Starting my RHCA

Starting my RHCA

Next week i'll be starting on getting my RHCA certification. I've said it many times, and i'll say it again, i really see good high quality certifications replacing the diploma as a metric of skills in the 21st century. I highly recommend that everyone look at picking up a few, and i'll shamelessly plug Red Hat for providing one of the most rigorous programs out there.

I will be taking the RH436, the Red Hat Enterprise Clustering and Storage Management, course and accompanying exam. It might not have been the most number one choice, but it's an issue we're working with at the Genomics Center, that i felt it would be the most practical choice. I want to thank my employer for sponsoring the course.

I'm going to be taking it easy this weekend, and next week i'll most likely not be online at all. If you can't reach me, you'll know why.

LOADays: the follow up

LOADays: the follow up

This weekend i was in Antwerpen for the Linux Open Administration Days. Or Handwerpen as Bert Desmet puts it so fondly. I was there to present puppetmanaged.org and some practical discussions on how to migrate to it's sometimes not so user friendly structure. For the rest, i went in with an open mind.

When Jeroen van Meeuwen and I arrived at the hotel, we ran into a small group of what were obviously sysadmins. It seemed there was also some kind of wedding or party going on because there were alot of people coming in with all sorts of musical instruments, dressed in a very middle eastern style, with robes and multicolor gowns and bustling all over the place. In contrast, four guys sitting in a circle with laptops out is not hard to spot.

We went downtown for some dinner, at a restaurant where a polylingual waiter served us in practically every language we wanted. After going around the table in three languages, English, French and Dutch, he finally looks at me and says, "oh good, at least we have one Belgian". So i said where i was from and that i'm living in the Netherlands, and that set off a 'oh, you poor thing.' Over dinner, we had a really great conversation about what we see as the future of configuration management and all sorts of other fun sysadmin-y topics.

My presentation went ok, though it was my first iteration of the slides and presentation. I think because of the unique way i positioned the presentation, i put too much information in and made the classic mistake of not having the perspective to see it. I'm hoping the next time i do this, i can do puppetmanaged.org better justice.

After my presentation, i spent the better part of an hour talking to Dan Bode from the newly minted PuppetLabs about some of the issues we are both trying to solve. The conversation went over how puppetmanaged.org deviates from the official recommendations from PuppetLabs and the differences is approach to our solutions. My big takeaway from the conversation is that it's very easy to make these things complex really fast. It's going to be an interesting challenge to keep these tools simple, which is what made them so attractive in the first place.

After the first day, the LOAD team treated us all to beer and pizza, first outside by the pavilion at the school where the event was held, and afterwards, we moved to a nearby pub for even more beer. Given my previous experiences in Belgium, namely Fosdem, i took it easy and left around 12, so i wouldn't regret it the next morning.

The second day was a little bit more relaxed. I started with two round table discussions, the first on "Open Core" vs. "Open Source" projects and companies. The second was on the general topic of configuration management. It was really good to be able to discuss the future of Configuration Management in general without it turning into a flamewar on who's tool was better.

After the lunch break i sat in on two more sessions, one on how to do configuration management entirely with RPMs, and the second was on the LSC project, the LDAP Synchronization Connector, which i'm pretty sure we will be using in the future internally.

I want to thank the LOAD team for putting together the event. It really went smoothly, there were no issues getting around and getting things done. It was a great pleasure to have the chance to meet many people from all over Europe and even a few from the US who are looking to solve almost all the same problems i am. I can see alot of potential for this event in the future.

Doing FOSS in your $dayjob

Doing FOSS in your $dayjob

Wednesday night, i gave a small lightening talk at OGD Utrecht about working with FOSS in the enterprise realm. This is a topic i've discussed with a number of people informally and i think i'm going to make into a proper talk in the future. It covers how to get the maximum benefit out of Free and Open Source Software and how to work with communities at the enterprise level.

It is structured around three phases that are meant to segue into a roundtable conversation. It begins with the use of FOSS inside your organisation, moves on to internal development and branches, and finishes with active development and hosting of projects. It's geared towards how FOSS is a good business decision and how to take said business decision and make the most out of it without compromising your values or the community.

Finally, it's the usual policy of mine that when you see this presentation, you should go out and present it yourself. I've licensed the slides as CC-by-sa, so feel free to go wild with them. They are structured around the bullet points you can talk about, but each line is meant to be a topic of discussion that can fill five or fifty minutes at a go. You can get the slides here http://ynemoy.fedorapeople.org/presentations/foss_in_enteprise/Open.Source.for.$dayjob.odp

Some Blogging Noise and Summer Coding

Some Blogging Noise and Summer Coding

I realize i've been mostly silent about some of the things going on regarding the summer of code style projects. Perhaps i should make a bit of noise, so get out your ear plugs, because i've got two pot lids and i'm not afraid to use them.

Most know at this point that Fedora was not approved by Google for the GSoC this summer. Rather than moping about it, i've seen a couple of trends, both quite interesting.. To start, from the moment Fedora was rejected, Karsten Wade and the rest of the crew got together and started putting together the Fedora Summer of Code project. For a project that had so little time to get its stuff together, it's working out pretty well so far.

Second, we've shared a really good relationship with kernel.org in the past, and last November, i met John 'warthog9' Hawley and we talked about a couple of ideas that would serve the linux communities better. A couple weeks ago, JH sent me an email asking about one of the projects, a statistics project for distribution mirrors. This will enable distros and mirrorers to better plan for resources. If a student proposal is accepted for this project, i will be comentoring under the kernel.org name. There is also another project, chasm, from our own Ben Boeckel on the list.

All in all, it's going to be an interesting summer.

Sorry for my English

Sorry for my English

Every time i see someone post at the bottom of an email "sorry for my english", i always feel like this person is apologizing for speaking english on an english speaking list. It's a very strange way to say it.

CLT - Catering-Tage mit Linux-Vorträge

CLT - Catering-Tage mit Linux-Vorträge

After traveling 1300+ kilometers, running around for two days heavily caffeinated and pleasantly fed, and talking non stop, i'm finally caught up from the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. I have to say, the entire event was by far miles beyond the Linuxtag event in Berlin. I'm glad we made our choice to focus more on this event in the future.

To start, from the moment we arrived in Chemnitz, despite the drab post industrial post communist palor, the experience was nothing but friendly. The hotel staff at the Mercure hotel were genuinely cheerful and pleasant and the atmosphere at the event was incredibly relaxed and open. It was a bit more challenging to communicate because naturally English isn't spoken as well in Chemnitz as in Berlin, but sometimes a smile on your face is more important than your fluency of language.

Like i said, the atmosphere was great. It didn't feel in the slightest way commercialised or business oriented, although there were business present, of course. Instead it had more of that open fair feeling, with whole families wandering around, a place for the kids to play, areas to socialise in, and even a magician at the social event. Even the floor was open, with a minimum of security, even at 2 in the morning, rather than closing down exactly at 6pm. The staff provided constant food for the booth staff, volunteers, and everyone else involved; it almost felt like a lan party rather than a serious conference.

At the same time, the attitude there was very professional. It was a great opportunity to sit down and talk about all sorts of business with people i don't see that often. The entire setup was very well organised, down to the germanically precise tape and cabling on the floor between the booths, smooth working internet, and large screens announcing the current and upcoming presentations. It's only a shame i was busy with meetings that i didn't have a chance to see any lectures.

I really hope i will be able to go next year. This is not an event to miss. That, nor the giant 10 meter tall bust of Karl Marx around the corner from the hotel.

The four F's: Friends

The four F's: Friends

Did you know that we run a pretty sweet Asterisk server in Fedora Infrastructure? It's simple to connect to it via nearly any SIP client. When i mean nearly any, this means not just your computer, but your SIP phone, your Android, your Maemo, and pretty much any device with a speaker and microphone that lets you run your own software. There are also dial in numbers so you can reach the system from some countries, like the US. You can even use it to have friendly chats with other Fedora contributors without racking up expensive long distance phone bills. It's not just there to look pretty, but it's really part of the Friends bit of Fedora. (And well, it's also free, full of features, and i don't know of any other open source community offhand that has Asterisk set up.)

My thanks to Fedora Infrastructure for the great job they do and all the hard work.