Here are the slides from my presentation about Chef at the SF Bay Area Large-Scale Production Engineering meetup group. Accordingly to the organizers from Yahoo, there were 90 people present. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and passionate about infrastructure you should definitely join this group. Highly recommended!

Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.6 release

This week the Debian project released the 6th update to its stable release Lenny, 5.0.6. All recent security updates have been added, as well as some other fixes. The linux-2.6 package was also updated for increased hardware support.

Backports service is now official

I was very happy to hear that the debian backports project is now an official debian project. I always used (and liked) the backports.org repository to easily bring in updated software to the stable release. Now, after it become an official project and not just a fun project of three developers will hopefully be even better and have more software added into backports much faster. Don’t forget to change your apt sources config to point to backports.debian.org (old backports.org mirror will still work for a while).
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Debian growth over time

Also on some unrelated news Romain Francoise published some interesting stats on the growth of the Debian archive over time:

• woody (2002): 8273 packages
• sarge (2005): 15195 packages (+83.7%)
• etch (2007): 18043 packages (+18.7%)
• lenny (2009): 22277 packages (+23.5%)
• squeeze (2010?): 28870 packages (+29.6%)

Wow… now that is really impressive.

NoSQL fun… 5 minutes Q&A session covering NoSQL and relational databases; very funny. Check it out:

Squeeze has been frozen for some time now, and hopefully will be released by the end of the year, and today the Debian team has revealed the name of the next Debian release 7.0: Wheezy.

Just like all the previous releases, this is another character from Toy Story – wheezy – a rubber squeeze toy penguin with a red bow tie (that appears only in the 2nd movie). This will be the first character selected as a Debian version name which has not appeared in all the movies.

Source: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/09/msg00000.html

I’ve just released a simple chef cookbook that will install nodejs from source. You can check it out directly from github or download it from the opscode cookbook site. Let me know what you think if you find it useful.