Like all good conferences you are inevitably faced with with the problem that there are multiple talks that you would like to see but the are being held at the same time. Some of the talks inevitably make it online and this years is now exception. They are available here

Of course, like most conferences, its not all about the tech. FOSDEM is the conference where I see the most socialising. I guess the fact the Belgium has some of the finest beers in the world helps this no end

Each year I come away from FOSDEM itching to get my hands on some of technologies that I have heard about, and this year is no differnt. Spacewalk is a project Ive been interested in for about 6 months now and it seems to have had some really nice features added soon. Im just waiting for them to break the need to use Oracle before I really dive back into it. PostgreSQL is on the roadmap and should be here soon.

There was an interesting talk by Linsay Holmwood about Flapjack, Cucumber Nagios & Visage, both of which Id like to have a play with. Another very interesting talk was give by a couple of Guys from Facebook. They were talking about how they have scaled Facebook with Open Source tools and the additional tools that Facebook have created and Open Sourced. Full marks have to go to Facebook for this, nice to see a company contributing back to Open Source so much. You can go to facebook.com/opensource to find out about this.

I have also come away from FOSDEM ready to give OpsView another try, @dotwaffle extoled its virtues, so I certainly need to take a look at that. I have to say it was a real priviledge to listen to Andrew Tanembaum talk about Minix as well, I had no idea about some of the cool technologies included in it such as the reincarnation service. He was an entertaining speaker also which always helps.

I mentioned that FOSDEM seems to grow each year and take on more and more talks, inevitably this leads to some talks being put in rooms that are too small for the level of interest. I really wanted to take a look at some of the Coreboot talks but the room seemed to be at capacity right from the start. I guess I need to use those online videos I mentioned above.

Each year there also the usual swag available and this year was no different. I came away with a new TShirt and Max Spevak (Fedora Community guy) had brought over some excellent “powered by Fedora” case stickers. Spreaking of which, Max had also organised a Fedora Activity Day on the Friday afternoon, which was a nice way of starting off the weekend, a kind of pre-con. It was great to see so many Fedora Ambassadors at FOSDEM again this year.

All in all I had a great time there, a time that always seems to be over too quickly. It would be great to seem then extend the conference by a day or two. There were over 200 lectures given over the space of two short days, so Im sure there is enough content. I guess it depends if they could secure use of the University on weekdays that may be the limiting factor.

Anyway, a *very* big thanks to the organisers, the sponsors and the people who volunteer their time to make sure that the conference runs so smoothly. If you have never been to a FOSDEM, please make sure to see if you can go next February – watch the site for the exact date.

Other Conferences
While Im talking about conferences, please be sure to check out
LOAD www.loadays.org April, Antwerp BE
OGGCamp oggcamp.org March, Liverpool UK

Well now, if you have a WordPress blog and an Android phone you too can have this functionality. WordPress is now in the Android app store, and what’s more its totally free.

Thanks to readwriteweb for the headsup.

Note: This post was done from my phone, alhtough the above link was impossible to do and categories also seem to be broken at the moment but this is a 1.0.0 version.

Im a very happy geek now!

Once logged in you will only have access to a web browser – the browser will be Googles Chrome Browser, as you may expect. There will be no desktop or other apps, everything will be done from the browser. They are going to build in functionality for  working offline, for when you are not connected to the net.

Many people, even in the Linux world, seemed to be opposed to this but I can only see it as a good thing. Under the hood its based on Linux, Google have said they have been working with Ubuntu in this respect. Google have stated that Chrome OS will be Open Source and released the current dev version on Chromium.org. From my point of view I think its going to be good for the Linux platform. The improvement in boot speed and hardware drivers alone can only be good.

I really dont know why Google seem to have so much opposition. I understand peoples concerns about a company that knows so much about its users but they are the only company to have a “do no evil” moto. Whats more Google are also a very transparent company, the information that they have on you can easily be found and deleted if you so wish. For example, if you want to view or delete your web history, just go here and do so.

I do wonder how many people know about the Data Liberation Front, a team of Google engineers who work solely on making sure that you can easily get your data in or out of as many Google products as possible, as simply as possible.

I really do feel that Google are a friend of open source. Their Android phone OS is Open Source and while I know there was some concern over their reation to the Cyanogen mod, when you read into it, you can understand their point of view – plus they worked with the Cyanogen guy to come up with a work arround.

Also, lets not forget the Google Summer of Code. Each year they make this great contribution to Open Source. Im sure its not entirely altruistic but never the less it is a very valuable contribution.

Recenlty Google seemed to cause some more negative ripples with their aquistion of the Etherpad Project. I think anyone who has tried both Wave and EtherPad will understand why Google wanted Etherpad. Etherpads real time document editing is much better than the current Google Wave client. So the Etherpad team have been pulled off Etherpad and put to work on Wave. The controvesy was not so much about this but that the fact they closed Etherpad, a product that many people use and find invaluable. They gave people about a months notice to trasition away from it. The thing I will say about this is that as soon as they became aware of the communities concern, they re-examined the decision and have re-opened EtherPad – in a matter of days. They then said, in a very open way “what were we thinking”.

UPDATE: They have also released the sourcecode for Etherpad under the Apache Licence

This brings me on to Google Wave.I know that people who have been able to try this out are not that overwhelmed with it. What I will say is that its very early days in this products development. I would also so that Wave is all about the protocol underneath that lets you collaborate on document editing and the current Wave client is just the first implementation of a client – there will be other clients. In other words, think of Wave as SMTP and the current client as Outlook Express. There will be better clients

My main point about Wave though is how Google have gone about this. They said, from the outset, that they wanted to create an open protocol, just like SMTP. They also built federation in and they have also desinged it to be extensible, so that people can develope their own plugins. This shows that they are a company that just seem to get it. The understand why Openess is important.

So whats the point of this article, well what Im really saying is give Google a break. Yes they have a lot of information about us and its right to be concerned but their every action to date seems to have been honorable. Lets save the paranoia for companies that treat us and our data appallingly on a daily basis

I’d love to hear your opinion of this subject, please leave a comment or use the contact form

OSG

On a web server, the service runs under an account context – in my case the account is apache. Now all the files in the root of my WordPress folder are owned by root, and only root can write to them. So this is why auto-upgrade doesnt work. Changing the ownership of these files to be Apache would fix it. However, this means that if ever Apache is attacked and breaks giving the user access as the apache user, he would have read-right access. Its a pretty unlikely scenario I know but hey, call me paranoid

If you want your WordPress to be autoupgradable, you simple need to change the ownership of the wordpress files to apache so that the webserver has read/write access.

Ive decided to come up with two scripts, one that is run before the upgrade, that changes the ownership to apache and one that runs after the upgrade to change the ownership back. Its really very simple, so here they are

Before upgrade

chown apache:apache /var/www/html
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/readme.html
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/index.php
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/license.txt
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/xmlrpc.php
chown -R  apache:apache /var/www/html/wp-content/
chown -R  apache:apache /var/www/html/wp-includes/
chown -R  apache:apache /var/www/html/wp-admin/
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/wp-*

chown root:root /var/www/html

chown root:root /var/www/html/readme.html

chown root:root /var/www/html/index.php

chown root:root /var/www/html/license.txt

chown root:root /var/www/html/xmlrpc.php

chown -R  root:root /var/www/html/wp-content/

chown -R  root:root /var/www/html/wp-includes/

chown -R  root:root /var/www/html/wp-admin/

chown root:root /var/www/html/wp-*

chown root:root /var/www/html
chown root:root /var/www/html/readme.html
chown root:root /var/www/html/index.php
chown root:root /var/www/html/license.txt
chown root:root /var/www/html/xmlrpc.php
chown -R  root:root /var/www/html/wp-content/
chown -R  root:root /var/www/html/wp-includes/
chown -R  root:root /var/www/html/wp-admin/
chown root:root /var/www/html/wp-*

Its probably not really necessary but it feels better this way

Please note, my WordPress files are in the root folder, not in “wordpress” or “blog”, so you will need to adapt the above for your own case

OSG

My home setup is pretty straight forward. The Host runs Centos minimal and upon that platform I use OpenVZ (great for thowing up and tearing down linux guests in a very short time) and VMware Server 2.0. I made the VMware choice a few years back, there wasnt much else out there and I wanted something that I could manage from a Linux machine – my home is entirely a Windows free zone VMware Server 2.0 is managed from a web interface, so that works for me.

Anyway, with my recent issues I decided to re-evaluate my virtualization decision, thinking that I would probably just end up back with the same setup. Before I talk about which Hypervisors I have tried in the last week, lets look at my requirements

• to be able to mange from Linux is high on the list but negotiable (I guess)
• I need some kind of container technology for Linux guests (OpenVZ or VServer etc)
• I need to be able to do full virtualization for guests that cant exist as containers
• Id like to be able to quickly move a guest to another hardware platform easily, in case of maintenance or hardware failure.
• Snapshots – to be able to take a snapshot and quickly roll back to it is pretty important to me
• Ease of management
• If its open source then great
• Zero cost

So lets look at which solutions Ive tried

• OpenVZ & VMware server 2 – its the current solution and works well for the most part
• XenServer (running OpenVZ as one of the guests)
• VirtualBox – I know, bet you didnt expect that
• ProxMoxVE – an Open Source combination of OpenVZ and KVM

As you can see, Im a big fan of OpenVZ – its simple, fast, clean and offers quick guest migration to other hardware and very little overhead. The choices in that list, two maybe obvious and two maybe less obvious.

Lets start with the first option – VMware Server 2 and OpenVZ combination. Looking at my requirements you can see that it meets all except one (its not Open Source). Its a good combination and has served me well over the years. One of the requirements that I say it matches is being able to move a guess to another server easily. OK, this is a bit of a stretch as it would involve shutting down the guest, copying the files over to the other server and booting it up. A little bit of hassle but not bad. OK, lets move onto the next one.

XenServer 5.5.0 (using OpenVZ inside one of the guests). The install is pretty straightforward, once online you come to the first problem – management. XenServer is managed from a Windows thick client – there are 3rd party web front ends that you can install and that’s why I even entertained the idea. One of the upsides of this platform is that it offers live migration of all guests to another XenServer and that is included in the version that Citrix gives away for free. However, please not that live migration is only available if the CPUs of the Hosts are the same, which in my case they are not – so no live migration for me. I deduct a point for that, which you may think is a little harsh but my two home servers dont have identical CPUs. I ran this setup for a few days before deciding it wasnt the solution for me. Things that made me make that decision – no roll back to a snapshot. You have to take the snapshot, create a template from it and then create a VM from the template – all that in order to roll back to a snapshot! Thats madness!! Also, the fact that you cant over commit resources – so if you have 4 gigs of ram then your guests need to be configured so that they dont exceed this total. Weird, most hypervisors allow you to overcommit, anyway, so XenServer is nice but its no where near what I need. Live migrartion would be cool but it wont work in my setup. All that and I have to boot my laptop into Windows to manage it – no, XenServer you have been evicted.

Number three on the list is Virtual Box and I bet many of you are thinking that this is not a server solution, its a solution that runs on a Desktop. Well for those who dont realise there is a commanline tool called VBoxHeadless that lets you start guests from the command line and the thick client is available on Linux so its not as out there as you think. It does snapshots, its Open Source, it costs nothing etc but ultimately I decided against this option

So finally there is ProxMox. This is a combination of KVM and OpenVZ that all comes wrapped up on an install CD that uses Debian as its base. Again, the setup is pretty simple – you install onto the server and then all management is done via the Web Interface. (You also have ssh access to the host by the way). This solution is a great fit, it only misses out on one option, there are no snapshots available. As Proxmox uses OpenVZ I was able to import my existing OpenVZ containers into it easily and manage tem from the web interface from then on. For the sake of testing I installed an XP guest using the KVM option (fully virtualised) and it was all very simple and straight forward. This relies on you having a processor that it VT capable but I did, so that was no problem. In many ways Proxmox is better than my existing setup because all the guests are managed from one interface (before I used the VMware web interface for fully virtualised hosts and the commandline for OpenVZ containers). the other advantage this has is that its fully open sourced.

We have a winner

So who won, what did I decide to do? I have to say that even I was surprised by this as I had expected to go back to VMware but Ive actually stuck with the last option – Proxmox. OK it doesn’t let you create snapshots from the web interface but thats the ONLY thing it doesn’t do – and its all totally Open Source. Rock on!

Open Virtualization Format

A lot of this (moving from one hypervisor to another) wouldn’t be possible without the OVF, its great that so many people got behind it so quickly. The last thing we need in the virtualization space is vendor lock in. In short you can export your Virtual Machines into OVF format and from there into your new hypervisors format. Most modern hypervisors will support this. Interestingly, while VMware ESX(i) supports it, VMware Server 2 didnt – but VMware provide OVFtool for this very purpose. Citrix provide a link about how to convert VMs here. VirtualBox not only supports importing and exporting from OVF directly but, as I recently found out, can directly read VMware disk formats and let you boot a VM without the need to convert.

I’d love to hear your experiences in this area, drop me a line via a comment or Contact form

OSG

UPDATE: Just a quick note to add that Virtual Box have just announced that their new version will introduce “teleportation” of a live guest from one platform to another – ala VMware Vmotion but VirtualBox can do it to disparate hardware – even different CPUs (AMD to Intel). Read more here

Long Time Fan
Ive been a long time (read 2000/2001) fan of VMware – they were the first and, you could argue, still are the best in their space. Im a Linux fan, have been for a while and one of the reasons that I liked VMware was because the software I bought from them (yes I paid for Workstation and upgrades) was available for my OS of choice. Whats more they took the time to make sure that the windows worked with GTK2 looks. This to me meant that they liked their Linux users, they gave a crap about us.

I was so disappointed when I moved my home server from VMware Server 1 to VMware server 2 as the Linux client had gone. At least its been replaced with a web interface, that seems like a good idea – then all operating systems can manage the server. The interface came in for some criticism but it did everything I needed it to for the most part and I could manage my home VM server while out and about.

Times change and VMWare came out with their free version of ESX – namely ESXi. Now while ESX also had a decent web interface, ESXi did not. Your only choice of a graphical interface now meant you had to run Windows. So I stayed with Server 2.0

Recently I became aware of “VMWare Go” which was a “new web interface of ESXi users”. Yay I thought, good times! Alas no, when I went to log in I was prompted with a message that said “Your broswer must be at least Firefox 3 or higher, or IE v7 or v8 to use this site”. Thats odd I thought as I am running 3.5.5. What I very quickly realised is that this wasn’t to do with browser, it was to do with OS. I tried the site from my dual boot laptop (the only place I have Windows left these days) and I was able to get in with Firefox 3.5.5 on Windows but running the wizard prompts you to download components like the .net framework and other such single platform technology. How utterly disappointing

End of the Road
What did we do VMware? Why did you abandon us? Well anyway, I guess its the end of the road then old friend. Be happy.

Im off to migrate my stuff to Xen or KVM. Im not sure which yet, Xen has Amazon using it and Citrix seem committed to open source. In fact Ian Pratt was on FLOSS Weekly earlier in the year, so they seem to have the right mindset. On the other hand the Redhat road map points to KVM.

Anyway, watch this space. Im going to take my time to decide which to chose – i am on the rebound after all

OSG

Faulty by Design
The Rocom devices seem to last about 12-18 months before going faulty. I suspect that its the flash cartridge but being a proprietary design means its not easily replaceable.

Requirements
Ideally the device will have no moving parts; we did away with the original devices (which were literally CD players) because they were unreliable and not remotley manageable.

All we really need it to do is

• play music on a loop
• automatically start after power interuption
• be remotely managable

Open source
The continued failure of device after device (we have about 70 of them accross EMEA) got me thinking, there must be a better way. I looked at Shuttle PCs but they failed the moving parts criteria (well there are ways but it didnt seem a good fit). Then my mind we to a very small fanless PC that i bought a couple of years back from Aleutia. So I took a look at the website to see if it was viable. The original device has now become the Aleutia T1

While the original device ran Puppy Linux but all the current ones run Ubuntu. Great, so the device is small, fanless and runs a very good, open source, operating system, and has a network port. So far so good.

Next I needed to work out if it would automatically start after a power outage. I dropped a quick email to the guys at Aleutia to see if this was possible and they very quickly responded to confirm that there was a BIOS setting for exactly this requirement. The final part was playing music on a loop. I was expecting it to be quite easy to acheive and I wasnt wrong.

The method of music playback I have gone for is called MPD (Music Playback Daemon), which is easily installable (its in the Ubuntu repos). I quickly installed MPD an uploaded an MP3 to the folder. Finally I added the MP3 to the playlist and set it to repeat and I was in business. Within 30 mins of unpacking the T1 I had it playing back music.

I shutdown the T1 and removed the power adaptor to test its ability to power on automatically. No sooner than I applied the power the device booted up, once the device had booted, MPD started playing the music – WIN

Final Steps
Now that I had a working device up and running, I need to think about how its supported within our company. I guess other people wouldnt be happy with SSHing into it to control it (which is really very simple actually). What I needed was a front end. Needless to say there are many front ends written for MPD. I went with a very simple web front end called MPDPlayer – its one of the many open source front ends listed on the wiki.

Ive done a little customisation of this and added a file upload button so that the whole process can be managed from the web interface.

Test Test Test
Im now in the process of testing and I do seem to have come accross a bug where playback stops after a number of days. I could just schedule a reboot of the device every night but I would prefer this to be a last resort. The MPD forums have given me some into on how to debug MPD, so I shall persue that.

Conclusion
So whats the catch? Well there doesnt seem to be one, plus this solution comes in nearly £100 cheaper than a Rocom and comes with a three year warranty rather than Rocoms 12 month one. Finally, as it uses a standard compact flash card, if it does go faulty, we can very easily replace it.

Overall Im really pleased with how easy its has been to “scracth my own itch” using existing open source projects. I intend to contribute my file upload button back to the MPDPlayer guys in the true Open Source fashion. Im also hoping that this experience will open my companies mind to using more open source solutions in future.

As ever I welcome your comments

OSG

The process was quite straight forwardand their clear pricing meant that I could be sure roughly how much it would cost. The only part I couldnt work out is the bandwith costs. Anyway I decided to leave OSG with Amazon for one month so that I could get an idea of the total cost of hosting a server instance with them.

Its been about a month now and the costs are in. The bandwith costs were tiny (probably due to the very small ammount of traffic that my site gets) and so my calcualtions were spot on.

Does it compare?

How does it compare ? Well thats not a straight forward comparison as my old server had 512megs of Ram and the smallest Amazon instance is 1.7gigs. So while the Amazon instance is more expensive, when you compare it to a server with the same amount of RAM its actually a very good price.

That said, I dont need all that extra RAM, so I have elected to move OSG back out of the Amazon cloud and back to a hosting provider.

Where did I go?

I have moved over to Linode – these guys seem to have good feedback on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and my experience with them has certainly been very good so far compared to my previous hosting provider.

I will no doubt do a mini write up on that in a week or two but please let me know if anything isnt working

OSG

While you have to feel sorry for them and all the extra work that they have been doing to rectify the issue now is a good time to go back over that age old question. Do you have a DR plan? Are you backing up, is your documentation up to date, have you tested a restore? Luckily I was in the process of documenting my setup when this happened and so my pain hasn’t been as great as I should imagine some others are experiencing

I think its also worth mentioning that, as I had no ETA of when my sites would be restored (or even if they could be restored by the provider) I moved everything into Amazons EC2 offering. This seems like an ideal platform for just such an occurrence, if you dont know how long your main site will be down you can very quickly get servers back on-line and then when and if your original platform is ready you can move back and you will only have had to pay for the hours/bandwidth that you have used.

If your on-line presence is important to you, and I cant think of many businesses that this doesn’t apply to, I would encourage you to look at adding something like Amazons Cloud offering to your DR strategy – and don’t forget to test, remember you only pay for the hours that you use and this is from as little as $0.10 an hour

OSG

Google Wave

Ive just watch the 80minute talk about Googles Wave and I think they really could be onto something. It combines rich interaction with very social features and its kind of an opt in model, like Facebook or Twitter, where you have to add people to your system. This means no unsolicited waves.

They have been working on this for two years and it looks really good. Dont take my word for it, go and check out the video here

Finally, and I have saved the best until last, they will be releasing it under open source so that you can set up your own Wave platform and it has federation built right in so that it will interoperate with other Wave platforms brilliantly

Lets hope this finally kills off email – it had a good innings but its time for it to go now

OSG