This post is long overdue, as the idea struck me when dicussing with Lefred while preparing his Fosdem talk on Maintaining too big tables

I got triggered finishing this post by Mr BuidlDoctor

Fred has been struggling with a typical DevOps problem resulting in the most unmanageable database setup possible, there's little room for him to move but he managed is way out .. because he is good at his job

It set the mark for me that because in different organisations even the Opsteam is fragmented `in different groups that there also we need to get the Devops idea going.

Typical setups here are the Network guys vs the Platform guys , specially with the growth of virtualization where the network stack doesn't stop at the physcial switchport anymore but the vlan trunks go deep in to the VM's a lot of discussion happens. There where traditionally the story for the network engineer stopped at the switch they now want control much deeper in the infrastructure.

But an even bigger group that needs integration are the security folks, it's no secret that in some organisations the security guys job is to be the bad guy, their default reply to something is NO. Specially to people wanting to drill holes in their architecture .

Patrick wonders if its the specialist vs generalist dillemma, I think it's the Web vs Enterprise IT way of thinking ..
DevOps first gained ground in Web environments , the battle has only started ..

We still have a long way to go before in say a banking environment the Devs and SecOffs' and the DBA's and the Ops are on the same line ... they all need to break the walls of confusion, they all need to come out of their silos. And when you are a generalist in charge of a bunch of these things you have to make sure your tuesday afernoon security persona talks with his other persona's from time to time ... otherwise you are really gonna need those meds :)

Technorati Tags: DBAOps devops NetOps SecOPS Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/992

I created rpms for CentOS and Fedora of openERP 5.0.7

I didn't test them yet but you can try them and send me your feedback to improve them.

AttachmentSize openerp-server-5.0.7-1.noarch.rpm14.56 MB openerp-client-5.0.7-1.noarch.rpm847.93 KB openerp-web-5.0.7-1.noarch.rpm1.52 MB openerp-server-5.0.7-1.fc12.noarch.rpm14.32 MB openerp-client-5.0.7-1.fc12.noarch.rpm833.84 KB openerp-web-5.0.7-1.fc12.noarch.rpm1.48 MB

Day 2 at the conference was much more interesting then day 1, cause it the talks way more technical.

Only on the lego talk I had some comments: java on embedded devices --> WTF.

Sejo had some issues with his server while doing his presentation on djagios, but nevertheless it was like the best talk I saw.

For both lunch and dinner we ended up in Haiku sushi which was VERY good. For dinner we took a bunch of people with us, cause the lunch was so good. So if you're in Copenhagen and like sushi, that's the place to be!

A couple of weeks a go Brian Profitt pinged me for a chat about Devops , the result of that chat , his article can now be found on the Zenoss blog, it's titled Datacenter Barometer: Better days arrive when dev meets ops

It's a very nice read with some pointers to places regular readers of my blog should already know ;)
So with lots of leading Open Source infrastructure companies on different levels, such as config management (OpsCode and Reductive Labs) , monitoring (Zenoss) , deployment (openQRM, RPath, and obviously Consultancy companies , the upcoming Devops conferences around the planet promise to be a lot of fun ! ;)

Oh, and apparently there is some more on the story on /.

Technorati Tags: devops ha krisbuytaert monitoring opensource zenoss Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/991

I have to say we didn't see that much talks at day 1. First of all day 1 is the commercial day and second we had some things to do.

As we, Sejo and I, are now members of the exherbo infra team, we had to introduce us to all exherbo people here and start our contribution to it.
So we ended up in the cafeteria ( best place for wifi access ) setting up some virtual machines for the infrastructure we want to setup and debugging some issues with bind for delegated subdomains.

The only talk we did see, was the nokia talk about QT. After that one we left with a bunch of guys to eat something downtown. We called it a day after some more drinks in the hotel with a few people of the dinner.

Because of the injury of my colleague Sejo I had to go with him to OpenSourceDays. One of the Exhebo developers, Ingmar, joined us.

As Sejo doesn't like to take a plane, we drove all the way up here. After some detour and two border controls we arrived at Copenhagen after a 13 hour drive. ( Me likes! ) Was a very nice roadtrip!

We did meetup with some people of the organisation and after checking it at the very fine hotel ( A big thanks to the OpenSourceDays organisation ) we went out to dinner. ( First food of the day ). After that we called it a day.

Devops, Devops, Devops, everybody talks about it but we're still defining it ...

There's so many different interpretations possible for the term Devops , It's automated infrastructure, it's agile infrastucture, it's getting devs and ops closer to eachother, it's briding the gap between devs and ops , it's agile system administration, it's the movement , it's the mindset , it's the spirit.

Lots of people, lots of opinions .. Indeed some people have been doing this kind of work for ages, some claim the cloud is what makes devops become visible (but we've been doing cloud since before the cloud marketeers called it cloud)

Some define the devop as a European based , open source backgrounded , thirtysomething senior sysadmin , or should I say infrastructure architect , originated concept . Others claim it's developers gone sysadmin gone partly developer again ..

But it seems like lots of people claim that Devops is more about the team, not about the unique individual doing a job.

You'll have to agree however that our jobs are significantly different from the system adminstration type jobs you'll find at the average IT department. With that in mind: How shall we call this breed of people cooking up chef stuff, playing the puppeteer or cranking up the CFEngines ?

And no I don't like Devministrator :)

Technorati Tags: devops puppet Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/990

No really .. it seems like everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon ...Or just let us know they were already on the pulling the train ..

Brian Moon weighs in that it isn't anything new. Hey .. it's not like we've been claiming that Devops is new ..

The dev2ops guys give their views on stuff ..

The rPath crowd weighs in

And if that wasn't enough ... you really should have a listen to what Jono Bacon and his pall have to say about it

Oh and there's more stuff on the way .. given people being interviewed etc ..

Technorati Tags: devops Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/989

\\//!

Sunday I was in my garden burning some small wood. When I crouched to pick op a piece op paper and got up again, I got a pain shock in my knee and couldn't stretch it any more.

As I used to play a lot of basket and already had some issues with my knees that always disappeared in an hour or two I decided to wait it out. That didn't help, so my wife took me to the ER.

At the ER they informed me that I needed surgery but they suggested to wait until Monday to get it confirmed by the surgeon. I really liked that idea (and hoped it wouldn't come to that) so Monday morning I was at the Hospital.

I didn't like what he said though... I needed the surgery... He did give me a heads up and told me that if it was only the meniscus it wouldn't be that bad...

This did impose a possible problem. My talk @ Open Source Days in Copenhagen would be an impossible thing to do :/

This morning I had the surgery... I had a really rough time getting awake no idea why. Last time I was put under I woke up and after an hour I was ready to go home... Now it took me more than 4 hours (recovery room included) to be awake. It's almost midnight here and I never thought I would be awake like this (read can't sleep).

About the knee: Part of the meniscus was torn off and blocked the joint. But good news is that it was only a block and that there was no damage to the joint nor the ligaments. This means that by next week Thursday I should be enough recovered (especially as I can walk on the leg already).

There were a few remaining problems...

• I can't drive to Denmark (not allowed): solution --> Raf Nijskens will bring me
• Need someone to help me with the luggage etc: solution --> Raf Nijskens will help me!
• Extra hotel room and ticket to the event: solution --> OSD will take up the bill!

So as you can see Open Source Days organisation and Raf really helped me out to make sure I can still present Djagios at the event. I should mention that the company I work for Inuits sponsors the 2 days for me and Raf Nijskens, Which is a nice and cool effort! Thanks!!!!

llap!

Xen KVM VirtualBox Something else (add comment) Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/988

The Belgian senator Philippe Monfils (MR) has presented a few weeks ago a project (in french) for a HADOPI-like[1] law in Belgium. This law aims at condemning people who share copyrighted works without going to court. If an internet user's connexion is used for illegal filesharing, she will first receive a warning, then a fine. The third step proposes a limitation of bandwidth. The last one is the complete suppression of that person's internet connection (but she still has to pay for that connection).

In the facts this arises a lot of questions and fears about the freedom to access the Internet but also about the means used to prove the facts. An IP address isn't enough to prove anything, considering how easy it is to break into a WiFi access point, even a secured one. It also raises the problem of the conviction that will affect a group of people (whole families, businesses,...) for the crime of a single person. There is also a chances of double penalty (the obligation to continue to pay the fees for a suspended Internet access) and there is also the possibility that somebody gets convicted for counteracting while his neighbour only gets a warnings for the same infraction and thus breaking an equal justice.

Also, will such a law really help artists (or the entertainment industry)? There is no proof that it will encourage people to buy more discs and moreover how can anybody buy anything from legal sources without an internet access?

What is sure is that this will cost lot of money for results that are not proven.

Hadopi Mayonnaise is a group of concerned citizens that want to open the dialogue about this law. If you want to help them you can visit NURPA[2] website. They are currently looking for translation for both websites in Dutch.

Notes

[1] HADOPI is the name of the law that has made lot of noises in France

[2] the association behind Hadopi Mayonnaise

\\//!

A client of mine asked for a proxy and an analyser for the results. This because their site is in use 24/7 and they wanted to verify if all traffic is legal/SFW.

So we quickly decided to go for squid, I set it up against their AD so only users that are in their domain could access the web. The easy part was changing the browser settings as they can only surf through Citrix.

As analyser we tested a few that are listed on the squid website but only one passed the bar for the client. And that's Surftrackr. A Django (jeej) based analyser that is clean and easy to use. The only negative point for that tool was it's non-compliance with Django > 1. I needed to install Django-0.96. That done the tool does it's job pretty well. I'm currently contemplating whether I'm going to pursue the creator and help him convert it to the latest Django version... I probably should do it, but my time schedule is cramped already.

I did some more goodies over there but that will be part of another post :p

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 Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/987

Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro's indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.

However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?

First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don't have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.

So rather than using a tarball for the MySQL instance an --force to satisfy the missing dependencies (hence also cluttering your system) , a much cleaner and less error prone setup is to only deploy from your own , self controlled repository , in which you only allow tested packages, most probably not the distro based package , hence packages that won't break your setups ;) But still you will be using apt or yum and deploying rpm's and debs , perfectly satisfying dependency needs.

Apart from that .. watch out for Banquise .. :) Coming to your favourite distro soon..

Technorati Tags: apt apt-get banquise deb mysql rpm yum Share with Shareomatic! --> Trackback URL for this post: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/trackback/986

\\//,

Today I installed SyncEvolution on my n900, with this app my last peeve about not being able to sync my calendars has been removed.
So as of now my n900 does everything I need and even more! I also installed and tested bluemaemo which will help me a lot with presentations!

If you have more cool n900 apps to tell me about, do not hesitate to comment!

And before I forget: I bought World of Goo and it totally rocks!!!!

This is a short howto for installing an Android 2.1 rom (e.g. OpenEclair) on the HTC G1/ADP1/Dream.

First of all you the Amon Ra recovery tool.
A howto on installing this can be found here

Notice: To be able to continue this howto you need at least amon ra 1.3.2.
I used the recovery-RA-dream-v1.5.2.img. You can find more information on the xda-forum

Then you need to format your SD card. ( Backup your SD card to your computer as you will format your SD! )
A video howto can be found here

But here you have the written one:

• Boot in to recovery mode ( HOME + END )
• Select "Partition SDcard"
• Select "Partition SD"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• Then you will be able to select the swap-size. Use the trackball to change.
  Select the preferred value ( I selected 128MB ) and hit HOME.
• Then you will be able to select the ext2-size. Use the trackball to change.
  Select the preferred value ( I selected 640MB ) and hit HOME.
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
  Now the formatting starts and will show you some progress - dots.
• Select "SD: ext2 to ext3"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
  Now the convertion starts and will show you some progress - dots.
• Select "SD: ext3 to ext4"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
  Now the convertion starts and will show you some progress - dots.
• Hit BACK
• Select "Go to console"
• Hit Enter
• Type "reboot recovery" and hit Enter
  This will reboot your device directly in recovery mode.

Now you can start the installation of your new Android 2.1 rom. Here I will use the OpenEclair 1.2.1.

A video howto can be found here

On your PC

Get all files you need:

• Latest radio image: ota-radio-2_22_19_26I.zip
• Danger/Death SPL: spl-signed.zip
• Android 2.1 based rom: OpenEclair-v1.2.1.zip

Connect your phone to your computer.

On your phone

• Select "USB-MS toggle"
  This will mount your SD card to your computer.

On your PC

• Put all 3 files you just downloaded on the root of your SD card.
• Unmount/eject the SD card.

On your phone

• Hit HOME.
• Select "Wipe"
• Select "Wipe data/factory reset"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• Hit BACK
• Select "Flash zip from sdcard"
• Select "ota-radio-2_22_19_26I.zip"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• It will ask you to reboot by pressing HOME + BACK. ( So hit HOME + BACK )
  This will reboot your phone and will bring you back to the recovery mode.
• Select "Wipe"
• Select "Wipe data/factory reset"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• Hit BACK
• Select "Flash zip from sdcard"
• Select "spl-signed.zip"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• It will ask you to reboot by pressing HOME + BACK. ( So hit HOME + BACK )
  This will reboot your phone and will bring you back to the recovery mode.
• Select "Wipe"
• Select "Wipe data/factory reset"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• Hit BACK
• Select "Flash zip from sdcard"
• Select "OpenEclair-v1.2.1.zip"
• It will ask you to confirm by pressing HOME. ( So hit HOME )
• It will ask you to reboot by pressing HOME + BACK. ( So hit HOME + BACK )
  This will reboot your phone and will bring you back to the recovery mode.
• Tab the android.
• Select "Skip"
• Select "Skip"
• Select "Next"

You're now at the home screen of your new image. If want to setup your google account, do this by the marker.

P.S: Try this at own risk. It is possible that you brick your phone!

Since the first day of my blog running on drupal I always used the garland layout and now time has come to finally change that.

After seeing the fervens theme at my colleagues Lefred blog and the display suite demo site, I liked it that much that I'm also using it now.

\\//!

Ok I fixed a small script that added all my wordpress posts to django-mingus.
How did I do it?

1. Export the wordpress posts (tools/export)
2. write import_posts.py like below import sys import os from django.core.management import setup_environ import settings from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify from django_proxy.models import Proxy import elementtree.ElementTree as ET from basic.blog.models import Post, Category tree = ET.parse('/tmp/wordpress.2010-02-13.xml') for item in tree.findall("channel/item"): post = Post() post.title = item.find("title").text post.slug = item.find("{http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/}post_name").text post.body = item.find("{http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/}encoded").text post.created = item.find("{http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/}post_date").text post.status = 2 post.publish = post.created post.save() categories = item.findall("category") for c in categories: try: cat = Category.objects.get(slug=slugify(c.text)) except: cat = Category() cat.title = c.text cat.slug = slugify(c.text) cat.save() post.categories.add(cat) post.save() p = Proxy() p.title = post.title p.description = post.body_markup p.pub_date = post.publish p.active = {'status':2} p.content_type_id=15 p.object_id = post.id p.save() 3. put the file in your django-mingus/mingus folder
4. run it with python import_posts.py

llap!

\\//!

I’ve updated my blog to django-mingus, Simple reason in that as a Django lover I should at least have my own blog in Django.

Django-mingus does already a lot and has been written by reusing as many existing projects as possible. Which is the Django way of working. Also it allows me to write my blogs in reStructuredText and that is awesome!

anyway I’m going to try to import the blogs I wrote on wordpress… let’s hope it works!