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Architect Britt Stalmans

Bart Vanbrabant — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:02:55 +0000

Yesterday Britt her website was put online. You can visit it at http://stalmans.eu

It is a drupal based website running on a linux vps, it is ipv6 enabled!

eAccelerator 0.9.6

Bart Vanbrabant — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:44:01 +0000

We released eAccelerator 0.9.6 today. Next release should be 1.0.

Last few days I have been hacking on new caching code. You can get the code from this git repo:

http://github.com/bartv/eaccelerator/tree/new-cache

I hop to get this ready, stable and fast enough for a 1.0 release.

Google Scholar Citation Explorer

Bart Vanbrabant — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:01:11 +0000

http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/~mayank/software/slh/index.html

eAccelerator.net

Bart Vanbrabant — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:16:33 +0000

Apparently eaccelerator.net has not been renewed. We’ll try to get this sorted out as quickly as possible.

Update: This has been fixed.

Devops

Bart Vanbrabant — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:45:14 +0000

This weekend I attended the devopsdays. The conference topic was “agility in system administration”, and breaking down the wall between development and operation. I like the idea and I think this is the way forward. This is also import for me from a research perspective, because an important aspect is the use of system configuration tools. By using this tools operations also becomes development using the API provided by the tool.

Although the conference was nice and I especially liked Teyo from reductive labs talk, I was a bit disappointed. Most of the attendees where part of small companies or startups. As Teyo said in his talk, this is where a lot of these new ideas are formed and they trickle up to enterprises. The second part of the conference, after the presentations, was an openspace meeting. It was there that I got a bit disappointed. Most discussions were at a low level and did not touch the real problems that the devops concept faces.

Instead of talking about the next generation patch tools, how to migrate partially puppet manged debian boxes, how evil mailing lists are or the “next yet another” cloud management tool. These are all really interesting discussions if I was wearing my sysadmin hat, but they do not have much to do with devops (and I was wearing my researcher hat).

Devops is much easier to do when you talk about a small team, where the developer is setting next to the sysadmin. This is, like Teyo said, much the case in small companies or startups. According to me the discussions should have been about:

How do you move from the current model in enterprises to the devops model?
How do you make devops compatible with stuff like ITIL or COBIT? This is important for enterprises, you can not ignore this.
What about security? Are you going to give everyone access to the API? How do you control access? ACHEL is a step in the right direction according to me.
How far do you want to go? Will everyone be dev and ops? Or is there still some specialization? Because even in development, nobody does everything.

I know this is the whole point of open space, everyone can propose a session. I tried one about the security aspect, without talking about ACHEL. But nobody was interested. I also did not want to push this, because forcing would have been contra productive. Maybe a last question: How do you bring these kinds of questions on as a sysadmin, without looking like a researcher in his ivory tower? I have no idea …

HTC Hero

Bart Vanbrabant — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:55:06 +0000

I bought hero Android phone. This a post made with my new phone. Cool!

Varnish

Bart Vanbrabant — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:12:02 +0000

Varnish rocks! For the yearly 24urenloop event we use a drupal website. Last year we used three servers to host the website and it still was slow. This year we use varnish as a reverse proxy in front of a single server serving Drupal, and this server is less performant the one used last year. We get a lot more request and the load on the server is less than 0.3 All static content is cached for 600s, all live updates are cached for 10s, all the rest is cache 60s. We have a hit ratio of about 90%.

Dev ops days

Bart Vanbrabant — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:53:25 +0000

I will be attending http://www.devopsdays.org Discovered it yesterday. I think it is going to be very interesting, looking forward to it!

I’m going to LISA

Bart Vanbrabant — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:31:07 +0000

Moved

Bart Vanbrabant — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:28:12 +0000

This weekend we moved to a new place. There is still a lot of work before everything is back in its place, but it already looks great!