Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

When I tell people that the concept of copying VM's around as frequently done in the VMWare world is one of the most stupid ideas on this planet, I get the weirdest looks.

In my world it is, I want my infrastructure to be reproducible , I want to be able to throw any machine in my infrastructure out of the 10th floor of a building and be up and running again in no time. If I spread a bunch of VM copies around who knows what kind of life they start leading. Some will get upgrades, some won't ..
If I get an image from someone, how did he get there ? Nobody knows ..

To me Image Sprawl is more than not being able to to manage your Virtual Machines, it also matters for physical machines that are being deployed using a golden image.

Now rewind back about 4 something years.. back then I wrote a paper for LinuxKongress titled Automating Xen Virtual Machine Deployment which described a Hybrid way of Bootstrapping an infrastructure.
Quicly summarized, you use the benefits of images to quickly deploy a minimal image which
Luke today calls a Stem Cell then go on using centralized package management and a configuration management tool to keep them up to par. There are 2 things that changed in between,
we replaced CFEngine with Puppet , and the fact that today some people do care a bit more about the infrastructure side of the web, guess we have to thank Amazon and the Cloud Hype for that

But fundamentally .. not that much changed :)

Tarry has an overview of the commentaries about Oracles latest Virtualisation announcement.

Two things hit my brainwaves, First ,seemingly Larry is claiming that his Xen package is better than
the others since he supports Live Migration and all the others don't. I don't know where he gets the idea.. I have to admit I don't remember which year it was .. but it was somewhere in december that I first starting with Live Migratiion of Xen machines and it was also on a CentOS platform. No fancy gui, no hardcover manuals that had it all documented. But fast and seamlessly working live migration, ready for everybody to use.

Second one is he claming that since Xen was re-engineered by Oracle to be faster than the competition.
The way you read it there is that Oracle took Xen, modified it then started redistributing it.
Is that really what happened ? Are they redistributing the source, or are they violating the GPL ? Coz if they are
redistributing the source everybody just got a faster Xen and if they aren't ..
I don't know but there sure is room for rumour here. Or is this just a bunch of marketing people and IT journalist that are mispresenting the facts. Fact is that one needs to spend lots of time verifying the facts of stories one read on the internet today.

I`m also seeing people crying that Oracle is finally stepping to the open source side.. .. I`m wondering on which planet they have been living.. Oracle has been supporting different Open Source products for ages already and they even are the owners of core components of typical daily used packages, so where do those authors get the idea that Oracle is finally stepping over ?

Tonight I don't have time to go and hunt back the original sources and see who actually said what . Honestly I don't care that much about Unbreakable, Last time I tried caring was when one of my european customers was interested in it, and no one at Oracle.be could help me . It's Like Dell shipping Ubuntu.. not on this part of the world.. and sadly it's also like the OLPC .. Give one Get one only on the other side of the Ocean.

It's all good marketing .. until you actually want to get it .. :(

Just give me the source code .. then I don't have to sit trough presentations from marketing people that can only read from spec sheets for some product , but fail to read the fine print and leave me disappointed again ...

I just got an invite to connect to an old collegue on Plaxo Pulse

I`ve been ignoring Plaxo for a while now as the only thing it did for me was keeping an online addressbook.
I already have an online addressbook it's called LinkedIn.

Upon accepting the invite Plaxo proposed me to import my contacts from both Facebook (which I don't even actively use) and LinkedIn . Now this is the first time an app proposed me to import my contacts from LinkedIn.. an API was announced but I haven't found it yet.

I browsed around on the new Plaxo Beta but honestly I can't say I found anything interresting on it so it'ss yet another passive social network account for me.

However it made me wonder if there are already drupal frameworks out there that let you use FaceBook or LinkedIn data. And I promptly ran into the Facebook one still pretty young. I couln't find a LinkedIn one yet however .. altough that one would interrest me more

Any takers ? :)

I've just been Zattood, meaning that I can now watch real time local TV on my computer.

There is both an OSX client and a Linux client and some weird OS client for those who care too
I just tested it and it seems pretty fast an usable for someone who has an IP connection and sporacdially wants to watch TV.
However I couldn't care less .. I have cable and I never watch realtime TV anymore.

MythTV does that for me .. and I watch the shows weeks later :)