So after all the preliminaries it was finally time for the actual Linux.conf.au conference.
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.
