There are some news with the tool, and hopefully a new version, and some future evolution that I’d like to communicate. I also plan to present less slides, and have a more concrete demo to help people see the value of the approach.

While not presentting, I’ll probably be around near the Mageia booth or around my HP colleagues attending the event as well (Bdale Garbee, Martin Michlmayr, Hugo Roy). Don’t hesitate to come and chat !

After looking at the logs they send (kind reminder, that’s a mandatory info if you want to get any form of support !), I saw that in their case, the resizing factor was incorrect, even sometimes 0, leading to empty partitions.

This should have been fixed with revision 2932, and I have released a beta of 3.0.1 that people encountering this problem should use. Let me know if you want to test the fix for a distribution not yet published.

I’ve also repackaged mindi-busybox (with tag 2) for all the deb distributions I manage, in order to solve a dependency issue when upgrading, which was not seen on RPM based systems (for once I have an advantage )

I’d like to have more rapid cycles for this 3.0 branch to reach a very stable point asap, allowing me to work on other branches. Feel free to give feedback so that I could publish 3.0.1 quickly.

Alors même si cela ne fera encore pas les gros titres du 20h, il faut affirmer qu’il a été celui par qui la révolution de la musique ancienne est arrivée, au même titre que Nikolaus Harnoncourt, David Munrow, ou Thomas Binkley et Jordi Savall, chacun dans leur domaine de prédilection respectif. Pour Gustav Leonhardt, ce fut le clavecin qui fut enfin considéré comme un instrument majeur grâce à lui et non pas comme un ersatz de pianoforte mal dégrossi. Et cela parce qu’il a su faire chanter la musique sur cet instrument comme personne avant lui. Et heureusement, comme beaucoup après qui lui ont emboité le pas.

Je me souviens encore des concerts que j’allais voir de lui sur Paris, ou je me retrouvais dans la même rame de métro qu’un Pierre Hantaï qui venait le voir aussi ! Gustav Leonhardt mérite le titre de maître que je lui donne plus haut, car justement, il a joué un rôle de passeur, tant dans l’enseignement, que dans la redécouverte de pans oubliés de répertoire (j’écoute en ce moment même son second disque consacré à Johann Jakob Froberger qu’il m’a fait découvrir comme à des milliers de mélomanes dès son premier enregistrement 1962 (!) pour Harmonia Mundi) ainsi que par la publication d’un ouvrage consacré à l’art de la fugue de Johann Sebastian Bach.

Puisque l’on parle de Bach, c’est évidemment ce compositeur qu’il aura le plus illlustré au disque. J’ai encore un frémissement rétrospectif lors de ma découverte de la fantaisie chromatique et fugue sous les doigts du maître hollandais ! Quel adéquation pour moi entre la hauteur de vue du compositeur et de cet interprète. Ma femme se souvient encore des 500 kms aller-retour faits pendant les vacances une année pour aller l’entendre jouer à l’abbaye de St Guilhem le désert où il avait interprèté de façon magistrale diverses pièces de Bach, dont une de ses propres transcriptions de sonates pour violon seul au clavecin.

Ce qui m’a toujours frappé dans ses interprétations, c’est l’extrême lisibilité des voix, dans la musique si riche de Bach, qui rendait l’oeuvre à l’écoute évidente, tout en lui laissant sa richesse et sa complexité visible. Et les mots qui me viennent naturellement en tête quand je pense à ses enregistrements, c’est non pas austérité, dont on l’a souvent affublé, à tort, mais au contraire fulgurence (2è prélude du clavier bien tempéré de Bach), noblesse (son disque Louis Couperin chez Harmonia Mundi), architecture (son concerto italien de Bach), gravité (ce premier disque de Froberger chez Harmonia Mundi), virtuosité (son Scarlatti chez DHM ou son Duphly pour Séon), probité (Suites anglaises de Bach chez Séon).

Je crois que je n’ai jamais autant écouté des disques que ceux de ces partitas de Bach (HM) d’abord en 33T, puis en CD. C’est l’un des sommets de la musique enregistrée (meilleur pour moi que sa seconde version pour Virgin où de nombreuses reprises manquent). Et je ne peux plus écouter toute cette musique autrement qu’au clavecin depuis ma fréquentation assidue des enregistrements qu’il a réalisés (comme ceux du regretté Scott Ross, inoubliable lui aussi dans Domenico Scarlatti, Jean-Philippe Rameau, François Couperin et pour moi tellement complémentaire de la discographie de Gustav Leonhardt). J’ai failli travailler le clavier vers 17 ans, après tant d’heures passé à écouter la musique qu’il avait enregistrée, mais mon emploi du temps ne m’a pas permis de le faire vraiment et je reste hélas seulement un auditeur. Mais je suis toujours capable, comme à Saintes, de passer une demi-heure rien qu’à écouter un claveciniste s’accorder (Trevor Pinnock a vraiment dû se demander ce qui se passait ce jour là )

N’oublions pas non plus ses apports en tant qu’animateur d’ensemble. Quelle messe en si de Bach d’une majesté, d’une ferveur que peu d’autres que lui peuvent se permettre. Et que dire de son Requiem de Biber !! J’ai encore le frisson de la fois où je l’ai entendu en concert, et où il avait demandé à ne pas applaudir à la fin du concert. Le silence qui s’en est suivi, la concentration qui avait été accumulée par le public était simplement d’une densité palpable.

Ce maître artiste a dédié sa vie à la musique, jusqu’à en faire le sacrifice en se produisant jusqu’à la fin. Il m’a fait aimer le clavecin plus que mon propre instrument (la flûte à bec qu’un Franz Brüggen a si bien illustré avec son accompagnement). Il a contribué à graver une intégrale des cantates de Bach qui a fait date et reste, par sa diffusion sur France Musique par Jacques Merlet, une de mes nombreuses initiations à la musique, de celles qui vous marquent pour la vie. Et il laisse un corpus d’enregistrements pour le clavecin et l’orgue qui est toujours la base d’un discothèque idéale.

Alors, à l’heure où votre descente et arrêt brutal sur le clavier qui illustre la chute de Mr Blancrocher résonne à mes oreilles en fin de disque, un grand merci pour tout ce que vous avez apporté, Monsieur Leonhardt, à la musique et puisse le son de vos enregistrements longtemps susciter des vocations de mélomanes, d’amateurs et de professionnels. Ils ne pourraient mieux choisir leur modèle.

Alain Recordier à la sacqueboute en 2010

Ce fin connaisseur de la musique ancienne avait crée en 1986 l’ensemble Musicque de Joye (du nom d’un recueil publié vers 1550 à Lyon par Jacques Moderne). Il avait aussi été membre de l’ensemble de cuivres Da Camera, du quintette Arban, de l’ensemble Guillaume de Machaut et était trombone solo de l’orchestre d’Orléans.

Il avait participé à de récentes académies de musique sacrée de la Renaissance d’Etampes, dirigées par Jean Belliard

Alain Recordier lors de l'académie de la Renaissance 2007

Comme l’a si fort bien dit le mail que j’ai reçu: “Que de beaux concerts avons nous donnés ensemble ! Sa discrétion et sa grande gentillesse faisaient l’unanimité.”

Alain n’avait pas besoin d’épater la galerie. Il vivait sa musique intensément, donnant un air chaloupé aux canzons de Gabrieli avec énergie et velouté. Sa connaissance transparaissait dans les remarques qu’il sonnait à ses partenaires lors des répétitions avec son accent méditerranéen. Un court exemple pour mettre tout le monde d’accord, et on repartait dans la musique.

J’espère qu’aujourd’hui il joue avec tous ses pairs dans l’orchestre céleste ! Il me restera la mémoire auditive de quelques enregistrements que nous avons faits lors des académies, où je retrouverai la qualité de son son. Et le souvenir d’un musicien humble au service de son art.

(Images personnelles hébergées sur flickr.com)

I previously made unsuccessful tries, as her environement was different, with many more subdirectories, and special chars, so it didn’t work with the previous version of the script.

Now with the revisions 1389 and 1390 of the md2mb.pl script, I have successfully migrated her environment, without any manual intervention.

Hopefully, seeing the number of times the previous post was looked at, it will be again useful (even more now that it works better:-)) for others. I even clarified the license in revision 1391 for you to use more easily.

Happy migration !

Some i386 VMs are now freezing, so I had to find new correct parameters for them. Then autoconf wasn’t generating a correct content for all Mandrake/Mandriva build for mondo, so I had to call for these distro now %configure2_5 as a macro, instead of %configure.

And I still have some issues remaining, with busybox on SLES 9, Mandriva 2009.1, and RHEL 3, with some old SuSE (10.1-11.0) and old Asianux 2, RH 7.3/9, RHAS 2.1 … So Project-Builder.org gained at this occasion a new feature which consists in enumerating on the remote repo which packages have been built correctly or not. And chain the result to a sbx2vm option through the new –rebuild option, which will trigger the rebuild of all not correctly built packages. Very handy ! And will be used to finish publishing what is missing and still useful.

But I already delayed too much the delivery of that important evolution in the project life, so it was time to officially introduce MondoRescue 3.0.0 to the world !

And finally looking at all the modifications since latest stable, MondoRescue really deserve it’s 3.0.0 label ! I won’t be able to cope with the Linux kernel, now at 3.2, but hopefully you’ll find that new version usefull. It fixes a lot of issues brought recently on the mailing list. Remains to work on the Xen kernel support more precisely, but most of what I wanted to fix is in it, including OBDR fixes, RHEL 6.2 fixes, SSSTK ProLiant support improved, loop mount issues, bootable USB keys, mdadm support for metadata, a grub install fix among many others.

You’ll need to use mondo 3.0.0 with mindi 2.1.0 and mindi-busybox 1.18.5 to have a working environemnt as underlined on our Wiki.

And even if it’s a 3.0.0 number, I consider it stable and in the line of latest 2.2.9.x versions. I’d like to avoid copying my Red Hat friends with their .0 versions

Happy New Year and Disaster Recovery with MondoRescue !

As I have a transparent proxy setup, I looked at how to do that with Squid 2.5 (old I know !) and used google to find examples.

The ones I found first turned out to be wrong in their explanations and the squid doc lacks of an example here.

Especially, the names of days should NOT be separated by spaces. Instead you rather need to use other examples which give good advises, and also explain the constraints on the hours.

So I came up with this configuration:

#Time
acl bfore_time time SMTWH 00:00-06:00
acl after_week time SMTWH 22:30-24:00
acl after_wend time FS 23:30-24:00
#Kids
#acl punition src 192.168.x.y/32
acl kids src 192.168.x.y1/32 192.168.x.y2/32 192.168.x.y3/32
#http_access deny punition
http_access deny kids bfore_time
http_access deny kids after_week
http_access deny kids after_wend


That way they are restricted to using the Web between 10:30PM and 6:00AM during the week, and later (11:30PM) the week-end. And I can ban one easily in case of punishment

Of course, that’s not a completely blocked context, as they can use our machines, or try to change the IP address (but they aren’t root and dn’t know that yet – but could learned which would be great !!). But it’s a kind reminder when it’s becoming late.

ACLs in Squid are very powerfull, and combined with Squiguard, you can also activate parental control if you want.

Voici un extrait:

La salle de concert de l’Opéra de Sydney contient 2 700 personnes. Ce blog a été visité environ 16 000 fois en 2011. Si c’était un concert à l’Opéra de Sydney, il faudrait environ 6 représentations à guichets fermés pour pour qu’autant de personnes le voient.

Cliquez ici pour voir le rapport complet.

Maintenant la question que je me pose est pourquoi y a-t-il autant de personnes qui lisent ce blog Bonne année 2012 à vous tous, et bonnes futures lectures !

Statisticians at WordPress.com have prepared the yearly 2011 report for this blog.

Here is an extract:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Clic here to read the full report

Now the question is why are so many people reading this All the best for 2012 and happy future reading

Of course, there is the easy way to perform the upgrade: you take out the camera’s card, put the firmware on it at the root, and voila.

But I tried to do that from my Linux system, with the camera directly connected to the box in USB. As it only works in PTP mode, it could a bit more chalenging

First, get the firmware from the download page and look at the instructions.

Once you have the right file downloaded, extract the firmware from it:

$ unrar x F-D7000-V103W.exe
Creating D7000Update OK
Extracting D7000Update/D7000_0103.bin OK
All OK

Then check that your camera is seen correctly:
$ gphoto2 --auto-detect
Modèle Port
----------------------------------------------------------
USB PTP Class Camera usb:008,005

$ gphoto2 -u D7000Update/D7000_0103.bin --folder /store_00010001/
[...]
*** Erreur ***
PTP Accès refusé
*** Erreur (-1 : « Erreur indéfinie ») ***
[...]


So I activated debug mode, and it turned out that you can’t really write with PTP mode that way on the card
Same thing if you use Dolphin and try to copy paste the file, the target is blocked !

So back to begining, I turned off the camera and removed the card from it.
Then using USB disk emulation, it was easy to copy the firmware at the root of my key placed in a card adaptor on the USB port of my system.
$ cp D7000Update/D7000_0103.bin /media/D7000

Then I put back the card in the camera and turned it on again. I went into the FW menu,just to realize that I didn’t had any way to upgrate, contrary to what was written in the doc. Going back and forth I finally had the idea to unconnect the camera from USB, and then the menu option appeared !
However, the battery wasn’t full anymore so had to charge it again

A couple of minutes later, the camera was upgrading, and I now have a fully patched one !

Mr Nikon: is it that difficult to provide direct USB disk support in your cameras ? That would be the most direct way for us, Linux users, to deal with your wonderful toy ! Maybe for the next firmware update !!!

Distributed redundancy by Roopesh Keeppattu – Huawei

Redundancy is about availability, by duplicating components to avoid unavailability of the service.
Availability measured with ’9′.
4 nines is 1 hour per year, 5 nines means 5 minutes, 6 nines 32 seconds.
Major types of redundancy: standby (cold – the other server remains unpowered, warm – all servers powered, hot – all servers provide identical services).
ALso notion of N modular redundancy (N servers in parallel).
1:N redundancy = 1 standby for N active units.

Traditional redundancy: mainly based on backup HW systems, with similar capabilities so large CAPEX and OPEX.
So moving to distributes redundancy to reduce costs.
1:1 scenario taken in account
Instead of duplicating HW, there is a duplication of process instances on a set of servers
3 models available: live migration of OS/VM or of processes or of pre-distributed processes

• live migration OS/VM: preserve states, less complex from application point of view but higher migration time due to size of what to transfer.
• processes migration: you encounter more complex migration design, which has to be part of the application, and gain on the data to transfer. This method can also provide dynamic load distribution. But you need pre-failure detection for failover.
• pre-distributed process: you increase again the ressource optimization, availability and switching time but also the complexity, the need of additional SW to deal with states and the linkage to the application.

The future is in redundancy in the cloud, and ressource abstraction.

I was hoping for a more in depth presentation, and was not satisfied by this one, as it didn’t go into details, just remaining at the surface. However, this is a critical topic for most customers today in their Linux adoption.

Experiences booting 100s of thousands to millions of Linux VMs by Andrew Sweeney – Sandia National Lab

Managing a large number of VMs presents some challenges and horror stories (such as filling fill the switch CAM table, creating VM feed back loops, finding some unique bugs or odd behaviour). Even 0.01 % of error is 100 VMs in their case.

They tried multiple technologies such as lguest, QEMU, KVM, NOVA. They are using a mixed of technologies due also to hardware limitations.

Guests configurations are computed at runtime. Everything is stored in RAM. They treat VMs as an application process. They use standard tools, the same TCP stacks, kernel…

They are using VMatic to generate the images and boot 1000 VMs in < 3 minutes.
Another tool used is Gproc (Cluster Management tool written in Go) allowing O(ln(n)) execution time.. It scales beyond 200K+ instances. Web based interface.

The first cluster type was:

• Using PXE boot for booting physical host Hypervisors and then start the guests.
• In July 2009, they reached 1 Million VM with lguest and 4600 Dell Super Computer (256 lguest per node) bootleneck being RAM.

They then created KANE (sort of their own cloud approach) made of 520 nodes with 12 GB RAM with Video cards (because that was more expensive to remove them !!)) 13 racks, 40 nodes/rack, 1 PDU/rack.

Then they developed a strongbox ARM cluster made of 490 nodes 512 MB RAM little power needed with lguest.

Then they started Megatux 2.0 to reach a higher number of VMs. Everything is virtual. They even created a network creation language. Use virtual quagga & linux virtual routers (+ physical) and virtual VDE switches. It supports multiple OS normally, but for Windows they got many blue screen (ipconfig before IP is sup, ping before IP is up, …). They’re using KSM a lot (and made patches) and various approaches to reduce VM footprint. gproc is used after the initial boot to push the VM images and start the VM + aggressive KSM.
Cold boot to experiment is performed in 7 minutes. 1 daemon per host to regulate KSM, VM state.

Interesting problem to collect info from 1 Million of nodes overloaded and where to store it ? Using network sniff, VM inspection. For that they used a MongoDB backend populated at runtime. Data collected in in best effort mode.
They’re looking at using KVM tool instead of QEMU/KVM to reduce memory footprint and AXFS (Advanced XIP FS) combined with cramfs.
Next steps with Android, more realistic network usage, improved monitoring, data visualisation and error handling.

A good talk on very unusual context with some interesting issues to consider, even if far from being current problems as of now.

I then met with my colleague Sue Paylor, who is one of our excellent FLOSS expert in EMEA, and that was again a good talk exchanging about our respective customer experiences, how to improve HA with Linux, and lots of various topics.

Providing High Perfomrance Round table (instead of SuSE Keynote)

Ludek Safar, Ministry of Interior, Czech Republic approched the linux topic from the desktop side, and they’re now moving to the Data Center (Oracle instances on physical hardware and the rest in Xen VMs including java based custom devs.). They help by giving publicity for some FLOSS projects. The choice of an enterprise distribution is specifically to be the linkage with the communitites. He likes the embedded approach with regards to the fully integrated hypervisor which provides the perfect cloud solution for them.

Dr. Udo Seidel, Amadeus explained that they started 9 years ago with Linux. They have done lots of internal developments including lots of mission critical workloads. Participating to events is key to keep good technical exchanges, influence the developments, give feedback. He really likes the flexibility and the open mindset. However he is still missing a central approach around role based manageemnt (a la AD).

Andreas Pöschl, BMW explained that they started back in 2003 for servers, and in 2006 decided that Windows and Linux were the strategic OS on x86. They run SAP on Linux e.g. and desktops on Windows. They do virtualization (1000 VMs) with Xen, including 16 cores 64 GB VMs for SAP. They don’t do direct contributions, but rather provide use/test cases for large configurations, and rely on their distribution providers to do the return. Sharing what they do with Linux is also important to improve the ecosystem. He insisted on the freedom of choice which avoids vendor lock-in and also marked his appreciation for the large set of possibilities offered by FLOSS. He is still concerned by boot time. BMW has requirements around storage and scale out, so they appreciate the work done on Btrfs. He mentioned usage of Linux in GENIVI that will bring infotainment to the end users.

Nils Brauckman underlined that the SuSE company, is organized to take this feedback and make it available upstream, doing that since 20 years, as well as providing mission critical solutions to customers, and detailed the new features brought into Linux 3.0 (btrfs rollback, snapshots, trace capabilities, …) bridging the gap between Unix and Linux. He underlined also for SuSE the new agility brought by being back as a separate Business Unit, operating like a single company.

I like more and more this type of round table, as it gives concrete production example of FLOSS usage, and show how serious customers are today, and also how far they want to push their usage, which creates interesting challenges for us !

It takes a community/village to raise a Distribution by Tim Burke, Red Hat

"Unix was a job, Linux is a crusade" Tim said it’s awesome to be a part of RHEL as well as OLPC.
He started by showing a large set of stars in the sky (glibc, LVM, X.org, Linux), independant stars that only come together when gathered in a distribution, which give them visibility. Then he showed the various actors, hardware vendors, translators, designers, lawyers, testers, and distribution vendors as well. The real competitors of Red Hat are VMWare, Microsoft, not the other collaborative groups such as other distribution makers. He explained the relationship around the kernel between upstream, Fedora and RHEL. He also underlined the benefit of working upstream such as they did around the Real Time extensions, instead of coming with a large patch developped separated.

The role of distribution makers is also to coordinate with hardware vendors (I’m well placed to know that !). Distribution can help create communities such as for AMQP, which was a real common need among FSI companies, as they know how to do it.

Mantra is "get it upstream first". Being divergent is being ignored, costs more, represents more work.

Time then gave some numbers:

• 80% of Fortune 500 run Linux.
• 92% of supercomputers for healthcare or analytics run Linux.

He mentioned the OVA to bring up in the stack integrated solution based on KVM.
No keynote without cloud, so Tim had to mention it and noticed Linux usage in it, and the integration characteristics it requires, very near from the one you have to make a distro.

A good talk, but not as pushy as the one made by Jim Whitehurst

How Linux runs the World of Finance by Christoph Lameter, Graphe Inc.

Christoph started by explaining the various players (Stickes, traders, banks, …) and explained their needs of speed. This creates the need for certain technologies (Real Time, kernel, binaries and network optimisation, RDMA APIs, fast C++ code, processor caches). One problem is the limitation of speed of light (even if that may change !). That sounded like a joke first, but is very serious !! 200 µs to go round the earth. It creates limitations to signaling of events.

We’re moving from manual to automated trading. Hours vs ms, human vs compute/algo, 30-60 trades/min vs 1000/s. Manual is used as a backu p mechanism only today.

The case for Linux is because you can modify what you want, and such win against competitors by speed improvements. The first there wins ! Windows couldn’t make it in term of latency in its network stack. Linux was already used for Internet, large companies such as Amazon, Facebook, … All major stock exchanges are on Linux today. Commercial solutions vendors focus on Linux. Solaris is diminishing after Oracle bought Sun.

Distributions used are mainly RHEL, some SLES (Germany mainly), a bit of Gentoo and Ubuntu/Debian.

There are still some challenges for Linux in Finance: involvement upstream is rare, as they want to protect their advantages. Regression in kernel components is creating higher latencies (so some still run RHEL 3 !). Christoph Gave an example of a customer having a 200% regression moving from RHEL4 to RHEL5.

The Forward path is with direct access to hardware (OS bypass) to gain on latency. RT linux does not scale and increases average latency. RT linux is used by exchanges not traders.
Linux dominates finance for the forseeable future. Common hardware looks like supercomputers today (Numa). HPC goes mainstream. Offload technology is seen with suspicion by the community. So again no willingness to contribute these improvements upstream.

One of the best presentation of the day, with lots of anecdotes, and a visible knowledge of the topic end to end.

Where is the Money in Open Source? Business Models and the Marketing of Open Source Technologies by Nithya Ruff, Wind River Systems

Nithya created a story to illustrate this talk. 3 communities: producers, distributors, consumers.

• Producers are interested by solving problems. License used is key. It’s all about meritocracy. How do developers make money ?: being hired by a company, consulting contracts, venture funded, sponsorship/grants/donations.
• Why consumers use linux: no vendor lock-in, comparable perf and high quality, time to market and savings, choice and flexibility, empowerment,, innovation and transparency
• Distributors make it available for consumers with support, favour FLOSS adoption making it safe to use, employ developers, solve some issues and contribute back, market FLOSS, and serve as a liaison between consumer and developer. Successful business models are subscription, services fee, training, books but also proprietary extensions

Marketing FLOSS is different. You need to clearly articulate your added value in the ecosystem. So you have to add value. (TTM, ROI, Integration, risk mitigation)
Prediction, by 2021, 100000 infrastructure core endpoints and 1B mobile endpoints and 20B MtoM endpoints.
Even more need to collaboration between the various communities.

I was expecting a bit more from such a presentation. Good for beginers, but lacks new thoughts on our ecosystem.

ReaR by Dag Wieers

I was particularly interested by this presentation as ReaR is a MondoRescue competitor, and Dag is mister rpmforge, mrepo, … so was really curious to attend it.

Rear provides a Disaster Recovery Workflow in bash. Its framework is easy to use and extend. It supports HP SmartArray, SW Raid, DRBD (not MondoRescue !), LVM, multipath, ext2,3,4, xfs, jfs, vfat. It supports tape, ISO, USB, eSATA, NFS, CIFS, rsync, HTTP, FTP, SFTP. It also provides back-ends with TSM, HP DP, Bacula, …

ReaR works on RHEL4,5,6. It’s shipped with SLES (the one distribution on which it’s tested).

It saves storage info and network info. It has local GRUB integration, serial console support, network and SSH key integration, syslinux management.

Dag then explained the use case of the Belgian Federal Police (HP-UX to Linux migration using Ignite before):
Developers prefered USB usage for flexibility instead of OBDR (also lack of OBDR support by latest HP HW). It manages labels on tape and USB devices. For this project, they support a central DR server with PXE boot and control the HTTP PUT upload with ACLs.
They provide a tool to detect when changes are needed to relaunch ReaR by cron.

In the future they plan to work on: better rsync support (like rsnapshot or rbme), more backup backends, PXE integration, code base reorganization, release process, website+doc, dev tools.

Dag made backup and restore demos.

I really liked the presentation. Dag is an excellent presentor, and has accomplished a huge work to improve the tool.If only I could also have some brilliant contributors like hom for my project !!

So after the presentation, I introduced myself to Dag, and we ended up talking together most of the evening during the dinner organized in a central place of Prague. We talked not only about DR, on which we share a lot of common ideas, but also about a large set of other topics, some of them HP related such as webOS future, … I like making new relationships during evens like LinuxCon as you end up talking with luminaries and that helps a lot enrich your own vision.

Some pictures of this event are available on Picasa.