Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Devops Needs Sushi

The 4158 second catalog run.

Two of my tweets , sorry dents, earlier today caused some people to ask me what on earth I was doing :)

You don’t exist, go away!

Was the first one, indeed .. it was a long time since I had actually seen that one.. this actually happens when you delete the user you are logged in with on a host, when the host notices you don’t exist anymore it will tell you.

Vagrant & Rubylibs

I was testing some MySQL puppet modules on my Vagrant box earlier this week and one of them required augeas.
I kept running into “Could not find a default provider for augeas”, however all the appropriate augeas , augeas-lib and ruby-augeas packages were installed. I inspected the different ruby directories and the files were perfectly in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 where I expected them.

With all the files seemd to be in the right place, my next option was to strace a small ruby script that included augeas, guess what that showed ..

Watching the Guards

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.

24 hours of Puppet Drama

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.

dhcpd on Shared Networks

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. }

Converting KVM to VirtualBox

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 )

Ensure Running

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.)

At Fosdem

  • on Friday evening , apparently having a confirmed reservation in a resto is not enough to actually be welcome at that restaurant.
  • at DrupalDevdays, only 2 laptops were open during our presentation
  • at DrupalDevdays, almost nobody in the room was already using CI
  • at Fosdem , the parking lot is full before 11:30 on a saturday
  • at Fosdem , much less Macs than last years .
  • at Fosdem , way too much rooms are already at full capacity so you need to have 2-3 backup alternatives ..
  • at Fosdem , people expect me to be in certain rooms, at the same time
  • at Fosdem , even with too much rooms already full one still misses a bunch of interresting talks
  • at Fosdem , one doesn’t even realize friends are speaking there too ..
  • at Fosdem , Android is the standard …
  • at Fosdem , you are confronted with the fact you probably forgot more names of people than you remember ;(
  • at Fosdem , you are surrounded by famous open source people, that aren’t even on the schedule
  • at the MySQL Meetup Dinner, Monty brings Salmiakki
  • at Fosdem , you wonder how many other people have survived their 11th edition
  • at Fosdem , you can’t get into any devroom on sunday morning
  • at Fosdem , begging on Twitter to get in to a devroom from the other side of the door works (at least for me :))
  • at Fosdem , netbooks are much less popular as opposed to 2-3 years ago ..
  • after fosdem … you crash ..\

Reservation Confirmed

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