Devops Needs Sushi
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a weird drop in web usage stats on the site you are browsing now. Kinda weird as the drop was right around Fosdem when usually there is a spike in traffic. 
So before you start.. no I don’t preach on practice on my own blog, it’s a blog dammit, so I do the occasional upgrades on the actual platform , with backups available, do some sanity tests and move on, yes I break the theme pretty often but ya’ll reading this trough RSS anyhow.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been fighting with a weird puppet problem , we eventually cracked it , but I promised a bunch of you to fully explain it here ;)
So we were deploying 2 Blade chassis at a pretty remote location with a mix of phyisical and virtual machines, some 48 instances in total. This is a pretty standard rollout, we’ve got a bunch of similar platforms in our lab , so we knew about a couple of glitches, what to expect etc.
And as I always forget (getting old remember) how to have dhcpd configured to serve for multiple networks on one interface (e.g with aliases)
(as in test setups eg. ) I`ll write it down here, So next time google can point right back to me
1. shared-network thisismessy {
2. subnet 10.8.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
3. option routers 10.8.0.1;
4. }
5. subnet 10.12.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
6. option routers 10.12.0.1;
7. }
8. subnet 10.16.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
9. option routers 10.16.0.1;
10. }
11. }
I have had most of my test environment, aka puppetmasters, test mysql setups etc running in KVM for the past couple of years .. (yes I`m still using a lot of Xen in production environments, but we’ve also been using KVM for a while already .. it’s a good mix) , Virtual box has always been the lesser loved Virtualization platform , however while playing more and more with Vagrant Up I realized I needed to convirt some boxen (e.g my PuppetMaster) to Virtualbox, and google was really no good help(most people seem to go the other way , or want to use some proprietary tools )
Has anyone noticed that pretty much every puppet module one finds on the internet by default enables the service they try to configure in the module
When looking at it from a single machine point of view it makes sense to include the module , have it configure your service and directly enable it by default.
So I started wondering .. isn’t there anybody out there who is building clusters ? Where services have to configured on multiple nodes but should NOT be running acitvely on all nodes by default because there is an external tool which manages that for you (Pacemaker framework eg.)
Apparently I don’t understand french :(
Copied from my inbox …
1. From: Info Falstaff <info@lefalstaff.be>
2. To: 'Kris Buytaert' <Kris.Buytaert@youalreadyknowmyaddy.be>
3. Subject: RE: Reservation Next Friday 4/2/2011
4. Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:55:45 +0100
6. je confirme votre reservation pour le vendredi 04 02 2011
8. vous trouverez ci-joint nos differentes formules
10. bien à vous
12. guy Lommen chef de cuisine
I admit .. I`m lazy … unlike last year I did not organize MySQL and Friends meetup at Fosdem.
I outsourced it to Kenny
More info and registration here
Lenz gave the good example so I`ll follow :)
Next weekend saturday I`ll be giving a talk about devops at StartUp Weekend Brussels, from what I’ve read so far it promises to be an audience that needs the talk,
The week after I`ll be speaking at the DrupalDevDays, again about devops , however this time with a touch of Drupal , giving a devops talk at Devoxx last year to a Java audience learned me that the devops evangelist need to go outside of their usual conference audiences and als talk to the people that are usually in the other silos.
Just last last year we’ll have a Devops meetup just before Fosdem,
I’ve setup a page for registrations , that way we’ll know how many people to make reservations for.
If possible we’ll go to the same place as last year .. walking distance from the Fosdem Beer event.
Feel free to spread the news !