Keynote – Glyn Moody

• Interviewed people for “rebel code” , found free software people “very nice” even compared to other people in computer industry
• arXiv.org setup week before Linux kernel first released (Aug 1991)
• Overview of public Library of science
• Human Gnome project – DNA inherently digital
• Bermuda Principles – finished annotated sequences submitted to public database
• Jim Kent published and got full human gnome into public domain a short time before Celera finished their work and could have patented everything.
• open data – data is not published just results – example of recent climate data being released, not a big problem if it had already been in public.
• open notebook , reqular updates on progress
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNotebookScience
• History of sharing art – Project Gutenbery 1971  .10 books 1991 , 1000 in 1997.
• Various free licenses slightly incompatible , hard to convert between, took several goes to get licences correct
• wikipedia – easy not programmer example of sharing tht people can understand – “open source is wikipedia for code”
• Open government is more “Shared Source Government” rather than “Open Source Government”
• Global economic crisis – tragedy of the commons
• At least the Financial crisis has some winners
• Very anti financial system, suggest more  “open source” options and commons
• “if you share stuff you are destrying property, you are taking jobs away from the poor people” – How the debate is being framed

Lindsay Holmwood – Flapjack and Monitoring

• Check – unit test – good bad ugly
• Monitoring system – monitors for failing checks
• 3 questions for monitoring systems – next check? , was check okay?, who do we notify? . Fetch , test , notify
• fetch – lookup
• test – execute , verify
• notify – decide , callout
• traditionally done in single process
• but it’s an embarrassingly parallel problem
• parts can be split. fetch+test fetch+notify – pass id/command between
• precompile checks – so fetch is less expensive
• transport between processes is the scheduler
• no data collection when testing (graph seperately)
• scheduler – workqueue – filled by populator, assigns stuff to notifier and workers
• Lots of workers can be created (to do test)
• flapjack – in ruby , talks to nagios plugin format
• beanstalk – ansyncrnise workqueue service – ubuntu/debian packages
• beanstalk – producer  puts jobs on beanstalk , consumer takes jobs off
• uses named tubes (queues) , multiple tubes per instance
• flapjack-worker – started up by flapjack-worker-manager starts multiple copies on machine. various control commands
• worker is simple so linear scaling, spread across multiple machines required
• flapjck-notifier – has manager to start it.
• notifier has recipients.conf file with list of people to notify
• notifier.conf – config for various notifiers (MAIL, SMS)
• APIs – notifiers, filters, systems
• notifier API – who , when and how sort of stuff.
• “how many here use puppet – about a dozen – How many use Chef? – none “thanks a shame” “no it’s not”
• persistence API – store stuff , mysql, couchdb whatever, standard way to store data.
• filter API – parent checks hierarchy (so don’t check ports if host down)
• flapjack-admin – pending – nodes , check templates , checks (check template + node ) , batches (group of checks)
• 3 types of checks
• Gaugaes – stuff within range – collectd ( point flapjack at collected output )
• Behavoural tests – cucumber-nagios
• Trending – reconoiter – growing area
• collectd – gets stats from anything – nagios bridge – collectd-nagios queries collectd data
• collectd client – gathers data from node and sends to collectd server
• collectd forwarding server – agregates, filters and forwards
• falapjack – crrently gems, soon to be real packages
• http://flapjack-project.com

• Reusable passwords are dead , hard to remeber, something you know which can be shared and discovered, captured, guessed
• Alternative – One time Passwords – doesn’t matter if captured.
• examples – RSA keys, SMS based systems, Yubikey, 2 factor authentication
• Created by Yubico in sweden, open-source
• Looks like a USB keyboard to a computer, generates a 44 character OTP each time button is pressed. No batteries, 2st 23 characters fixed for each key
• $12 each in volumn – $40 as one-off
• Based on secret AES 128-bit key
• Yubicoships yubikeys with pre-generated IDs and AES keys. Offer publicauthentication, they know secret 128-bit key, need to trust them
• secret-id+sess+timestamp+session+rand+CRC  string created by key , then encrypted and public ID prepended.
• Server decrypts , checks checksums and looks to make sure secret-id matches and session and timestamps are incrimented from previous values.
• Unless you trust and always want to use Yubicom’s servers you should reprogram you keys with your own keys and IDs. Can’t then be used against Yubicom’s server.
• weaknesses – requires computer with usb port that accepts usb keyboard – some bugs with 1st generation keys – unused generated keys remian live until the next valid key is used
• You can run your own server fairly easily – ykaserver – various interfaces, postgress database for storage – can also call out to PAM for two-factor authentication
• softykey – software Yubikey – can use to generate 1-time pad for stuff without usb keyboard interfaces
• Tested with ssh, VPNs , web logins – mostly use PAM or LDAP method
• See Linux Journal and yubico.com

Jan Schmidt – Towards GStreamer 1.0

• History of dev, faster bits during hackfests, when switched to git etc
• Overview of last year, switched to git, slowdown when people busyswitched to binary registry
• Support for various DVD playback  functions, special subtitles etc.
• I’m not really in this area so I was just listening to get an idea where things are going. A bit too much detail for me at times.

• Once again this was a bit over my head. It does look like the X guys spend a lot of time fighting assumptions built into the protocol and code 10 years ago however.

• What would you change about Mysql – Modular architecture
• Some crazy legacysuff in the Mysql code – good oppertunity to clean
• move alot of code out of core, especially option parts – understandable and to reduce load – don’t load if you don’t need
• more code coverage with tests
• plugin interfaces – protocols, replication , logging, etc
• modular replication system
• general refactoring of storage engines
• “If part of API sucks then fix API rather than work around it”
• New this week – rot13() powerful encryption
• Authentication plugins – authpam , authhttp
• Various Logging plugins – loggingquery , loggingsyslog
• Drizzle Community – All contributors equally – All project information public – No contributor license agreeements – Release early and often (~2 weeks ) – 100+ contributors , 500+ on mailing list
• Milestone releases
• When production release? – waiting to solidfy compatability – Sounds like a few months. – Reliable but still in flux
• Pacakages to be pushed out to dists once things stable

The keynote was Benjamin Mako Hill talked about various things the most interesting bit was “antifeatures”. Things like DRM, crippling of products etc. The one of these I most hate right now is they way that cheap netbooks have fairly low specs (small resolutions, low RAM, slow CPUs ) partially because they have to keep the spec below a certain value in order to qualify for the really cheap Windows license.

The dreamwidth talk was quiet interesting (although the speakers pre-rehearsed banter between the speakers didn’t really work). Lots of practical examples , war stories and good sound advice.

Selena Deckelmann talked about choosing which open source database your should choose. The quick answer is “what problem are your trying to solve?”. She did a survey of the 50-odd databases out there and got 25 replies. Also did her own research and comparisons. Classified DBs into several categories (which I won’t list) such as

• General Model – Key-Value, OLTP.
• Distribution model (replication, partitioning, sharing).
• Memory vs disk (eg keegin g everything in memory only like memcached).
• HA options, Node failover.
• Code dev model – Core +modules , Monolithic , Infrastructure
• Community dev model – Dictator, Feature driven, Small group, A mix

• Databases implement each others protocols
• Need verification that protocols correctly implimented
• Need tools/test to check things like replication working
• More connections between projects/people (eg java seperate)

• Hard to make robust. Many different workloads, lots of state, very parallel
• Hard to balance getting it out with getting it stable enough to be fairly safe to use
• 75-100 persons-years for filesystem to be production ready.
• eg zfs around a dozen people , start 2001, announced 2005, shipped 2006, people confident with it around 2008-2009
• Ext4 renamed from ext4dev at end 2008
• Ext4 Shipping is some community distributions, soon in some enterprise distributions, widespread adoption 12+ months later
• Lots of bugfixes still in ext4, most not real-world and picked up by auto-tools or careful checks in weird conditions.
• Ted: “my other prefered term for Dbench is ‘random number generator’ “
• Paths like online resize, online defrag that are not regularly tested by users or testers so source of many bugs.
• Many bugs were in the recently subsystems and features
• Making General purpose file system takes longer and a lot more effort than you might expect. Labour of love, hard to justify from business perspective.
• Solid state drives with “flash translation layer” in place are fairly much the same as spinning disks. Extra optimizations for disks don’t help but they don’t hurt

• Started by listing things he’s not talked about
• The Linux community is “Like the Koreas”
• To be a member of the Linux community “you just have to care, just have to turn”
• As community we are very hostile, it’s seen okay to flame and it is being rewarded still
• Should we stop just cause it’s a nice thing to do or because it’ll stop scaring people off?
• Ubuntu code of conduct has mean’t that users are consider part of the community more than in other distributions
• Code of Conduct must be enforced or it’s useless
• “We value code above all else… not a good thing” . We need people to feel that by using software they are part of something
• Communty entirely based on technical excellence or encompasing everybody who users, cares, contributes to projects
• Idea for positive examples Wiki with pointers to COPs and best practice examples
• Not gained behavior standards normally associated with grown communities

• How different
• scaleable to 1000s , grow from a few
• reliable, HA, replicated data, fast recovery
• snapshots, quota-like accounting
• Motivation – avoid bottlenecks and symetrical shared disks
• avoid manual workload partition, p3p-like protocols, intell storage agents
• POSIX file system , scaleable metadata server
• metadata (MDS) servers/clusters and object store boxes seperate
• CRUSH hash function used to distrubtute objects across devices, works as devices are added. Spread them out explicitly across infrastructure if required
• fast (no lookups), relieable, stable
• celp object storage daemon on each node
• talks to peers on other node: rep data, detect failures, migrate data
• hashing fuction means nodes don’t have to negotiate with each other, CRUSH says where data is going.
• monitor storage nodes, moves data around, make sure it’s in the right places, uptodate. fixes if required.
• raw storage API if you don’t need full filesystem fun (dirs etc)
• proxy that emulates s3 REST interface
• metadata cluster , uses object store for all long term storage, needs memory and fast network for performance.
• metadata streamed to journal. large journal (100s MB) flushed now and then
• snapshotting on per-directory basisi via simple mkdir
• snapshot leverages btrfs copy-on-write storage layer
• file systems client near-posix
• kernel client, FUSE, Hadoop clients
• stable but not production ready
• client should be in mainline kernel soon
• aim to work in multiple datacentre, across unrelieble links
• http://ceph.newdream.net/

Not really a technical talk. More a few stories about funny inventions. Quiet amusing but I’m not sure it fits in with the rest of the conference.

The signup are at the venue was fairly quite with people being processed quickly and many having been signed up for the weekend.

First up was the Welcome talk which had a few hitches. Due to illness it was being given by and understudy who was a little unpracticed with the delivery and had a problem when the overhead screen went blank for 5 minutes due to technical problems (not sure if it was the screen or the laptop’s fault). Highlights were a 42-below ad for Wellington and everyby singing Happy Birthday to Rusty.

I spent the first couple of sessions at the Haechsen/LinuxChix Miniconf since most of the topics were interesting and for various reasons (mumble mumble) talk times between miniconfs were not sync’d so it was hard to move between them.

It looks like this year the video situation is fairly good. All Miniconfs and main sessions are both being streamed live (although in wma format which caused some comment ) and being record for later download. Hopefully It’ll all work out.

Talks I attended:

• Version control for mere mortals by Emma Jane Hogbin was a good intro to VCS and practices including a bit aimed at sysadmins and content maintainers rather than just coders. She obviously likes Bazaar a lot more than git. Goods intro and once again I feel guilty about not using it more.
• Happy Hackers == Happy Code by Sara Falamaki was an overview of what makes programmers happy. Mostly concentrating on tools but with some other bits and pieces mentioned. Great, especially the bit where Sara started throwing (often wildly) lollies to members of the audience who made good suggestions.
• Through the Looking Glass by Elizabeth Garbee gave here perspective on using open source software and the high-school level. Interesting stuff on tools, and how other teens viewed open source and programming and the scary story about how her school had a rule that any student how bought a computer to school running Linux/Unix would be expelled!
• Creating Beautiful Documentation from Lana Brindley covered some high level bits of the process redhat uses to create documentation as well as a bit of an overview of what technical writers do and why their jobs rock
• Getting you feet wet for Angela Byron gave ways and advice for getting involved with Open source projects ( including the old “woman’s work” (my, not her term)) of documentation etc. Pretty good.

• Code of our own from Liz Henry was about the first feminist orientation talk of the day. Lots of stories and advice for women in open source as well as a few bits where she gave your low opinion of how well some ideas have worked in practice.

For Lunch I wandered around a little bit an eventually found a place called “The coffee club” where I had a soy milkshake and a pesto bruschetta. Very nice.

For the last session I went to “The business of Open Source” Miniconf and then “Libra Graphics”

• The 100 mile Client Roster from Emma Jane Hogbin was an interesting overview of the way her business and business model has evolved and where she thinks the next step is. Good talk and delivery although it’s a bit outside my area for me to give a good review of the content.
• Building a service business using open source software by Cameron Beattie didn’t really appear to me. The talk was a bit flat and delivery lacked much spark.
• Cheap Gimmicks to Make your designs ‘New’ by Andy Fitzsimon from suffered a bit from technical problems with delivery but looked like there was a good talk in there somewhere that just required a bit more prep.
• Dynamic PDF reports via XSL and Inkscape by Peter Lieverdink was cool but a little over my head.
• Inkscape: My Cheerleading Adventures by Donna Benjamin was a little sparse even for a 5 minutes talk

Last up I grabbed a coffee and cake at Midnight Espresso.

Overall not a bad day, tomorrow will by Sysadmin Miniconf all day wih the Speakers Dinner in the evening.

• I’ve bought a new computer a couple of weeks ago for home. The computer is intended to replace the house server. The main functions will be as a file server and host for virtual machines. The big changes is that I’ll be switching from Xen to KVM as virtualisation technology.
• KVM + PXE + Kickstart + Ubuntu  – I really want to build my virtual machines automatically and at the same time to be using a more general machine building method . This page on the Ubuntu site looks like it is a good start and I’ll blog a bit when I get it all done.
• I need to do some work on Mondo Rescue , I have a bug I reported that is supposed to be fixed and I have to test.
• GlusterFS is a distributed network file system that looks really cool, I’m intending to play with this a bit.
• Once again we’ve applied to do a Sysadmin Miniconf at the 2010 Linux.conf.au conference. Once again we hope to have a really good miniconf. However no less that 32 miniconfs have applied for just 12 slots so not sure if we’ll get in. We were really popular last year but personally I’ve no idea what our chances are this year. Bit down about the thought of not getting but I guess whatever happens will happen.
• I keep getting good ideas for websites and products. Not programming and having poor time control means most of these ideas are probably not going anywhere. Maybe I’ll try a couple of them though. Also got some further ideas for technologies to play with but want to get the ones above sorted first.

Next I went to a talk from Mathew Wilcox on Solid state drives. It was pretty interesting although a little over my head.

Afterwards I hosted ( to the extent I stood up, wrote notes and pointed at people) a BOF for Miniconf organisers. Around a dozen people showed up including about 3/4s of this year’s miniconfs plus at least one perspective on for next year. We had a good round of discussion and I wrote up a few notes (not really for public sorry , but contact me if you have a special interest) and somehow volunteered to help setup a Miniconf Organiser’s howto document.

After lunch I went to sessions on Power management and usability. Bother excellent and giving me a chance to pick up some information in areas outside of what I normally do.

Then it was a presentation from Terri Irving at Dreamhost, she did some overview stuff about how they do things and then a little bit about how they use their internal “servicectl” tool to provision and run their services but not a lot of technical nitty gritty. She used the second part of her talk to introduce the Ceph distributed file system that one of the Dreamhost people are working on ( which is publicly released) so the talk wasn’t a total loss though.

I had a bit of a headache so I skipped the lightning talks and the wind-up and announcement for next year. As expected it’ll be in Wellington. Generally I think this should work out okay, the extra distance for Australians should be balanced by a good number of locals attending, I did hear some concern about lack of the publication of the bid documents and the fact that the Wellington organisation seems to be a “company led” rather than a “community led” . Also I am not sure if cheap accommodation is going to be available, having the college dorms like in previous years is great, lots of space, security and closeness to the other attendees at a low price. Hopefully Wellington can do something similar.

Anyway I missed all of that and had a snooze till after 7 when I got up and went into the Sandy Bay shops with a few guys. On the way we went via the party but it didn’t seem to be much fun. The drinks were “buy your own” (probably to avoid problems from previous years) and the food was of the sausage roll type ( I heard that Google was unimpressed with the food quality after having dropped a lot of $$$$ towards it).

Ended up going to a nice pizza place with 4-5 other guys and having a really nice pizza at a good cheap price (low $20s per head) . The manager even gave us some shots at the end free ( cool, although I don’t drink so just had a small one).

Next day was the the semi post-conference with the Open Day being the only real official thing happening plus a cheesy sounding “march” from Salamanca place to the Open Day ( at the Casino). I decided to skip these and went to the Salamanca market instead. I was really impressed with the whole thing, 2-300 stalls of mostly high quality with plenty to choose from, since I was flying back to NZ I couldn’t buy much food to take away but I got some nice fudge and ate at a couple of vendor stalls. Couple of galleries by other people here and here.

And apart from an uneventful trip back that was my linux.conf.au for 2009.

Overall I felt the whole event was on par with previous years, I understand they had a few speakers and attendees drop out at the last minute which was a bit unlucky and the extra travel distance probably put some off. I got them impression there were not as many locals as in previous years but I guess Hobart isn’t a big place.

The organisers seemed pretty on the ball most of the time and largely kept in the background compared to previous years. The weather was pretty good (apart from some sprinklings of rain) and not enough to extremes to cause problems. I’ll definitely be back again.

The keynote today was from Wikimedia person Angela Beesley Starling talking about various wikipedia and wikimedia stuff. I didn’t feel I learn’t a lot but I follow wikipedia a bit already so I am perhaps not a typical person. The speaker was also a little quiet.

Next was a good talk by Paul Wayper about how he contributed to the lmms ( linux multi-media studio) project with general observations and advice for both projects and potential contributors. Very interesting and useful. I liked Paul’s rendition of  the poem “How McDougal Topped the Score“.

I went to a a bit of a legal thing next on how the lawyers have problems grasping what the free software people are coming from. Interesting enough.

After lunch there was a bit of a change in the session I went to and it was split in two, the first half was on problems with the kernel API process, mainly with how new syscalls (and other kernel interfaces) are getting created and pushed out (and once the are live they are set in stone) and then people have second thoughts about if they were the best way to do things. The problem was highlighted ( and Michael Kerrisk mentioned that he would shortly be losing funding so his documenting of the calls would suffer) but solutions were missing.

The second half was a talk by OpenSUSE guy (and former journalist) Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier on publicising your project. Lots of good stuff on press releases, websites and setting priorities with a few good and bad examples.

I skipped the proper sessions next and went to a Puppet BOF. Some advice there for people implementing puppet ( which is a big item on my TODO for work this year).

Last up I went to a talk highlighting some tricks the speaker had learned from others. Interesting enough but I didn’t really pick up many I could use that I didn’t know already.

The Professional Delegates Networking Session ( pdns, not to be confused the powerdns ) was held at the Cascade Brewery’s visitors centre. Pretty nice place with lots of drinks on tap and nice food. I’ve decided I quite like the Cascade soda drinks , especially the raspberry. The main problem was the the weather got a little cold and wet ( actually it was raining) after an hour so almost everybody was crowded inside rather than being spread out. I thus found it a bit noisy and crowded so I perhaps didn’t enjoy it as much, however nothing much you can do about the weather.

The first talk I went to was on remotely managing ( across a 3G phone) a series of computers that were in a remote rural area. Really interesting, detailed and a great presentation from Thomas Sprinkmeier. Although he was a bit cagey on the purpose of the whole thing.

James Turnbull’s puppet talk was well attended and pretty good.

The Django tutorial was good although a bit over my head ( and I was feeling a little sleepy), the presenter answered a question I had though and provided a bit of insight on why a feature I was after wasn’t directly supported.

The kernel development talk from Jonathan Corbet was good. It both aimed to help potential developers get involved ( especially those from vendors ) and provided some insight for those generally interested. Comments from Linux during the talk were great as well.

I was really disappointed at the talk by Sarah Stokey and Jeff Waugh on the Crikey website and blogs. I have a rule of thumb that says if you spend more than a minute talking about your organisation (unless that is the point of the talk) then you are in trouble. However at least half the talk was on the history of the site, bios of the columnists/bloggers ( one after the other) and bits about how they got sued by such-and-such. This stuff was a total waste of the audience’s time, and nothing like what was promised in the topic description. I work on a media site and I was hoping for some actual nitty-gritty on the project, how they got some buy-in and the problems they encountered. Jeff did do a bit of this (after he spent 5 minutes making faces at the camera) and also broadly did some basic technical stuff about wordpress but I really wonder if a good talk missed out when this one was let in.

Zach has already documented the auction at the conference dinner, I’d like to add that I thought the dinner was quite nice. The food was great and overall pretty well organised.

The first talk was by Matt Moore on how he scaled a hosting solution for a charity ( $20 of donations over 6 weeks ) website and ensured ( in the face of some big problems and not huge budget ) reliability of the site ( where outages cost $1000 per minute during peak ).

Next there were a couple to IPv6 talks from Glen Turner and Angus Lees. Angus’ talk covered how he and a couple of other people were working towards getting a AAAA record for www.google.com . They have spent the last year or so working towards it. The most interesting bit was they were doing survey ( using a web-bug on 1/1000 user ) to see how many users of google could access a URL that had both a A and AAAA record. His stats found that when both records were presented 0.238% of users used the AAAA URL and 0.09% broke. The 0.238% was increasing during the period when he tested ( late 2008 ). He also found that access ( ie route path optimisation ) was around 150ms worse than the ipv4 path. Overall he seemed to think google could go live with ipv6 records in 1-2 years.

Glen’s talk was a bit more general with some intro to ipv6 and the way ipv4 addresses were running out. But he also addressed the concerns that in 3-5 years when ipv4 address run out ipv6 won’t be ready and ISPs will start implementing NAT solutions which will break the end-to-end connectivity of the Internet. He also thought that large access providers would try and use this to try and extract a greater control and share of the revenue from the Internet ( ie not just access but a share of the profits from the end sites in return for proving eyeballs).

After Lunch Devdas Bhagat covered database backed authoritative DNS servers. His company hosts a high number of domains and needs very high performance. He did a good comparison and work though of how they tried bind and eventually moved the PowerDNS ( pdns) . They paid a developer to enhance some of the paths in the system and that latest releases ( a RC with pdns although Devdas has been running it for months ) get some 40,000 q/s on standard hardware ( which exceeds the gold standard commercial product from nominum ( do do do do do ) ).

Steve Ellis then covered trac with some concentration on using trac ( and similar solutions ) better to tie in documentation, tickets and workflow better rather than just keeping them all separate.

The Lightning talks covered ( SAGE-AU , Time management, DKIM , Computer Room disaster stories and a quick plug from a linux based router vendor ). I especially liked the DKIM intro presentation which reminded me of the old format people used to sign Usenet Control messages.

The session covered Spam, Roland Turner from Boxsentry covered the product his company uses to reduce false positives. He also announced that his company was allowing people to freely talk to his companies system ( probably via a spamassian plugin ) up to 100,000 queries/day. See http://rex-tools.sf.net .

Peter Chubb then did some general spam filtering advice.

Last up we had a BOF talking about what software and hardware people were using on their site. A good chance for people to catch the names of tools others were using and ideas for what they could look at. One thing I was interested in was that only around 5 out of the people in the room were actually using puppet on their site.

Breakfast was a fairly common dinning hall setup and I walked down the hill to our venue. The Sysadmin Miniconf is in a 200-odd seat lecture theatre right next to the registration desk. We are  getting recorded so hopefully video’s of most talks will be available at some point. About the only problem with was that there was only a hand-held microphones available so we have problems when ( for instance ) people were trying to type and talk at the same time.

First talk was by Andew Bartlett on the directory ( as opposed to file ) service in Samba 4. He gave a basic overview followed by a lot of questions.

Rickard Keech then gave an overview on how he provisioned servers. It was a little different since it was a CD based method ( since many of his customers were fairly small and not well network connected). He is automatically building the kickstart files and testing and rebuilding them to ensure that the server is in sync with it’s deployed version ( much like maintaining a source tree and compiling it into a kickstart iso).

Several other presenters pointed out how sysadmin practice is 20 years behind programming ( no version control, testing, libraries, development environments etc).

Similarly Dedvas Bhgat talked on how his team was able to use configuration management ( puppet) to hugely reduce the load ( and stress ) on his team and to improve service. He is using puppet to look at ~300 servers.

The next two talk were a bit over my head. The first discussed a new snapshot implimentation which was much more efficient that the previous one while the second ( which was in the miniconf section ) demonstrated adding modules on a Xen server which was able to probe running Xen Child machine ( the extra shown was spotting signals being sent to the apache process but it looks like just about anything is available).

The lightning talks were next. Devdas talked about programming practices while I did my Mondorescue and PXE talk.

After lunch there was a talk about the setup (and large amounts of data and processing) at the NIWA ( New Zealand weather research agency )  and a talk on Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). I found PCP quite interesting, it seemed to be a fairly simple was to get date and states out of a server and access them ( realtime or later) for graphing, alarming etc.

Robert Postill then gave a talk on deploying Ruby on Rails with lots of experience and advice. Pretty good and applicable for similar systems like Django.

Last up there was an intro to Redhat Satellite and RHN.

For dinner we organised a little Sysadmin thing at the Bay Leaf Bistro on Sandy Bay Road. The place was really great, food was simple and great ( suburban ) while the service was excellent. They had a great system for taking orders and doing individual bills and overall were really friendly. Best restaurant experience I’ve had in ages.

During and after dinner I was chatting to various people so didn’t get to bed till a bit late. I probably need to get to bed earlier in the week or I’ll be tired out.

The university accommodation is right at the top of the hill so but the rooms that about 2/3s of the people are in are pretty nice. They are 6 bedrooms with 2 toilets and a large common are ( kitchen, stoves, fridge, freezer, lounge and TV). It all feels only a few years only ( lots of pwer points for example).

After getting some problems sorted out with room access and finally geting my missing bag from Qantas ( and have a change and a shave) around 10 of us wandered over to the Sandy bay shops for dinner. We split up and 5 of us had some Indian curry (okay but a little expensive) and then headed back via the supermarket.

Looking at tomorrow I’ll be at the Sysadmin Miniconf pretty much all day. I have a lightning talk to deliver (some more practice tonight) there and the programme to organise. I’ll have a quick look at the other miniconfs and see if there is one I’m really keen on I can sneak away but probably not many.

Dinner will be the Sysadmin dinner which will be at a little place we’ll book tomorrow. Over things are looking pretty promising for LCA and organisation seems to be reasonable.