Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Just read it !

The only unrealistic part about the scenario is that I fear that most purchasers within a government agency won't be asking these questions, yet.

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending on the first one also can't be integrated anymore

Some projects are prepared for local contributions, they have a modular framework that allows you to build on top of the project while not having to touch the core of a project, Drupal and openQRM are great examples of those, but not all projects are that smart. Needless to say that when you have such a modular framework you really shouldn't be modifying the core part of the platform, unless you are fixing a real bug.

But the general rule of thumb is that when you fix bugs, make sure they are inserted upstream , or implement new features.

Now sometimes there is no easy way to get your code accepted upstream, in which case you should announce clearly that you want to contribute but you are blocked and publish the patches somewhere else ...

Don't let the community work for you, but work with the community !

I covered this one before .. but as it struck twiced today .. I think it's worth repeating. Both my collegue Karl and Trent ran into the same problem , within hours hours of eachother, a missing or failing reverse dns mapping that caused performance issues .. and a lot of log entries..

Karl denies having a second life in Perth but I`m not really sure about that ...

But I guess they both have to agree... Everything is a fscking DNS problem.
(I noticed other people using that spelling this weekend, on stage in the Janson)

The slides for my Monitoring MySQL talk , which I gave earlier today in an overcrowded MySQl Developersroom at Fosdem are now online, both at my site and at Slideshare

As of now I actually expect people to use those slides for schoolwork or next year in a main Fosdem track :)
As afterall that is the goal of Open Source and spreading the word ..

When I read Monty's post on leaving this passage struck me the most.

The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.

In short, Sun isn't open enough. I think I've said that enough, it's typically more Open Core than Open Source .. and for a growing amount of people.. that isn't good enough.

Reacting on that post we see Matt Asay trying to convince his CNet Audience that Open Source Ideals don't translate well into a big sofware business.

I think Tarus view I see it as just the opposite. Open source spells the end of big software, if big software is defined as companies that make billions of dollars from selling software licenses. is much more to the point.

And the way Sun has been working, with MySQL, Virtualbox and different others doesn't seem to work that well either.
I stopped counting the P companies but I think I`m allmost a point where I know mere ex-Sun/MySQL employees than current Sun/MySQL employees and it's not just on the MySQL side that this happens.

Maybe Monty leaving Sun will wake up the powers that be, maybe it won't.

Finishing off with another quote from Tarus

In my mind Monty is a role model and I wish him all the best.

So Fred and I were wondering what people were planning to use as a Database the next couple of months / years or now.

We mostly see MySQL deployments and a little PostgreSQL

But there's other stuff around ..

So what are you using, , or planning on using ?

Vote Here !

If you read this blog, you should probably sign the petition !

There is a really easy way to figure out ...

Look at the size of of the devrooms , if at all , a project gets at Fosdem
It's really interresting to see the Embedded room move to a 500 seat room which it really needed when the first openMoko talk was held there in a previous edition.

The FDO , Drupal, Mozilla, Centos/Fedora and Suse rooms stay in similar size rooms as last year.. But it seems lik the BSD and PostgreSQL room which was pretty crowded moved to a bigger location.

The Ruby room also seems to move to a bigger room. Fosdem has a couple of new rooms too it seems this freed up room for new groups such as the MySQL Crowd

Obviously these sizes aren't a real match to the size of a community, as the new rooms might need (and probably will need) a reshuffle for next year ;)

Different schedules for the devrooms are online .. you'll probably find me in the Debian , Fedora+CentOS, MySQL or Drupal rooms :)

Did I mention that :

and I`ll actually be speaking there again about Monitoring MySQL

A while ago Dries wondered about Contributing back to Drupal .

Now Inuits is not a Webshop, we are an Open Source shop, so you won't see a zillion Drupal modules being contributed by us in the near future (albeit there are a couple) , we are company assisting other organisations in their adoption of Open Source, and Drupal is amongst the projects we care for. You'll notice code from us in the different other Open Source projects, including the Linux Kernel and other core infrastructure. And not all of it was code, there is a lot of published documentation, methodologies, bughunting and also spreading the words, or talking about our experiences around different topics such as MySQL Cluster and Drupal, or different alternatives to Monitor , or to Monitor MySQL etc ..

But we've been contributing in different other ways to open source and we have always been benefiting from that. And we try to convince our customers to do so too.
So Dries is right in all his reasons why one should contribute back to open source, specially as an organisation that uses OpenSource for it's customers you just have to.

The lack of contributions however might have different reasons
I can imagine however that the moment a commercial Open Source company starts backing or distributing people start looking at that project in a different way.

The amount of contributions to a pure open source project has been traditionally lower than the amount of code contributed to an open core project.

And I`m pretty sure that most of the braindead box moving RedHat and other so called Value Added Resellers aren't contributing a single line of code and my fear is that with the current growth of open source adoption that more of those traditional IT shops will just resell support subscriptions as if it were just another software product.

Now the Drupal community is one with a lot of developers so things might be different there compared to a group of system integrators that are installing operating systems and don't know the difference between python and php.

I think we'll see more and more open source users that aren't planning to contribute back, (although it is easy ) , But do we honestly think te group of developers is infinite ? However the more Open Source users the more chance we have these users turn into developers, I just don't think the current percentages will stay the same.

Anyway .. we'll continue to contribute.. and we hope you do the same ...

My MythTV store lives on an LVM volume that is spread over 2 disks, one of them is an external USB disk. So the cleaninglady seems to have touched a cable and after coming back from holiday I had a read-only filesystem that afer a remount had about 350Gb in lost+found with irrelevant filenames.

total 337407844
drwx------   2 tv   tv         4096 Dec 17 22:47 .
drwxrwxrwx  15 tv   tv         4096 Dec 17 22:44 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  423343556 Dec 14 07:10 I303109.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 2990538924 Dec 13 19:05 I303107.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023691768 Dec 13 08:10 I319494.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023622348 Dec 13 07:45 I327684.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  423735892 Dec 13 07:10 I327682.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  466749476 Dec 12 15:43 I135169.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023314212 Dec 12 07:45 I098309.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1022459928 Dec 12 06:35 I098306.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 2458822948 Dec  9 22:50 I139264.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 2129683736 Dec  9 21:30 I323592.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  466735992 Dec  9 15:43 I323590.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1022747296 Dec  9 07:45 I323588.RCN

Obviously I wanted to recover my data.
So I had files with a wrong filename on a filesystem but with a correct timestamp and probably the right filesize.
Luckily the mythconverg.recorded table also gives me lots of information about the files that mythtv had originally stored the content in.

mysql> select basename,lastmodified,filesize from recorded limit 10;
+---------------------------+---------------------+------------+
| basename                  | lastmodified        | filesize   |
+---------------------------+---------------------+------------+
| 1003_20081003230000.mpg   | 2008-10-07 21:53:49 | 6197765380 |
| 1093_20080320232600.mpg   | 2008-03-20 23:25:31 |          0 |
| 1075_20060301191300.mpg   | 2006-03-24 22:48:42 |          0 |
| 1002_20080729160500.mpg   | 2008-07-29 19:20:30 | 3679223940 |
| 592251_20081217072000.mpg | 2008-12-17 07:20:02 |          0 |
| 1002_20080911143500.mpg   | 2008-09-11 16:41:44 | 3486101572 |
| 1002_20080923143500.mpg   | 2008-09-23 16:49:41 | 3679789684 |
| 1033_20081110153500.mpg   | 2008-11-10 15:47:12 |  338877000 |
| 1002_20080922144000.mpg   | 2008-09-22 16:47:38 | 3485505140 |
| 1002_20080721160500.mpg   | 2008-07-23 20:52:16 | 3679559444 |
+---------------------------+---------------------+------------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

My first idea was to use the mysql filesystem engine to query the filesytem and write me a simple query however I totally failed to build that engine :(
(Anyone else successfull here ? )

So I created a temp table

CREATE TABLE `temp2` (
  `size` bigint(20) default NULL,
  `oldname` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `lastmod` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

And parsed the content of my lost+found directory into a set of insert statements

ls -l --time-style=long-iso | awk  -F' ' '{print "insert into temp2 values ("  $5 ",\""  $8"\",\""$6" "$7"\");"}'

From there is a matter of grabbing the matching filenames

echo "select \"mv \" , oldname, basename from recorded, temp2 where temp2.size= recorded.filesize ;" | mysql mythconverg

And moving the actual files ... now all is back to normal ..