Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Yesterday evening was the speaker dinner it was in some Turkish
restaurant near the conference venue .. I was sitting with some of
the Xen people and Till "I kill the Rainforest" Kampetter , some
interresting stuff has been talked about..I bailed out "early
because of my talk today .. "

Keynote time, Olaf Kirch on the past and the future of the linux
kernel. In his Dear Santa letter we noticed NFSv5. What is NFS v5 ?
He goes on discussing the end of binary only modules, one day there
will be a "big bang" and we won't be allowing binary kernel modules
anymore, this won't be such a problem since mostly only 3D stuff
isn't relevant anyway ;).

Olaf's tells us that he knows that his week is ruined when on Monday
morning he gets a mail "Very Important Customer reports bad NFS
performance. Please fix immediately" It shouldn't be since the obvious and easy fix is probably vi /etc/hosts .

During the break Alan ran up to me and made some remark about my Everything is a Fscking DNS T-Shirt I should have traded it for a HAt :)
Alan is giving his regular "Why do you need Linux-HA", and We (the open source people) can afford HA since we haven't spent an arm and a leg to expensive software and hardware introduction It's all about "Blame" management. He then goes on describing the new features in LinuxHA v2, build-in resource monitoring, sophisticated dependency model where you can even define dependencies on remote machines or constraints that define resource you don't want to see together on the same machines, or resources that have to be on the same machine. Time dependent constraints such as only failback during such and such time, but failover when it is required. Resource management becomes more important, I should have a closer look at OCF, the Resources will have multiple states, started-as-slave, started as master, stopped, running etc.. About complexity: Isn't the v2 model significantly more complex than the v1 model ? LMB answers : you should see it as more consulting opportunities.

As everybody keept telling it as time to drop the 0. from the version number or DRBD , so DRBD made a hughe version step from 0.7 to 8. As a shared storage box is is a SPOF we obviously prefer a shared nothing environment, DRBD enables this for us. The most important new feature in DRBD: Shared disk semantics Allow both nodes RW access to mirrored storage. Usefull for shared disk file GFS, OCFS2, GPFS It seems that theperformance cutback for using DRBD is only 4% (according to Bonnie) , supporting up to 4TB -128Mb :) A commercial DRBD, DRBD+, version is now also available from Linbit. A DRBD version pre 8 is about to be released when Philip gets back from the conference.

Csync2 , a nice feature is adding triggers to the event of a file transfer, e.g an apache restart could be triggerd after an apache config file has been modified. It uses a database sqlite to store it's metadata which makes it a bit heavier than one might want the environment.

Csync2 looks to me (and Clifford) as a good tool to keep a simple cluster's config/data files in sync. Not as a way to manage your infrastructure or as a replacement for cfengine. Another difference is that csync2 uses a meshed architecture as opposed to a central repository in Cfengine.

Gerd Knorr gave a good overview of Xen which was very well attended even while he was scheduled next to Harald who usually atracts full
auditoria. Having seen Ian giving his Xen talk in Swansea already there wasn't that much new in it for me.

Then there was some speaker with stuff about how to deploy Xen in large environments. I already knew most of that stuff hmm.. Been there , done that .. gave the talk :)

Just before the boattrip to Social Event in the museum of work there was a talk about Freenigma which a lot of people missed since they
wanted to go back to the hotel first (including me). The social event location reminded me of the Linux.conf.au delegates session venue, it's a great concept to combine "technology"museum visits with a social event. Nils Magnus announced that LinuxTag will be getting more support from GUUG and moves to Wiesbaden next year, as Germany is totally in Football chaos during June it will also be early May for a change.