Tuesday, October 30. 2012
I feel like I just got back home from Oracle OpenWorld (check out my pictures) and some vacation, but I'll be on the road again next week to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona. I'll be there from Monday (Nov. 5th) until Wednesday evening. Oracle is sponsoring the event and we'll have a booth at the exhibition area (booth #19), handing out free Oracle Linux and Oracle VM DVDs. I'll be at the booth every now and then and plan to give a short introduction and live demo of Ksplice rebootless updates on Monday evening (6:00pm).
Two colleagues and myself will also give some presentations:
I look forward to meeting many people I still know from the SuSE days and to learn more about what's new in Linux - the schedule looks very promising and it will be a tough challenge to pick the right talks. And if you happen to be in Barcelona these days, I'd like to recommend two related events:
- On Monday evening (Nov. 5th, 8:00pm), there will be a "Cluster / Storage / HA Geek Dinner" which I plan to attend. Please get in touch with Florian Haas directly for an invite to the Google+ Event. Thanks to Florian and Lars Marowsky-Brée for setting this up!
- A week later, on Tuesday (Nov. 13th, 7:00pm), there will be a MySQL community event "State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication", including a presentation on the topic by Robert Hodges and Giuseppe Maxia from Continuent, followed by a networking event including beer and snacks.
I wish I could attend that second one as well, but I'll hopefully be back at home by then again...
UPDATE 2012-10-30: The direct link to Google+ Event did not work - Sorry for the inconvenience. Updated the RSVP instructions accordingly.
Tuesday, September 18. 2012
It's that time of the year again — the summer holidays are over and the conference season starts!
I'm very excited to be at Oracle Open World in San Francisco again, where I will pretty busy. On Saturday and Sunday I will attend MySQL Connect, primarily to man the Oracle Linux booth in the exhibition area. But I hope to catch some of the talks as well (I shared my favourite sessions with Keith Larson from the MySQL team in this interview). During Open World, I will help out manning the Oracle Linux demo pods in the exhibition grounds in Moscone South, where we will showcase Oracle Linux with Ksplice and related technologies. I also have a joint presentation with two of our customers about "Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments" and I've prepared two hands-on lab sessions "Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device-Mapper" and "Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services". Both hands-on lab sessions will actually be run twice. The lab sessions were quite popular last year, I look forward to moderating these again.
In November, I'll be at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to give a joint presentation with my colleague Manuel Hossfeld about "Oracle Linux - best practices and benefits" (in German). We also plan to request a slot for a BOF/Unconference about Linux, I'm curious about the feedback and discussions that will arise during these sessions.
If you happen to be around these conferences and would like to meet, please get in touch!
Thursday, January 5. 2012
Reposting of what I wrote on the Oracle Linux Blog:
Just a friendly reminder: this year too, we'll continue this series of free one-day events.
OTN Sys Admin Days are like OTN's Developer Days, but we focus on the Sys Admin with two parallel, hands-on Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux tracks. These are live classroom events and you'll need to bring your own laptop to follow the practical exercises that we will go through in a VirtualBox environment.
The Linux track will cover topics like package management with RPM and yum, storage management with LVM2 and Linux RAID as well as learning the basics of managing the Btrfs file system. The Solaris track will cover the ZFS file system, Solaris containers and security (roles, SMF).
The next OTN Sys Admin Day will take place in Salt Lake City (UT), on January 18th, 8:00am-4:00pm.
Attendance is free, but a registration is required – reserve your spot now by following this link! We look forward to your participation.
Friday, November 11. 2011
It's conference time again – next week I'll be attending the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to speak about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Tuesday, 12:00 and the OCFS2 cluster file system on Thursday, 13:00.
In addition to that, me and my colleague Manuel Hossfeld will host an Unconference Session about Oracle Linux and the UEK. The rest of the time I'll be manning a demo pod at our booth and try to attend some sessions myself – the conference program looks very promising!
Wednesday, September 14. 2011
Last week we concluded our first Oracle Technology Network Sys Admin Day in Sacramento (CA). Well, it was actually the second Sys Admin Day, but the first one that had two parallel tracks of sessions about both Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.
I helped preparing for the event by creating the Linux lab handbook as well as the VirtualBox appliance of Oracle Linux 6.1 that was used for the exercises. Unfortunately I could not be there in person, but it would have been pointless for me to go on an intercontinental flight just for one day.
From the feedback we've received so far, the attendees really enjoyed the event and were positively surprised about the depth and quality of the practical hands-on lab sessions.
If you've missed the first one and happen to live somewhere in the Seattle area, you have another chance to attend OTN sysadmin day: we'll be hosting another one on Thursday, September 22nd at The Westin Seattle (1900 5th Ave., Seattle, WA 98101). Again, attendance is free, all you need to bring is your own laptop with VirtualBox installed. We'll provide the rest. Space is limited — you can review the agenda and register here!
Friday, September 2. 2011
In my last post, I provided a short review of what I have been working on in the past few months since I joined the Oracle Linux team. Now it's time for a summary of upcoming events! Looking forward, I already have a few more things lined up:
I'll attend and speak at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference in San Francisco in October. I have a joint session with Chris Mason titled Overview: New Features in Oracle Linux 6 where we'll cover the latest developments. I have another joint presentation with my colleague Rob Young from the MySQL product management team titled Using MySQL with Other Oracle Products - this one will give an overview how MySQL has been integrated with the other products in the Oracle portfolio.
At OpenWorld, I'll also do some booth duty (find me at the Oracle Linux demo pods) and I'll also give a number of hands-on lab sessions:
For these labs, I created an Oracle Linux 6.1 VirtualBox appliance and wrote a 70+ page lab manual. I'll be around, aiding the attendees through these exercises.
By the way, a sneak preview of these hands-on labs will be available prior to OpenWorld as well: they are part of an upcoming series of the OTN sysadmin days, free one-day events that will provide practical workshops on both Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. We have three days scheduled so far - the first one of these will come up faily soon:
On November 15-17, I'll be at the DOAG 2011 Konferenz + Ausstellung in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll give two presentations (in German):
I'll also hold an "Unconference" (or BOF) about Oracle Linux and the UEK together with Manuel Hossfeld, one of our Linux/OVM consultants.
And finally, I'll be giving a talk about "Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel: Status Update and Overview" at the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2011 in Birmingham (UK) on December 6.
If you happen to be at any of these events, please let me know if you'd like to meet!
Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".
But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:
I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:
In addition to working the @ORCL_Linux Twitter account and FaceBook page, I've been blogging on the Oracle Linux blog:
From time to time, I'm a guest blogger on the OTN Garage blog:
I also created new content and updated pages on the main Oracle web site and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):
I've been traveling a bit as well and attended a few conferences where I spoke about Oracle Linux (and MySQL):
I probably forgot a few things in my reflection of the past few months, but these were some of the highlights.
Check out my followup blog post on what I'm up to in the coming weeks and months!
Thursday, June 16. 2011
 fisl12 is likely the largest free and open source software event in Latin America. This year, it takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from June 29th to July 2nd. Oracle is a gold sponsor of the event and I will attend it as a speaker. I feel honoured and excited to be there – for me it will be the first visit to the South American continent.
They already have over 3000 registered attendees, so this definitely is going to be a great conference. There is quite a number of well-known names on the speaker roster and I look forward to meeting a lot of familar faces there.
The agenda is still under development but quite impressive already – too bad I don't speak Portuguese...
I will be giving an introduction and status update to Oracle Linux and as our virtualization technologies Oracle VM and Oracle VM VirtualBox. Other Oracle speakers at fisl12 include:
- Davi Arnaut - MySQL Engineering
- Roger Brinkley - Java Evangelists and the Community Leader for the Mobile & Embedded Community
- John Ceccarelli - Middleware Engineering
- Anil Gaur - VP of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and GlassFish Server in the Fusion Middleware Group
- Arun Gupta - Java EE and GlassFish evangelist
- Luke Kowalski - VP in the corporate architecture group
- Henrique Leandro - MySQL Support Engineer
- Simon Ritter - Java Technology Evangelist
- Dave Stokes - MySQL Community Manager
- Dalibor Topic - Java F/OSS Ambassador
It's been a while since my last post on this blog; I definitely need to get back into the habit! One of the reasons for my radio silence was that I switched roles here at Oracle. After having been with the MySQL team for 9 years, I felt it was time for a change. Fortunately I did not have to look far – I'm now a member of the Oracle Linux product management team and I am having a lot of fun there.
However, I realized that while I was an active Linux user on the desktop, quite a lot has happened on the enterprise and data center side of things. Linux has really come a long way and I am glad to be back in this field, drinking from the firehose and learning a lot about recent developments and technologies. For me, this is kind of going "back to my roots", as I have been deeply involved with Linux at SuSE before I joined MySQL in 2002.
Anyway, I'm still alive and you can expect to hear more about Linux and less about MySQL from me on this blog in the future. I also started writing for the official Oracle Linux Blog as well as the OTN Garage blog – watch these spaces for future posts from me, too.
In addition to that, my travel schedule is also filling up again: at the end of this month I'll be speaking at the fisl12 conference in Brasil and Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco later this year. I also submitted talk proposals to the DOAG conference and the UKOUG conference. Looking forward to it!
Friday, April 29. 2011
Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...
I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new features and improvements have been implemented in this version, which was released in December last year.
In addition to my presentation, there will be two more talks given by Oracle employees:
Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle will give the first keynote on Wednesday 11th, 14:00. He'll be talking about Taking Linux into the Clouds — this is a very hot topic and I look forward to this session.
Right afterwards, Dalibor Topic will provide us with an OpenJDK Community Update. If you're a Java developer and you'd like to get the scoop of what's coming, this presentation is one you should not miss!
See you in Berlin!
Thursday, January 6. 2011
Congratulations to the Drupal community for getting version 7.0 released! This is a major mile stone and an excellent reason to celebrate!
If you want to give Drupal 7 a try without having to install anything, I've now updated my Drupal 7 appliances on SuSE Studio to the latest release. The appliance is based on openSUSE Linux 11.3 and is available in two variants:
- A text-mode only appliance to which you connect using your local web browser via the network.
- A GUI version that starts up the Firefox browser in a minimalistic GNOME desktop to perform the installation locally. Remote network access is available, too.
The database backend is MySQL 5.1, with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled. phpMyAdmin has been added to support web-based administration of the MySQL server. You can access it via http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/. I also added drush, the Drupal command line shell and scripting interface and some additional packages (yast2-http-server, bind-utils, php5-ctype, patch). I also bumped up the appliance's version number to 7.0.0, to match the version number of Drupal included.
The appliance is available in various formats:
- A live raw disk image, ready to be written to an USB stick or flash drive
- A live ISO image, to be burned on a CD or used in a virtual machine
- A hard disk image, to be dumped on a hard disk drive
- Various virtual disk formats, e.g. OVF, VMWare/VirtualBox/KVM and Xen
Please see the installation instructions provided on the download pages for details on how to use the various image formats.
So congratulations to the Drupal developer community for reaching this goal and thanks to SuSE/Novell/Attachmate for providing the infrastructure for creating such appliances. I also would like to especially thank Richard Bos for the testing and many suggestions for improvement of these appliances!
Tuesday, November 2. 2010
Am 5.+6. Februar 2011 findet in Brüssel die "Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" (FOSDEM) - Konferenz statt. Auch im nächsten Jahr wird es wieder einen "Developer Room" zum Thema MySQL geben. Unter dem Motto "MySQL & Friends" möchten wir ein umfangreiches Programm an Vorträgen rund um den MySQL Server zusammenstellen, mit dem wir Entwickler und MySQL-Administratoren gleichermaßen ansprechen wollen.
Jeder Vortrag wird 20 Minuten dauern (plus 5 Minuten Q&A). Es sind insgesamt 12 Slots zu vergeben. Der Call for Papers ist bereits eröffnet - Vorschläge für Vorträge (in englischer Sprache) können bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember hier eingereicht werden.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki und dem englischen Call for Papers.
Ich freue mich auf Eure Themenvorschläge!
Monday, October 25. 2010
 Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.
In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the Drupal installation page by default. I hope you will find this useful if you want to toy around and test Drupal 7 without having to go through the entire OS and LAMP stack configuration yourself. In fact, you can even test this appliance via the recently added test drive option from right out of your web browser!
The appliance is now also available in OVF format. SuSE Studio now also builds Amazon EC2 images, which don't seem to be available for download from the SUSE Gallery yet. I assume this is a recent addition to the continuously improving SUSE Studio functionality, hopefully these images will be made available soon.
Friday, October 15. 2010
Heute hat mir der Postbote Post aus Österreich gebracht: Michael Prokop vom GRML-Projekt war so freundlich, mit ein Exemplar seines Buches "Open Source Projektmanagement" (Open Source Press) zu schicken, das im September dieses Jahres auf den Markt kam. Sogar mit Widmung - vielen Dank dafür!
Ich zitiere einfach mal aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:
Die Unterschiede bei der Entwicklung von Open-Source- und Closed-Source-Software gehen weit über Fragen der Lizenzierung hinaus. Wer ein freies Projekt startet, sollte die ganz eigenen Regeln kennen, um nicht Motivation und Arbeit aller Beteiligten zu gefährden. Das heißt zugleich: Wer die besondere Dynamik bei der Entwicklung freier Software zu nutzen weiß, wird von den technischen Ergebnissen und der besonderen Atmosphäre gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit immer begeistert.
Michael Prokop, Initiator und Leiter des erfolgreichen "Grml"-Projekts, schöpft aus der Erfahrung, wenn er die vielfältigen Aspekte freier und zugleich professioneller Entwicklungsarbeit beschreibt: soziale Belange der Teambildung und Motivation, technische Hilfsmittel der Kommunikation und Code-Entwicklung, aber auch ganz praktische Fragen der Finanzierung, des Marketings und der Dokumentation.
Wer neue Impulse für seine Mitarbeit bei freien Projekten sucht oder als Entwickler kommerzieller Produkte Einblick in den Open-Source-Kosmos nehmen möchte, findet in diesem Buch eine wertvolle Quelle.
Unter der Adresse http://release-it.org/ findet sich die Website zum Buch. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis liest sich vielversprechend – ich hoffe ich habe bald Gelegenheit dazu, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen.
Die Kapitel sind mit Berichten aus der Praxis und Exkursen externer Autoren angereichert und ich konnte einige bekannte Namen unter den Beteiligten ausmachen. Es war mir eine Freude und Ehre, zum Kapitel 4.1 "Team - Arbeitsformen in der Softwareentwicklung" einen Exkurs über das Arbeiten in einer virtuellen Firma am Beispiel von MySQL beisteuern zu dürfen. Zum Thema "Community Management" hat Alexandra Leisse von Nokia/Qt einen interessanten Exkurs geschrieben, dem ich voll und ganz zustimme 
Saturday, September 18. 2010
The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.
If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the SQL mode and InnoDB mode. Using this configuration helps to ensure that Drupal works well with the current version of MySQL/InnoDB and does not use any "questionable" SQL statements. This might be especially interesting for additional modules - Drupal core did not reveal any problems using strict mode so far.
You can download disk images for VMware/Virtualbox/KVM or XEN from the SUSE Gallery (free login required). Just boot the appliance in your virtualization application of choice, choose your keyboard layout and step through the network configuration and Time Zone selection. Once the appliance has booted up and the login: prompt appeared, point your web browser to the appliance's IP address to start the Drupal installation/configuration. MySQL has been pre-configured, there is an empty database named "drupal" and a user "drupal" with the same password to access it. You just need to enter this information in the Drupal Database configuration dialogue during the installation. Anything else can be configured to your liking.
After you have finished the installation, you can toy around with a fresh Drupal 7 installation! Install additional modules, change the themes, add content. And make sure to report all bugs that you run into while doing so! Have fun.
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