Simon Lyall's Blog

Big day for me on Tuesday with the Sysadmin Miniconf happening. We ( Ewen, Andrew and myself) and the other Miniconf people all had to be in at 8am to setup for out Miniconfs. It turned out this was a good idea since the controls in our room were not working and one of the University techies had to fix it remotely, the MySQL people had to move completely when there room’s equipment didn’t work at all.

After we started our room filled right up, past overflowing so we ended up swapping with MySQL and moving into the big theatre in the block. I think we had close to 150 people at most talks so a big success.

Apart from a couple of small glitches (mainly with the sound) and the printed programme being out of date the day went pretty good. Ewen and Andrew kept things ticking over and I mostly avoided getting too stressed, collecting slide copies and actually listening to the odd talk.

I think the one I liked best was Lindsay Holmwood’s puppet based one in the early sessions. It was very well presented ( Lissig style with lots of simple slides) and the content was great. The slides from all the talks along with video should be available on the web very soon.

The rest of the talks were all good as well, feedback from others was pretty positive and I think I’ll definitely try and do it again next year. Due to time constraints the maximum talk length was just 25 minutes but keeping to this meant we got a lot more talks into the day although I would have liked more depth sometimes.

After the end of the Miniconf I went to the Speaker’s dinner. I wasn’t actually speaking at the conference but Miniconf organisers got invited along too which was really cool.

The venue was nice and I got to talk to some interesting people who I hopefully didn’t bore too much

First thing Monday I decided to go to the Virtualisation Miniconf to something labeled “Keynote”. Unfortunately it appears their schedule was completely screwed so one of the later talks was happening. I didn’t find this interesting so I snuck off to Debian and caught the “State of the Debian Project” talk which was pretty interesting.

Due to the brochure being printed a few weeks ago, the timetables from many of the Miniconfs are out of date. While this is 100 times better than last year when nothing had been printed it is still frustrating. The organisers were really cool and let me print out a couple of our the Sysadmin Miniconf schedule so I’ll hang this outside our room tomorrow to give people the latest schedule.

At this point I really have to thank the organisers, so far they have been incredible efficient and helpful beyond the call of duty. So when I’ve asked for weird and non-standard stuff like printouts they have been really nice, helpful and complete good about doing all them. I’d like to give them a big thank you and a “You guys rock!” .

I dropped into the Multimedia Miniconf for the next session and caught an overview of some new Dirac codecs from one of the people at the BBC and then 3 quick talks. The first was a great update on the ogg projects by Chris Montgomery , the second was a report on a FOSS survey which was a little wasted when the presented spent the first 10 minutes going on about her organisation and I missed the 3rd.

For lunch ended having a very nice Italian lunch of pasta and bruschetta ( I love bruschetta) with some guys so I was a bit late back to the next session.

I caught the end of a session at the virtualisation Miniconf ( I apparently missed the good ones this morning) and then over to debian for a discussion about “Why don’t the big guys love Debian”, some good points discussed although I think some people are hung up about shipping binary modules, for large companies that want to run Debian on servers binary modules are not important, solid support and someone to yell at is. For the last session I squeezed into the security Miniconf to heard about ssh exploits

Afterward a bunch of us went to Lydon St for the Sysadmin ( and friends) dinner. After a bit of problem with the venue we ended up in a nice place and had a good pizza dinner with a bit of ice cream afterward

After a few problems with delayed flights I finally got into Melbourne. for linux.conf.au. Meet some people from NZ and we shared a taxi into the venue ( $42 total ).

I arrived around noon on Sunday and the registration for my accommodation ( Trinity ) didn’t open till 1pm so I sat in the shade chatting to people and trying to get my cellphone to work.

My room is on the 3rd floor and a little old but nice enough, the whole college has an old feel with hundred year old main buildings (at least they look) 100 years old.

The conference venue is just 10 minutes walk away from Trinity so I wandered over and signed up. I’m professional this year so a bit more stuff than previously. After that I went with some people to Lygon St for an ice cream.

The newcomers session was pretty good, some others have already blogged about it. Afterward about 50 people went to a local pub (across the road from trinity ). The pub had just opened just last week so it was still not 100% work with staff fairly new and only a few a couple of beers on tap. In the end I was feeling a little sick so I went home a little early. Talked to plenty of people during the day and caught up with a few people from previous years, this would of course be easier if I actually could remember names and faces, roll on the Sense Cam clone

Just one day till the start of linux.conf.au 2008 so I thought I should do a few posts. This one was supposed to out yesterday (Saturday) but I ended up getting distracted. So just pretend this was posted 12 hours ago.

For the rest of this week I’ll be in Melbourne attended linux.conf.au and related events. If you are new to LCA then see the main site or read the First timers that I wrote a few months ago.

The Main event I am looking forward to is the [System Administration Miniconf](http:// sysadmin.miniconf.org) on Tuesday which I am helping to organise. The programme is online here although there might be a last minute change or two.

Monday is the first day of the Miniconfs with Community Wireless, Debian, Education, Embedded, Fedora and Multimedia, Security and Virtualisation all happening. I’ll probably spend most of the day at the virtualisation Miniconf but I have to do a detailed check of the other miniconf’s schedules to spot cool talks elsewhere.

On Monday night an informal dinner has been arranged at a local Italian place for the the Sysadmin Miniconf and anyone else who wants to attended. Details are here

In a burst of productivity, IT Journalist Paul Brislen reports comments made by Vodafone spokesman Paul Brislen in this herald article.

I guess later in the year the paper will have rookie journalist Helen Clark uses her unprecedented contacts to interview the Prime Minister and senior government figures.

After a bit of playing around I got Xen going nicely a few weeks ago. One of the tricks seems to be to make sure you have “gutsy-updates universe” setup. Since then I’ve been rebuilding my home setup.

I’ve been creating documentation on every step as I go so I keep track of weird stuff (trying to keep this to a minimum) and so I can repeat it later. So I have a little document on create a new Xen instance (10 minute job), another on a dozen things to configure it as a long term server (backups, email, etc) and a few specific ones like Setting up Spamassassin and a Wiki.

Everything now looks like:

• 2 * Workstations
• Server
• Storage and NFS server
• Backups
• Virtual machines
• Mail / spamd / DNS Server
• http / Wiki / dhcp / DNS Server
• Various temp test servers.
• Switch
• DSL Router
• Eee Laptop

Which is a bit quieter than I had in the past with 3 server machines