Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

Lenz just posted pointers to a great presentation of his about MySQL HA and Drupal,

Seems like a small part of me did go to Szeged afterall :)

But not a commercial one :

I was trying to check out the new Zabbix beta's when I ran into a couple of problems. Mostly missing dependencies but also some bugs.

The big troubles start when trying to install the frontent.
It seems like php code shipped in the last release might well work when you are upgrading but it fails when you are doing a fresh install. As I never got a Setup Wizard.

The clue is to get the most recent code from their SVN repo svn co svn://svn.zabbix.com/trunk , that actually allows you to run the setup wizard.

If you are installing the latest RPM's they are also not really requiring all the dependencies you need to run the frontend.

yum/apt-get install php-bcmath php-pear

Will get you a step further.

Another thing is the new password policy.. it seems the Admin/blank is gone.
I have no clue what the new password is but you are encouraged to set it yourselve in the mysql database

md5('new_pass') or echo -n new_pass | md5sum will help you .

Big thnx to the friendly folks over at #zabbix on irc.freenode.net for helping me out earlier.

Next steps .. debugging autodiscovery :)

Ostatic interviews my good friend Matt Rechenburg of openQRM fame

There is one part however where I think we need to elaborate ..
In the Question about the closest alternatives Matt replies "There are some projects like Virtual Iron and Zenoss which are focusing on the same tasks as openQRM. Now I have to disagree about Zenoss being in the same area as openQRM , But Zenoss.. totally different product , not even remotely close to what openQRM does. Zenoss is a competitor to Nagios, HypericHQ , Zabbix etc. You could have an Zenoss plugin in openQRM , just as you can have a Nagios or Hyperic HQ plugin for it . We have presented about these different technologies earlier this year at OLS. And you can still vote for your favorite tool.

Competition for openQRM to me is Enomalism, openNebula, Eucalyptus , with that difference that they don't do Physcial machines.
All of the Enomalsm, Nimbus , openNebula, OS Circular etc projects are focussing on managing Virtual Machines deploying them over the network . with that difference that they have or support an API to talk to and they are al rebranding to the overhyped Cloud terminology. They are all focussing on just a subset of wat openQRM is doing and that's where openQRM has the edge.. OpenQRM does more than just one type of Virtualization and it does more than just virtual machines. Because of the fact that it supports more than 1 Virtualization platform it also comes with a complementary P2V and V2V migration toolkit. Apart from that it integrates (Virtual) Machine Management with other tools and gives you a dashboard to work from .

The 451 group has some more insights about the growth of openQRM since Qlusters set it free , seems like both the downloads and the traffic for at SF.net since the changes are up. Obviously the community likes the new openQRM approach, and so do I ;)

JP just wrote in to let me know that the T-Dose 2008 CFP has been extended. So there is still time to send in your abstracts

Oh right .. I was expecting to much from you folks.

So lemme translate, Jean-Paul Saman, one of the T-Dose organizers, wrote me this morning to let the world know that he is still accepting proposals for talks at T-Dose , The Technical Dutch Open Source Event which will take place on 25 and 26 October 2008 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

Zennoss has announced the entries for their zenpack contest . What strikes me is that there is not a single entry that plans on monitoring Xen, KVM, VirtualBox or any of the other Open Source virtualization technologies .. Not in the contest entries and not in the existing community packs .

This sounds like a big opportunity to me :)

Over at OReilly GMT I listed lots of upcoming European conferences .. lots of interresting ones but I can't go to all of them .. well not till someone starts paying me for that ;)

So I won't go to Drupalcon , and Tom will be presenting at the Nagios Conference

I will however be talking about Open Source Virtualization at OpenExpo in Zurich , and one week later at OpenDays in Copenhagen. The talk will be based on my series of Articles on the History and Future of Open Source virtualization earlier this year at Virtualization.com

Given that those 2 conferences are week after week and LinuxKongress Hamburg being exactly a week later , this year will be the first since many that I'll have to miss LinuxKongress. I had a topic in mind, but time just didn't allow me.

T-Dose is also on my list and there is some talk about an upcoming CloudCamp in Berlin , but no final plans there yet.

Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.

Lots of other companies are innovating on top of Open Source, they are using the LAMP stack or just Linux as an OS to build their products on they need the stability and the features an Open Source stack provides them with and only in this way they can deliver their customers with a stable and cost effective platform. Lots of these companies contribute back to the open source community (sadly some don't ..yet) .

But at the end of the day there is much more money involved in the Opensource world than the money the Open Source product vendors like RedHat, Alfresco, Zimbra, Zenoss and are getting from selling their products.

And that's what counts !!

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully booked schedule so I won't be able to actually make it to Mechelen for either days of the conference. Sad because unless we have a conference in Antwerpen some day soon it's probably going the to be the closest FOSS event to home.