Author: simon

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.

Today was my first full day in Hobart. After a good night’s sleep I went into town with a couple of
people to get some breakfast. Had a nice eggs benedict at a pub/cafe down by the waterfront in the  middle of town and then a couple of us walked back to the motel and caught a taxi up to venue.

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.

I’ll be at linux.conf.au all next week and I’m planning to update my blog a few times. The problem is that I’ll be on a wireless connection so prone to people sniffing my passwords.

So I thought I’d see if I could get https going on my server. A quick google found a page on generating self signed certificites and another on lighttpd as a ssl proxy so with a bit of tweaking:

#### SSL engine
$SERVER["socket"] == "64.62.228.123:443" {
                  ssl.engine                  = "enable"
                  ssl.pemfile                 = "/etc/lighttpd/server.pem"
                  server.name                 = "blog.darkmere.gen.nz"

                  proxy.server = (

                       "" => ( ( "host" => "64.62.228.123", "port" => 80 ) )
                   )

}

Which work well enough for me to post this article via. Obviously self-signed certifcates are not the best sort of thing for public sites but in my case I just have to make sure I get my browser to trust the cert before I leave and from then on I can be pretty sure I’m connecting to the right site and nobody is sniffing my traffic.

This evening I’ve been doing the slides for my lightning talk next week. Everything is turning into a bit of a rush since I leave early Saturday morning. But I think I should be okay.

Just had my last weekend in NZ before Linux.conf.au 2009 . I’m flying over this coming Saturday and back the Saturday following. So this weekend I’ve cut down a bit on other stuff and been prioritizing LCA.

I sent sent out a call for lightning talks to the LCA attendees list. So far we’ve got 3 confirmed lightning talks for the Sysadmin Miniconf and with a 1 hour slot on each day we have plenty of space for more. I hoping that a few first-time presenters will do quick talks about things like how they deploy apache or which monitoring system they use. Sometimes it’s very hard to get a feel for what other people are doing and a 5 minute talk on a simple tool can really help a lot of people.

Towards that I volunteered to do a 10 minutes (approx) talk on mondorescuse and PXE based on some stuff I’m doing at work and a previous blog post . My main bit last night and today was getting some screenshots of mondorescue and doing a little testing of stuff I didn’t cover at work.

I did my own screenshots since I couldn’t find any under a nice license ( I’ll release mine under Public Domain ) and the ones at work using VMWare client under Windows XP didn’t look right. To get mine I just ended up using KVM on my desktop and the built-in gnome-screenshot program.

A couple of interesting links:

• Edge.org’s “World Question Centre” asks a wide range of destingished people (mainly scientists) : “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” .
• Stewart Brand has posted the BBC TV series based his book “How Buildings Learn” to Google Video. This is one of my favorite books and I remember seeing the series at 2am several years ago. I’ve keeping keeping an eye on the p2p networks for a while now looking for it without success.

I’ve just posted the programme for the linux.conf.au 2009 Sysadmin Miniconf !

This year we were allocated 2 days by the programme committee so we have 15 full length talks by some great speakers on a wide variety of topics. Have a look for yourself to see which ones you are interested in.

I’ve not yet updated the lightning talks but we have a few already and are still looking for more, so contact lca09 @ sysadmin.miniconf.org is you are interested in presenting.