As I was driving with a colleague in California a couple of weeks ago during the conference, the topic of conversation turned to the notion that Percona and the rest of the MySQL community really need the presence of a central entity that provides a recognized home for the MySQL server. The conversation went something like “I was talking to so-and-so, and he said, you know, you guys really need Sun/MySQL, because without the mother ship, things will fall apart and your own business will fail.”

I happen to believe this is FUD, and that the reverse might actually be true. (This is one reason why we’re competing head-on with MySQL.) Having a “mother ship” is in the long run, a very complex scenario to fully understand. There are all sorts of causes and effects that play out in subtle ways. I honestly doubt anyone can really …

Cacti is a great tool for collecting information about systems and graphing it. However, it likes to use SNMP, and SNMP is often not desirable. Instead, I often see the need for a method that is:

• Secure. Use trusted, well-known, encrypted communication. Do not open up new ports.
• Zero install on the monitored system.
• As little installation or modification on the monitoring system as possible.

Over the last several years, I’ve slowly created more and more software to create Cacti graphs via standard POSIX command-line utilities over SSH with key-pair authentication. (I’ve also created similar software for Nagios, but that’s another matter.) The major problem with the work I’ve done is that it’s totally un-publicized.

The system works by passing command-line arguments to a local PHP script like any other Cacti script. This …

It's interesting that just as Apple announced surprisingly positive quarterly results, Microsoft announced their first decline in sales revenues in 23 years.  While Microsoft is not in any kind

read more

The big news to kick off this week was Oracle’s announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems. There is already a lot of discussion of the integration challenges, how Oracle is getting into hardware (or as Matt Asay describes it, having an ‘iPod moment’) and of course, the implications for open source software. What stands out to me is the fact that the world’s biggest proprietary database player — one of few software giants that still sells and supports primarily proprietary software — will own the world’s most popular open source database, MySQL. It is unclear how significantly MySQL figures into the deal, but given Sun spent $1b acquiring it and further invested in its enterprise readiness and use, …

So the cat is out of the bag,

As of today Inuits is rebranding to Pinuits,
The press release is here

We've had good feedback on the new name so far. Different people told me the name matched better to what we are doing . Actually my wife thinks our new name is much better as at least the Pin in Pinuits refers to our favourite Tux again ..

Finding an appropriate name for an Open Source consultancy company, with focus on Linux, Open Source Monitoring, MySQL, Open Source Virtualization , Large Scale Deployments , High Availability and Drupal, isn't easy .. you want to show both community involvement and professionality. And find a domain that's still available.

Technorati Tags: apache drupal …

UPDATED - I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below.

There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into nearly all aspects of enterprise and broader IT, and also reinforcement of the idea that open source software will continue to have a pervasive and disruptive impact on the way organizations of all shapes and sizes do their computing and deal with their data.

First up is RightScale, which as detailed by 451 colleague and Principal Analyst William Fellows, is up and running across the pond on Amazon’s EU EC2. As WiF reports, RightScale started with …

Ian Bullard asserts that you should never use the RAND() function. The Ayn Rand Google Ad is pretty funny. The new Zend Server is coming out as a web stack. Although it can be easier to install a Xampp style … Continue reading →

Since I’m creating a new install of a development environment on an XP gaming machine, I thought I’d just document the process for posterity. Make sure you are running at least Service Pack 2. Here is the version I’m installing: … Continue reading →

How To Add Two-Factor Authentication To phpBB

This document describes how to add WiKID two-factor authentication to phpBB through Apache using mod_auth_xradius. Given the recent attack against phpBB and the exposure of it's users' passwords, we thought two-factor authentication might be timely.

This video has been going around for some time now, but I think its worth the post for those that have yet to see it.

Video Source: The Web Site is Down