Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

1. Do not require them to send resumes in Word, most of the open source people will be happy to send you a PDF, ODF file or point you to their online resume. If you insist they will rename a .html file to .doc and send that to you

2. Make sure your corporate website is readable with Firefox and adheres to open standards. If your site is requiring them to install all kind of proprietary plugins, they probably won't even look further.

3. Listing MS Office as a skills requirement is not a good idea.
Requiring documentation skills is.. but Open Source geeks prefer Latex or Docbook to write their docs.

4. Don't list other proprietary tools as job requirement, you are looking into hiring Open Source people, they probably know alternatives for the tools you list. Forcing people to use a tool they don't like never works out, either way.

5. Forget about Degrees , a self taught person with years of writing code and using it is worth much more to your organization than someone who proved he was capable of sitting on the school benches often reproducing what some retard who isn't fit for the industry thinks was cool 2 decades ago. However degrees don't hurt, but they shouldn't be a requirement.

6. Forget about Certifications too , Certifications are mostly a way to get more income from training for a software vendor. Most Certification exams are Multiple Choice and don't really prove a person is actually capable of implementing something. There are only a limited number of valuable certifications out there.

7. Don't expect that because their code is free they are free too. The average Unix guy might be 25-30% more expensive than the windows admin. But you only need 1 to manage 200 machines, not 20.

8. You need social skills also , yes there are bunch of people out there with no social skills, unless you need a Monkey force to write code and you have enough people capable of interacting with them.

9. Reward Open Source contributions , with conferences, a bonus etc
Stimulate an environment where Open source is not something that you use, but which you also create.

10. Do not create a history of violating licenses , but have a public record of good open source citizenship. If you are known to violate the GPL or related licenses Open Source people will hav doubts about why you need them or why they would be interested in creating a better product with you.

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 :)

Everybody is in Zwitserland these days .. even the Userfriendly crowd , so am I :)

I'm in Winterthur for the OpenExpo Zurich, a less eventfull flight than my last conference trip brought me to my hotell where I crashed and after a short walk to the conference site I managed to catcht the last part of Bruce Perens talk

He talked about Spies using Open Source, he talked about Casinos in
Vegas wanting interoperability and asking him for help.

Bummer the Mozilla talk was in German, so I left ..

Altough asked to give the Open Source in the Telco industry talk in English it was in German too .I tried to follow ..failed .. to bad as most of the work I do is in the Telco industry .

Enrico Zini talked about Debian Diveristy and the clear conclusion is that
Debian people are weirdos :) Some of them insist in wearing Kilts a bit more thatn the average male on this planet. Some of them meet their wife at Debian Conferencesm others go to debconf on honeymoon.. they go on holiday to space..
start contributing less, build their own meta distro and take away a lot of the less experienced people, which was a good thing.

After Enrico Max Spevack took the floor to talk about Fedora, he was the second in line to apologise for not doing his talk in German. Weird..
I'm in doubt in which language I'll give mine . Dutch of French .
There are significantly less people in this talk compared to the Debian talk

No real info on the recent security hickup however, I got a Fedora T-Shirt for asking though :)

So earlier this week I ran into the weirdest problem with Linux-HA. Heartbeat was happily adding an IP address as an active resource so one of my nodes when needed, but upon removal it failed to remove the IP from the stack. Further debugging learned that the Heartbeat scripts claimed the ip wasn't on the actual stack.

It was.. but it the output from ifconfig was different from what it expected it to be.

Heartbeat checks the output of ifconfig and expects to find the IP address it added itselve to be on a :0 or similar interface. Now ifconfig only seems output 8 characters for the interface name Which means that when you have an interface called eth0:0 the output perfectly lists it and heartbea
t is smart enough to remove the ip again when the node goes to standby. If however you have a vlan with 3 digits on a bond interface Heartbeat will add :0 to bond0.129 , the Heartbeat resource will add the ip address perfectly but opon checking all the :0 interfaces the bond0.129:0 interface won't be parsed as ifconfig outputs it as bond0.129 , hence resulting in a potential painfull situation where 2 nodes still share an IP address.

So where's the actual problem ifconfig, or heartbeat, I'd say both, but the easiest fix will be in Heartbeat, afterall there are other preferred ways of adding an ip addres to an interface. ip addr add comes to mind :)

So I filed a bug report :)

Tarus is happy not to have VC's on his back. He doesn't want to be responsible for turning a 15 Milj investment into a 150 Milj cashout. Others chose to go that way.

Back when he wrote the article the chances were small that he already knew that Qlusters was going to be shut down with still sooo much money in the bank, but the VC's wanted it back.

So how do open source companies plan on making those tenfold roi reality.
Apart from selling out to a bigger company I think thats a very difficult task.
Especially when you keep in mind how to manage both the Open Source community and your customers. The figures he mentions that VC's require surely start pushing vendors into violating Fabrizio Capobianco rules.

Now the story changes when indeed you cn go to a model where you are selling a large scalable service to your customers, even with microsized payments it becomes a possibility, but that's a totally different business model from what e.g. the Open source systems management shops are doing .

So will the Zenoss, Hyperics or the Groundworks of this world survive the demands of their VC

Luckily these projects are Open Source, so when the company dissapears, the project can continue, and grow even better. Like openQRM did

The past couple of weeks my blog is being annoyed by different comment spams, the content of the comment seems perfectly relevant, often even correctly tackling the topic, or sometimes even almost insightful follow up questions.

However the link to the author site is totally bogus.

If talking about drupal and high availability , a question on GFS or OCFS2 is obviously on topic. However I don't want my blog to link to lot of irrelevant sites.

On the other hand I can't tell Mollom the content of the article is crap. I do want to tell Mollom the "author" of the comment is crap. I even might want to have the comment visible but not link back to the author.

Anyone got good ideas on that ?

Harish Kumaresh from Packt wrote me last week to ask if I wanted to review their Zenoss Core book

The package arrived today ..

So I`ll try to free up some time asap to actually read it :)

PS. Yeah I know, the pictures are is so "Dries", but I like the concept :)

I`m absolutely astonished when I see some of the ideas / concepts people are trying to build a busness around , call it a cool startup and expect VC capital.

But I`m even more suprised that a big part of the world and even the VC world is falling for these ideas, or thinks that the general public will pay for such a product or service.

Let's have a look at some TechCrunch 50 startups.

Michael blogs about OtherInbox, when looking at their site my first reaction was: Hasn't google been doing that for ages ?
The ivo.rentoren+spamfromblog@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+cocacola@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+chanel@gmail.com type of addresses ?

On which you can base filters etc ? So what's new ? From reading their website I fail to see where they are differentiating.

2 articles down the road I learn from Brady that a company called Yammer which provides a hosted version of Twitter is also launching at TechCrunch... Now the idea of an enterprise Twitter version isn't stupid, but with a tool like Laconi.ca already available in open source it is something everybody with a functional brain can implement in his own company. Question arises obviously if Twitter itselve shouldn't host this :)

Yammer seems to be a spinoff of a much more interresting tool that I'm actually using Geni now that was/is a groundbreaking and interresting tool to use for which I haven't found an equally strong alternative.

Having had a couple of ideas before where I usually killed the potential project after thinking about the business model I wonder if I just should have pursued the projects even though I myselve would never become a customer at such a company.

We belgian people tend to be to critical for ourselves it seems, we think a project can't succeed to fast, so maybe we should start more stupid ideas and see how the rest of the world react. Afterall.. Reinventing the wheel seems to be a popular hobby of a lot of people these days

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

Lenz just posted pointers to a great presentation of his about MySQL HA and Drupal,

Seems like a small part of me did go to Szeged afterall :)