Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I`ll be heading to bed early today as tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get up early to catch my flight to London where
Tom and I will be representing Inuits at the UKUUG 2009 Spring Conference.

Tom will be giving an updated version of our Open Source Monitoring Shootout talk again, I`ll probably be skipping a couple of his slides as right after that Jane Curry will be covering Zenoss in depth and on thursday there will be an OpenNMS talk too.

On Thursday I will be giving another session of my Open Source Virtualization overview talk .. and I also plan on skipping slides and referring to the next speaker, as Matt will be giving an openQRM talk right after me :)

See you there !

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 !

Last weekend I blogged about openQRM 4.2 being released.

This morning Matt finally let me know the long waiting fresh and new Drupal based openQRM.com is live !

Feed Added!

I didn't even have time to finish my post about the Puppet Podcast and DevMinistration before John had already posted his chat with Matt as recorded yesterday in Eindhoven.

I'm glad I could bring these guys together ! Great stuff !

So what happens when you run into a guy wearing a Barcamp ESM cap, an OpenNMS shirt and a Zenoss jacket. You ask him how he got all that stuff .

It seems to be pretty easy ..
Let see if it works for mee too :)

So Tarus and Mark , do you already have my snail mail address ? :)

Oh and Matt, we need some openQRM gear too :)

It was fun, the good part about T-Dose is that is small enough to actually be able to speak with everybody you want to .. well almost .. there were still some people around I wanted to talk to but I didn't get the chance to . Specially Ber Kessels and Roy Scholten who filled in the gaps in the Drupal track. After my own talk I had to run to the other track so I could answer the tricky questions in our other talk about Open Source Monitoring Tools. And I never really made it back to the Drupal room. So Ber, Roy , next time you run into me I`ll buy you a Beer !

Anyway Pics are up (so Geert now finally has pictures of himself on stage)

Social event pic is also up ..

Slides (Drupal/ Virtualization) were already up

Somehow I had problems seeing al the sessions I wanted to see this year. lots of interesting things happening at the same time and therefore forcing me to choose for specific sessions. JP and Jeroen already announced they will be there again next year .. I just hope to have a better planned Drupal track then ...

T-Dose kind of concluded my current scheduled list of talks , I`m looking for new interesting conference venues to visit .. specially in southern Europe .. so if anybody has ideas :)

I mentioned the Lighting talks during the Social event at OpenExpo in Zurich earlier

I've now placed my slides for the openQRM lightning talk online .. basically a stripped down version of the slides I used at the OLS Virtualization Miniconf

I also told you folks about the 80 something slides lightning talk Tobi Oetiker did in Zurich , turned out I was wrong he used 128 slides
And he mailed that they can be found at svn://svn.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/trunk/talks/rrdtoolfast

Lightning talks are fun :)

Yesterday apart from Free Beer, the social event also featured a couple of 5 minute lightning talks.
Tobias Oetiker took the first slot, his 5 minute talk was incredible. In 5 minutes he went trough 80 something slides , really remined me of the St Peter talk about Jabber and Security a couple of years ago at Fosdem. I after 2 talks I realised that I could strip down my OLS openQRM talk and give it in 5 minutes too .. so I did :) Awesome.. 5 minutes is really really really short :)
But I managed .. I even got questions at the end :)

Definitely a good concept to let people decide on giving a talk at such a short notice :)

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 ;)

In this article the ScienceLogic blogs wonders.

Here’s an interview with David Lily, founder and CEO. Hmm. What happened to CEO Ranga Rangachari? As far as I can tell, he disappeared somewhere between Nov 2007 and Jan 2008. No announcement that I could find… Wonder how things are going for GroundWork? Are they about to follow QLusters and drop the “Open Source” part of their name that they tacked on a couple years back?

Then followed up with the article on Qlusters closing shop where they identify different reasons for an Open Source systems management shop to close

What are the signs that a systems management company is going out of business?

a) they abandon their open source project, which was supposedly tied to their commercially supported version

b) they switch CEOs very very quietly

c) they are an “open source” company trying to actually make money (via paying customers, not VC)

d) all of the above

I've read rumours about GroundWorks management leaving before, but are they really heading the same direction ?

Now while we are on the crazy similarities subject ...

Remember Caldera ? Who bought SCO, after which it rebranded to SCO ?
Didn't have a nice ending didn't it ? So can you come up with another example of such a TakeOver and Rebrand scenario ?