Linux.conf.au - Day Four

Jes Fraser — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:50:27 +0000

The fourth day of the conference opened with a keynote by Eric P Allman, author of a little MTA some people may have heard of called Sendmail - an "... old program that has changed the world."

Sendmail grew out of an environment very different to the way our internet looks today - Berkely in 1980. Eric led the audience through the history of sendmail, it's original design principles, and certain problems with the original design - some of which seem glaring to us now with 20:20 hindsight.

After a morning tea for all attendees, the main conference stack started. I chose to attend Rusty Russell's session on Advanced C Coding for fun, detailing examples of '.. less sane' C programming tips and tricks, then moving on to Using splice and vmsplice with custom Embedded Linux architectures by John Williams, explaining system calls for zero-copy file and network IO using in-kernel pipe buffers.

Valerie Aurora, kernel developer, delivered a fascinating presentation on easing kernel development using User Mode Linux - a version of Linux that runs as a process within an already existing Linux installation. UML provides an alternative to having a seperate dedicated test machine or virtual machine, that needs constant rebooting in order to test. Valerie also mentioned briefly an upcoming project of hers - the Ada Initiative, to encourage women in Open Source.

Other highlights included Perl Programming Best Practices by Jacinta Richardson, and Building RPMS - How Fedora's Koji Works, and how you can use it to build your own software by Dennis Gilmore.

After the conference, those attendees who purchased tickets went to the Brisbane Convention Centre for the Penguin Dinner, a sit-down formal dinner event with a delicious restaurant menu and a charity auction to support Queensland flood relief efforts - raising over $20,000 AUD.

Image of the Penguin Dinner venue taken by Andrew McMillan, 2011

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Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two

Jes Fraser — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:01:56 +0000

by Jes Fraser

The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the 'fathers of the internet', having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

Vint discussed some of the history of the internet, pointing out how much of the current state of the internet still reflects the original architecture, and covered some of the mistakes that were made in light of what we know today - for example, the current scarcity of IPv4 addresses and the security and privacy issues that have arisen with today's social internet.

After breaking for morning tea, the second day of miniconfs followed.

Miniconfs Schedule:

Systems Administration
Multicore and Parallel Computing
Mobile FOSS
Data Storage
Research and Student Innovation
Libre Graphics Day
Open in the Public Sector
Rocketry

I chose to spend the day in the Systems Administration miniconf, starting with a presentation by Devdas Bhagat on Implementing DevOps in the Real World. Devdas explained how DevOps is not about technology, nor process, but about culture and how to implement this cultural change. Following Devdas was a fascinating presentation on system time keeping and time sources by Julien Goodwin in his Brief History of Time Sync.

Other highlights included an update of Samba 4 features by Andrew Bartlett, a brief presentation on how to set up a HA cluster in 20 minutes by Sander van Vugt and an excellent summary of the features of Cgroups by Steven Ellis.

After the conference proper the conference speakers were given the opportunity to network at the Speakers Dinner, held in the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre.

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lca2011

Linux.conf.au - Day Four

Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two