Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Dirk Hohndel told us that we should really become more polite on LKML and stop calling people pummel, twat, stupid clueless or braindead . Yes even Linus should.

Over lunch I figured out that we are not 10 .be folks but 12 .. yay !

Bdale is talking about GNU Radio after that it's GIT Time

Frank.be will be very happy to see that the majority of talks here in Cambridge this morning were focusing on Power Consumption. Arjan van de Ven started of introducing us to powertop. Then Matthew Garret continued with a talk on making Linux suck less (power)

It clearly shows that this LinuxConference will be followed by the Kernel summit as lots of familiar faces start to show up here .

Robert McQueen is talking about Telepathy now so i`m gonna keep quiet for a while .. coz I`m sure he can read my mind now :))

Sunday evening was the conference dinner, someone tought he was really funny to have us all walk about 3Km more than we needed to. The instructions on the back of our entrance tickets gave us a full tour of the Cambridge suburbs, I should have followed my guts.. not the people trying to read the instructions, would have saved us half an our at least .
Luckily we took the short way back. Dinner was typically english .. nuff said :)

So monday started out with a whole bunch of sessions related to filesystems and storage.
Bryn M Reeves gave a really good intro to LVM , then Jan Blunck took over and started talking about how to scale the Device Mapper snap shot solution. I tried to see Dag's talk on dstat but I`ll have to try again at T-Dose as I missed the largest part of the talk due to some phone calls :(
Next up was Olaf "thank god I`m not doing nfs anymore" Kirch (who also listens when you just shout Lars in the streets of Cambridge) who introduced us to iSNS.

So after lunch the filesystem track continued with Steven Whitehouse talking about VFS and cluster filesystems , Jorn talking to us about the future of Flashdisks ant their appropriate filesystems, and Chris Mason from Oracle finishing of with a talk on Btrfs.. pronounced "ButterFS"

There were 2 different busses to the Duxford air museum which was a bit of a pity since both groups didn't really meet eachother, so it wasn't really a social event where you could chat and meed with everybody at the conference.

Couple of people again have asked me where I got the t-shirt

I actually made it myselve and you can buy it from Spreadshirt

Dear Linux.conf.au organisation, you might have read the interview with Linus on APCMag . You probably noticed it yourselve .. but there was a small hint in there to a possible future Linux.conf.au location :

One of these days I hope to find myself on the Great Barrier Reef and do scuba diving (which I love), but for some reason I've always ended up in other parts.

So might I suggest Brisbane some time soon as a Linux.conf.au location ? :)

Raf posted the Juliux End Of Life announcement a couple of days ago, http://www.x-tend.be/pipermail/juliux-dev/2007-August.txt
We started Juliux about 2 years ago with as idea to create an open source alternative for the back then proprietary RedHat Satelite and the back then totally broken ZLM from Novell. We set out to build a webbased platform from where you could do package management for a hybrid set of servers, with as a second version target to also integrate some form of configuration management. We even presented our proof of Concept at the 2006 UKUUG Lisa Conference

RedHat in the meanwhile announced open sourceing Satellite, but more importantly Puppet became more popular and more feature rich.
One of the features that came in puppet that made me rethink Juliux was the fact that you could do package management including installation etc within Juliux, so I started thinking about making Juliux a webfrontend that used Puppet as a back end.

The ideas were good, but we really didn't have time to focus on developing the things we wanted to write. So when I ran into PuppetShow the time was right to refocus the little efforts we were spending and as Raf announced he now will be working on PuppetShow when he has time.

Funny . there was a time when I was thinking about rebranding Julux to PuppetMaster, or Master of Puppets, but I actually like PuppetShow better .. So we had similar ideas , only Luke had more time to implement his ideas .

Time often is an issue in opensource development. There's lots of stuff that I have in my head that could easily be written .. but I don't always have time to do it myselve or other people available that can write it for me .. :( Well.. maybe one day :)

The UKUUG Spring 2008 Conference on Large Installations System Administration is announced and will take place from
31st March to 2nd April 2008 in Birmingham (not in Oxford as announced earlier)

And also there is no focus on Configuration management as rumoured but again a focus on Virtualisation .

More info on http://www.ukuug.org/events/spring2008/

There used to be a time where I was the only .be guy running around at Linuxconference or Linux Tag , or when it was just Peter and I running around at LinuxKongress . Today that's different .. so far I've counted no less han 10 people from our little country.

Yeah Belgium !

PS. If you are from .be , you are here in Cambridge and I didn't count you yet .. lemme know :)

After our first night in Cambridge with Tab and Gildas where we expierenced some traditional English lack of culture , I woke up this morning ready for the first LinuxConference Europe , the schedule looks good I hope the conference lives up to my expectations.

So the first stop of the day was in Johnatan Corbets Kernel Report talk.

• On Release Cycles
  The curent release schedule of the kernel is different from what it used to be 2-3 years ago. But now we should be able to predict when new kernels will be released.. this looks like a good thing
• On Kernel scalability, remember the time when people told you that Linux couldn't handle 2-4-8 or 16 CPU's ? Well Linux handles about 1024 CPU's easy. Things are starting to get rough when you want to ma
  nage 4096 CPU's. About 20% of the systems memory then is used to actuall manage those CPU's but hey I guess that by the time I got 4096 CPU's in my they will have fixed that problem ;)
  scalability works both ways up, but also down. The embedded linux users really should start to contribute more to the kernel , not just fork and forget but contribute their changes back.
• On Filesystems, there is a lot of stuff going on the kernel regaring filesystems. Ext4 is peeking around the corner, btrfs is coming , LogFS is comming and most of those filesystems are being discussed
  at the conference. Johnatan mentions that one of things we are struggling with is fsck. Big disks mean long fscks, one theory is to split a filesystem in multiple parts, and monitor which parts of the fils
  ystem have bveen modified so you only need to fsck those. The basic idea of this concept is pretty simple but the implementation is a bit more difficult, think about what should happen when a file on such
  a part grows beyond the available free space on that part, how do you manage that ? However this still need to be implemented.
• On Virtualisation, lots of stuff going on there. Xen, Containers, KVM , lguest etc are all growing and Rusty even claims that these days there is more to virtualisation than collecting money from VC's

New features in the kernel these days seem to have to be "Hellwig Approved" :)

As on the GPLv3 question Jonathan mentions that it will probably never happen in the kernel, one of the biggest reason is that you can't possibly trace back everybody who once contributed to the kernel , l
et alone have them all agree on the chance of license.

Next step was the OS Circular talk by Kuniyasu Suzaki
OS Circular is a framework of Internet Disk Image Distributor for anonymous OSes, it bases lots of stuf on Fuse and supports different Virtualisation techniques, pretty interresting.
It reminds me of the original Xenoservers project. If you are looking in this direction also have a look at Floz (Free Live OS Zoo)

Too bad Stephen Heminger wasn't at the conference in time so we had to head into Jeff Dike's talk ..
As Alasdair told me he still had a free slot on monday afternoon which Stephen could fill up if he showed up and I just ran into him in the hallway I'll be trying to catch his talk later.

One of the talks I had been looking forward to was the Ganeti talk, I was pretty dissapointed by the lack of depth in this talk and the general approach, honestly I don't care on how many machines you are
deploying it. I wan't to know how it works, what you are using underneath etc. I have to download the tarbal and look into it , but it seems they are pretty old versions of Xen and DRBD .
If in the next decade I find some spare time .. I`ll be talking about my experiences with it here ;)

More later ..

In the comments of Dave Jone's article on the ridiculous reason why there won't be a LinuxWorldExpo in the UK this year.

DirkHohndel mentions :

LinuxWorld Boston was killed mid last year. It didn't happen this year, won't happen next year.LinuxWorld New York was revived this year in a new format and won't be back next year, either.LinuxWorld Germany was canceled this year and allegedly will be back next year.
Now we hear the same for the LinuxWorld UK. Bottom line: the sponsors are voting with their dollars.

I never really liked the LWE formats in Europe... as they were everything but technical and usually colocated to some other event.
But I`m still wondering where this is heading for local events such as the dutch and the Belgian one.