Simon Lyall's Blog

Handle Conflict, Like a Boss! – Deb Nicholson

• Conflict is natural
• “When they had no outfit for their conflict they turned into Reavers and ate people and stuff”
• People get caught up in their area not the overall goal for their organisation
• People associate with a role, don’t like when it gets changed or eliminated
• Need to go deep, people don’t actually tell you the problem straight away
• If things get too bad, then go to another project
• Identify the causes of conflict
• 3 Styles of handling conflict
  • Avoidance
    • Can let things fester
    • They come across as unconnected
    • Looks like support for the status quo
  • Accommodation
    • Compromise on everything
    • Looks like not taking seriously
  • Assertion
    • Going to wear down everyone else
    • People won’t tell you when things are wrong
• Going a little deeper
  • People don’t understand history (and why things are weird)
    • go to historical motivations and get buy-in for the strategy that reflects the new reality
  • People are acting to motivations you don’t see
    • Ask about the other persons motivations
  • Fear (often of change)
    • “What is the worse that could happen?”
  • Right Place, wrong time
    • Stuff is going to the wrong person or group
  • Help everyone get perspective
    • Don’t do the same forum, method, people all the time if it always has conflict.
• What do you do with the Info
  • Put yourself in other persons shoes
  • Find alignment
  • A Word about who is doing this conflict resolution
    • Shouldn’t be just a single person/role
    • Or only women
    • Should be everyone/anyone
    • But if it is within a big or then maybe hire someone
• Planning for future conflicts
  • Assuming the best
  • No ad hominem (hard to go back)
• Conflict resolution between groups
  • What could we accomplish if we worked together
  • Doesn’t look good to outsiders
  • More Face-to-Face between projects (towards a common goal)

 

Open Compute Project Down Under – Andrew Ruthven

• What is Open Compute
  • Vanity free Computing ( remove pretty bits )
  • Stripped Down – we don’t need, no video, minimum extra posts)
  • Efficient and easy
    • Maintenance, Air flow, Electricity
  • Came out of Facebook, now a foundation
  • 1/10th the number of techs/server
• Projects and Technologies
  • 9 main areas, over 4000 people working on it.
  • Design and Specs
• Recent Hardware
  • Some comes in 19″ racks
  • HPE, Microsoft Project Olympus
• In Aus / NZ
  • Telstra – 2 rack of OCP Decathleon, Open Networking using Hyper Scalers
  • Rackspace
  • Large Gaming site
  • Catalyst IT
• Why OCP for Catalyst
  • Very Open source software orientated company
  • Have a Cloud Operation
  • Looking at for a while
  • Finally ordered first unit in 2016 (Winterfell)
  • Cumulus Linux switches from Penguin computing, works of 12volt in Open Rack
• Issues for Aus / Nz
  • Very small scale, sometimes to small for vendors
  • Supply chain hard, ended up using an existing integrator
  • Hyper Scalers in Aus, will ship to NZ
  • Number of comapnies seee to NZ
• Lessons
  • Scale is an issue for failures aswell as supply
  • Have >1 power shelf
  • Have at least 2 racks with 4 power sheleves
  • Too small for vendors to get certification
  • Trust in new hardware
• Your Own deployment
  • Green field DC
    • Use DC Designs
    • Allow for 48U racks (2.5 metres tall)
    • 2x or 4x 3-phase circuits per rack
  • Existing DCs
    • Consider modifications
    • 19″ servers options
    • 48OU Open rack if you have enough height
    • 22OU is you don’t have enough height
    • Carefully check the specs
  • Open Networking
    • Run collectd etc directly on your switch
  • Supply Chain
  • Community Support
    • OCP has a Aus/NZ Mailing list (ocp-anz)
    • Discussion on what is a priority across Aus and NZ

400,000 ephemeral containers: testing entire ecosystems with Docker – Daniel Axtens

• A pretty interesting talk. It was largely a demo so I didn’t grab many notes

Community Building Beyond the Black Stump – Josh Simmons

• How to build communities when you don’t live in a big city
• Whats in a meetup?
• Santa Rosa County, north of San Franscisco
  • Not easy to get to SF
  • SF meetups not always relevant
• After meeting with one other person, created “North Bay web Professionals”, minimal existing groups
• Multidisciplinary community worked better
  • Designers, Marketers, Web Devs, writers, etc
  • Hired each other
  • Seemed to work better, fewer toxic dynamics
  • Safe space for beginners
• 23 People at first event (worked hard to tell people)
  • Told everyone that we knew even if not interested
  • Contacted the competitors
  • Contacting firms, schools
  • Co-working spaces (formal of de-facto like cafes)
  • Other meetup groups, even in unrelated areas.
• Adapting to the needs of the community
  • You might have a vision
  • But you must adapt to who turns up and what they want/need
• First meeting
  • Asked people to bring food
  • Fluffy start time so could greet people and mingle
  • Went round room and got people to introduce themselves
    • Intro ended up being a thing they always did
    • Helped people remember names
    • Got everyone to say a little
    • put people in a social mindset
  • Framework for events decided
  • Decided on next meeting date, some prep
  • Ended up going late
    • Format became. Social -> talk -> Social on each night.
• Tools
  • Used facebook and meetup
  • 1/3 of people came just from meetup promoting automatically
  • Go where people already are
• Renamed from “North Bay Web professions” to “North Bay Web and Interactive Media professionals”
• “Ask a person, not a search engine”
• Hosted over 169 events – Core was the monthly meeting
  • Tried to keep the topics a little broad
  • Often the talk was narrow but compensated with a broad Q&A afterwards
• Thinking of people as “members” not “attendees” , have to work at getting them come back
• Also hosted
  • Lunches, rotated all around the region so eventually near everywhere, Casual
  • Unconfernces
  • Topical meetups
  • Charity Hackathon, teamed up with students and non-profits to do website for non-profit. Student was an apprentice.
  • Hosted Ag+Tech mixers with local farmers groups
  • Helped local cities put out tech RFPs
• Q: Success measures? A: Survey of member, things like Job referrals, what have learnt

 

 

Servo Architecture: Safety and Performance – Jack Moffitt

• History
  • 1994 Netscape Navigator
  • 2002 Mozilla Release
  • 2008 multi-core CPU stuff not making firefox faster
  • 2016 CPUs now have on-chip GPUs
  • Very hard to write multi-threaded C++ to allow mozilla to take advantage of many cores
• How to make Servo Faster?
• Constellation
  • In the past – Monolithic browser engines
    • Single browser engine handling multiple tabs
    • Two processes – Pool Content processes vs Chrome process
      • If one process dies on a page doesn’t take out whole browser
    • Sanboxing lets webpage copies have less privs
  • Threads
    • Less overhead than whole processes
    • Thread per page
    • More responsive
    • Sandboxing
    • More robust to failure
  • Is this the best we can do?
    • Run Javascript and layout simultaniously
    • Pipeline splitting them up
    • Child pipelines for inner iframes (eg ads)
• Constellation
  • Rust can fail better
  • Most failures stop at thread boundaries
  • Still do sandbox and privledges
  • Option to still have some tabs in multiple processes
• Webrender
  • Using the GPU
    • Frees up main CPU
    • Are VERY fast at some stuff
    • Easiest place to start is rendering
  • Don’t browsers already use the GPU?
    • Only in a limited way for compositing
  • Key ideas
    • Retain mode not immediate mode (put things in optimal order first)
    • Designed to render CSS content (CSS is actually pretty simple)
    • Draw the whole frame every frame (things are fast enough, simpler to not try to optimise)
  • Pipeline
    • Chop screen into 256×256 tiles
    • Tile assignment
    • Create a big tree
    • merge and assign render targets
    • create and execute batches
  • Text
    • Rasterize on CPU and upload glyth to GPU
    • Paste and shadow usign the GPU
• Project Quantum
  •  Taking technology we made in servo and put it in gecko
• Research in progress
  • Pathfinder – GPU font rasterizer – Now faster than everything else
  • Magic DOM
    • Wins in JS/DOM intergration
    • Fusing reflectors and DOM objects
    • Self hosted JS
  • External colaborations: ML, Power Mngt, WebBluetooth, etc
• Get involved
  • Test nightlies
  • Curated bugs for new contributors
  • servo.org

In Case of Emergency: Break Glass – BCP, DRP, & Digital Legacy – David Bell

• Definitions
  • BCP = Business continuity Plan
  • A process to prevent and recover from business continuity plans
  • BIP = Business interuptions plan
  • BRP = Recovery plan
  • RPO = Recovery point objective, targetted recovery point (when you last backed up)
  • RTO = Recovery time objective
• Why?
  • Because things will go wrong
  • Because things should not go even more wrong
• Create your BCP
  • Brainstorm
  • Identify events that may interrupt, loss access to physical site, loss of staff
  • Backups
    • 3 copies
    • 2 different media/formats
    • 1 offsite and online
    • Check how long it will take to download or fetch
  • Test
  • Who has the Authority
  • Communication chains, phone trees, contact details
  • Practice Early, Practice often
    • Real-world scenarios
    • Measure, measure, measure
    • Record your results
    • Convert your into an action item
    • Have different people on the tests
  • Each Biz Unit or team should have their own BCP
  • Recovery can be expensive, make sure you know what your insurance will cover
• Breaking the Glass
  • Documentation is the Key
  • Secure credentials super important
  • Shamir secret sharing, need number of people to re-create the share
• Digital Legacy
  • Do the same for your personal data
  • Document
    • Credentials
    • Services
      • What uses them
      • billing arrangments
      • Credentials
    • What are your wishes for the above.
  • Talk to your family and friends
  • Backups
  • Document backups and backup your documentation
  • Secret sharing, offer to do the same for your friends
• Other / Questions
  • Think about 2-Facter devices
  • Google and some others companies can setup “Next of Kin” contacts

 

 

Designing for failure: On the decommissioning of Persona

• Worked for Mozilla on Persona
• Persona did authentication on the web
  • You would go to a website
  • Type in your email address
  • Redirects via login page by your email provider
  • You login and redirect back
• Started centralised, designed to be uncentralised as it is taken up
• Some sites were only offering login via social media
  • Some didn’t offer traditional logins for emails or local usernames
  • Imposes 3rd party between you and your user.
  • Those 3rd parties have their own rules, eg real name requirements
• Persona Failed
  • Traditional logins now more common
• Cave Diving
  • Equipment and procedures designed to let you still survive if something fails
  • Training review deaths and determines how can be prevented
  • “5 rules of accident analysis” for cave diving
• Three weeks ago switched off Persona
  • Encourage others to share mistakes

 

• Just having a free license is not enough to succeed
• Had a built in centralisation point
  • Protocol designed so browser could eventually natively implement but initially login.persona.com was using it.
  • Relay between provider and website went via Mozilla until browser natively implemented
  • No ability to fork the project
• Bits rot more quickly online
  • Stuff that is online must be continually maintain (especially security)
  • Need a way to have software maintained without experts
• Complexity Limits agency
  • Limits who can run project at all
  • Lots of work for those people who can run it
• A free license don’t further my feeedom if we can’t run the software

 

• Prolong Your Project’s Life
• Bad ideas
  • We used popups and people reflexively closed them
  • API wasn’t great
• Didn’t measure the right thing
  • Is persona product or infrastructure?
  • Treated like a product, not a good fit
• Explicitly define and communicate your scope
  • “Solves authentication” or “Authenticate email addresses”
  • Broke some sites
  • Got used by FireFoxOS which was not a good fit
• Ruthlessly oppose complexity
  • Tried to do too much mean’t it was overly complex
  • Complex hard to maintain and review and grow
  • Hard for newbies to join
  • If it is complex then it is hard to even test that is is working as expected
  • Focus and simplify
  • Almost no outside contributors, especially bad when mozilla dropped it.

 

• Plan for Your Projects Failure
• “Sometimes that [bus failure] is just a commuter bus that picks up that person and takes them to another job”
• If you know you are dead say it
  • 3 years after we pulled people off project till officially killed
  • Might work for local software but services cost money to run
  • Sooner you admit you are dead the sooner people can plan to your departure
• Ensure your users can recover without your involvement
  • Hard to do when you think your project is going to save the world
  • Example firefox sync has a copy of the data locally so even if it dies user will survive
• Use standard data formats
  • eg OPML for RSS providers
• Minimise the harm caused when your project goes away

 

The Internet of Scary Things – tips to deploy and manage IoT safely Christopher Biggs

• What you need to know about the Toaster Apocalypse
• Late 2016 brought to prominence when major sites hit by DDOS from compromised devices
• Risks present of grabbing images
  • Targeted intrusion
  • Indiscriminate harvesting of images
  • Drive-by pervs
  • State actors
• Unorthorized control
  • Hit traffic lights, doorbells
• Takeover of entire devices
  • Used for DDOS
  • Demanding payment for the owner to get control of them back.
• “The firewall doesn’t divide the scary Internet from the safe LAN, the monsters are in the room”

 

• Poor Security
  • Mostly just lazyness and bad practices
  • Hard for end-users to configure (especially non-techies)
  • Similar to how servers and Internet software, PCs were 20 years ago
• Low Interop
  • Everyone uses own cloud services
  • Only just started getting common protocols and stds
• Limited Maint
  • No support, no updates, no patches
• Security is Hard
• Laziness
  • Threat service is too large
  • Telnet is too easy for devs
  • Most things don’t need full Linux installs
• No incentives
  • Owner might not even notice if compromised
  • No incentive for vendors to make them better

 

• Examples
  • Cameras with telenet open, default passwords (that can not be changed)
  • exe to access
  • Send UDP to enable a telnet port
  • Bad Mobile apps

 

• Selecting a device
  • Accept you will get bad ones, will have to return
  • Scan your own network, you might not know something is even wifi enabled
  • Port scan devices
  • Stick with the “Big 3” ramework ( Apple, Google, Amazon )
  • Make sure it supports open protocols (indicates serious vendor)
  • Check if open source firmward or clients exists
  • Check for reviews (especially nagative) or teardowns

 

• Defensive arch
  • Put on it’s own network
  • Turn off or block uPNP opening firewall holes
  • Plan for breaches
    • Firewall rules, rate limited, recheck now and then
  • BYO cloud (dont use the vendor cloud)
    • HomeBridge
    • Node-RED (Alexa)
    • Zoneminder, Motion for cameras

• Advice for devs
  • Apple HomeKit (or at least support for Homebridge for less commercial)
  • Amazon Alexa and AWS IoT
    • Protocols open but look nice
  • UCF uPnP and SNP profiles
    • Device discovery and self discovery
    • Ref implimentations availabel
  • NoApp setup as an alternative
    • Have an API
  • Support MQTT
  • Long Term support
    • Put copy of docs in device
    • Decide up from what and how long you will support and be up front
  • Limit what you put on the device
    • Don’t just ship a Unix PC
    • Take out debug stuff when you ship

 

• Trends
  • Standards
    • BITAG
    • Open Connectivity founddation
    • Regulation?
  • Google Internet of things
  • Apple HomeHit
  • Amazon Alexa
    • Worry about privacy
  • Open Connectivity Foundation – IoTivity
  • Resin.io
    • Open source etc
    • Linux and Docket based
  • Consumer IDS – FingBox
• Missing
  • Network access policy framework shipped
  • Initial network authentication
  • Vulnerbility alerting
  • Patch distribution

Rage Against the Ghost in the Machine – Lilly Ryan

• What is a Ghost?
  • The split between the mind and the body (dualism)
  • The thing that makes you you, seperate to the meat of your body
• Privacy
  • Privacy for information not physcial
  • The mind has been a private place
  • eg “you might have thought about robbing a bank”
  • The thoughts we express are what what is public.
  • Always been private since we never had technology to get in there
  • Companies and governments can look into your mind via things like your google queries
  • We can emulate the inner person not just the outer expression
• How to Summon a Ghost
  • Digital re-creation of a person by a bot or another machine
  • Take information that post online
  • Likes on facebook, length of time between clicks
• Ecto-meta-data
  • Take meta data and create something like you that interacts
• The Smartphone
  • Collects meta-data that doesn’t get posted publicly
  • deleted documents
  • editing of stuff
  • search history
  • patten of jumping between apps
• The Public meta-data that you don’t explicitly publish
  • Future could emulate you sum of oyu public bahavour
• What do we do with a ghost?
  • Create chatbots or online profiles that emulate a person
  • Talk to a Ghost of yourself
  • Put a Ghost to work. They 3rd party owns the data
  • Customer service bot, PA
  • Chris Helmsworth could be your PA
  • Money will go to facebook or Google
• Less legal stuff
  • Information can leak from big companies
• How to Banish a Ghost
  • Option to donating to the future
  • currently no regulation or code of conduct
  • Restrict data you send out
    • Don’t use the Internet
    • Be anonymous
    • Hard to do when cookies match you across many sites
      • You can install cookie blocker
  • Which networks you connect to
    • eg list of Wifi networks match you with places and people
    • Mobile network streams location data
    • location data reveals not just where you go but what stores, houses or people you are near
    • Turn off wifi, bluetooth or data when you are not using. Use VPNs
  • Law
    • Lobby and push politicians
    • Push back on comapnies
  • For technologiest
    • Collect the minimum, not the maximum

FreeIPA project update (turbo talk) – Fraser Tweedale

• Central Identity manager
• Ldap + Kerberos, CA, DNS, admin tools, client. Hooks into AD
• NAnage via web or client
• Client SSSD. Used by various distros
• What is in the next release
  • Sub-CAs
  • Can require 2FA for important serices
  • KDC Proxy
  • Network bound encryption. ie Needs to talk to local server to unencrypt a disk
  • User Session recording

 

Politely socially engineering IRL using sneaky magician techniques – Alexander Hogue

• Puttign things up your sleeve is actually hard
• Minimum viable magic
• Miss-direct the eyes
• Eyes only move in a straight line
• Exploit pattern recognition
• Exploit the spot light
• Your attention is a resource

Stephen King’s practical advice for tech writers – Rikki Endsley

• Example What and Whys
  • Blog post, press release, talk to managers, tell devs the process
  • 3 types of readers: Lay, Managerial, Experts
• Resources:
  • Press: The care and Feeding of the Press – Esther Schindler
  • Documentation: RTFM? How to write a manual worth reading

 

• “On Writing: A memoir of the craft” by Stephen King

• Good writing requires reading
  • You need to read what others in your area or topic or competition are writing
• Be clear on Expectations
  • See examples
  • Howto Articles by others
  • Writing an Excellent Post-Event Wrap Up report by Leslie Hawthorn
• Writing for the Expert Audience
  • New Process for acceptance of new modules in Extras – Greg DeKoenigserg (Ansible)
  • vs Ansible Extras Modules + You – Robyn Bergeon
    • Defines audience in the intro

 

• Invite the reader in
• Opening Line should Invite the reader to begin the story
• Put in an explitit outline at the start

 

• Tell a story
• That is the object of the exercise
• Don’t do other stuff

 

• Leave out the boring parts
• Just provides links to the details
• But sometimes if people not experts you need to provide more detail

 

• Sample outline
  • Intro (invite reader in)
  • Brief background
  • Share the news (explain solution)
  • Conclude (include important dates)

 

• Sample Outline: Technical articles
• Include a “get technical” section after the news.
• Too much stuff to copy all down, see slides

 

• To edit is divine
• Come back and look at it afterwards
• Get somebody who will be honest to do this

 

• Write for OpenSource.com
• opensource.com/story

 

• Q: How do you deal with skimmers?   A: Structure, headers
• Q: Pet Peeves?  A: Strong intro, People using “very” or “some” , Leaving out import stuff

 

 

Fishbowl discussion – GPL compliance Karen M. Sandler

• Fishbowl format
  • 5 seats at front of the room, 4 must be occupied
  • If person has something to say they come up and sit in spare chair, then one existing person must sit down.
• Topics
  • Conflicts of Law
  • Mixing licences
  • Implied warrenty
  • Corporate Procedures and application
  • Get knowledge of free licences into the law school curriculum
• “Being the Open Source guy at Oracle has always been fun”
• “Our large company has spent 2000 hours with a young company trying to fix things up because their license is not GPL compliant”
• BlackDuck is a commercial company will review your company’s code looking for GPL violations. Some others too
  • “Not a perfect magical tool by any sketch”
  • Fossology is alternative open tool
  • Whole business model around license compliance, mixed in with security
  • Some of these companies are Kinda Ambulance chasers
  • “Don’t let those companies tell you how to tun your business”
  • “Compliance industry complex” , “Compliance racket”
• At my employer with have a tool that just greps for a “GPL” license in code, better than nothing.
• Lots of fear in this area over Open-source compliance lawsuits
  • Disagreements in community if this should be a good idea
  • More, Less, None?
  • “As a Lawyer I think there should definitely be more lawsuits”
  • “A lot of large organisations will ignore anything less than [a lawsuit] “
  • “Even today I deal with organisations who reference the SCO period and fear widespread lawsuits”
• Have Lawsuits chilled adoption?
  • Yes
  • Chilled adoption of free software vs GPL software
  • “Android has a policy of no GPL in userspace” , “they would replace the kernel if they could”
  • “Busybox lawsuits were used as a club to get specs so the kernel devs could create drivers” , this is not really applicable outside the kernel
  • “My goal in doing enforcement was to ensure somebody with a busybox device could compile it”
  • “Lawyers hate any license that prevents them getting future work”
  • “The amount of GPL violations skyrocketed with embedded devices shipping with Linux and GPL software”
• People are working on a freer (eg “Not GPL”) embeded stack to replace Android userspace: Toybox, Toolbox, No kernel replacement yet.
• Employees and Compliance
  • Large company helping out with charities systems unable to put AGPL software from that company on their laptops
  • “Contributing software upstream makes you look good and makes your company look good” , Encourages others and you can use their contributions
  • Work you do on your volunteer days at company do not fill under software assignment policy etc, but they still can’t install random stuff on their machines.
• Website’s often are not GPL compliance, heavy restrictions, users giving up their licenses.
• “Send your lawyers a video of another person in a suit talking about that topic”

U 2 can U2F Rob N ★

• Existing devices are not terribly but better than nothing, usability sucks
• Universal Two-Factor
  • Open Standard by FIDO alliance
  • USB, NFC, Bluetooth
  • Multiple server and host implimentations
  • One device multi-sites
  • Cloning protection
• Interesting Examples
  • U2F Zero – u2fzero.com
  • Tomu – tomu.in – Not 100% there yet
• User experience: Login, press the button twice.
• Under the hood a lot more complicated
  • Challenge from site, send must sign challenge (including website  url to prevent phishing site proxying)
  • Multiple keypairs for each website on device
  • Has a login counter on the device included in signature, so server can panic then counter gets out of sync from a cloned device
• Attestation Certificate
  • Shared across model or production batch
• Browserland
  • Javascript
  • Chrome-based support are good
  • Firefox via extension (Native “real soon now”)
  • Mobile works on Android + Chrome + Google Authenticator

BTW: Conference Streams are online at linux.conf.au/stream

The Future of Humans – Pia Waugh

At a tipping point, we can’t reinvent everything or just do the past with shinny new things.

Started as a Sysadmin, helped her see things as Systems

Trying to make active choices about the future we want,

• Started building tools, knowledge spread slowly
• Created cities, people could specialise, knowledge faster
• Surplus created, much went to rulers, sometimes rulers overthrown, but hierarchy started the same
• More recently the surplus has got given to people
• Last 250 years, people have seen themselves as having power, change their future, not just be a peasant.
• As resources have increased power and resources have been distributed more widely
• This has kept expanding, – overthrown you boss at work
• We are on the cusp on a massive skyrocket in quality of live

 

• Citizens have powers now that we previously centralized
• We are now in a time of suplus not scaricity
• Small groups and individual can now disrupt a country, industry or company
• We made up all of our society, we can make it again to reflect the present not what was needed in the past.
• Choose our own adventure or let others choose it for us. We have the option now that we didn’t previously
• Most people’s eyes glaze over when they here that.
• “You can’t do that” say many people when they find out what software can do.
• People switch off their creativity when they come to work.

How Could the World be better

• Property
  • 3D printing could print organs, food, just about anything
  • Why are we protecting business models that are already out of date (eg copyright) when we couple use them to eliminated scarcity
• Work and Jobs
  • Everybody is scared about technology taking jobs
  • What do we care about the lose of jobs
  • Why is the value of a person defined by a full-time jobs?
• Transhumanism
  • tatoos, peicing have been around forever
  • Obsession with the human “normal” , is this a recent thing from the media?
  • Society encourages people towards the Norm
  • Internet has demonstrated that not everybody is normal – Rule 34
  • “If you lose a leg, instead of getting a replacement leg, whey not have seven legs?”
  • Anyone who doesn’t make our definition of Normal is seen as something less even if they have amazing abilities
• Spaceships
  • Still takes a day to get around the planet
  • If we are going to set up new worlds how are they going to run?
• Global Citizenship
  • People are seen though the lens of their national citizenship
  • Governments are not the only representative of our rights

 

• “How can we build a better world? Luckily we have git”
• We have the power and knowledge to do things, but not all people do
• If you are as powerful as the tools you use, where does that leave people who can’t use computers or program?

 

• Systemic Change
  • What doesn’t you Doctor say about “scratching your itch” ?
  • Example: “diversity” , how do we deal with the problems that led us to not having it.
• Who are you building for? Not building for?
• What is the default position in society? Is it to no get knowledge, power?
• What does human mean to you
• Waht do we value
• What assumptions and bias do you have?
• How are you helping non-geeks help themselves
• What future do you want to see?

 

• How are Systems changing? How do out policies, assumptions laws reflect the older way?
  • Scarcity -> Surplus
  • Close -> Open
  • Centralise -> Distributed
  • Belief -> Rationalism
  • Win/Lose -> Cooperative competitive
  • Nationalism -> World Citizen
  • Normative Human -> Formative Human
• I believe the Open Source Culture is a good model for society
• But in Inventing the future we have to be careful not to drag the legacy systems and values from the past.

Turtles all the way down – Thin LVM + KVM tips and Tricks – Steven Ellis

• ssd -> partition -> encryption -> LVM -> [..] -> filesystem
• Lots of examples see the online Slides
• https://github.com/steven-ellis/ansible-playpen

Samba and the road to 100,000 user – Andrew Bartlett

• Release cycle is every 6 months
• Samba 4.0 is 4 years p;d
• 4.2 and older are out of security support by Samba team (support by distros sometimes)
• Much faster adding users to AD DC. 55k users added in 50 minutes
• Performance issues, not bugs, are now the biggest area of work
  • Customer deploying SAMBA at scale
• Looking for Volunteers running AD will to run a tshark script
  • What does your busy hour look like?
  • What is the pattern of requests?

The School for Sysadmins Who Can’t Timesync Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too – Paul Gear

• Aim is 1-10ms accuracy
• Using Standard Linux reference distribution etc
• Why care
  • Same apps need time sync
  • Log matching
• Network Time Foundation needs support
• NTP
  • Not widely understood
  • Unglamorous
  • Daunting documentation
  • old protocol, chequered secrity history
  • The first Google result may not be accurate
• Set clock
  • step – jump clock to new time
  • slew – gradually adjust the time
• NTP Assumption
  • The is one true time – UTC
  • Nobody really has it
  • bad time servers may be present
  • networks change

I ran out of power on my laptop at this point so not many more notes. Paul gave a very good set of recommendations and myth-busting for those running NTP though. His notes will be online on the Sysadmin Miniconf site and he has also posted more detail online.

Running production workloads in a programmable infrastructure – Alejandro Tesch

• Talk was demos of openstack, Scipts are online here:
• https://github.com/gatesch/ansible

Managing performance parameters through systemd – Sander van Vugt

• Mostly Demos in this talk too.
• Using CPUShare parameter as an example
• systemd-cgtop and systemd-cgls
• “systemctl show stress1.service” will show available parameters
• “man 5 systemd.resource-control” gives a lot more details.

Go for DevOps – Caskey L. Dickson

• SideBar: The Platform Wars are over
  • Hint: We all won
  • As long as have an API we are all cool
• Always builds staticly linked binaries, should work on just about any Linux system. Just one file.
• Built in cross compiler (eg for Windows, Mac) via just enviroment variable “GOOS=darwin” and 32bit “GOARCH=32”
• Bash is great, Python is great, Go is better
• Microservices are Services
• No Small Systems
  • Our Scripts are no longer dozens of lines long, they are thousands of lines long
  • Need full software engineering
• Sysops pushing buttons and running scripts are dying
• Platform Specific Code
  • main_linux.go main_windows.go and compiler find.
  • // +build linux darwin     <– At the top of the file
• “Once I got my head around channels Go really opened up for me”