Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

James Dixon has some polls on his blog, they let you choose between being a free software junkie, an open source hacker or what I'd call a an incompetent moron ;)

I had mostly 2's , no 3 in case you'd wonder.

With the fresh launch of inuits.be this long overdue post popped up again , Earlier this year we got this very nice letter from the BSA That's right the Business Software Alliance.

The letter pictured below is in dutch, so allow me to translate
some parts :) (Although I`m pretty sure you've seen variations of this letter in different languages before..)

In short they are warning us about using software with no licenses.

They warn us, that in the next couple of weeks they will specifically focus on our sector, that is the Linux and Open Source Consultancy sector,

Obviously they are pointing out the potential legal risks we are taking if we would be using illegal software. What illegal software ? What on earth makes them think we are violating licenses ?

Now sending us that letter is just plain stupid, but sending that letter to a lot of other companies might get them all terrified , and that's just racketeering isn't it.

Anyhow feel free to have a good laugh with the letter below

I mean, we are heading towards 2010 , some of us have been using Open Source for decades, the Open Source vs Free Software discussion was like last millenium, and we've been doing open source consultancy for over a decade, yet today companies still think their customers are stupid,

Fancy this story on ZDNet today .. there's actually companies out there claiming that "Bind" because of it's FreeWare nature , yes that's right you've Read FREEWARE , (hadn't heard that word for over 5 years..) , is less secure than their proprietary offering in the Cloud. So the very nature of their Secure product is offering Security by Obscurity in an insecure environment .

The sad part is that they probably get customers that believe their story, afterall it's hosted in the Cloud .. so it must be good not ?

Oh well... James McGovern had a nice comment on that earlier today "

"The goal of the security market is to make money, not to ensure the customer's security"

I'll keep my security infrastructure Open, thank you very much

But afterall everything is a fine DNS Problem ...

You must have noticed the fuzz around CentOS, the open Letter , and luckily Lance showing up again ..

I've been a long time CentOS user , so this kind of events are pretty close to my heart, I never really worried about the future of the project , the CentOS community is was standing behind their message as one group. If Lance wouldn't have shown up again quoting Arrfab:
"The worst would be to switch to another domain name .. but you already know that everything is a fscking DNS problem"

In this case it would actually be more of a mareketing problem :)

Fact is that sometimes an active community standing up against a lesser active project lead has it's results, however this time there probably won't be any other DNS entries to be added , but I hope one day the logo will become better :)

First of all, I don't come from a Tivoli, OpenView background , I have never touched the commercial network monitoring tools and I`m not a network guy . I'm an infrastructure guy whith a focus on Open Source platforms so I have been using Nagios and more recently Zabbix, Zenoss etc for the better part of the last 2 decades in large to very large environments.
My syslogs go to a central (r)syslog)-ng) server where I frequently abuse grep. So If my experience with RiverMuse is not what it should be , there's work to be done on both sides ;)

So When looking at my Rivermuse setup (in a VirtualBox FC9 setup) my first tought is "Those Rivermuse folks will really need to explain me what their tool is all about .. as to me it's just a fancy colortail integrated with snmp traps."

Hopefully it's not just that and it all becomes clear in a couple of days .. Apart from the FC9 annoyancy there is the frequent Unresponsive script errors.

And those I fear will be the real killer problems for RiverMuse

On the other hand, RiverMuse does good job in displaying the actual events in your network and following up the actions that one ... after a while you'll get a good overview of the actual issues as opposed to all the relevant events

I've dropped RiverMuse into my blade test setup (more on that subject later) and I`ll be keeping a look on what I can learn from it but the dreaded Unresponsive scripts that I know so well from Bamboo really need to be fixed :)

Well time will tell :)

(thnx Tarus

When you eventually will buy Sun ..

Oh nooos.. I started this post last week and now it al seems in vain :(

Steven has some clues on what could have happened, I think he is right on the spot on with his Solaris prediction ..

He wonders why IBM would spend even another dime on Solaris, actually even today I can't even see why Sun is spending any more money on developing Solaris. But even with no acquisition his prediction of the future of Open Solaris imvho is spot on:

OpenSolaris will likely live on as a purely community-based operating system. After failing to gain any real traction against Linux, I expect it to become like the BSD operating systems: useful in niches and with a strong, core group of developers, but never to become a major operating system power.

As for Sparc, well I told it before.. and given the Siemens- Fujitsu split, given that Fujitsu has the money (which is where I have no clue) and given 2 Sparc companies with completing markets , both geographically as on hardware and software level.. merging Fujitsu and Sun would make sense ...

Looking around me .. I think Netbeans has already been Eclipsed ages ago .. I once used to work with NetBeans, but today I don't know a lot of people who still use it.

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that different prominent MySQL folks have left Sun will only push the MySQL development model towards more openness.
And towards an even more Redder RedHat alike model, we already have the first CentOS alike rebuilds of MySQL , so a distribution model based on the same kernel with different feature sets or focus indeed might be the future.

Steven has a nice follow up on what can happen with Sun now. But the obvious problem would have been be the culture clash , at least for the MySQL folks.. , I can hardly imagine al that nice code being written with no Liquor :)

So the cat is out of the bag,

As of today Inuits is rebranding to Pinuits,
The press release is here

We've had good feedback on the new name so far. Different people told me the name matched better to what we are doing . Actually my wife thinks our new name is much better as at least the Pin in Pinuits refers to our favourite Tux again ..

Finding an appropriate name for an Open Source consultancy company, with focus on Linux, Open Source Monitoring, MySQL, Open Source Virtualization , Large Scale Deployments , High Availability and Drupal, isn't easy .. you want to show both community involvement and professionality. And find a domain that's still available.

I've updated the slidedeck of my Open Source Virtualization talk, with the 2009 edition as I gave it last week at the UKUUG Spring conference.

Talk is up, both on my page as on SlideShare

Tom also updated our set of Open Source Monitoring Tool Shootout slides .
They are also on SlideShare

Last week the UKUUG Spring , Large Scale Infrastructure conference took place in London,

Altough only 1 track was scheduled, the content was very good, some talks were a bit short, others were a bit too long. And luckily the talks that didn't really bring me new content were entertaining :) Also the after conf chatter in the pub across the street was so much fun we almost failed to catch our plane back to Antwerp.

However lots of people wondered where the real action is going. Not sure but maybe the fact that ApacheCon was scheduled around the same time might have pulled some people to Amsterdam. Truth is that there is a need for a real Unix Sysadmin conference on mainland Europe, sure we got Fosdem and different local Open Source events, but there isn't any focus on the sysadmin part of the job, or rather the devministration part , the large scale part, the automating part etc.

There is the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC) which looks interresting, but won't attrackt an international crowd as sadly a big part of the talks are in German , but it also
seems Sane hopes to be back in 2009 , so maybe there is some hope ..