Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I was transferring an apt repository to a remote site using the tarbal I created locally. When the first machines tried to do an apt-get update from that repository they failed to getthe package list.

Jun 24 11:01:28 10.99.2.253 root: Failed to fetch <a href="http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro" title="http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro">http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro</a>  404 Not Found
Jun 24 11:09:29 10.99.2.253 root: Err <a href="http://10.99.0.1" title="http://10.99.0.1">http://10.99.0.1</a> i386/CentOsDistro pkglist

However at first sight the appropriate files were in place

base.old]# ls -al
total 700
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root   4096 Jun 23 10:09 .
drwxr-xr-x  11 root root   4096 Jun 24 13:01 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 372662 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBase
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  59804 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBase.bz2
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  54788 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBaseUpdates
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   9908 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBaseUpdates.bz2
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  35685 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsCustom
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   8231 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsCustom.bz
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  34663 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsDistro
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   8901 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsDistro.bz
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  23432 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsExtrapackages
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   5931 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsExtrapackages.bz2
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  11144 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.Externals
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   3607 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.Externals.bz2
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   1650 Jun 23 10:09 release
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    129 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsBase
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    136 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsBaseUpdates
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    131 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsCustom
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    131 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsDistro
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    138 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsExtrapackages
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    128 Jun 23 10:07 release.Externals

Now if you take a closer look you'll notice 2 out of 6 .bz2 files ending with .bz rather than .bz2
On the server where I created the tarbal they had the correct .bz2 extension

When digging into the remote tarbal with mc (MidNight Commander) however the .bz extention was shown again.

Somehow while copying the directories out of the tarbal using mc the filenames got changed, as upon doing a regular untar from the command line the files once again had the correct .bz2 extention.

I`m not using mc again to get selected data out of a tarbal, I`ll stick to the old commandline for untarring :)

Weird stuff ...

This one has been sitting in the drafts for too long, but frankly there's not much I have to add.
Twitter is acting weird , we all know that .. but the following movie really beats everything.

Yes that's right what you are seeing is me logging into my twitter account, checking my @krisbuytaert
messages and seeing the @vti messages and then even taking full control of their (in the mean while deleted) account.

I used Istanbul to record the session and realized later that I should have done it in a better quality, however I didn't want to do the "hack" again :)

Anyone got an explanation for this ? Obviously I've sent the VTI people a mail so they are informed of this hickup.

Collegue troubleshooting a machine that he couldn't log into anymore

root@Validation_Radio3_Ku_VN1:~# cat /etc/shadow
# /etc/resolv.conf generated on 20090604022133 by
/etc-ro/rc.d/resolvdotconf.pl
nameserver 192.168.104.1

Really folks .. Everything is a fine dns problem :)

PS. Yeah yeah .. the real problem was a filesystem corrupted

By now everybody and their neigbour has realized that indeed Everything is a funky dns problem, Frank is giving talks about it at ZooCamp, and Serge figured out the hard way the downtime of planet.geekdinner.be was due to a dns problem :)

But I told you different things before ... and some of you listened others are still reinventing the wheel as we go ...

Matt A. points out that the OpenBravo folks realized that one should try to build on top of Open Source projects rather than modify core code ..

Wonder where he read that before :
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.

Over at the MySQLPerformance blog, Peter points out that Open source projects don't do big fat marketing campaigns and the community doesn't appreciate features being developed in a corner then being released with a big bang ... we prefer our releases Early and Often...

On Automating Software installations, a Tom Limoncelli about how we install software and debug setups, with a nice quote "Oh my god. Is that why nobody uses the GUI we spend millions to develop?".
Well Luke said it before .. If my computer can't install it .. the installer is broken

Stephen Walli has some good toughts on how Open Source vendors should setup their partner programs, indeed with their eyes wide open ..

I ranted on Open Source Vendors thinking they should still work with partners models and the channel the traditional way before

However I have to admit that over the last month I did talk to people that do understand our Love / Hate relation ship with the Open Source Vendors that want to partner with us .. and that some of the newer Open Source Vendors are actually attracted by our different way of tackling partnerships.

Oh well.. as Tarus says .. my 3 readers understand..

Last saturday was ZooCamp , also known as Barcamp Antwerp II

The location , the Antwerp Zoo, was the same as for the last CloudCamp Antwerp edition, so I was already pretty familiar with the location.

Lots of new people at ZooCamp and also a bunch of regulars..

My 4th barcamp and the 2nd where I didn't do a presentation, I hope the fact that Inuits was sponsoring ZooCamp made up for that.. contributions can be done in different forms, and you can't always keep coming up with new topics.

I went to ZooCamp with a backpack full of internet connected things as that was the topic , my freshly upgraded TuxDroid and my Chumby .. but I didn't even have the time to fully unpack them and set em up. The biggest problem with the chumby was the website authentication that was required for wifi access.. and a Chumby with no wifi is like a pub with no beer.
I had even planned to do a rerun of my CloudSec talk from the last CloudCamp Antwerp, however the schedule filled quite fast with different interesting talks ...

Frank even managed to hijack my favourite topic, yes that's right .. he did a talk titled "Everything is a Frakkin DNS Problem". He pretty much covered zero of my typical cases so I can still do a run of my version of that talk one day :)

This barcamp was almost back to basics, apart from the location, wifi and the obligatory catering the crowd took charge , Lunch was everybody on their own .. so we ran out for Sushi , great ..
Not sure if we need to cough up that amount of money for a location in the future ..
Ideally we'd be able to find a location for free at some companies office, but that seems to be a difficult task for a saturday event.

Oh and we got to see the baby Elephant.. it was sleeping :)

As Teyo will be in Leuven (Belgium) next week for the training , some folks had the idea to meetup after the training for a Puppet Users Meetup.

So the plan is to meet for Drinks and Puppettalk, next week wednesday as of 20u00 in the Domus in Leuven

http://www.domusleuven.be/

I hope to meet a bunch of you there !

PS. Feel free to spread the news.
PPS. There is a chances I won't make it myselve which shouldn't keep you folks back :)

Less than 1 week till ZooCamp, you know .. Barcamp Antwerp 2, but then in the Antwerp Zoo.

Register here

I`m not a big user of docs.google.com , but occasionally I use it sharing a public document to work on with friends or collegues.

So we have this spreadsheet we're sharing with some family and friends to swap Disney stickers. Google Docs has the option to publish that document publicly as html for others to view.

So I tried , and it generated me a very nice url

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rtlvf2-JSU1Pw-oPtuIZBPg&output=ht...

My sleepy eye catched the A1:C300 ending part .. which was generated by the friendly popup that asked me if I wanted to show all Sheets, or just a range of the page.

Dare I pasting that URL into another browser and change the range ? Like changing the range from A1:C300 to A1:D300 ?

Suprise suprise .. that worked ! I could perfectly see the content of the other cells.

Apart from pointing to the Google API the popup doesn't really mention that publishing only a range won't restrict the actual viewing off the other data.

I can imagine some less technical savvy people to expect the rest of their data is secure... Well, it obviously it's not !
Not sure if Google does this on purppose, or by accident.

If it stops working next week it was by accident :)

Today I lost a machine, a physical one, I couldn't find it back in my rack anymore. One moment I was logged on to it, and when I instructed it to boot off the network again for a fresh installation I couldn't find it back anymore, it was gone.

When you have different ad hoc build development environments, you often grab whatever hardware is available to add to your pool and hope it doesn't kick you back, time always works against you when you have to build a fresh platform from a pool of hardware ready to be reused.

I had half a rack of hardware ready to be redeployed, the default boot order of most machines is Disk, Network so we trigger a fresh network install by overwriting the MBR. So the one machine .. after doing a quick check to see if there was nothing relevant on it anymore we sent it to the reboot pool.

The host was supposed to boot of the network, but I didn't even see a dhcp request coming in. So off to the lab it was .. where was that machine.. none of the consoles I tried was the correct one... until I found one box.. with a really really old installation , a machine that had returned from a different office.

And then it all came clear ... unlike all the other machines this machine had a 2 disk raid setup, which we actually weren't using , we indeed hat cleared the bootsector of the first disk, but not the second disk .. and we never had really cleared the 2nd disk. So rather than booting of the network because the first disk failed it booted of the old copy on the second disk.

Scratching that 2nd disk solved the problem .. for once it wasn't a DNS problem, but the RAID setup wasn't really helpfull either :)

PS. Yes re-labeling the machines is still on the todolist .. maybe next year :)

But I won't become a paid subscriber when they close down access for some countries

Last.fm is awesome .. it learned about my music habits, and it got really good at streaming me My Music, yes.. you read that correctly .. about 85% of the music it sends to my rhythmbox also lives in /home/MyMusic , that's like the CD's I bought and ripped to play anywhere I go.. I already paid for those, so why would I want to pay for them again ?

Pandora did a better job in teaching me about new music I'd like .. it gave me new music to listen to, but it got killed in Europe, heck even my I can only be bought in the US Chumby doesn't want to play from Pandora.

StuBru tells me about the new music etc , but it doesn't have a "Ban"/"Hate It" button so I only use it in my disconnected car, Oh it's not that Last.fm was perfect on the Hate part either.. I hate Filip kowlier's music , I told it a zillion times .. it keeps forgetting.

So when Last.fm eventually will close down for people istening from Belgium

I`ll probably move to listen.grooveshark.com. , till they decide I have to pay again for something I already own.