Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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

Technorati Tags: comments drupal mollom opensource php views

Following up on Wim's example

Technorati Tags: buytaert drupal mollom opensource

So John wrote down his experiences on deploying Drupal sites with Puppet .

It's not a secret that I've been thinking about similar stuff and how I could get to the best possible setup.

John starts of with using Puppet to download Drush... while I want to use rpm for that ...

I want my core infrastructure to be fully packaged... not downloaded and untarred. I want to be able to reproduce my platform in a couple of months , with the exact same versions I`m using now .. not with the version that happens to be on ftp.drupal.org at that point in time, or with ftp.drupal.org being down.

Now the next question off course is what's the core infrastructure.
Where does the infrastructure end and does the application start. There's little discussion about having a puppet created vhost , an apache conf.d file, a matching .htaccess file if wanted , and the appropriate settings.php for a multisite drupal config.

There's also little doubt to me on using drush to run the updates, manage the drupal site etc . Reading John's article made me think some further about what and when I want things packaged.

John's post lead to a discussion on #infra-talk on getting all drupal modules packaged for Centos with Karan and some others

In a development environment I probably want to have periodic drush updates getting the latest modules from the interwebs and potentially breaking my devs code. But making sure that when you put a site in production it will be on a fairly up to date platform, and not on the platform you started developing on 24 months ago.

In a production environment however you only want tested updates of your modules as indeed they will break code.

It's probably going to be a mix and match setup having a local rpm/deb repo with packaged modules that have been tested and validated in your setup and using drush to enable or configure them for that production setup.

But also having a CI environment wher Drush will get the new modules from the interwebs when needed. and package them for you.

To me that sounds beter than getting all the available Drupal modules and packaging them, even automated, and preparing a repository of those modules of which only a small percentage will actually be used by people.

But I need to think about it some more :)

Technorati Tags: apt-get centos devops drupal puppet rpm yum

I would like to point the crowd to the Call For Presentaions of Loadays. , the Linux Open Administration Days .

The Linux Open Administration days 2010 will be the first edition of a new conference focusing on Linux and Open Administration, we are trying to fill a gap for System Engineers and Administrators using Open Source technologies"

More details on the Linux Open Administration Days site

I'll probably be there .. given the fact that the event will be 5 minutes from where I live .

Technorati Tags: antwerpen cfp conference drupal mysql opensource presentation talk tstad wilrijk

Fosdem 2010 was my 10th fosdem Edition (including the first OSDEM)
As every year Fosdem suffered even more from it's own success.

On Friday evening ther was the obligatory Beer event... however as people need to eat to .. the Devops crowd fled the scene

I had made reservations for a 20 something group and with the CentOS crowd joining us (as there was some overlap anyhow) we were 25 when we arrived in the restaurant .

Dinner and Discussions were great .. I learned about some new projects and we had some insightfull dicussions on how fat your thin foil should be ...

After dinner we went back to the Beer Event were lots of Free Beer was tasted ...

Saturday was the first full day of Fosdem, as usual Fosdem was the victim of it's own success , too much interresting stuff to see .. too little time.

Lots of Devrooms had the "FULL" sign put up more than you want as a visitor ...
I never even made it into the Drupal or NoSQL rooms :(

Sadly I had to correct Ploum's first law but for a lot of people .. Fosdem each time means the battle choosing which presentation you'll go to ... If you can even make it to the talk .. as usually the the hallway track is much more interresting :)

The MySQL devroom was on sunday but on saturday the crowd met in an Italian place nearby the Fosdem campus to get to know each other and chat a lot ..
The discussions ranged from French vs Canadaian and the future of Forks

During Saturday afternoon @patrickdebois suggested a Devops Meetup for Breakfast ... and some how that also happened ...

When I arrived at Fosdem on sunday morning they were still there :)

I spent the biggest part of Sunday in and around the MySQL devroom listening to a bunch of interresting talks

My own talk went fairly well given the time constraint .. sqeezing content for an hour in 20 minutes means you can't really go deep into the topics ...
My initial plan was to only focus on Pacemaker integration however the community had voted for the overview talk :)

After my own talk it was almost time to head to the Janson auditorium for the Footnote of Greg Kroah-Hartman, and as on any Fosdem .. there once again had to be Beer

Technorati Tags: devops drupal fosdem mysql nosql open source

Fosdem is coming up again .. It's going to be the 10th edition already So it's going to be 2 days and nights of fun, tech and geek stuff

Lenz already posted the announcement , but allow me to recapitulate.

The MySQL & Friends meetup is on saturday evening , we'll meet around 1900 in front of the under the big tree in front of the AW building...

As with the Devops Meetup you can once again vote for your preferred food

The crowd voted and Favoured an Italian place , so I've made reservations for a 15+ persons group at Sogno d'Italia which is walking distance from the conference location, so there'wont be any hassle with cars and transport

The schedule for the Devroom is also already available

See u there :)

Technorati Tags: drupal fosdem mysql opensource

So when you setup an aggregator there's this one thing you miss from a regular planet ...the list of blogs with their individual Feeds.

I wanted to use this for planet.loadays.org again and realized I don't know where I got this snippet from or if I wrote it myselve or whatever .. but I do realize that unless I document it here I won't be able to point other people to it again :) So just create a block like this one :

<?php
 
 
 $subscriptions = db_query('SELECT title,link,url FROM {aggregator_feed} ORDER BY title');
 while ($list = db_fetch_object($subscriptions)) {
      print "<a href=\"$list->link\">$list->title</a> (<a href=\"$list->url\">feed</a>)<br>\n";
 
      }
 
?>

Technorati Tags: code drupal open source php planet

Dear Drupal Community,

If any of you are interrested in getting a packaged version of Drupal 6 into Fedora's EPEL repository (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) and therefore usable in RHEL and Centos,
please comment on the Bug I filed to get it's introduction started.

Any pitfalls, benefits etc are welcome ..

thnx in advance !

Technorati Tags: centos drupal drupal6 epel fedora package rpm

A couple of weeks ago I was once again manually installing Drush as there were no packages for CentOS / EPEL or whatever, apart from the needed patch to get it running on a 5.1.X RHEL php

I had found this thread on Drupal.org mentioning that a package already exists
however David had not answered the exact location yet
So I created a drush package with a with the above mentionned patch and sent it to Jon Ciesla again he gave some suprising feedback ;)

Drush itself might need to be modified in Fedora. It seems
like one of the major functions of drush is to install and update
modules. That's great for modules we don't ship as rpms, but we can't
allow drush to modify modules that we ship.

This feedback pretty much leaves me with 3 options.

The first one is the easiest one, I just forget about packaging drush for Fedora.

The second one would require me to patch Drush so that for all existing drupal modules that have been packaged for Fedora, Drush will call yum to install them. This obviously would create a lot of work maintaining this excludelist.

The third one would be to disable the download functionality for Drush in a Fedora/Rhel enviornment, Jon suggested that this would probably be the saftest path.

(Jon also suggested a fourth option, namely removing all drupal modules from fedora and add a prohibition to package them in the Packaging Guidelines, which he immediately called ridiculous.)

I once again understand the problem of the Distribution maintainer, but on the other hand if I were the upstream Drush developer I wouldn't want to see my software severely disabled in a distribution.

So what do you folks think, disable the functionality or not ?

PS. Yes I've contacted upstream , but I haven't gotten a reply yet.

Technorati Tags: drupal drush epel fedora rhel rpm

Some of you might have noticed that Fedora 11 and up already have an up to date Drupal6 version, but EPEL , which is what a lot of people are using on their CentOS or RHEL builds only has a Drupal5. I asked Jon Ciesla, who is maintaing the Drupal packages in Fedora why :

Because when Drupal was initially built for EL-5 and EL-5, the 5.x
branch was the current release. It's up to date, 5.20 is the most
recent release, and is still supported upstream in terms of security
fixes. 6 is out, and has been for awhile, but we have the following:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies

Since 5.x isn't broken or insecure, it'll be a tough sell to move to
6.x. Once upstream drops support, this may change.

It's a correct answer from a Distribution point of view, but the fact is it is widening the gap between the Ops and the Devs. If the ops want to keep their platform clean we need to have our software packaged on the platform we want to use, which is most often an Enterprise Linux distro, on the other there is understandably no hair on a dev's head that he will be building a new site on a Drupal 5 platform.

So until the Drupal community doesn't declare Drupal 5 dead, RHEL and CentOS users will have to use 3rd party Drupal6 RPMS , or rebuild the F12 rpm from Source again .

Technorati Tags: centos drupal epel guidelines politics rhel rpm