We at Tag1 have used the Cacti Memcache templates many times. (http://dealnews.com/developers/cacti/memcached.html) They have become a staple for us and many others. However, we and one of our clients have had issues making them work for monitoring multiple Memcache instances (running on different ports) on the same host. It is possible to make this work with the vanilla templates, but it is a bit difficult.

read more

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 …

Back in November 2008, I wrote a 4 part series on improving Drupal’s MySQL Performance. In that series of posts, I used the BENCHMARK() function to demonstrate the improvement of some of the SQL that Drupal uses. 

Note: Displaying commands and SQL looks horrible in Firefox, but just fine in Opera and IE. Not sure why exactly. I’ve not found a clean way to display code on blogspot.com. If anyone knows how to format code so it looks great, maybe even has line numbers, could you drop me an email? Thanks.

Baron Schwartz, AKA xparb opines: 

“ BENCHMARK() doesn't work the way you think it does. The second parameter is an expression, not a string to be treated as a statement.

Try this:

set @sql := 'select sleep(5)';
select benchmark(1, @sql);

If it works as you think, …

Back in November 2008, I wrote a 4 part series on improving Drupal’s MySQL Performance. In that series of posts, I used the BENCHMARK() function to demonstrate the improvement of some of the SQL that Drupal uses. 

Note: Displaying commands and SQL looks horrible in Firefox, but just fine in Opera and IE. Not sure why exactly. I’ve not found a clean way to display code on blogspot.com. If anyone knows how to format code so it looks great, maybe even has line numbers, could you drop me an email? Thanks.

Baron Schwartz, AKA xparb opines: 

“ BENCHMARK() doesn't work the way you think it does. The second parameter is an expression, not a string to be treated as a statement.

Try this:

set @sql := 'select sleep(5)';
select benchmark(1, @sql);

If it works as you think, …

Grab your calendars and mark the following dates :

• T-Dose 2009 will be held on 3 and 4 october in Eindhoven again.

  Last year we had a nice Drupal track, some great MySQL talks and , a great unplanned Cloud talk , and different other interesting talks, so this year promises also to be very interesting.
  (PS. Drupal Themers.. you might want to propose a new theme for the T-Dose site, who knows you'll even win something)

• For the first time , 2009 will be the year that Belgium will have it's own Security Conference, BruCon has just announced Christofer Hoff as a KeyNote speaker , BruCon will take place on 18 and 19 september... obviously in Brussels ;)
• While we mention VirtSec …

I've had the opportunity in the last few days to use quite a few cool little utilities that made my life considerably easier. I've known about most of them for awhile, but discovered some new tools or new uses for old tools and wanted to share two of them.

read more

I recently joined Tag1 Consulting full time. My main project since I joined was building up our monitoring infrastructure. My personal goal being world domination, but first the best monitoring system I can build. Baby steps...baby steps. For quite awhile now, I've used the monitoring system we built at the Open Source Lab to detect and diagnose problems with drupal.org, apache.org, kerneltrap.org and many more Free Software projects hosted at the lab. These experiences convinced me of the absolute necessity of a robust monitoring system.

read more

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending …

If you read this blog, you should probably sign the petition !

A while ago Dries wondered about Contributing back to Drupal .

Now Inuits is not a Webshop, we are an Open Source shop, so you won't see a zillion Drupal modules being contributed by us in the near future (albeit there are a couple) , we are company assisting other organisations in their adoption of Open Source, and Drupal is amongst the projects we care for. You'll notice code from us in the different other Open Source projects, including the Linux Kernel and other core infrastructure. And not all of it was code, there is a lot of published documentation, methodologies, bughunting and also spreading the words, or talking about our experiences around different topics such as MySQL Cluster and Drupal, or different alternatives to Monitor , or to Monitor MySQL etc ..

But we've been contributing in …