Presentation Summary
- 7 Networking things all Systems Administrators should know - Julien Goodwin
- Using Performance Co-Pilot to monitor SNMP devices - Hamish Coleman
- Stress and Performance Testing in Virtual Environments - Rodger Donaldson & Aneel Hay
- You can't spell KABOOM without OOM - Anthony Towns
- Under the covers -- chef in 15 minutes or less - Sarah Novotny
- Reliable cellular connections under Linux - Toby Smith
- Time to harden up - SELinux is no longer an option - Steven Ellis
- Samba4: After the merge, ready for the real world - Andrew Bartlett and Andrew Tridgell
- Lazy Security in a Large Gateway - Mark Suter
- Easy Platform as a Service - Mark Atwood
Talk Details
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7 Networking things all Systems Administrators should know - Julien Goodwin
This talk covers the basics and "gotchas" of seven small aspects of networking, from weird things that can happen with traceroute, how broadband access networks work, how large scale Internet services use tools like anycast and DNS to share load, why NAT is not a security measure, and why IPv6 is so simple to deploy you're probably already running it.
Julien is a Network Engineer at Google Sydney, working day-to-day maintaining one of the worlds largest IP networks. In the past he has worked as a (primarily Linux) Sys Admin on educational networks, and in small businesses. He has a long history working with the Australian FOSS community and was a member of the LCA2008 team.
Length: 30 Minutes
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Using Performance Co-Pilot to monitor SNMP devices - Hamish Coleman
Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a tool for monitoring servers - but it is not always possible to install the PCP software on all the devices you want to monitor. Most of these devices can report their performance via SNMP.
In this talk, I will present a PCP addition that provides a real-time gateway to all this SNMP data. This is useful even if you are not currently using PCP because the PCP tools provide a framework for logging, alerting and consolidation of data that is more flexible than many other open source monitoring tools. Thus, once PCP can query data from SNMP devices, this solution becomes a good all-round answer for collecting and querying your device metrics.
Hamish is a systems administrator living in Melbourne who has been using Open Source Software since before Linux existed. He also has a unhealthy drive to graph everything around him.
Length: 20 minutes
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Stress and Performance Testing in Virtual Environments - Rodger Donaldson & Aneel Hay
Stress and performance testing are an oft-maligned and widely misunderstood art; vendors misuse them for benchmarketing purposes, standards bodies misuse them to milk vendors for compliance stamps, and everyone else misuses them in an effort to prove that the bit of a system they're responsible for is working *just fine*. Even when it obviously isn't.
Getting it right can be a challenge; and to add to that challenge, virtualisation has become more and more popular, moving away from expensive proprietary platforms or development and test environments.
We've added a whole new layer of complexity to understanding why our apps perform (or don't). We've experienced a lot of that pain; we'd like to share some of the lessons we've learned over the years.
We'll rattle through a quick introduction to stress and performance testing - what it is, what problems it solves, what we use it for.
From there, we'll cover off some key concepts and tradeoffs that are common to any kind of performance testing: benchmarking the user experience vs component behaviour, understanding your workload, understanding your goals, reproducibility, baselines, and monitoring and metrics.
The we'll come to the meat of the presentation: what changes in virtual environments? We've added a sea complexity to be set adrift on; how do we unpick it so we make sure we actually understand what's going on, and what we need to do about it.Rodger has been wrangling Linux in commercial environments since before it got trendy. He has run Linux on everything from cobbled together skunkworks PCs to get things running to mainframe-class hardware.
His background is in corporate environments, working in the media and finance industries. As well as the Holy Path of systems administration he has worked on the dark side of development; please don't ask him about TCL; it can cause fits. A large part of his career has been spent making broken things work faster, or at all.
Aneel has had his fingers in a range of IT pies working on both sides of the business/technology divide.Length: 30 minutes
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You can't spell KABOOM without OOM - Anthony Towns
There isn't a lot of software out there that will be satisfied with just 640kB of memory these days, but some isn't even satisfied when its given four or more orders of magnitude more memory than that. This talk discusses the task of tracking down one such malcontent within Red Hat, from changes to our code, through tweaking python and Apaches and finally to fixing a bug in the kernel, along with some tips on how to get useful data and convincing other people when they have a bug to fix too.
Anthony Towns is a Release Engineer at Red Hat's Brisbane office.
Length: 20 minutes
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Under the covers -- Chef in 15 minutes or less - Sarah Novotny
Learn how to automate your infrastructure to make more time for fun things. In this rapid fire intro to Chef, an open source provisioning and automation platform, we'll touch on the strengths of it's flexible architecture as well as showing some concrete and simple starting points on your path to become an executive chef.
Sarah Novotny talks about infrastructure automation for a living at Opscode. She is a founder and board member of Blue Gecko which does remote administration and management of databases around the world. Her focus has been MySQL database administration since MySQL was in version 3.23.
She is additionally the Program Chair of OSCON and the Chair of the IOUG?s MySQL Council. Her technology writing and adventures as well as her more esoteric musings at http://sarahnovotny.com. For twittery things, check out @sarahnovotny. To connect with her on linkedin wander over to http://linkedin.com/in/sarahnovotnyLength: 20 minutes
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Reliable cellular connections under Linux - Toby Smith
At Opengear, we build embedded linux based appliances for wiring closet and data centre management, allowing out-of-band access to remote infrastructure for remote management and disaster recovery, and monitoring of the surrounding environment. These devices can be connected back to other networks via Ethernet, 3G GSM/CDMA/LTE, PSTN modems and Wi-Fi. This talk will discuss the problems we've found and solutions we've deployed in making use of commercial 3G GSM, CDMA and LTE modems under Linux to provide a reliable out-of-band connection to potentially geographically remote devices. This talk will also discuss the technical directions we are seeing these devices move and the changes required for supporting these features in the future
Toby Smith is a Senior Software Engineer at Opengear Inc. and has over 8 years commercial experience in building embedded Linux solutions in the security, networking, mining and monitoring domains. Toby holds degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland and has lectured at a university level on Operating System concepts
Length: 20 minutes
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Time to harden up - SELinux is no longer an option - Steven Ellis
SELinux has been in the mainline kernel since 2003 yet still many system administrators build systems with SELinux turned off. With many of the recent Enterprise Linux releases we are now at a point where fully enabled SELinux should be the norm.
The purpose of this session is to demystify SELinux and show some of the tools now available to tweak and tune without compromising the security features SELinux offersSteven has been involved in Open Source for over 20 years, and a Linux user for over 15 years. Since moving to New Zealand he has provided technical direction and operational guidance for a number of New Zealand companies on the use of Open Source and Linux. His experience has included over 3 years running the the Linux operations team at IBM NZ, and the development of myPVR a MythTV based PVR solution designed for the New Zealand Market. He now works for Red Hat as a Solution Architect for NZ focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and their Virtualisation products.
Steven gives regular talks on FOSS to the Auckland Linux User Group and Auckland BarCamp, and has given presentations and organised tutorials at IBM NZ and Optimation NZ. He has been an invited speaker at a number of regional and international conferences including OSDC, Linux.conf.au, Linux World and OSCONLength: 30 minutes
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Samba4: After the merge, ready for the real world - Andrew Bartlett and Andrew Tridgell
Andrew Bartlett and Andrew Tridgell will talk about the state of Samba, particularly as we approach a Samba 4.0 release.
This release is important for the Samba Team and the system administration community, because it will be the first release where both the AD server and the existing file server are present in the same release, and are integrated in their operation.
In the past year, a lot of work has been done to build all of Samba with one build system, which in turn means that we will see packages for all of Samba, rather than Samba and Samba4 packages.
This will, we hope, make it much easier to deploy Samba for both distributors and system administrators, as we have also made tools like 'smbpasswd' now operate against Samba4 AD databases just as effectivly as they do against the flat smbpasswd file.
This talk will take administrators though the process of upgrading a Samba3 to a Samba4 domain, and teach how the various components interact.
A Samba 4.0 release has been promised for quite some time now, but we do expect to finally release Samba 4.0 as the Samba Team's next major release. We hope this presentation will give administrators the tools they need to then decide how they want to use itBoth Andrew Bartlett and Andrew Tridgell are core Samba team members and long-standing sysadmin miniconf and LCA speakers.
Length: 25 minutes
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Lazy Security in a Large Gateway - Mark Suter
My workplace is a secure gateway for a large government client. It has many different types of devices forming a response to the risks we face in connecting to the world.
One of our largest Laziness efforts (reduce *overall* energy expenditure) is how we handle all the technical policies on all those different devices.
This talk discusses the different devices with most of the focus on what works for us, minus some detail to keep the security people onside ;)
Slides will be available at http://zwitterion.org/talks/
Mark Suter is a geek with a deep interest in the how and why of complex systems. He has have a strong focus on getting things to work well and contributing to the lifelong learning of my fellow professionals.
He joined Unisys Australia in July 2008. Shortly after getting a wiki going for lazy documentation, he looked for further way to increase Laziness, Impatience and Hubris and found a welcoming workplace.
Mark has presented at several previous Linux Australia Conferences and the presentations are available at http://zwitterion.org/talks/
Length: 25 minutes
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Easy Platform as a Service - Mark Atwood
"Platform as a Service" or PaaS is a popular buzz-word in Cloud Computing. But what does it mean, and how can you use it?
OpenShift by Red Hat is a free-as-in-beer and soon to be free-as-in-speech PaaS platform that supports several open-source application server environments, including JavaEE6, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Perl.
This demo will show you how to sign up for OpenShift, install and use the command-line tools to create an application, and how to use git to download, modify, and upload your own applications in your language of choice.Mark Atwood is a professional open source advocate, and is currently a Community Manager and Developer Evangelist for Red Hat OpenShift.
His technology interests include NoSQL and Cloud Computing. He contributes to open source projects such as the Drizzle database project. He is a coauthor of the OAuth Core specification.
He speaks regularly at meetups, users groups, and open source technology conferences.
LCA is a particularly favorite conference of his.
He makes his home in Seattle, with an annual trip to Black Rock City.Length: 20 minutes