Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - conference

FlossUK and Puppetcamp Edinburgh

Kris Buytaert — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:49:47 +0000

I've just finished presenting my talk on how I currently work on Puppet modules at Puppetcamp here in Edinburgh where I've been for the week talking on both FlossUK 2012 and Puppetcamp.

7 tools for your devops stack

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Earlier this week I opened FlossUK 2012 with my talk on 7 tools for your devops stack

How I hack on puppet modules

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Call For Abstracts : NLUUG Fall Conference on Security

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:53:08 +0000

For all the security experts : the NLUUG has published it's Call For Abstracts for it's Fall conference.. as you might have guessed the topic is Security, we welcome all abstracts tackling security in a broad sense.

Possible topics include:

* cloud security
* online privacy
* rfid hacking
* secure programming
* programma-analysis-tools
* web services security
* web browser security
* embedded hardware hacking
* incident response and forensics
* malware and rootkits
* responsible disclosure
* legal response
* fighting spam
* patch policies
* identity management
* central point of administration
* DNSsec
* VPN based WANs
* etc.

The NLUUG fall conference is scheduled on 11 November 2010 in De Reehorst in Ede, the Netherlands.

Hint.. maybe a talk on secdevops would be welcomed too :)

Disclaimer : I`m on the program committee

NLUUG Spring Conference 2010

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:52:49 +0000

Last week the NLUUG Spring Conference was held in Ede, this years topic was System Administration in general.. which means there was a pretty wide range of talks ... some of the talks were extremely interesting and gathered a lot of people , others really shouldn't have been put in the main room.. Frequenly organising them myselve it's always a difficult choice for a conference organiser.

Must say this was one of my better talks .. it all went smooth and nicely fit within time. Probably the promise of drinks and food after my talk helped some.

I started it of by showing the audience Patrick's opening Devopsdays'09 Video ...

I slightly modified the the slides for my NLUUG presentation, but they are based on the talks I gave on the same topic before

De v ministration

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Please note that the Devops definition I give early in the
slides is there to misguide the audience ... :) Everybody knows drinking beer and eating sushi is just a start in the journey when you want to become a #Devops :)

The fun part about conferences often are the speakers dinners, you get to sit down with interesting people and talk about a variety of topics such as panacotta recipes and configuration management ..

It was fun ... too bad it took so long to drive there.. good thing we got back pretty quick..

Linux Open Administration Days 2010

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:43:05 +0000

So about 4 monts ago there was the crazy idea to start a new FOSS event in Belgium targeted at sysadmins.

What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

We had a book raffle where we handed out O'Reilly's .. we had a great free pizza party (got the idea from the saturday pizza event at LCA 2005) , and we had some free beer. Sounds like a good combination for a geeky weekend.

Apart from the regular talks there were plenty of Open Spaces where interesting topics were discussed ... we had spaces on Open Source vs Open Core , strong voices were heard when we discussed what we should do with the Open Core companies that claim to value Open Source , some people think we should actually list the fauxpensource ones somewhere and make sure the world knows about them

We had an awesome configuration management discussion session discussing Chef vs Puppet vs CFengine . And much much more ...

Some people owe me plenty of Sushi as I had to do my MySQL HA talk before their Managing MySQL talk , but other than that .. things just went fine..

UKUUG Spring Conference 2010

Kris Buytaert — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:16:20 +0000

Last week I was in Manchester for the 2010 UKUUG Spring Conference, right .. make that 2 weeks ago , :)

The UKUUG usually hosts the more interesting conferences around ... , it's not just the schedule that attrackts me , yes there's the strong focus towards Larger Scale Unix (and mostly Linux) deployments and how to manage them, but there's also the opportunity to chat in real life with the Devops from across the chunnel.

Spending time with R.I.Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Simon Wilkinson , Alex Davies , Simon Riggs , Josette, and many others is always fun .

As I was in town early I went to the preconference beer meetup and met with a lot of people and chatted about config management, virtualization and lots of other stuff ... after the pub the plan was to go for curries nearby .. and while walking to the , ahem Bus stop, I managed to recognise Ben Martin from meeting him back ages ago in Hamburg for LinuxKongress , always fun ..

Apart from having to jump on a bus and our group being split at the curry place , rather than being able to tell the latecomers where to walk to and being seeted upstairs with the whole group , the curries were interesting and fun.

As I had been pushing Simon Wardley on Twitter to submit a talk for the conference it was really great to finally see him present .. His talk was the perfect soft introduction to the conference ...

Simon's talk was followed by a talk on Security for the virtual datacenters, after I questionned the speaker if anyone actualy uses TPM outside an academic lab the talk suddenly changed into a commercial presentation for a Quack, nuff said.

The Ever energetic Matt S Trout talked about 21st century perl before Simon "Life is to short for SELinux" Wilkinson talked about his experiences in getting the openAFS crowd on Git.

Bummer Thierry Carrez didn't show us the real juice of UEC and just the installations of a Cloud Controller and a Node Controller , but he managed to do so in approx 30 minutes as promised .

A talk titled Coherent and Integrated Configuration of Virtual Infrastructures always cathces my eye.. however when that talk turns out to be a Coherent and Integrated configuration only within the Univerity of Edinborough (aka lcfg2) talk I`m dissapointed, specially since it pretty much didn't introduce any new concepts from the ones I introduced back in my Durham UKUUG presentation

Luckily Andrew Stribblehill gave a very interesting talk on MySQL scalability, in which I promised him some answers to his questions for the next day :)

The Conference dinner was without a doubt the best UKUUG dinner so far , no typical english "food", no weird location (Old Trafford, an abandoned warship) , but just a big chinese place and plenty of food !

I started thurday morning in the wrong track, I assumed to be in the Virtualization track, but I ended up in the Sun thinclient and Abusing Linux to serve weird desktops under the Green computing umbrella track, not my favourites ..

When Patrick and Julian started their Hudson hit my Puppet with a Cucumber talk (which featured some aweseom #devops content) I was a afraid that we'd had to look for a replacment PostgreSQL talk as Simon hadn't arrived yet .. Luckily he arrived in time for his presentation and he explained us about the new replication features that are slowly making it into PostgreSQL, one way ... log shipping ... not really up to par with other alternatives yet :(

So with no further ado .. here's the presentation I gave

MySQL HA with PaceMaker

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PS. If at a Ukuug event and not sure about a person's name ... try Simon.. pretty good chance you're correct :)

11 days till Loadays

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:59:34 +0000

That's right .. only 11 more ...
The schedule looks promising, there will be some devops juice, some open spaces, some tutorials, som regular talks .. it really looks promising ... the schedule is packed ,

Apart from the talks, tutorials and open spaces there's also the
Pizza party and the Beer event on saturday ...

No need to register .. just show up ..

Loadays CFP

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:55:56 +0000

I would like to point the crowd to the Call For Presentaions of Loadays. , the Linux Open Administration Days .

The Linux Open Administration days 2010 will be the first edition of a new conference focusing on Linux and Open Administration, we are trying to fill a gap for System Engineers and Administrators using Open Source technologies"

More details on the Linux Open Administration Days site

I'll probably be there .. given the fact that the event will be 5 minutes from where I live .

Upcoming Conference Talks

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:04:36 +0000

I know the biggest part of my fanclub already booked tickets for my upcoming presentations, but the other 2 might want to check their calendars to see if they aren't missing out on the good stuff :)

Next Sunday I`ll giving a shortish overview of MySQL HA alternatives in the MySQL and Friends devroom at Fosdem.

March will bring me to Manchester again for the UKUUG Spring conference where I`ll be giving a longer version of that presentation with a strong focus on integrating with PaceMaker, and automating the whole boostrap procedure of a HA setup.

Early may will bring me to Ede in the Netherlands where I`ll be telling the crowds at the NLUUG spring conference, about their new fancy jobtitles, as all the Systeembeheerders there will have to become Devministrators, or Devops if you prefer ...

Apart from my talks also watch out for LoadAys , PuppetCamp Europe, OpsCamp Europe and maybe a Real CloudCamp in Belgium :)

And I`m not the only Inuit on Tour,

Enterprise Open Source Adoption at BT, London

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:24:10 +0000

Repost from our corporate blog

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark "I`m from outer space" Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown ... ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of "people close to you" for supporting solutions .

Steve Bouch, of the Synapse Project at BT discussed ao the decisions they had to make, the varialbes they took in to account when starting
to use Open Source , discussions such as the reputation of the project, the internal skill zet, the ease of importing and exporting data in and
out of the project, and the different license terms were covered.

Andrew Katz , legal guy , who's also working on the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review gave an overview of the legal impact of Opensource . We learned that his customers have similar questions as ours, such as when to publish the code, what code to publish, when to look for alternative licenses etc

There was avid discussion regarding the Affero GPL license and using Open Source as a key component to build your killar webinfrastructure while not contributing back etc.

During the pannel discussion questions like Software Patents, and the fact that Ubuntu One won't be fully Open Source were tackled For us , most of the event was confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do, And that is worth a lot !

T-Dose 2009

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:28:03 +0000

As every year in october a small crowd navigated to Eindhoven to spend 2 days discussing Open Source , Free Software and Beer

The good part about T-Dose is the fact that it is so small, you actually get the chance to talk to a lot of people, you get the chance to sit down with them and play with the code they have been working on ,

T-Dose had talks on IPv6, Bind10 , Linux Auto Update USB, eTokens on Linux , VirtSec, Django , Puppet and other topics.
I actually missed talks that I had wanted to see.. just because I was in the middel of interresting discussions with people. That's totally different from some other conferences where I don't even make it to the talks because of the smalltalk :)

T-Dose social event is always nice .. and so is the post social social event. (you know .. where the beer comes into play...) Luckily the dutch guys know where to go .. places with Duvel, Chouffe and Kwak ...

On Sunday I did a rerun of my VirtSec talk , the discussion was different this time more open :)

After my talk Sejo gave his first talk on Djagios .. it went great .. albeit some members of the audience fiddling with his live demo.

(Ok I plead guilty.. but it was just too tempting..)