I ended up staying up quite late on Wednesday night so I was a little zonked out on thursday morning.
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/Open_Notebook_Science
- 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
It was noted by one person that this year’s keynotes are more “Freedom” and “High tech”.
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
Bob Edward – Yubikey authentication in a mid-sized organisation
- 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
vimperator – automatic launch prog for netbooks
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.
Adam Jackson – The rebirth of Xinerama
- 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.
Stewart Smith et al – Building a Database kernel with Lego Like parts (Drizzle)
- 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 – auth_pam , auth_http
- Various Logging plugins – logging_query , logging_syslog
- 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
Afterwards I had some dinner and went to the Professional Deligates networking session.
