Fedora on mac book (air) : wireless and kernel 2.6.40-4.fc15

If like me you are using Fedora on your mac book, after the week-end and in case of reboot, your wifi should not work any more :( Good, news, it's easy to fix, just add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf blacklist bcma Restart and enjoy wifi back ;-) ps: of course you need to use: kmod-wl-2.6.40-4.fc15.x86_64-5.60.48.36-2.fc15.6.x86_64 kmod-wl-5.60.48.36-2.fc15.6.x86_64

new professional perspective

For nearly 4 years, I invested myself in the growth of Inuits. At the beginning we were 5 to believe in this project and now, 4 years afterwards, Inuits has become the Belgian reference in the world of open-source consultancy companies. We started in Flanders, then in Wallonia with Esquimaux and now in the Netherlands with Eskimo (and I think it won't stop there). Having the feeling of the achieved duty, I had opportunity of working for a company which, for me, represents most the open-source point of views, of technical excellence and the opportunity to spend more time with my family. I was honored when Percona showed interest in me and I thus decided for that new challenge! -- thanks to all my friends/former colleagues/collaborators who played the role of references ;-) -- I whish good luck to all my colleagues of Inuits/Esquimaux, I appreciate them very much. They can always count on me if they need help and I hope to see them all at Fosdem and other free software or devops conferences !! I'm also always available for a drink or for sushi's :-) I also really appreciated the 10 years collaboration in open-source I shared with Kris Buytaert (sdog) June 16th will be my first day in my new position ! Percona here I come ;-)

Google calendar support in Gnome 3 evolution ?

During my test and discovery phase of Fedora 15, I noticed that Evolution doesn't support anymore google calendar... is it on purpose ? why ? Or do I need to install some other package ? I found this feature in Fedora 14 something very useful ! I hope this is something that will be fixed in the final release. In Fedora 14 (evolution-2.32.2-1.fc14.x86_64) : In Fedora 15 :

Gnome 3 and my favorite window focus and raise behavior

Yesterday night I installed Fedora 15 Alpha to see and test the gnome-shell (gnome 3) improvements. I stopped to test for one reason: I was not able to setup my favorite behavior for window's focus. What I like (this is mandatory, that's also the one major reason why I don't use Mac OSX daily) is that the focus follows the mouse but doesn't raises the window ! After having "googled" a bit, I tried to install gnome-tweak-tool... but it didn't help for this task... :( The solution is to use gconf-editor and changing the default value (click) of /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode to sloppy. Now I'm very happy and I can continue my tests of Gnome 3.

MySQL facter

Yesterday I started to play with mcollective I added some agents like service and facter. I really liked the facter agent.... and then I decided to add facts for MySQL. Of course I needed to learn some ruby first :-) A fact is created for the version and all other MySQL facts come from the SHOW STATUS statement. All the new facts start by mysql_ I plan to add new facts related to the replication like Seconds_Behind_Master The current version is available on github here

Some usage examples:

with facter: 
[root@delvaux facter]# facter mysql_version 2>/dev/null
5.5.10
[root@delvaux facter]# facter mysql_max_used_connections 2>/dev/null
3
with mcollective: 
[root@delvaux facter]# mc-facts mysql_version
Report for fact: mysql_version

        5.0.51a-24+lenny5-log                   found 1 times
        5.5.10                                  found 1 times

Finished processing 2 / 2 hosts in 64.36 ms



[root@delvaux facter]# mc-facts mysql_open_files
Report for fact: mysql_open_files

        16                                      found 1 times
        18                                      found 1 times

Finished processing 2 / 2 hosts in 2418.13 ms

[root@delvaux facter]# mc-facts mysql_open_files -v
Determining the amount of hosts matching filter for 2 seconds .... 2
Report for fact: mysql_open_files

        16                                      found 1 times

            delvaux.maladree.be

        18                                      found 1 times

            debian1.maladree.be


---- rpc stats ----
           Nodes: 2 / 2
     Pass / Fail: 0 / 0
      Start Time: Sat Apr 02 00:11:46 +0200 2011
  Discovery Time: 2001.84ms
      Agent Time: 1344.24ms
      Total Time: 3346.08ms

[root@delvaux facter]# mc-facts mysql_threads_connected 
Report for fact: mysql_threads_connected

        2                                       found 2 times

Finished processing 2 / 2 hosts in 3270.86 ms

[root@delvaux facter]# mc-facts mysql_threads_connected -v
Determining the amount of hosts matching filter for 2 seconds .... 2
Report for fact: mysql_threads_connected

        2                                       found 2 times

            debian1.maladree.be
            delvaux.maladree.be


---- rpc stats ----
           Nodes: 2 / 2
     Pass / Fail: 0 / 0
      Start Time: Sat Apr 02 00:12:47 +0200 2011
  Discovery Time: 2001.73ms
      Agent Time: 50.43ms
      Total Time: 2052.15ms

April 1st

My contribution to this heavy day for our rss readers is: The April's Fool Centipede ! 
    .:/          .:/           .:/            
  ,,///;,   ,;/,,///;,   ,;/,,///;,   ,;/
 o:::::::;;///o:::::::;;///o:::::::;;/// 
>::::::::;;\\\::::::::;;\\\::::::::;;\\\   
  ''\\\\\'" ';\''\\\\\'" ';\''\\\\\'" ';\
beware, don't believe all news today :)

Puppet and 64bits packages

Since I use puppet to manage my machines (and the machines of customers), I noticed that I had more packages installed then before, I noticed also obviously the same behavior in packages to update and bandwidth consumption during updates. I realize that on 64bits machines, most of the time, the 32bits version of the packages managed by puppet were also installed. This is what I did in my recipes before: 
    package { "corosync":
        ensure => "installed",
        require => Yumrepo["clusterlabs"];
    }
This kind of package declaration installed then the two version of the package, in this case corosync and the dependencies too. To avoid this I added the fact hardwaremodel and used the alias to keep my recipes consistent: 
    package { "corosync.$hardwaremodel":
        ensure => "installed",
        alias => "corosync",
        require => Yumrepo["clusterlabs"];
    }
Hope this could help people having noticed the same behavior... or not :-)

High Availability Open-Xchange Server

Since I tested it 4 years ago, I like Open-Xchange (even if I'm not a java app fan). I like the layout and also all the feature it provides. The calendar is very complete. For a customer where I set it up 4 years ago, I've migrated this service to a cluster running the last version. The machines are fully installed via kickstart from a pxeboot (using cobbler) This post describes the solution. The setup is based on CentOS and use the pair corosync / pacemaker as cluster. The solution consists in two nodes where only one machine provides the service. The components are : - one ip balancing between the two nodes - apache running on the "active/master" server (the server providing the service) - open-xchange running on one node at the time - funambol running on one node at the time - openldap running on both machines in mirroring - cyrus running on both machines as master/slave - mysql running on both machines as master/master replication. This is an overview of the crm: Most of the needed steps are put in some puppet recipes to help the provisioning (you can find them on my github account) With the cyrus-imapd delivered by default on redhat/centos, when the cyrus master starts without the slave running, cyrus won't reply for a long time... the bug we are hitting here as been resolved in newer version. I use cyrus-imapd 2.4.6, package from Simon Matter. You can find the source of this package here

MySQL & Friends Meetup at Fosdem 2011

Like last year I'll be present at the MySQL & Friends Meetup on Saturday evening of the Fosdem. If you wanna share some experience around MySQL, please join ! You can register here

devops Meetup at Fosdem 2011

I will be present at the devops meetup of Fosdem 2011. It will take place the Friday 4th February. I hope to see you there if your are in the devops mind and if you wanna share some experience with us ! Register here

tomcat6 with APR on RHEL5.5

The other day at $CLIENT I had to install a webapp that needed tomcat6 and I found it was quite a hassle to install a packaged version on a 32bits RedHat RHEL 5.5. During that painful process, lefred helped finding the magic package that solved it all so I felt it was only fair for me to publish the complete solution as a guest post on his blog!

devops… to package or not to package… this is the question !

During the Devopsdays in Hambourg, one of the most recuring discussion was about "packaging vs non-packaging, when and what?" I won't try to convince people on what do do when, neither will I say I have the absolute best solution, this post just illustrates the solution I implemented with @zipkid. Some points aren't finished yet, not implemented... or we have not yet decided which direction to follow.

First, let's start we the description of the environment:

A web based application (J2EE) with a MySQL backend, this product is delireved to us as a tgz package. There are many interconections between gateways, applications, databases, map servers, etc... all these defined in configuration files. We are using SLES from 10 to 11sp1 and we maintain a bunch of servers: physical machines of different types (dell, IBM blades,..) and virtual machines.

What tools do we use ?

- GNU Linux - redmine + kanban board plugin to define the tasks - a pxe installation system (autoyast in sles and cobbler in redhat/centos/fedora) to (re)install the machines - puppet to deploy the configurations - git to save all our configurations of puppet - svn to save other things like specs files (this should be migrated to git) - puppet-dashboard to have an overview of the deployed machines, an overview of puppet and define some variables we use in our recipes - rpmbuild to ... euh... build the rpms :) - jmeter to perform load test - nagios to monitor the systems

What is the process then ?

To define the processe, we must first divide it in several categories : - OS installation and maintenance - "our business product" To install a machine, we install a basic image on a machine (virtual or physical) via pxeboot using kind of kickstart files for redhat base system or autoyast for SLES. We create the node in the dashboard, we add some variables if needed like ip, environment, task. We add the server in the autosign file of puppet. In the dashboard and puppet we have several different environments that are linked to some git branches. This allow us to test recipes or settings without modifying the production. Then puppet is started and takes care of everything : vlan interfaces, bonding the interfaces, dns resolving, install the needed package and change the configuration files via puppet. Nagios checks are also configured by puppet. For our product, we first create the package (rpm) from the tgz provided by the developers, and put it in our own repository. After having installed it on the test servers we start some load test scenario.

Back to the big question then: do we package ?

The answer is definetively YES ! To keep a control of what is installed on the system (package version, release and not having orphaned files). BUT the default configuration files are overidden by the puppet run. conf files, xml, shell scripts, cron jobs are indeed provided by puppet and available in git (which provides us version control too) Of course puppet runs constantly on every machine to constantly guarantee the desired state, both on production and on the test machines! This is only dangerous if you don't test your puppet recepies enough during the development phase. We don't start the puppet client in deamon mode but we start the process via cronjobs to avoid any memory usage issues which we encountered with puppetd in daemon mode.

How to improve ?

We would like to improve the load test and automate the build, installation and test on the test server of "our product". We plan to use hudson for the CI with jmeter for unit tests and why not tsung for bigger load tests ? Some open question we still have if we deploy a CI system is how to link a build version with a puppet configuration ? Using a new branch in git linked to a new environment in puppet (and puppetdashboard) doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. We opted then with a git tag corresponding to the build release and only the last one in testing is deployed on the test machines. If needed we can rollback to a previous tag and package. It would be also great to automatically test our puppet recipes with a tool like cucumber-puppet. I think we are going in the right direction, but the road is still long to a fully automated processes with an overview control of all aspects. But we all agree that puppet already helped us a lot to maintain all our servers.

This is a schema illustrating the process :

1. developers provides a tgz with their application (a java compiled application, they also use Hudson to test their package) 2. the "DEVOPS" machine is started ! Devs and Ops collaborate to write the specs for the rpm package and the puppet recipe (dependencies, configuration settings) 3. test the package build and the puppet recipe (with cucumber-puppet) 4. add the package to the rpm repository and commit the puppet recipe to git (and the rpm spec to svn in our case) 5. puppetmaster gets updated with the new recipes 6. this is only in case of a new machine, the machine is automaticaly installed via pxe 7. puppet client installs the needed packages and configure the system as needed 8. puppet also configures nagios and nagios automaticaly startsmonitoring the machine and the services, hudson also starts unit tests and load tests if needed 9. same as point 6 10. puppet installs the needed packages and configuration to the production machine. it also configures nagios to monitor the machine and its services

As MySQL Community Manager, I am an employee of Oracle and the views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

You can find articles I wrote on Oracle’s blog.

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