Original Post: Robert Postill
I went to LinuxConf Australia 2009 (LCA) this year and had a great time. Its the first time I've been to Hobart and Tasmania but I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. I can't recommend Hobart as a city highly enough. The scenery is lovely, very picturesque and unlike Melbourne or Sydney taxi drivers know where they're going, you gotta love that :) Also the food is good and the beer, well let me say the cascade brewery is well worth the visit!
Anyway, on to the point. The first two days of LCA are the mini-confs which split over various topics, personally I get the biggest kick out of the SysAdmin mini-conf. While I've been a sysadmin before I don't get to immerse myself in sysadmin much any more in my current roles. The SysAdmin mini-conf is also a great way to ground your thinking about software and architecture as those people who have to maintain what others develop have many interesting insights about real-life technology. I visited a couple of other mini-confs and I can tell you that there is lot to be garnered from attending something out of the ordinary. For instance I spotted a couple of presentations on databases and figured, well I'm no DBA but maybe I'll see something interesting. Well sure enough the first thing I saw was SELinux used on Postgresql (see http://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/wiki/WhatIsSEPostgreSQL for more), while I managed to miss the setup the really, *really* cool bit was when the SELECT from the credit card table brought out automatically secured results (well at least the first twelve digits of the card number were replaced with Xs). Awesome! Then the mighty Monty Widenius spoke about the development of a new storage engine. Monty's talk was exactly the kind of thing that gives you real hope about Open Source, here's a guy who's been knocking out a formidable database for years (Wikipedia says 1995) and here he is helping to knock out a new storage engine for MySQL. Its a big deal and a multi-year project, yet moving the storage engine forward is, at least in my mind, moving mysql past innodb (which Oracle bought in 2005 according to Wikipedia) and I'll be looking hard at Maria next time I'm using MySql. Sadly there are some dangers to straying outside your main constituency. I decided to attend the talk called " It's all fun and games until someone wants to sue you: Reporting in the age of citizen journalism". I thought there might be some discussion about how to undertake journalistic activity and relate that back to Linux. Instead there was information like use Wordpress and YouTube (becuase obviously I've spent my entire life up to now living in a cave), some confused politics (stats about bloggers being jailed) and pointless truisms like educate yourself on the laws of copyright and defamation. It takes a lot of effort to get a presentation together for something like Linuxconf but you have to get the pitch *right* for these things. No one in a crowd of people that has paid for a ticket and travelled to another state or country just to spend a week talking Linux needs to hear that. If you want to be complete why not point people to your blog or a page on a website?
The SysAdmin miniconf kicked off with a rip-snorter on Samba4, which is a great project and an advert for working with Microsoft. They've managed to create something that looks a lot like Active Directory and did more than just hand everyone the pieces and expect them to tape it together. There was the usual discussion about how dealing with Microsoft stuff, even documented Microsoft protocols can be a frustrating experience. However at least in the case of Samba Microsoft is working with the project, lets hope that whole TomTom thing doesn't toilet the green shoots of co-operation. There followed a couple of presentations that reflect the feeling that I've personally felt as someone who has been a SysAd. That feeling is SysAd is being left in the dust of development as a craft. From my point of view its about time we started taking the inclusive approach, because systems are exploding in complexity and we need the SA community to help us tame that complexity. In the afternoon of the first day we talked Red Hat Satellite, which in the nice possible fashion is a way of Red Hat shipping you patches and keeping an eye on your licensing situation. I just can't get excited about this stuff, I tried and tried but when you stack up the Red Hat approach against the Debian approach you end up making the easy decision between some kind of Orwellian control mechanism and the feeling of freedom Linux is supposed to give you. Red Hat simply don't make the trade-off compelling enough.
The following day started off with a nice presentation of a PHP-based site that had massive exposure. The presenter was from the ISP that I think was third (second maybe) in line to host this app. The earlier contenders had got it wrong and our hero (whose name is Matt) had to try and work out how to make this thing work. As ever with a PHP app, cue stories about SQL gone nuts and bonkers traffic figures. There followed some great discussion about IPV6. The first presentation focussed on IPV6 mostly from the ISP point of view. Its almost the equivalent of climate change, we know its going to happen yet we just keep on living the way we are in the vain hope something magical will happen. Yet here we are years after the inclusion of IPV6 in everything, OSes, network devices and the kitchen sink barely ever using it. So the first presenter gave out some basic evangelism, its not scary, its not too hard to deploy and the world won't end when we deploy it. The second presentation talked about Google and how they have an IPV6 specific page (ipv6.google.com). This has allowed them to start to collect stats about IPV6 and find out two things. First, that the state of production IPV6 looks like and secondly, how bad the routing for IPV6 is. Interestingly, there are humans out there using IPV6! Well done them :) Secondly, those people sometimes take the most circuitous route through the internet. Interestingly the presenter (Angus Lees) thought things could have been worse, although that doesn't mean they're peachy. As an IPV6-denier myself I have to assume there are special IPV6 routing services I am unaware of, but sadly because they don't get the traffic these services can be misconfigured for some time without being flagged as an issue.
Google would love IPV6 because like so many others they find delivering services over NAT IPV4 is difficult and can lead to a crap experience for the end user. The Tuesday wrap up dealt with spam. Sadly the presentations were slightly out of order as the first presenter really should have come after the second presenter. Still they both had interesting things to say and as a wrap up to the mini-conf it was very solid.
Copyright (C) 2009 Robert Postill.
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Nice post Rob
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