Michael Prokop (mika) is an IT consultant with a strong focus on FOSS specialized in Debian, Linux live systems and deployment [http://grml-solutions.com/en/]. He's project lead of Grml [http://grml.org/], a well established Linux Live system for systemadministrators, an official Debian Developer [http://debian.org/] and member of the Debian Forensics team. Mika has a blog [http://michael-prokop.at/blog/] where you can find all the stuff that doesn't fit on InfoQ.
In this article, InfoQ spoke with Mattias Jansson, Operations Engineer at Spotify (an online music streaming service) about the adoption of Kanban by the Spotify Operations team. Jansson offered a lot of detail about the choice to adopt Kanban as well as the experiences that the Operations team at Spotify has gained while implementing a Kanban-based approach to dealing with their workload.
The need to scan a given filesystem for changes is a fairly common one, and there are a variety of common tasks which need this. A framework which offers real-time event notification for Linux file system events is Inotify. In this article we will walk through how to use Inotify to monitor directories and trigger alerts on changes and present tools you might want to add to your personal toolbox.
Recently Adobe released Puppet recipes that they are using to automate Hadoop/HBase deployments to the community. InfoQ spoke with Luke Kanies, founder of PuppetLabs, to learn more about what this means.
If using HDDs from Western Digital (WD) with the string "EARS" in the model name, poor performance may have been encountered. Normally HDDs store data with a sector size of 512 bytes; WD's Advanced Format Technology uses 4096 byte sectors. Alignment of data on disk is essential to get the best performance. It's also only a matter of time until other vendors ship disks with non-512-bytes sectors.
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) is a non-interactive system to avoid the boring and repeating task of installing, customizing and managing Linux systems manually. FAI is used for maintaining chroot environments, virtual machines as well as physical boxes in setups ranging from a few single systems up to deployments of large-scale infrastructures and clusters with several thousands of systems.
The Debian project plans to release a new stable version of its universal operating system, Debian 6.0 (codenamed "Squeeze"), this year. As part of this release, the Debian installer team recently announced the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 6.0. One of the most notable changes to APT is that Squeeze installs packages from the "recommends" section by default.
