- Lukas Chaplin of Linux-Lancers.com, a Linux recruiting and placement agency, has interviewed me about working from a home office. This is not yet as pervasive elsewhere as in the Open Source environment, which is really a shame.
- Of course, before going to Lukas you should first check whether Novell & SuSE can offer you a new challenge!
-
It's been a while since I blogged, so I have two conference reports as well, starting with the Cluster Developer Summit in Prague, 2008-09-28 - 2008-10-02. (See the link for Fabio's report.)
This Summit was organized by Fabio from Red Hat and hosted by Novell, with attendees from Oracle, Atix, NTT Japan and others, which Lon captured on this picture. It is my honest belief that within a year or two, we shall have one single cluster stack on Linux; totally awesome! Amazing how much progress one can make if one is not stuck to one's own old code, but willing to select the best-of-breed.
I think we have come a long way in the last ten years; having explored several different paths through concurrent evolution, we are now seeing more and more convergence as there is less and less justification for the redundant effort expended. Dogs, cats, and mice eating together ... It also reinforced my opinion that small, focused developer events can be exceptionally productive.
-
At Linux Kongress 2008 in beautiful Hamburg, there were many tutorials and sessions where Pacemaker + heartbeat were used to build high-availability clusters. In my own session, I presented the last year or so of development on Pacemaker and heartbeat, and of course summarized the results from the Cluster Developer Summit.
I also learned about a neat trick Samba's CTDB plays with TCP to make fail-over faster; of course, thanks to this being Open Source, they were able to contribute it to the community instead of reinventing their own cluster stack. (Haha, just kidding, of course they rolled their own - this is Open Source after all.) However, it should be possible to copy it and integrate it as a generic function for IP address fail-over. Cool stuff.
I also very much enjoyed dinner with James, Jonathan, Andreas, Lars (Ellenberg), and Kay - who lives in Hamburg, but whom I only see at conferences ... Refer to the working from home offices interview!