Over the past couple of years, several tools have come up to solve some of the long standing problems for developers, DBAs and operations teams. This list is no where near exhaustive and your mileage may vary.

These tools should let you get up and coding, saving your code to a central place.

I run (Mac/Windows), I need a Linux server to learn some of this cool stuff, right?

Not exactly. VirtualBox is a virtualization project for multiple platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris) that allows you to run a guest OS right from your laptop or desktop. There are repositories of images (alternative here) that you can use to get yourself going quickly, or you can provision your own.

I set up (cool open source package here) and now my team …

Continuent, a leading provider of database clustering and replication software has five (5) new positions open:

Build/Test Engineer Senior Database Availability and Clustering Engineer Senior Database Replication Engineer Data Replication Sales Engineer Clustering and Replication Test Development Engineer

If you want to get in on the ground floor of a growing company in a challenging field

Lately there have been a lot of organisations trying to hire a devops engineer.
I myselve have been asked to fill in devops roles ..

There's a number of issues with that.

The biggest problem is that I always have to ask what exactly the organisation is looking for.

So you want a devops engineer with experience in Linux, MongoDB, MySQL and Java , does that mean you want a Java developer who is familiar with MySQL and Linux and breaths a devops Culture.
Or a Linux expert who understands Java developers and knows how to tune Mongo and MySQL ?

It's absolutely unclear what you want when you are hiring "A devops engineer"

The second problem is that you are trying to hire people who are knowledgeable about devops,

Yet a lot of those people know that you can't do devops on your own , devops is not a jobtitle. devops is not a new devops team you create.

To some of them you are …

A couple of us have been taking about it a lot already .. we wanted to host a one day #devops event in .be already last year.. then talks about starting a meetup group started again with @wonko_be but it was @fs111 pushing the final button and calling the rest of the .be community to order, we've set a date
and the first session will take place (agenda still needs to be detirmined)

So all you Belgian devops enthousiasts, maark October 11th in your calendar and go register here

We already have 2 other venues (Gent, Boom) lined up .. but let's get this first one started :)

Next to that here's an update for the rest of my upcoming Conference Season :

• Later this month I`ll be heading to San Francisco for a talk at PuppetConf 2012. I'll probably be around in the valley a bit …

With 2 of the bigger Open Source projects I care about talking about certifications programs questions pop up again ...

Should we certify ourselves ?

So let me tell you about my experiences in getting Open Source related Certifications ..

Over a decade ago, (2001) when RedHat was still Redhat and not yet Fedora the company I was working for was about to partner with RedHat and needed to get a number of people certified for that.

So I took the challenge, I bored myselve to death during a 4 day RedHat fast track training and set out to do the exam the next day. Obviosly I scored pretty well given my yearlong experience in the subject. Back then I was told that I scored the one but European Record on the exam which was actually held by another collegue (hey Ico) , our CTO however was not amused when I told that I could have scored better but I didn't bother running a chkconfig smb  on since I …

Devopsdays Mountainview sold out in a short 3 hours .. but there's other events that will breath devops this summer.
DrupalCon in Munich will be one of them ..

Some of you might have noticed that I`m cochairing the devops track for DrupalCon Munich,
The CFP is open till the 11th of this month and we are still actively looking for speakers.

We're trying to bridge the gap between drupal developers and the people that put their code to production, at scale.
But also enhancing the knowledge of infrastructure components Drupal developers depend on.

We're looking for talks both on culture (both success stories and failure) , automation,
specifically looking for people talking about drupal deployments , eg using tools like Capistrano, Chef, Puppet,
We want to hear where Continuous Integration fits in your deployment , do you do Continuous Delivery of a drupal environment.
And how do you …

Topics for this podcast:

*Opscode Chef extends to Windows for more enterprise devops
*Black Duck continues growth, gains new funding
*Cloudant expands NoSQL database focus, customers
*New open source Web server and vendor Nginx arrives
*The downside of Microsoft’s Android dollars

iTunes or direct download (27:35, 4.7MB)

Debian and Ubuntu make use of the !includedir directive at the end of the packaged my.cnf to allow for extending and overriding their default configuration without having to modify the distribution config file.

This is especially nice in combination with configuration tools like puppet as it is usually much easier to add a file to the system than to modify an existing file.

I ran into a small gotcha with this though: the default my.cnf binds mysqld to the localhost TCP interface so that it listens IP 127.0.0.1 only. To make the mysql server reachable from other hosts the bind=127.0.0.1 setting needs to be overwritten.
How to change the binding to a different IP should be obvious, but how to disable an existing binding completely if you want your mysqld to listen on all available interfaces?

The most obvious would be to simply say

bind=

, this does not have any effect …

Topics for this podcast:

*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’

iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)

I was testing some MySQL puppet modules on my Vagrant box earlier this week and one of them required augeas.
I kept running into "Could not find a default provider for augeas", however all the appropriate augeas , augeas-lib and ruby-augeas packages were installed. I inspected the different ruby directories and the files were perfectly in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 where I expected them.

With all the files seemd to be in the right place, my next option was to strace a small ruby script that included augeas, guess what that showed ..

1. stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
2. stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
3. stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
4. …