Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Devops Needs Sushi

Robomow vs iRobot·

(aka the follow up to http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/testing-robomow-510)
Lennert was really helpful in dropping by and providing us with some extra isolaters for the cable… the RoboMow is now doing it’s work nicely again.

Yet we ran into another hickup. for some reason the Robomow stopped. The bleeping sound indicated yet another cable cut .. but I couldn’t find it …until I opened the the docking station … where I saw the cable had loosened , after fixing that … everything started working fine again ..

Open Business Models

When I started writing this I wrote “Last week Opscode came” obviously now that is “A couple of months ago Opscode came with a bunch of announcements … one of them being that they are also going to support the Open Source Chef .. rather than only their own platform.

I’d love to see more companies formally do this .. Over the past couple of years I’ve had numerous situations where organizations where happy to pay for support to an commercial backer of Open Source software… but they were not interested in , software updates, fancy dashboards , unneeded features.

Using broken development frameworks , or why we don't use Zurmo

People often wonder why DBA’s used to hate developers, and with DBA’s also the System Engineers,
(note that I just expanded devops by adding dba’s to the picture..)

So let me tell you a story ..

A couple of weeks ago one of our customers wanted to start experimenting with a new type of CRM. A gamified CRM.
Zurmo …

So we set this thing up in a dev environment and started playing with it , while at first it looks nice ..
the application actually felt pretty slow.. however given that is a low resource development environment we looked no further.

Done Ignite

Last month I gave an 5 minute Ignite talk at #devopsdays Amsterdam.

To summarize .. it was a rant against people that think that the end of a sprint their work is done, an idea they might have gotten from a broken definition of done.

Both the video recording and the slides are embedded below.

Dod is not done from Kris Buytaert

Why you shouldn't hire a devops

Lately there have been a lot of organisations trying to hire a devops engineer.
I myselve have been asked to fill in devops roles ..

There’s a number of issues with that.

The biggest problem is that I always have to ask what exactly the organisation is looking for.

So you want a devops engineer with experience in Linux, MongoDB, MySQL and Java , does that mean you want a Java developer who is familiar with MySQL and Linux and breaths a devops Culture.
Or a Linux expert who understands Java developers and knows how to tune Mongo and MySQL ?

Testing the RoboMow 510

A couple of weeks ago I noted fellow geek Peter Vanwelkenhuysen was talking about his #robomowtest experiences. obviously I wanted to know how he got to test one.

Some tweets and mails later I was making arrangements with Lennert van der Pols from Friendly Robotics too.
I’ve been thinking about buying a RoboMower for years . always have been delaying the purchase since we were planning to move
Since we moved, my wife has been a bit sceptic

Evolution Woes and yum magic

I`m an oldschool guy .. I still love pop3(s) to get my mails locally and read them with my fat email client. Evolution.

So when gmail breaks their pop/imap infra I`m screwed for a while. I hate reading mail from a web gui and the collapsed threading model gmail uses makes me nauseus.

So I fiddled with my config .. disabled it.. deleted the account.. created it again. But even after gmail was up again . I couldn’t access my mail from my favourite client. Yet from other clients it seemed to work.

Initial loadays speakers announced

Loadays is coming up soon .. 6 and 7 april ..
Loadays is the Linux and Open Administration conference of the low lands , held in Antwerp, Belgium

We’ve just published the initial batch of speakers

  • Being a Sysadmin at a company full of Sysadmins (Cody Herriges)
  • OpenNebula Fundamentals (Jaime Melis)
  • Integrate UEFI into REAR (Gratien D’haese)
  • Puppet v3 and Hiera (Garrett Honeycutt)
  • Integrating Linux into an Active Directory domain (Gábor Nyers)
  • Normalised instance provisioning for dev, on-premise and public clouds (Karanbir Singh)
  • C.R.E.A.M : Cache Rules Everything Around Me (Thijs Feryn)
  • OpenLDAP’s Lightning Memory-Mapped DB (Howard Chu)
  • What’s new in syslog-ng (Peter Czanik)
  • Introduction to Ansible (Jan Piet Mens)
  • Network Block Device: network-based block storage for Linux systems (Wouter Verhelst)

Tutorials

Love, MonitoringLove

Last year we were pretty negative about Monitoring, We shouted out that MonitoringSucked … A year has passed and a lot has changed … most importantly our new found love for monitoring, thanks to an inspirational Ignite talk by Ulf Mansson at devopsdays Rome.

Right after Fosdem about 20 people showed up at the #monitoringlove hacksessions hosted at the Inuits.eu offices to work on Open Source monitoring projects and exchange ideas. Some completely new people, some people with already a lot of experience.