Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - sysadmin http://127.0.0.1:8080/blog/taxonomy/term/1048/0 en Open Source Days 2008 , Day 2 http://127.0.0.1:8080/blog/node/739 <p>As I was already up since yesterday 0500 , it was dinner with Sven , Robin and some other conference visitors at a Turkish Buffet place , after which we headed to what seemed to be a great bar where they failed to serve us while waiting for over 10 minutes, so we moved on to another place. and then to be "early"</p> <p>After walking around a bit in Copenhagen and looking for a bus stop to go to the university I managed to bump into Wim &amp; Co who offered me a ride to the IT University. Where I was almost in time for the first talk by<br /> Jan Wieck about Slony-I, A master to multiple slaves-replication system for PostgreSQL<br /> Given my recent MySQL MultiMaster setups I was fairly interested where PostgreSQL is at today.</p> <p>Jan started out with explaining where he used replication the most,<br /> For backups and Specialized services so he could offload long running and intrusive reporting tools to an isiolated server.</p> <p>While going over the history of Slony he also mentioned eRserver, first written in Perl later rewritten in Java and that was a ... Well lets just say that memory usage wasn't really ideal.</p> <p>The presentation covered different potential replication scenarios and the problems one could run into.<br /> No sign however of multimaster replication. Jan Wieck even told us he had no plans to implmenent multimaster replication<br /> at all at the moment. To me MultiMaster means that I can move my database connection together with my application service in a HA setup. I don't need to wory about the possibility of writing in a slave and breaking replication as the slave is also a master and the other node Will catch up.</p> <p>Next up was a talk about openID, which made me realize a couple of things about it.. all off that in a separate post :)</p> <p>The University restaurant was open and you could pay for your Chilli Con Carne to a really Grumpy cashier which brings me right to the next talk I followed.. A Developers Guide to Grumpy Old Sysadmins however, the majority of people in the room were Sysadmins , or people with a mixed role doing both development and sysadmin work.</p> <p>You don't let your developers even close to your production systems. He then went on to read a fairly big part of "Over Clocked, Stories of the Future Present " by Cory Doctorow , which I've promptly put on my holliday reading list :</p> <p>So what's it like being a sysadmin ? You get calls in the middle of the night because a system breaks,<br /> When you work you .. people complain when things go wrong.. they don't cheer when things go right or when you have done your job correctly</p> <p>Reminds me of this situation at a customer where the Cisco people that fail to automate their work and get to travel around the qworld to do their work using their serial console , where as the Linux platform team has automated their work so far they get to stay home and watch the machines boot then do a quick check over ssh to see if they actually work.</p> <p>Anyhow.. the talk really wasn't focusing on how developers could cooperate better with sysadmins, apart from a couple of general tips so it really missed its goal.</p> <p>I popped into the Lightning talk about Ubuntu on EEE talk , hoping to learn something, apart from 1 url that I should read I guess it was the otherway around , it's usually a bad sign when a speaker starts every 2 slides with "I haven't tested this myselve but " ...</p> http://127.0.0.1:8080/blog/node/739#comments conferences open source open source days postgresql sysadmin Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:52:53 +0000 Kris Buytaert 739 at http://127.0.0.1:8080/blog