Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Devops Needs Sushi

DNS Tools

In my latest DNS Problem related post I mentionned that don’t know all the answers, I however know about some good tools to help you setup a clean DNS server.

Ages ago via Planet Fedora I ran into an article from Steven Moix about a tool he and his fellow students build for a summer project.

The tool is DNSKnife and it’s really interresting.

DNS Knife is a good tool to check if your DNS setup is ok, it checks the parent servers, it checks for if your nameservers are listed on the parent server, checks if all your nameservers are reachable and are authorative .
And so on and so on …

Apparently there are Borders

And therefore, sometimes you need to register domains in different countries.
So how does one proceed, one takes the zone file of the existing domain e.g. .be and creates a symlink for the different countries to the original zonefile e.g .nl and .eu . Afterall, you want to have te same hosts available in every country and you want to keep the hassle down when you update a host.

You tell your registrar, to reg the same domain for the other tld’s with the usueal Nameservers , you know . the one that are listed in your original zonefile

Nines , Damn Nines and More Nines

Funny how different experiences lead to different evaluations of tools. The MySQL HA solutions the MySQL Performanceblog list, are almost listed in the complete opposited order of what my impressions are.

Ok agreed, I should probably not put my MySQL NDB experiences from 2-3 years ago with multiple Query of deaths and more problems than you into account anymore , but back then went in the list Less stable than a single node. I’ve had NDB POC setups going down for much more than 05:16 minutes
Ndb comes with a lot of restrictions, there are

Heartbeat 2 OpenAIS

While upgrading a pretty recent Heartbeat cluster to OpenAis earlier today I ran into the following weird situation\

1. Last updated: Fri Oct 16 08:50:03 2009
2. Stack: openais
3. Current DC: CO_NMS-1 - partition with quorum
4. Version: 1.0.5-462f1569a43740667daf7b0f6b521742e9eb8fa7
5. 4 Nodes configured, 2 expected votes
6. 1 Resources configured.
7. ============

9. Online: [ CO_NMS-1 CO_NMS-2 ]
10. OFFLINE: [ co_nms-1 co_nms-2 ]

or

1. crm(live)node# show
2. co_nms-1(5c48ab4f-767f-e2dc-20ec-5969cddad152): normal
3. co_nms-2(922ff786-eca9-bed0-d79d-8222727a2c5b): normal
4. CO_NMS-1: normal
5. CO_NMS-2: normal

Whohoo.. OpenAIS must have realized I have upperase and lowercase cores :)

Open Source, Open Core, Open ScoreCards

There is this constant discussion about Open Core vs Open Source vs Proprietary Software , Fauxpen Source, Open Source Business models etc.. you probably know all the usual suspects involved, first up lets agree that nobody will ever agree on what’s best, (off course it’s pure open source.. ) , but one of the important aspects is to know what values are important for you and your customers

Simon Phipps thinks we should build a scorecard that lists the different values we attach to a certain level of openness

Everything is a Swedish dot Problem

Via @frank_be

.se goes down after a dns config issue
We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating “.” to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that “.se” is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down.

Enterprise Open Source Adoption at BT, London

Repost from our corporate blog

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark “I`m from outer space” Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown … ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of “people close to you” for supporting solutions .

What Kind of Open Source Fanboy are you ?

James Dixon has some polls on his blog, they let you choose between being a free software junkie, an open source hacker or what I’d call a an incompetent moron ;)

I had mostly 2’s , no 3 in case you’d wonder.

Monitoring MySQL

Ronald Bradford wants to know what kind of Monitoring you use..
He specifically wants to know about Alerting tools

There’s different cases , looking at it from a full infrastructure point my current favourite is Zabbix or good old Nagios,

But when looking at it from a debugging perspective you have MySQLAR or Hyperic, but those aren’t in the alerting list.

However, when you are building HA clusters, you have custom scripts running either from mon or from pacemaker ..

Why learn to type ?

When your machine knows what you mean ..

1. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]# crm configure
2. crm(live)configure# bye
3. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]# crm confiure
4. crm(live)configure# bye
5. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]# crm confiture
6. crm(live)configure# bye
7. [s3p-root@XMS-1 tomcat6]#

I’d better\

1. apt-get install coffee