing guest posts for other blogs.
Earlier this month I wrote an article with the title of this blog for Sysadvent ,
It’s a sysadmin relative of the Perl Advent Calendar: One article for each day of December, ending on the 25th article. With the goals of of sharing, openness, and mentoring, we aim to provide great articles about systems administration topics written by fellow sysadmins\
Karl has been jokingly calling Fedora the Distribution if you don’t want sound.
And I`m starting to believe him ..
Over the past 3 days that I’m using Fedora 14 I’ve had random crashes
Given that all my podcast feeds are configured in my favourite rhytmbox .. that’s what I started out with.. On my F12 setup it used to be pretty stable… however it took me less than 15 minutes
for the first crash… and then another one .. and another one..
So I started looking at other clients ..
When I read on the internetz that Alex Davies was about the publish a Packt book on MySQL HA I pinged my contacts at Packt and suggested that I’d review the book .
I’ve ran into Alex at some UKUUG conferences before and he’s got a solid background on MySQL Cluster and other HA alternatives so I was looking forward to reading the book.
Alex starts of with a couple of indepth chapters on MySQL Cluster, he does mention that it’s not a fit for all problems, but I’d hoped he did it a bit more prominently … an upfront chapter outlining the different approaches and when which approach is a match could have been better. The avid reader now might be 80 pages into MySQL cluster before he realizes it’s not going to be a match for his problem.
Over the course of the day I recieved 22^H3 mails from your friendly Bug Zapper.
Most of those bugs where bugs I had reported upon crashes using bug-buddy. Bugs on different desktop tools such as .. synergy, evolution, gwibber , gnome-settings and probably some others
I do understand that I development goes on and on .. and your fancy devs don’t care anymore about bugs I reported on Fedora 12 as they are all hacking on Fedora 15 and that I should update more frequently …
One of the open sessions last week (corr: last month) at Devopsdays 2010 Hamburg was the one on packaging software. It’s always a big question on wether you package the software that runs in your infrastructure or not. And if you package it .. what do you package ..
The general consensus of the open space was pretty much that you always package the software you deploy, unless you have some very good reasons not to. Pretty much the way I’ve been doing for ages ..
Actually it didn’t , but now I got your attention.
We just adopted the use of adding headers to all of our files that are managed by puppet so people will know not to touch it
All worked nice however upon bootstrapping our Xen host the bridges stopped working .. running the network-custom-vlan-bridges script manually solved everything and created the appropriate bridges. But at boottime it didn’t..
So I bought myselve a new gadget, a tablet. I wanted a couple of things, first of all I love the mythdroid app as a remote control for my MythTV, but as it runs on my phone and kids don’t have a phone it was pretty much a blocking issue when I wasn’t at home.
The second thing I wanted was a device for the kids to play small games on … and I also want to use it for the kids to watch some movies while we travel. On top of that it would be handy if I could use it to surf the web from my couch while not having to open up my laptop.