Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Devops Needs Sushi

#monitoringsucks hackathon 6&7 february Practical details:

As announced earlier next monday and tuesday we’re opening up the Inuits offices for everybody working on monitoring problems.

There’s already a good number of people that have confirmed their presence and some people have asked

As for practical details .. the plan is simple.
I`m going to be at the place somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 on monday. ( Hey .. it’s the day after Fosdem you know :))

The only thing I’ve planned is to do a get to know eachother round around 10:30 after that I`m expecting the hackathon to be self organising,

Graphite, JMXTrans, Ganglia, Logster, Collectd, say what ?

Given that @patrickdebois is working on improving data collection I thought it would be a good idea to describe the setup I currently have hacked together.

(Something which can be used as a starting point to improve stuff, and I have to write documentation anyhow)

I currently have 3 sources , and one target, which will eventually expand to at least another target and most probably more sources too.

#monitoringsucks and we'll fix it !

If you are hacking on monitoring solutions, and want to talk to your peers solving the problem
Block the monday and tuesday after fosdem in your calendar !

That’s right on february 6 and 7 a bunch of people interrested to fix the problem will be meeting , discussing and hacking stuff together in Antwerp

In short a #monitoringsucks hackathon

Inuits is opening up their offices for everybody who wants to join the effort Please let us (@KrisBuytaert and @patrickdebois) know if you want to join us in Antwerp

What is devops ?

I`m parsing the responses of the Deploying Drupal survey I started a couple of months ago (more on that later)

One of the questions in the survey is “What is devops” , apparently when you ask a zillion people (ok ok, just a large bunch of Tweeps..), you get a large amount of different answers ranging from totally wrong to spot on.

So let’s go over them and see what we can learn from them ..

Installing Vagrant, on Ubuntu Natty

(Warning some Ubuntu ranting ahead)

1. apt-get install virtualbox-ose
2. apt-get install rubygems
3. gem install vagrant

That’s what I assumed it would take me to install vagrant on a spare Ubuntu (Natty) laptop.

Well it’s not. after that I was greeted with some weirdness.

1. $vagrant
2. vagrant: command not found...

Yet gem list –local showed the vagrant gem installed.

1. $ruby
2. ruby:  command not found

I looked twice, checked again and indeed it seems you can install rubygems on natty with no ruby installed #dazedandconfused

How I like my Java

This is a repost of my article earlier posted at Jordan Sissel’s awesome SysAdvent

After years of working in Java-based environments, there are a number of things that I like to implement together with the teams I`m working with - the application doesn’t matter much, whether it’s plain java, Tomcat, JBoss, etc, these deployment strategies will help your ops and dev teams build more managable services.

Packaging

The first step is to have the native operating system packages as build artifacts rolling out of your continuous integration server - No .ear, .war or .jar files: I want to have rpms or debs. With things like fpm or the maven rpm plugin this should not be an extra hassle, and the advantages you get from doing this are priceless.

Lisa 2011

Last week I was in Boston for my 1st and their 25th Edition of the Large Infrastructure System Administration Conferences
Lisa was pretty much all I expected from it. Old Unix wizards with long hair and white beards, the usual suspects, and a mix of devops practitioners on a devops themed conference with on one side awesome and well positioned content and on the other side absolutely basic stuff.

On tuesday I had a devops bof scheduled for 2 hours.

QR Encode

For further reference .. and preventing me from googling it a 3rd time

1. qrencode "http://www.krisbuytaert.be/"  -o qrcode.png  -s 10

or\

1. cat Kris_Buytaert.vcf  | qrencode  -o vcf.png -s 5

A different shade of green

Back in late 1997 I had spent way too much time helping people to build websites and was fed up with customers wanting a different shade of green for the background of their website. I was fed up with the graphic artists that didn’t want to understand the concept of a color pallet and browser safe colors and didn’t understand the differences between print and web. So I decided to try not to work for the wannabe webexperts anymore and doing some real software.

Fall , Winter and Spring Conference Season 2011 - 2012

Patrick posted his upcoming conference schedule for the next couple of months.
as you can see there are a comple of overlapping conferences :)

Conferences I’m speaking at or likely to attend are:

  • The first week of October Ill be in the Valley , Ill be late for Jenkinsconf but I hope to pick up some events while Im there.. suggestions are welcome , Im also heading back to Europe earlier than planned so I will miss BadCamp :( …
  • Devopsdays Goteborg, Sweden : October 14,15 - The yearly Europe devops event is happening in Goteborg this time. It’s going to be really exciting this time , as the theme is inclusive. Eploring the boundaries of devops, I`m once again in the organization of this conference.
  • T-Dose 2011, The Technical Dutch Open Source Event, on 5 and 6 november 2011 , I will be talking again about my experiences with complex Puppet setups
  • Citconf , London: November 11-12 - All you ever wanted to know about Continuous Integration. Period, registered, haven’t booked flights yet.
  • Cloudcamp Belgium: November 21 - I’m looking forward to this year’s event, as there will likely more practioners and less marketing folks.
  • Lisa 2011, Boston, US, Im giving an Invited talk titled , Devops: The past and futre are here, It's just not evenly distributed (yet), and Ill be on a panel titled What Will Be HOt Next Year, really looking forward to this one :)
  • Fosdem.org will take place on 4 and 5 February 2012 , and as every year since it inception I’ll be there
  • The UKUUG rebranded to FlossUK , they are hosting their Annual Spring conference from 20th to 22nd March in Edinburgh , given their refound focus it will be even more interresting !
  • And as announced earlier this week Loadays.org will take place in Antwerp again this year on 31/3/2012 and 1/4/2012 , as the previous years I`m co organizing this conference

And yes, I do work from time to time. Just that these conferences are a great way to capture and share new ideas. All worth it!