The Eleventh Annual Southern California Linux Expo
February 22-24, 2013
Hilton Los Angeles International Airport

Presentations

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Keynote

Your average geek has probably heard of 3D printers but may not know about all of the Open Source underpinnings that have made the 3D printing boom possible. In this talk Kyle will discuss the similarities between the history of hobbyist 3D printers and the history of some popular Linux distributions. He will then talk about some of the 3D printers available today and help you justify buying your own 3D printer with examples of useful things you can print for around the house.

Audience: Intermediate

This will be a fast-paced introduction to Apache CloudStack, a turnkey, open source, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform. Attendees will get a quick overview of what it means to be an IaaS cloud, followed by a lively intro to Apache CloudStack. Will include a quick feature tour, followed by a user interface demo, and Q&A as time allows.

Topic: Keynote

Back in mid-2011, Microsoft published the hardware certification requirements for Windows 8. Key among them was a small section indicating that Windows 8 certified systems would have to ship with UEFI Secure Boot enabled out of the box. Secure Boot is a cryptographic verification mechanism that prevents systems from booting operating systems unless they're signed with a trusted key. As things stood, there would be no requirement that systems be able to boot anything other than Windows. In a bit over a year, it might suddenly have become impossible to run Linux on commodity hardware.

Topic: BoFs

Looking for employees?  Looking for your next great opportunity?  Then come join us!

If your company has openings, you are looking for work or you just want to network, then come to the Jobs Birds of a Feather (BoF) session Friday at 20:00 in Los Angeles A. This BoF will bring engineers and managers from groups that are hiring together with job seekers for an evening of two-sided information gathering.

Topic: Puppet

Learn about how Mozilla IT uses Puppet for configuration management.

Topic: BoFs

The "package" URI scheme is a simple idea to improve the way we install applications on the Linux Desktop and other operating systems too. It should be fairly simple to implement and deploy natively in distributions.

Topic: BoFs

This BoF is for lovers of Google and Open source technologies. Come talk about PaaS, App engine, and Open source alternatives.

Topic: BoFs

We will explore the ins and outs of Linux Certification including:

    * Benefits of becoming Linux Certified

    * Understanding of the different Linux Certifications

    * Suggestions on how to become Linux Certified

This talk is open to both newbies and experienced Linux users.

Topic: BoFs

Do you like working on hardware projects? Did you get a Raspberry Pi/Arduino/Kinect with the intentions of doing something cool? Do you wish that there was a local group where you can meet up with like-minded folks and actually make progress with your projects?

Topic: BoFs

Purpose: help new CFEngine 3 users get started.

Agenda

1. 15 min overview of CFEngine philosophy, design principles and architecture.

2. 15 min Demonstration of installing and using CFEngine 3 to configure /etc/motd and  install packages.

3. Q&A

Topic: BoFs

FreeBSD isn't just for the server. Talk and learn about FreeBSD derivatives like PC-BSD, FreeNAS, or that FreeBSD-based smartphone OS that you just can't get out of your head! Drop by and get a free pair of Daemon horns!

Topic: BoFs

Bring your Pi and share ideas for using it as a cool educational device. We would love to see all the neat things people are doing with their RPis and find out how we can do similar things with ours. Don't have an RPi? Come anyway and find out what RPi is all about! Hopefully we will be able to show OLPC/Sugar Labs' Sugar Software running on an RPi. If you have something great you would be able to show for the RPi, please let caryl@laptop.org know. Hope to see you there!

Topic: BoFs

Calling all functional programmers! Let's get together to chat about the projects you're working on, the languages you're interested in, and what the functional paradigm brings to the development table.

Topic: BoFs

The USENIX Women in Advanced Computing BoF will bring technical professionals together to discuss some of the challenges women face in the professional computing world.

Topic: BoFs

Do you use Etherpad? Do you work on it? Have you written an app that uses it? Well, Etherpad is on the way out, and its younger, slimmer, sexier sibling Etherpad Lite is stepping into the ring. The future of free collaborative editing on the web is here, and it's being developed by a few determined volunteers. Get into contact with a few of them, and learn more, at this BoF!

Topic: BoFs

This BoF is for those people interested in discussing opens source technologies that can be used to deliver open source cloud computing. We'll discuss infrastructure-as-a-service, distributed storage and software-defined networking as it pertains to delivering public and private cloud computing. 

Topic: BoFs

Come on in and talk about cool ideas for extensions, gadgets, modules, or even just changes you'd like to see in MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia and many other wikis on the web. Learn about what extensions, gadgets, and modules are and do, if you don't already know!

Topic: BoFs

This is going to be a great session covering an enticing array of topics from numeric quirks or "gotachas" to delving into PHP's internal workings.  Also, we're going to take a sneak peak at the upcoming PHP5.5 (PHP keeps getting better and better!).  So, there is something here in this session to be of interest to anyone who has ever had any interest in PHP.

Topic: BoFs

More than a decade ago, Infrastructures.org published their iconoclastic paper on deploying large installations. While they diverge in some design choices, tools like Cfengine, Chef, and Salt, and systems at Google, Facebook, and Amazon, largely echo the same ideas of "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure". In today's world of DevOps, Cloud Computing, Big Data, and Mobile Apps, many of the paper's assumptions and conclusions should be re-examined. 

Topic: BoFs

A discussion of inbound and outbound spam control methods, including ones suitable for web hosting companies.

Topic: BoFs

Find out where webOS is going today (and tomorrow). webOS Ports developers will demo Open webOS running on Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7, and Samsung Series 7 Slate devices. Discussion of the current status of Open webOS and active ports will ensue.

Topic: BoFs

If you're a CrunchBang user, curious about CrunchBang, or just like the words "crunch" and "bang" and think they look good together, this is the Birds of a Feather event for you. CrunchBang is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution offering a great blend of speed, style and substance, using the nimble Openbox window manager.

Topic: BoFs

A gathering for German speakers.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: UpSCALE

[d0x3d!] is a board game designed to introduce a diverse body of students to network security terminology, attack & defend mechanics, and basic computer security constructs.

[d0x3d!] is a 100% open-source game, released under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 license. All materials are freely available for downloading, printing and remixing from our GitHub repository and at www.d0x3d.com

Game Night

Audience: Everyone
Topic: UpSCALE

A quick look at MOOCs, what they are, what types of courses are offered, how they work, what the experience is like, and specifically, LocalFi, a final team project from the Stanford Venture Lab course: Designing A New Learning Environment.

Audience: Beginner
Topic: Youth

Tux Paint is a free and open source software that lets kids of all ages be creative while learning essential computer skills.

Sofia's presentation walks through the program functionality. She will share some tips and tricks for using and configuring the program, and will touch on some aspects of interest to educators. This isn't just a slide show. Sofia will build up her presentation live in Tux Paint using the same skills she is explaining.

You've heard of sing-alongs. This is a paint-along! Bring your laptop and have fun!

Topic: DevOps

Testing our configuration management code is getting talked about more and more these days in the Puppet and Chef communities. This talk will address why testing is important and is worth your time. Additionally, it will give different ways to think about testing beyond just reimplementing your manifest or cookbook in rspec or minitest code. Most code examples will come from Puppet but the concepts should apply evenly to Chef as well.

Topic: Puppet

Puppet Demos and general Puppet Q&A with Chris Barker

Topic: Puppet

Lessons learned in the OSUOSL puppet migration

Topic: Puppet

Creating a Mature Puppet System by Ramin Khatibi - SnappyTV

Come see members of the free & open source community face off against each, determining who has the greatest knowledge of geek culture.

SCALE's World Famous Game Night returns for a 3rd year!

Topic: Puppet

Hierarchical Systems Policy Management in a Puppet/LDAP Environment

Topic: Puppet

Automating your Apache CloudStack infrastructure with Puppet

Topic: Puppet

Nathan Valentine of Puppet Labs will provide an overview of the current state of Puppet.

Topic: UpSCALE

Google App Engine lets users deploy Python, Java, and Go applications to resources Google owns and autoscales without requiring a system administrator. We looked at Google App Engine and loved the framework, but wanted to run it on our own clusters or in other clouds. This talk covers why we created AppScale, how we did it, and the hardware that it can run on. We also cover the open source technologies we use to automatically deploy App Engine apps on your own hardware (e.g., Cassandra, memcached, ejabberd).

Audience: Everyone
Topic: UpSCALE

A quick analysis of why the average consumer doesn't use open source software.

Topic: Sponsored

This is a hands on workshop for deploying services into the cloud with Juju. Participants should bring their laptops and be comfortable with a text editor. We'll play around with the Juju command line and GUI and show you how to deploy things in the cloud, and we'll also cover how to write Juju charms for your own applications.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Sponsored

Come learn about the exciting technology that is changing the devops landscape. An overview of Salt's capabilities and a quick bootcamp on how to get your environment Salted.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Ubucon

Here Jono will discuss the new Ubuntu Smartphone system, and showcase the future potential that the system has. He will then bring out a phone and demo it in front of the audience for everyone to see. After this, he will talk about how to get your apps into the phone platform.This talk will allow people to see the new phone system before it hits shelves from someone who has worked with the phone before.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Ubucon

LiveCode is a rapid application development tool that's easy enough for non-programmers and flexible enough for professionals - and it's about to go open source.

Deploying to Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, LiveCode has been used many thousands of educators, business owners, and professional developers for productivity apps, courseware, games, and more.

This session will introduce the LiveCode development environment and it's  English-like language, building a simple application in real-time and outlining its open source strategy.

Audience: Everyone

Description of the realization of a high altitude balloon project, using the Arduino micro-controller.
This talk is about how to achieve a relatively complex project with a few teams of volunteers.
This project is still at a "work in progress" stage.

Topic: Sponsored

Clayton Weise of ISWest will provide a case study showing experiences with Continuous Delivery of a Cloud Based Services.

Topic: Sponsored

The shift to cloud-based services has dramatically altered the IT landscape as we know it. Enterprise infrastructure borders have expanded beyond the firewall and now include hosted applications and infrastructure hosted in public and private clouds. Puppet helps DevOps teams meet their common objectives, creating a seamless IT infrastructure across departments, reducing cost and increasing productivity.This training section will cover deploying cloud infrastructure automatically using Puppet, an open source configuration management and automation tool

Topic: Sponsored

Ceph is an open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability. It runs on commodity hardware, has no single point of failure, and is supported by the Linux kernel. This talk will describe the Ceph architecture, share its design principles, and discuss how it can be part of a cost-effective, reliable cloud stack.

Topic: Sponsored

An introduction and overview of the Eucalyptus project by project co-founder Graziano Obertelli.

Topic: Sponsored

Apache CloudStack is arguably one of the most mature, frequently deployed IaaS platforms - having been used in multi-national public clouds, and private clouds scaling to tens of thousands of physical compute nodes, wel look at considerations for deploying CloudStack and how to gain the most efficiency from your deployment.

Topic: Sponsored

The Xen Cloud Platform is an open-source, enterprise-ready server virtualization platform. It is based on the Xen hypervisor, and represents the common code base for Citrix's XenServer product line. This talk will give an introduction to XCP, and how it relates to both the Xen hypervisor and to Citrix's XenServer. We will cover XCP's XenAPI and how it can be used by two of the most popular cloud orchestration frameworks, CloudStack and OpenStack. Finally, we'll discuss the XCP "roadmap," and our plans for the future of XCP.

Topic: Sponsored

Mark Hinkle will provide openning introductions and kick off the event.

Topic: Youth

 A youth working in the Open Source world is likely to have great life skills, and be able to have many qualities that people who do not work in the Open Source world might have.

Audience: Everyone

Christian is the Executive Director of a non-profit that puts Linux computers in public schools, called Partimus.org.  Christian's talk will draw on common themes from those disparate experiences, to convey an overview of the benefits and best practices of using Free Open Source Software in public schools.  This will be a non-technical talk, as Christian is a relatively simple end user, and more of a community organizer not developer or sys-admin. 

Audience: Everyone
Topic: UpSCALE

The UpSCALE talks are held in the style of the Ignite presentations made popular by various O'Reilly sponsored events. Participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 automatically-advanced slides, making this a fast paced, fun event for participants and audience. 

Topic: DevOps

On your marks! Let's start the DevOps FAMILY FEUD!  Watch two local DevOps organizations compete this spin on the popular TV gameshow!

Audience: Everyone
Topic: UpSCALE

What is it? Is it a bumpy bed to sleep on? A shipping flat hanging over your head?

No.

It's an interactive physical artists' color picker!

The talk will cover creation of an Arduino-based physical input device with complex visual feedback and touch input.

Prototype phase is done, and domains have been reserved for coordination of software and UI refinement. Open hardware, open software, and lots of 'wow' for end users and even non-techies. Come join the fun and help us make it even better.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: DevOps

Christopher Smith's work has spanned from massive big data processing systems to small patches to ethernet drivers. In his talk, he'll share his practical hands on experience fighting the scaling and performance battle, identifying the trade-offs of the different architectural approaches, how to anticipate the next bottleneck, when to make the leap to the next tech stack, and practical identification how big scaling efficiency gains can be unlocked by having a well integrated technical team.

Audience: Beginner
Topic: Youth

Tale of a 5th grader who uses open source software for web design, school newspapers, homework, video editing, programming and all kinds of other fun things.

Audience: Beginner

Linux Beginner Training Class

Audience: Beginner

Linux Beginner Training Class

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Youth

Students are mostly end-users.  We mostly buy and use software made by industries and corporations every day, while having no clue about the components that drive the software. Schools don't properly teach computing. Only through Linux can the student understand enough about their computer to code for themselves, as well as enjoy serving in a worthwhile cause. 

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Ubucon

Introductions, State of Ubuntu, Q&A 

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Ubucon

In this informative presentation Aviv  will cover some preferred hardware to go with a linux system. We will go over multiple PC peripherals and give some tips for what is recommended when installing a linux ubuntu system.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Ubucon

Ubuntu Linux has grown out of it's infancy to become a robust and stable O.S.  I will make a use case for uBuntu Linux to become the O.S. of choice for Enterprises across the globe.  uBuntu will provide the foundation, Opscode Chef will provide the Infrastructure manangement system critical to all Enterprises and KVM will provide the key piece to creating a private cloud.  Combining these Open-Source technologies will give any Enterprise the ability to become Fault Tolerant to errors, able to recover quickly from disaster and see maximum return from hardware investment.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: PostgreSQL

Gentlemen, start your database engines!

PostgreSQL 9.2 beta is here, and it's faster and more exciting than ever before. Come down to the track and join us for a high-speed tour of a database which is faster than ever before!

Audience: Beginner
Topic: Youth
  • How to get started
  • How to choose your programming language
  • Examples of how you can help
  • Other ways to be involved
  • Resources for you to use!
Audience: Intermediate
Topic: PostgreSQL

In those rare situations when you find a new bug in an opensouce project, the likelihood of getting timely relevant help is often directly related to the quality of your question. Using a real life example of a bug I reported to Postgres, this talk will cover the steps you should follow.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: PostgreSQL

An overview with examples of the various ways you can properly backup PostgreSQL, including but not limited to, pg_dump/pg_restore, basebackups, and pg_rman.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Ubucon

In the world of Ubuntu, there are many places to get help that are not always looked at. This talk will go over the ways people can get help for their Ubuntu machine and when to effectivly use each one by exploring the differences in all of them.

Topic: ScaleU

Based on Tom Limoncelli's life-saving book, this course will cover Tom's Cycle System. These time management tips and practices can greatly increase the efficiency of any single sysadmin, and when applied in a group their effects can be a quantum shift in productivity. They also give the sysadmin practitioner greater peace of mind and more power and control.

Topic: ScaleU

 

This half day session on Git by the trainers at GitHub will teach you the ins and outs of Advanced Git Usage. Topics will include Interactive rebasing, shaping history with git filter-branch, merging with rere, and much more. 

 

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: Ubucon

Overview of some of the options for getting Ubuntu running "in the cloud" using popular services like Amazon EC2. Also, how you can quickly deploy your own Ubuntu-based cloud using OpenStack-powered DevStack.

Topic: Kernel

This talk covers system performance analysis methodologies and the Linux tools to support them, so that you can get the most out of your systems and solve performance issues quickly. This includes a wide variety of tools, including basics like top(1), advanced tools like perf, and new tools like the DTrace for Linux prototypes.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: PostgreSQL

Having scalability issues? Attracted to the idea of NoSQL but worried about consistency and having to rewrite your SQL-based applications? Postgres-XC let's you scale your PostgreSQL application beyond a single server without giving up Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) and consistency.

Come learn what Postgres-XC is, what the the ideal use cases are and most importantly, what its limitations are.

Audience: Beginner
Topic: PostgreSQL

With the new JSON features in 9.2, PostgreSQL has more options for handling unstructured data than ever before, while retaining the full typing system, relational integrity, and data safety features of a full RDBMS.

We'll go over the various schemaless data storage options in PostgreSQL, with a focus on the new JSON features. We'll talk about indexing, using JSON and other unstructured types in functions within PostgreSQL, and performance considerations.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Kernel

Checkpoint/restore allows to freeze a set of running processes and save their complete state to a disk. This state can later be restored, so the processes resume exactly the way they were running before. This opens a whole set of possibilities, such as live migration, fast start of a huge application, or kernel update without service interruption.

The talk outlines the current state of the project, including:

  • recent changes merged to the upstream kernel
  • some implementation details
  • current feature set
  • plans for the future
Audience: Beginner
Topic: ScaleU

This one-day training track is designed to prepare students for LPI's (Linux Professional Institute's) new "Linux Essentials" Certificate program.  

 

Audience: Developer
Topic: Kernel

Android Kernels are found on the majority of new mobile devices, Linux ones aren't.  Rather than reinvent the world and write new drivers, using LibHybris,  you can use the existing Android drivers to make the job of porting linux userspaces onto these devices much easier.

Audience: Developer
Topic: Kernel

Started as a braindead fuzz-testing tool for calling system calls with random garbage, trinity has grown into a tool that (at time of writing) seems to be finding bugs in areas all over the kernel, from network protocols to filesystems, from virtual memory to virtualisation, and many more.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: Kernel

The Presentation will cover the Linux command line utility 'strace' and some of it's many uses.  It will cover the basics of Linux System Calls and their use.  The presentation will use examples throughout to provide genuine use-cases for the tool.  The Presentation is focused on Practical Application Troubleshooting.  I will demonstrate many techniques that can help you to gain a deeper understanding of application execution flow on a Linux system.

 

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Presentation will show how to use Git to track changes to system and software configuration files on any OS.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: SysAdmin

Logs are a mess. Too many formats, no common timestamps, and too many amazing one-liner scripts to process them. Ugh! There's hope! Logstash and other tools are here to help. This talk will cover common logging practices (good and bad), some tools you might want to learn about later, as well as an overview of logstash and how you can use it to achieve victory in the battle against log abuse!

 

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

A brief overview of project life cycle management methodologies, with a focus on those best suited for open source software projects. Key points in these cycles where greater transparency and collaboration can be encouraged will be discussed, as well as tools for sharing release information.  Get your community code released and out the door with milestones, radical transparency, happy people, and minimal pain!

Audience: Everyone
Topic: DevOps

Many wise Operators, Developers, SysAdmins, Architects, and Engineers have told us how Dev/Ops is a movement, not a job title. Here an Operator, Developer, and co-founder of LA Dev/Ops, js.la, and LA Hack Night shares why he thinks it's time we change. 

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: General

Broad introduction to advanced Bash features for users who are comfortable using Bash at least at a basic or intermediate level.  We'll cover the distinction between various command types (file, builtin, function, keyword), as well as how to find appropriate system and command documentation.  We'll use compound commands like for loops, while loops, conditionals and command groups and show how they can be used to build functions.  We'll explore effective usage of parameter expansion (substitution and indirection), string manipulation, and brace expansion.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: Kernel

Multiuser OSes are common and well understood today. Multiuser, network file systems have also been around for decades. Virtualization brings new challenges, including the need for multitenant management of multiuser systems. Here we discuss the technical issues in extending the classic multiuser, networked storage protocols to be usable in a multitenant environment, where each client could be a member of a different name space. Challenges faced include security, isolation, and resource management.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: SysAdmin

Create high availability clustering for services that don't support it. Some services might internally support clustering or failover, but be dependent on components that don't.

Using corosync configuration, you can manage resources such as IP addresses, filesystems and services to failover to a secondary server. Example services include web servers, databases and message brokers.

The presentation will cover basic corosync configuration for resource control and DRBD configuration for failover filesystems. MySQL will be used as an example service for the failover configuration.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

New technological innovations keep coming with new restrictions, frustrating and
controlling users even while creating a perception of empowerment. The
Free Software Foundation wants to gain the support and protect the
interests of everyone, not just programmers. How do we reach people who
have no intention of ever modifying a program, and how do we help them?

Audience: Everyone

Imagine it’s eight o’clock on a Thursday morning and you awake to see a bulldozer out your window ready to plow over your data center. Normally you may wish to consult the Encyclopedia Galáctica to discern the best course of action but your copy is likely out of date. And while the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) is a wholly remarkable book it doesn’t cover the nuances of cloud computing. That’s why you need the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cloud Computing (HHGTCC) or at least to attend this talk to understand the the latest developments in open source cloud computing.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Kernel

KVM is the only hypervisor that leverages both the scalability of Linux and performance of hardware virtualization. KVM is gaining adoption for some unique workloads & forward-looking-use case. KVM is pressuring proprietary hypervisor vendors to be more open and competitive. IBM has been actively developing and using KVM internally and in products since 2007. Todays challenge for the KVM development community is to make the hypervisor easier to use, more self-aware (in the sense that it can tune itself), and to enable an ISV ecosystem around the oVirt and OpenStack infrastructures.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

In this new presentation from Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager and author of The Art of Community, he discusses the challenges that face the Linux community in building a pervasive, ubiquitous platform and how we can build great communities to cross the chasm together to build a Free Software platform that benefits everyone.

All of this will be encased in an entertaining, amusing, and anecdote-laden presentation that will be informative and entertaining with the goals of inspiring everyone to contribute to the future success of Linux.

Audience: Beginner
Topic: File System

GlusterFS is a an open source distributed file system that features:

* Automatic Replication, Failover and Self-Heal

* Scale-out - Add or remove storage nodes as needed

* Present one global namespace to all users

* Unified File and Object allows you to access data via traditional file system mounts, or via SWIFT, simultaneously.

Audience: Everyone

This will be an introduction to OpenStack focusing on the needs and expectations of the distinct classes of consumer of your cloud. The talk will emphasize best-practice from pilot to production while keeping track of the roles and use-cases following the 5-actor model of cloud consumer.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: General

We'd like to share what we've learned along the way while working on the Raspberry Pi Hacks book (expected release in May) through an assortment of fun projects, from trying to cram a Raspberry Pi with Gameboy emulator back into an original case to launching a Pi with a camera up, up, and... away?

We'll start with the basic important Pi tricks, like making sure you have the right SD card and that you've chosen the best distro for the job you intend to do up through some more challenging problems, like what happens when you need to build a cross-compiler or a custom kernel.

Audience: Beginner
Topic: SysAdmin

If you're a system administrator running RPM based systems, you should always package software. Having packages allows you to consistency check, verify, version control, and so on. This session will teach you how to create RPMs, even if you're not a developer, and even if you need to package commercial software for which you have no source code.

Audience: Beginner

Public and private cloud offerings are enabling innovations to help make life easier for developers. In this session you'll learn how to build your own Platform as a Service (PaaS), with the open source code (OpenShift Origin) Red Hat uses to power its OpenShift Online. OpenShift is a free, auto-scaling PaaS based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and built on top on Amazon EC2.  We will cover some of the basic pieces of the architecture, what we do with Linux kernel "magic" and SELinux, and how you can run it yourself.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

In our post-recessionary age, the job market continues to be highly volatile, unpredictable, and a bit scary. The presenter will explore common issues in today's market, issues that impact both the job seeker and the employer. In a nutshell, today's economic climate has led to a disconnect between the skills that job seekers possess, the kinds of jobs that they are interested in, and the specific mix of skills, experience, and knowledge that employers are looking for. Techniques will be presented to help bridge this gap and gain exposure to the employers and the jobs most desired.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

We live in a time when Apple iDevices are in the head of consumers like Kleenex is for cold sufferers. Worse, most Microsoft Windows users don't even realize what it is or that there are options other than perhaps something else from Apple.

Given that we advocates of software freedom generally cannot run Super Bowl ads or sponsor large, culturally-noticed events, where and how do we insert our message?

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: SysAdmin

This talk looks at how Facebook has redesigned its configuration management system to handle a massive, dynamic, heterogeneous environment with a tiny team and open source software. We will look at the philosophy we use to manage our systems, the implementation of that philosophy, and how you can apply these ideas to any size server footprint, from a handful of servers to a global environment.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

How do the court cases and legislative votes from the past year impact the landscape of seemingly endless software patent suits? Where are all these patents coming from? Ms. Nicholson will give a top-level view of recent and relevant scholarly papers in the field, discuss evolving strategies and global efforts to staunch the flow of settlement money. This talk is an update on the situation since last year and a deeper dive on recent trends and financial models that impact our ability to just get back to making awesome free software already.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

Does every open source project need an open infrastructure with root potentially available to any community member?

Not every project has experienced or heard about the horrors of what can happen when a community's code and content are on closed infrastructure it can't control. People leave, relationships change, vendors stop supporting, bad things happen.

In this presentation learn the reasons for running a 100% open community infrastructure and the practical steps for how to build your own open infrastructure, with lessons-learned from the Fedora Project, oVirt project, and others.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

Roy Sutton and Tom King will discuss two sides of working on an Open Source Project.  Roy will talk about the internal efforts of working with HP's Open webOS project and Tom will discuss his role as the lead of an external team working on porting Open webOS to various hardware platforms.  They will discuss how corporate contributors can work better with open source communities and the issues that community leaders face in organizing developers.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Roy Sutton will talk about the experience of moving webOS, a closed source operating system, into an open source project.  He will talk about some of the decisions that were made, some of the challenges discovered along the way and lessons-learned when attempting to get internal and external stakeholders to work together.

Audience: Developer
Topic: SysAdmin

OpenStack Swift and other open source storage technologies are moving quickly to bring cloud-driven disruption to the traditional world of data storage. Learn from a Mirantis OpenStack expert about the opportunities and misconceptions about what actually works.

Audience: Advanced
Topic: DevOps

Trigger was designed to increase the speed and efficiency of managing network configuration while reducing human error, and is the bread and butter of how we manage the large-scale network at AOL. In this talk I intend to cover the problems we solved using Python to manage our network infrastructure, especially how each network vendor does things distinctly differently, and about the code and API that makes Trigger tick using detailed examples.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

This is the second part of Aleksey's vi training based on Bill Joy's original paper introducing display editing with vi.  It covers the rest of Bill Joy's paper (after the basics).  The class is completely hands on with many lab exercises.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: ScaleU

The course covers the history, background and design principles of vi; all the vi movement commands; many text alteration commands; and the vi command language syntax. Attendees must bring a laptop with "vi" on it for in-class exercises. No prior experience is required but 20 year veterans of vi have come out raving how much they learned in this course.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Kernel

Excess buffering on the Internet leads to delays, slow downs and complaints. This presentation is a light hearted exploration of buffering demonstrated by (ab)using the analogy of Internet and plumbing. It explains the phenomena of Bufferbloat using common household objects and water.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

VLC media player is a universal, open-source, cross-platform media playback and streaming application. This talk will give an overview of the VideoLAN project, the history behind VideoLAN and VLC, and will speak about the most used features and an insight in less well-known features making the live easier for both beginners and advanced users.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

While Linux offers many fine text editors Emacs really shines because it can do so much more that just edit text. In this presentation you'll learn the basics of using Emacs and be introduced to the power of Emacs' Org-mode. With Org-mode you can manage projects using to-do lists, schedules, agendas and time-tracking tools. Org-mode can handle projects of any size using simple ASCII text files which lend themselves to version control. With Emacs and Org-mode you can use GTD (Getting Things Done) techniques to bring your life under control.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: MySQL

High profile break ins as of late all have one thing in common: the database was the target. Databases are unprotected when compared to the rest of the operating system, and once the host operating system is compromised, the thief can do whatever he wants to the database service. Usually this is stealing a snapshot of interesting tables to decrypt later at one's leisure. This talk covers securing your database against even a root OS user who acts hastily, as well as some PCI compliance tricks employed to prevent credit cards and other decryptable information from getting stolen.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: MySQL

Can you use a Relational Database to solve a Rubiks Cube or Pyraminx or Sudoku? Does it require a brute force approach? What are the maximum number of moves required to solve a puzzle, and how much disk space and memory will you need to solve it? This talk leverages the relational nature of an RDBMS to solve many classic puzzles, but more importantly, will make you think about the way you encode and retrieve large data sets, as storing every possible state a puzzle can be in can start get unwieldy.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

In January 2012, the DoD solicited public feedback on Open Source use. It specified three topics with respect to open source in DoD deliverables:

1. risks that open source may include proprietary material

2. potential for contractors to face warranty or performance issues?

3. Should the DFARS be revised?

The forum hosted ~50 representatives and also allowed other topics.

This talk will cover the meeting topics, Licensing and Classified Data, GPL hassles, and real world implementation difficulties - including conflicting DoD direction.  

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

We often store relationships within a database but we often lack the tools to find paths within those relationships without having to pull out all the data and use some other product to do that. However, with MariaDB and OQGraph, it is possible to traverse graphs durectly and efficiently, from within the database.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

OLPC got its start back in 2006 with the introduction of the first XO computers. Since then, almost 3 million of the little green and white laptops have been deployed all over the world. From the XO to the XO-4, come find out what is happening now and what is in the future for OLPC. Learn the status of the latest versions of Sugar on a Stick (SOAS) that you can use on your own computer. Find out how you can get involved in this important educational adventure.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Take a behind-the-scenes look at the powerful new video editing library which will bring many professional level features to the next version of OpenShot, including a curve-based animation system, time re-mapping, and sub-pixel image processing.

Learn how these features were developed, how they work, and how easily they can be controlled with curves to create the perfect effect for your next video!  This presentation is perfect for anyone with an interest in open-source video editing, regardless of skill-level. 

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: SysAdmin

This talk explores the ways attackers with no authorized database access can steal Postgres passwords, see database queries and results, and even intercept database sessions and return false data. Postgres supports features to eliminate all of these threats, but administrators must understand the attack vulnerabilities to protect against them. This talk covers all known Postgres external attack methods.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: PostgreSQL

Pg_Upgrade allows data to be transferred between major Postgres versions without a dump/restore. It does this by transferring the user data and version-dependent data separately. This talk explains the internal workings of pg_upgrade and includes a pg_upgrade demonstration.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

The speaker invented the Affero copyleft clause, on the urging from Henry Poole to address what was once called the “Application Service Provider Loophole” of GPL. It wasn't a loophole; the issue simply wasn't pertinent when GPLv2 was drafted in 1991. Since then, network services became a standard form of software delivery.

Unfortunately, AGPLv3 has not quickly risen in interest with software developers. This talk discuses potential reasons, and also address the corrupting influence of proprietary relicensing business based around AGPLv3.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: SysAdmin

The suid and sgid permissions set on a binary executable file can be used to provide greater access (controlled by the program) than the user normally is provided.  The sgid and sticky bit permissions set on a directory can simplify using that directory for collaboration for a group of users.  This talk focuses on how these permissions affect files and directories, how to set them and the potential security risks of these special permissions.  Learn to make use of these powerful permissions to make a more flexible environment.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: General

Hockeypuck is an open-source OpenPGP keyserver designed for reliability and performance. Development was easy and fun with the strong concurrency model and rich library ecosystem of the Go programming language. As a PKI service, Hockeypuck is uniquely equipped to support and secure new applications.

Audience: Beginner
Topic: SysAdmin

This talk walks users through the basic concepts of continuous integration, a practice becoming popular to help developers become more productive, regardless of the programming languages.

We do this by using an OSS CI tool called Jenkins, which is the currently most adopted CI server on the market. The ease of use of this tool, as well as the extensibility though 600+ plugins make it a good choice for people to do CI.

This talk will be introductory, and targets toward those who have never tried Jenkins or CI, to give you a good overview.

Audience: Everyone

When it comes to hypervisors, the engines that drive virtualization, "free" (as in freedom or as in beer) has become the norm, with management capabilities generally available as costly add-ons. The oVirt Project is changing the game, with a feature-rich virtualization platform that's open source from end-to-end. Attend this presentation to learn about what oVirt can do for your virtual data center, and about how you can participate in the project to help advance the state of open source virtualization.

Audience: Developer
Topic: General

Cloud database services may be riding a wave of hype recently, but there does exist a wealth of solid tools underlying the development of these systems. We'll take a look at Riak, an open source distributed database, and how it uses simple distributed patterns (merkle trees, vector clocks, distributed hashes) and message patterns to create a highly available system that can survive downed nodes and network partitions.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: File System

A discussion on the foundational architecture of OrangeFS and the major changes coming, Topics include: resilience, distributed file handles, policy based object location, distributed background frameworks and arbitrary attribute distributed indexes. We will conclude with a brief overview of PXFS and Parallex research underway.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Hack your health. Run your own labwork, 3D print yourself from imaging data, be the best patient you can be and an insiders guide to navigating the frustrating and esoteric maze of your payer, provider and hospital.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: DevOps

This presentation is an overview of how "Promise Theory" might be used to deal with the onslaught of infrastructure scale and complexity facing IT management in this 2010+ decade.  A short history of configuration management will be discussed as well as an in depth look at the ideas behind the science and math of "Promise Theory".

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

For the past ten years the OSU Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) has provided hosting for 150 open source projects from around the world. This session will cover a historical background of the past ten years, an overview of the types of projects we host, what types of hosting we provide, what tools we use and how we provide the hosting. Our audience should be people interested in what's going on at the OSUOSL lately and how we provide hosting for all the projects.

Topic: MySQL

High Availability Solutions for MySQL

Achieving High Availability with MySQL is a tricky thing; there are almost as many recipes as there are cooks out there. This talk will go through the most common solutions for achieving HA with MySQL and list the pros and cons for each of them. The solutions include standard replication, MHA, Continuent Tungsten, Galera, shared-disk based solutions and MySQL Cluster 

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: File System

As the size and performance requirements of storage systems have increased, file system designers have looked to new architectures to facilitate system scalability. Ceph is a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability and scalability.

Audience: Intermediate

Salt Cloud is a public cloud provisioning tool designed to automate
deployment of public cloud systems. Currently supporting a growing
number of popular cloud providers, Salt Cloud is a lightweight yet
robust solution to managing cloud-based systems.

While Salt Cloud has been designed to work with Salt, it is also a
generic cloud management platform and can be used to manage non
Salted clouds.

This presentation will outline requirements for Salt and Salt Cloud,
as well as demonstrate automated provisioning of virtual machines
across multiple clouds and multiple distributions.

Audience: Intermediate

With LXC (Linux Containers), one can split a Linux machine in multiple isolated environments. Compared to KVM or Xen, LXC has a very low overhead, since it runs processes within a common host kernel, instead of emulating complete machines.

LXC relies on kernel namespaces (providing isolation), and control groups (ensuring fair sharing of resources). We will detail their respective roles.

We will also show how to use unioning filesystems for fast & lightweight provisioning of environments, allowing to run thousands of containers on a typical server.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

With an understanding of how children learn and what skills are of the most value in the dynamic field of technology, we can see how open source is uniquely suited to introducing technology to young children in meaningful ways. This presentation will examine how children acquire the skills that will help them develop the technologies of the future and how parents, teachers, and mentors can avoid the pitfalls of dumbed-down technology and rote learning. This talk will appeal to parents, teachers, and the geeks of today who are looking over their shoulders at the next generation.

Audience: Developer
Topic: SysAdmin

If you're a developer in a small company, you probably don't have a dedicated sysadmin, but you still want to use best practices.

You've probably heard of configuration management as a better way to control your servers. You've heard of the big three: Puppet, Chef, and Cfengine.

But how do you choose between them? Especially when you've only got a week to spare for a project that should take 4?

This talk will walk you through the major differences between the big three solutions, and where each one would be the best fit.

Audience: Everyone

One of the best things about the cloud is the ability to horizontally scale. Traffic growing? Add more machines. While this is great it leads to other problems, as sites grow the complexity does too, and the concept of "individual machines" becomes less important. When it comes to hyperscale, we believe it's all about managing the services themselves, not individual machines. No more AMI soup, what if we could just manage "PostgreSQL" as a whole, and scale it horizontally based on your needs? This talk is about what we're doing in Ubuntu to help.  

 

Audience: Developer
Topic: General

Planning scalable environments isn't terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective. During this session we'll broaden our views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform,

Audience: Everyone
Topic: SysAdmin

 

Ever been frustrated getting Linux and Windows systems to play nice on your network? Truth be told, most enterprises do. Todays heterogeneous networks with a mix of Linux, Unix, or Windows have a host of interoperability headaches to resolve. This presentation will arm you with the knowledge of technologies to facilitate interoperability between Linux and Windows file sharing, printing, directory services and more. All the tools exist to make these unlikely bedfellows connect in peace. Join us to explore how!

 

Audience: Intermediate

The Xen Hypervisor was built for the Cloud from the outset: when Xen was designed, we anticipated a world, which today is known as cloud computing. Today, Xen powers the largest clouds in production.

This talk explores success criteria, architecture, trade-offs and challenges for cloudy hypervisors. It will show how Xen specific features such as Domain Disaggregation and the Xen Security Modules can be used to increase security, robustness, performance and scalability of your cloud and will conclude with a round-up of what is cool and new in the Xen community.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

In this talk, Bob Reselman shares the techniques that he has developed in his twenty plus years of helping organizations implement an effective technical documentation infrastructure that is easy to use and easy to maintain.

 

Audience: Everyone
Topic: MySQL

MySQL is a wonderful database but many programmers and administrators have a hard time writing queries that are efficient and actually return the requested information.  This session is a quick introduction to SQL (Structured Query Language), writing queries, designing tables, indexing, and how to make sure you queries do not suck.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: File System

FreeNAS is an open source, network attached storage platform based on FreeBSD. The Plugins Jail, introduced in version 8.3, can be used to extend core-NAS functionality by installing PBIs (push button installers) that integrate additional services into the FreeNAS administrative GUI.

This presentation will introduce the Plugins Jail and PBI architectures, demonstrate how to install, configure, and manage PBI software, and how to install and configure additional software that has not yet been packaged as a PBI. It will also provide an overview of how to create FreeNAS PBIs.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

There are a lot of areas where free software is significantly endangered, but gaming is possibly one of the worst examples. Giants like Blizzard and Valve have cornered the market handily, and even people who steadfastly use Trisquel GNU/Linux and free video drivers might often be tempted to play non-free games. This presentation will briefly introduce a few awesome free offerings that could not only use you as part of the players' community, but also as part of the production community in general.

Topic: DevOps

Mozilla has learned a number of lessons and developed a playbook of simple patterns for scaling our various web applications, as we've grown from thousands to hundreds of millions of daily active users over the last few years. Brandon Burton and Chris Turra from Mozilla's Web Operations team are going to share a few of those patterns and lessons with you today and provide insight into scaling the many pieces of a modern web application architecture and our strategies to keep pace with this growth.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

When FOSS project communities reach a certain critical point in their growth, corporations express interest in participating. Corporations have more stringent and robust software IP management needs, however, and projects are not always up to the task. Neutral non-profit FOSS foundations have proved to be a solution to these problems, providing for the IP management needs of corporations while offering additional business and technical services to the project communities to encourage further growth and adoption.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Do you wish you where back in the second golden age of video games? Remember the days when you could buy a Crystal Pepsi and pixelated 2D platformers ruled the world? Well, why not learn about how an experimental retro-style video game engine (Marshmallow) running on an extremely popular piece of hardware (the Raspberry Pi) fit into the creation of an open-source video game console.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: SysAdmin

There are a number of ways in which to automate the installation of FreeBSD & PC-BSD systems. In this presentation we will take a look at and demonstrate how to quickly setup a PXE boot server on PC-BSD / TrueOS. This service will allow us to boot client computers via the network interface, and perform a variety of installations, including FreeBSD servers, PC-BSD desktops or custom images. We will also discuss advanced disk setup, including built-in support for deploying to ZFS raidz and mirror configurations.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: MySQL

MySQL indexes are often used to make performance better. However, they can make performance suffer if you are not using them properly. MySQL Guru Sheeri Cabral explains the pitfalls to avoid with indexes and how to utilize compound indexes to maximize index availability with the least amount of write overhead.

Audience: Developer
Topic: Kernel

At SCALE 9X, David did a talk entitled "The Status of the Linux Slab Allocators." In the talk, several problems were introduced, mainly concerning performance and configuration, about the current situation of having multiple slab allocators available. This talk, introducing the SLAM allocator, is the solution. The SLAM allocator aims to become the one sole Linux slab allocator and introduces new technology that has never been done before in a slab allocator. Everyone who configures their own kernel is encouraged to attend.

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: File System

ZFS is a filesystem developed by Sun Microsystems originally for the Solaris operating system. It has since been ported to the Linux kernel by way of a kernel module. It is a modern 128-bit copy-on-write filesystem with an extensive amount of features. It combines software RAID levels, volume management, compression, deduplication, quotas, automatic mounting, checksums and a number of other features. ZFS is mature, stable, and highly tested. It has built in detection mechanisms for silent hardware errors, and has automatic continuous integrity checking and error correction.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

Most open source software groups rarely have the resources to devote to buying ads in Google search or doing hardware give-aways as a shortcut to gaining fans. Instead, the individuals behind these projects must look to other, cheaper methods to develop excitement about the project. Over the course of this presentation, Nathan will seek to describe many of the do's and don't's that he has experienced in his time working with XBMC.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Introduction to the Drupal open-source, content management system using a live demo in which we will demonstrate the basics of building out a Drupal web site. Are you new to Drupal, but don't know where to start? This session is for you! In 45 minutes (or less), we will install Drupal 7, build a functioning web site and deploy it live to the Internet. You will leave this session with an understanding of the foundations of Drupal site architecture.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

In this session, we’ll discuss tangible tips and tricks for building engaged meetup groups, drawing upon Meghan’s experience working with the network of 50+ MongoDB User Groups, as well as the local Python and C++ meetup groups in New York City. We’ll talk about cultivating speakers, find

Audience: Intermediate
Topic: SysAdmin

Most Small Business and consumer grade firewalls lack IPv6 support, and the one's that do don't have much in firewall settings. With the lack of NAT for IPv6, many network administrators are fearful of deploying IPv6. This talk will briefly cover basic setup of IPv6 connectivity and routing on Linux, then will center in on how to spin simple but effective ip6table rules to protect an IPv6 network. Differences between iptables and ip6tables will be discussed.

Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

This talk will attempt to review the history of IPv6 deployment and the reasons things aren't going as fast as some of us would like. It will seek to use a humorous approach to cover the ways in which human nature is leading us to the brink of losing the free and open internet and how people can take affirmative action to ensure that doesn't happen.

While the initial part of the talk will focus on some important non-technical aspects of these issues, the majority of the talk will provide practical steps, tips, and just plain instructions for deploying IPv6 in Linux environments.