Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

So I bought myselve a new gadget, a tablet. I wanted a couple of things, first of all I love the mythdroid app as a remote control for my MythTV, but as it runs on my phone and kids don't have a phone it was pretty much a blocking issue when I wasn't at home.
The second thing I wanted was a device for the kids to play small games on ... and I also want to use it for the kids to watch some movies while we travel. On top of that it would be handy if I could use it to surf the web from my couch while not having to open up my laptop.

I was looking into buying an Achos 10.1 which was due to be released earlier this month but I was fed up with waiting so I went googling for an alternative , and I found one .. it's an Apad, or an e-pad .. I still don't know .. the box says epad
ebay listed it as a 10.2" Android 2.1 Epad Apad 1GHZ Tablet PC UMPC Netbook It's not an iPad, .. it's chinese and it costs 1/3 of an iPad and it runs Android. Yes that's right .. I had it delivered from the UK within 2 working days for just about 200 Euro including shipping.
Ordered on thursday afternoon .. on my desk before 10AM on monday.

Opening the box was a bit scary .. it had a weird e logo on the side wich some people recognised as a kind of browser logo that I`m unfamiliar with and the acommpanying manual was only mentioning an platform I don't want to use , however booting up the device reassured me .. there was a nice penguin on the bootup screen and seconds later an android logo appeared.

The Good:

The device is really easy to work with , kids can use it .. (that was the goal wasn't it ? ) It has a USB slot where you can plug in external storage
and it has a SD slot for similar use .. it came with a 512Mb SD card which I replaced with an 8Gb one . It has an ethernet connection an extention cable with a real RJ45 connection . Lots of apps are available from it's market

The Bad:

It's not your default Google Market, the device has no access to the Google App Market but uses SlideMarket, not all apps are availble for download that way, however nothing blocks you from downloading .apk files and installing them on the device. For now I just swapped the SD card from my phone to get all the apps I wanted in a quick way but I should actually test plugging in my Android Phone using the USB and install the applications from the backup as the phone does have access to to the Google Market (Update: this actually works)

Not all apps are using the full screen estate, they've been written with 3-4 inch phone screens in mind and not with a 10" tablet in mind. I've heard the same rants about using iPhone apps on the iPad. The fontsize of the device is configurable but not all text adapts to the new font size and it also looks like the wifi chipset isn't the best around.. I often have to reconnect to my wifi

The Ugly:

Battery life is really not good enough .. it should last 3-4 hours but it didn't even last 2 hours when I first used it .. however I was busy installing new apps and testing lots of stuff so in

I haven't figured out how to configure gmail, gtail and other google services yet I should probably debug what's going on one day to see if it's actually a connectivity issue or if big G just blocks access from the device.

Would I consider it a 1 on 1 replacement for an iPad ? Probably not ... it's not as stylish as the fruit device but looking at the features I wanted compared to the price I paid for it , it's the perfect gadget ...

If I want to work I`ll open my laptop, when travelling I`ll be using my EEE , but to play with the kids and lookup stuff from the couch while watching TV it's going to be a 10" tablet.

The next 2 months promise to be the more busier of the year for me .

On october 11th I`ll be giving a presentation ab out Linux and High Availability at the KAHO Sint Lieven in Gent

Just 2 days later I`ll be leaving to Hamburg for the next European version of DevopsDays 2010.

Between Devopsdays Hamburg and Leaving for Malaga I`ll visit CloudCamp Ghent om October 20th.

I'll be in Malaga for the Software Libre Open Source World Conference which will take place on 27 and 28 october

The first weekend of November I`ll be at T-Dose , where I`ll give 2 presentations on Devops.

As I`m part of the program comittee of this years NLUUG Najaars conference on Security , I`ll be spending my official Belgian holliday "working" at a conference in the Netherlands.

And to finish off I`ll be talking Devops again at Devoxx 2010 together with Patrick Debois

Don't hesitate to say hi when you bump in to me :)

So earlier today the nice folks over at twitter figured it was a good time to change all the authentication to oauth ... they might have announced it all over the place .. but it never catched my attention

The onlything that did catch my attention was that after not having ued pidgin for about 2 weeks I didn't have access to twitter anymore.

I`m using the purple-microblog plugin and the default version of that plugin in Fedora 12 wasn't really up2date. The plugin supports OAuth as of 3.0 which was released ages ago.

The version in fedora-updates-testing however was already recent enough ..

So enabling that repo and running
yum  update  purple-microblog
quickly solved my proble .. till I disabled twitter in my pidgin again as there was way to much talk about some weird fruit ...

You might have noticed that this blog stopped accepting comments about a month ago.. well. stopped accepting is a big word.. I was still accepting comments, only they were never submitted to the database and after entering a comment to my blog people ended up on a white page.

So upon returning from holliday I set out to debug the issue together with one of our Inuits Drupal geeks and quickly ran into the following error.

PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function has_more_records() on a non-object in /somepath/modules/views/plugins/views_plugin_display.inc on line 1992, referer: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/comment/reply/1014

So apparently my veasion of views 6.x-3.0-alpha3 didn't really like to play with Mollom,
I downgraded views again to 6.x-2.11 and Mollom started showing its Captcha's etc again .

So apart from wondering how I ended up installing that alpha3 version (I`m sure Drush didn't do that), all is back to normal. and you should be able to comment on this blog again

I`m not the biggest fan of openSUSE but this weeks post by Colin Charles makes me happy ..

openSUSE users can now do a mariadb install from their default repositories.

With all the fuzz about Snoracle and MySQL's future last year to me it became clear that we would end up having different MySQL based distributions, probably with different names, and that it would be up to the Linux distributions to provide the users with what they preferred, working with those Linux distributions
therefore would be very important for the MySQL distributions.

Sadly my Fedora box doesn't allow me to do a yum install mariadb yet ... but I`m sure that's only a matter of time ..

What happens when you mention Open Office and Firewall in once sentence, in public ?

People start actually building it (French Article)

Then add to that list that there's also people out there that think that running MySQL over NFS is providing them High Availability, or that using DNS Round Robin will provide them a scalable setup,

So yes .. apparently there is indeed a parallel universe out there.

And no .. I don't want to see Webmin in any Appliance .. that is a joke..., or rather a rant ..

Couple of Fridays ago we had one of our @Inuits days again. Rather than having some people give talks and presentations about what they have been doing for the past couple of months this time we set out to research, test, and build stuff.

We split up in 3 different groups, one focusing on CI and testing freshly build stuff with cucumber, a second one setup and tested Galera

We setup a 3 node Galera cluster , not really as smooth as we'd like to ..

Our first bump was that the installation of the package on CentOS is hell, it needs manual interaction such as replacing packages. Deploying this from a repository is probably not going to be a straight forward option.

Galera only takes care of replicating data, just as with MySQL MM replication there still is a need for an external tool to define where to access the database, and implement monitoring in such a way that you are connecting to an up to date database.

Karl started wondering about Galera's locking, turns out the locks aren't cluster wide, locks within the same node work fine.. so if galera is solely used for HA with 1 active node and X failover nodes, it will work (so all transactions happening on 1 node).

We also ran into some issues when trying to start a node which couldn't contact the wsrep_cluster_address point (which is a node it will sync from at startup if specified in the wsrep.cnf file) , it just didn't want to start. This means that when the referenced node (configured in wsrep_cluster_address)is down, you will need to comment it out before you are able to start the mysql server.

The fact that Galera replicates everythying brought us to the discussion if we really wanted that , or if we wanted more finegrained control over which databases or even tables we want to replicate and which ones we didn't want to replicate. A minority of people wanted to replicate everything, the majority of our group wanted finere grained control over what is being replicated to another node.

I`m sure Lefred will shortly be writing about the progress his group made on Banquise

The day ended as it should .. with BBQ and plenty of drinks

This morning my HTC Hero told me it had an upgrade available.
It wasn't really the moment to do the upgrade.

So when tonight I wanted to perform the upgrade I couldn't really find out how to initiate it again .

Apparently the trick is to put the date of your phone one month forward and you get the update request again.

So my phone has been updated ... so let's hope this indeed was the preparation for a real upgrade ..

Oh and don't forget to put it back to the original date :)

It's a typical situation, the developers develop on their own boxen, they only start to integrate their code on on the production platform 3 hours before the deadline. And then the problems start, the typical "But it works on my system" , "its your problem now" is something nobody really likes to hear .

So how do you tackle this problem ? As Christian already mentions Talking is the first step of the solution,

But one of the most satisfying approaches to solve this problem is to provide your development teams with a standard platform that you support, and a platform they can play with , if you can't provide them with a fully defined platform, give them a set of guide lines on what they can expect. Things like library versions, database types , memory availability and storage availability are key components of such guidelines.

My platform of choice for this kind of projects today is to for an Enterprise Level distro, a distro that stays stable for a longer period, not one that is bleeding edge and changes every other week. So a CentOS or a Debian based distro is probably going to be the platform of choice. But a stable standard platform also means that all the latest nice features a developer wants to have from the bleeding edge libraries he is using aren't going to be available .

Sometimes your devs really need those features, sometimes its just a nice to have. On the other hand you as an ops guy don't want to be packaging and configurating every single tool they dream off. As usual in a Devops environment the key can be found in communication ... Talking with the devs will teach you what features they really need and how they might solve things in a different, more standardized way

We've learned that by giving them a default platform and keeping an open conversation helps, some developers take longer to understand the process others jump in right away .. but in the long term you really need to talk to your devs as soon as possible when they think of implementing a new project that has to run on your platorms.

Lets you sleep at night ..

Yesterday @beaker posted his ideas on the #devops movement ...

Apparently we haven't been stressing enough on the fact that it isn't just about Devs and Ops,
So let me repeat it's not just about Devs and Ops, it's about breaking silo's , about being good at our jobs, about getting conversation started, about talking to different stakeholders in the processes . We are absolutely trying to include all groups, not exclude some.

@beaker also seems to have seen many presentations where developers are shown to have evolved in practice and methodology, but operators (of all kinds) are described as being stuck in the dark ages. , is that a different point of view on another continent \, on this side of the Atlantic, it's mostly the Ops people that are already using agile methods spreading the word and it isn't about Devs talking about Deopvs yet. It's actually mostly the ops spreading the word because they feel most of the pain .

Hoff also wonders about routers switches firewall and all the other boxen where we aren't running puppet or chef on , the boxes that are left out of our fully automated environments .
Indeed, Puppetcamp Europe once again woke up the discussion on how to tackle these boxen, the lack of use of existing standards was covered .. and some mentioned that CIM and family are pretty much death or irrelevant for real life usage , both the Puppet and Chef communities are working on manifest, modules and recipes to solve the issues.

But the good thing is that we now have the security people involved too, maybe they'll figure out how to survive longer than 6 months in a CSO position if they talk to the others and come out of their Ivory towers :)