SCALE 9x - 2011 Southern California Linux Expo - Intermediate

Linux as a HTPC

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

Discuss software options that will allow you to set up your own home theater PC. (HTPC)

General

We will go over which software options there are for running your own HTPC on Linux, and compare the benefits and downsides of commercial software vs. free software. We will touch on media streamers such as the Roku, Boxee box, Apple TV, Popbox, and others to compare situations where those may be better solutions for your needs and what features they can bring to the table.

The presentation will focus mainly on different HTPC software (MythTV, XBMC, Boxee) and show the benefits and downsides of each one. I will talk about what other commercial options are out there Tivo and Moxi as well as look into media streamers such as the Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, Popbox and others. I will also show live demonstrations of some of the software so people can see it running first hand and see some of the features that set each one apart. We will go into why you would want to set up your own HTPC and what sources are available to you. (Hulu, Netflix, Revision 3). We can also touch on some hardware recommendations and good sources for help once you decide to build your own HTPC.

Speaker: Justin Garrison

Downloads

http://bit.ly/i3VePI

Presentation

Day:

Saturday, February 26th

Time:

6:00pm

Room:

Century CD

Introduction to Automating System Administration with Cfengine

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

An introduction to Cfengine, the open source configuration management tool with the longest track record, a large user base, and cutting edge features.

SCALE U

Modern system administration automates configuration managementby using state of the art tools. This is an introduction to Cfengine, the open source configuration management tool with the longest track record, a large user base, and cutting edge features. System administrators will gain an understanding of Cfengine 3, including its syntax and benefits, and will be able to start using it immediately.

Modern system administration automates configuration management using state of the art tools. Here is an introduction to Cfengine, the open source configuration management tool with the longest track record, a large user base, and cutting edge features.

System administrators will take back to work an understanding of Cfengine 3 including it's syntax and benefits, and will be able to start using it.

Topics include:
* Moving from ad hoc administration to automation
* The importance of convergence and self-healing
* The Promise model
* Data types
* Quickstart configuration
* Example configurations and demos

Speaker: Aleksey Tsalolikhin

Day:

Friday, February 25th

Time:

9:00am

Room:

Los Angeles C

Byobu: GNU Screen for Human Beings

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

Unleash the power of your command line environment through this innovative, intuitive take on GNU Screen

System Administrator

UNIX and Linux sys admins have been using the GNU Screen utility for 25 years. While expert Screen users swear of its importance in their toolbox, the learning curve for new users can be quite steep. Enter 'Byobu', an innovative, intuitive approach to GNU Screen. The author of Byobu will introduce the basic flow of operation and also showcase the advanced features of Byobu and GNU Screen.

Speaker: Dustin Kirkland

Downloads

http://bit.ly/f9uJvp

Presentation

Day:

Saturday, February 26th

Time:

11:30am

Room:

Los Angeles A

Application Acceleration from a Data Storage Perspective

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

New Advances In Caching and Solid State Storage

SCALE U

Data storage, one element of application delivery, is often a bottleneck. There are technologies that can optimize storage performance. I review innovations and explain how optimization technologies can be added to infrastructure: * I/O Patterns * SLC / MLC / DRAM * Solid state * SQL & Exchange acceleration * FS acceleration * SAN array dynamic tiered storage * Application QoS * Caching appliances * Solid state storage

Data storage is just one element in the application delivery ecosystem, but it turns out that it is often the critical performance bottleneck. A number of new technologies have recently come to market that optimize storage performance. This session reviews several of these innovations and explains how performance-optimization technologies can be easily integrated into the existing storage infrastructure. Topics Include: * Understanding disk I/O patterns * SLC flash versus MLC flash versus DRAM * Packaging options for solid state storage * SQL database acceleration * MS Exchange acceleration * File system tiering acceleration * Dynamic tiered storage in a SAN array * Application-Level QoS * 3rd party caching appliances * Solid state storage and deduplication

Speaker: Sam Eckhouse

Day:

Friday, February 25th

Time:

1:30pm

Room:

Los Angeles C

Securing web applications for system administrators

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

A presentation covering common attack methods and how to secure web applications when altering the code is not an option.

System Administrator

Neglected web applications are both a breeding ground for malicious activity on the web and a concern for web hosting providers. This talk will cover some basic info on three common attack methods (XSS, SQL Injection and insecure upload form) as well as three easy ways system administrators can address each type of threat, plus some other information on security best practices.

The ever growing pool of neglected web applications is a breeding ground for malicious activity on the web, and is a concern for web hosting providers whose customers tend to leave no time for security updates after updating their blogs, forums or CMS sites. This talk will cover some basic information on 3 common attack methods as well a 3 easy ways system administrators can address each type of threat and some other details regarding security best practices. Attack: XSS, SQL Injection and insecure upload forms. Defense: mod_security, IDS/IPS (snort/snortsam), and file system monitoring.

Speaker: Robert Rowley

Downloads

http://bit.ly/fLLSgD

Presentation

Day:

Saturday, February 26th

Time:

4:30pm

Room:

La Jolla

Security Best Practices and Tools for Linux

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

Learn essential security concepts and how to apply them on Linux. security

SCALE U

This class will offer an explanation of important IT security concepts and practical examples of system hardening, access control, privilege management, intrusion detection, and more. Beginners will learn how to think about security and how to use some important tools. Experienced attendees will receive a refresher on risk-based security management while learning about some of the latest advances in Linux security tools.

This class will offer an explanation of important IT security concepts and practical examples of system hardening, access control, privilege management, intrusion detection, configuration/change management, firewalls, vulnerability management, and sensor/log monitoring. Beginners will learn how to start thinking about security and how to use some important tools that are available to them. Attendees with more experience will receive a refresher on risk-based security management while learning of some of the latest advances in Linux security tools.

Speaker: Matt Disney

Day:

Friday, February 25th

Time:

9:00am

Room:

Los Angeles B

What's New in MySQL 5.5

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

MySQL is the heart of many Drupla sites. This session covers new features in MySQl 5.5

General

MySQL is the heart of many LAMP sites and MySQL 5.5 has many new features to make the life of DBAs and system administrators better. This presentation covers many topics from semi-synchronous replication, scaling, and other improvements found in MySQL 5.5

MySQL 5.5 runs stronger, more reliably, and more efficiently than previous versions. This presentation covers many topics from semi-synchronous replication, scaling, and other improvements found in MySQL 5.5

Speaker: David Stokes

Downloads

http://bit.ly/hpXUmZ

Presentation

Day:

Sunday, February 27th

Time:

11:30am

Room:

Carmel

Bond, Ethernet Bond

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

If someone unplugs your network cable, do you expect your server to talk, or do you expect it to die?

General

A server used in production should have every possible level of fault tolerance. Ethernet bonding allows you to create redundant NICs on a server so that you can lose a NIC, a ethernet cable, or a switch, without downtime. In this talk Kyle will introduce “ethernet bonding”, discuss the different bonding modes, and describe how to set up bonding on Red Hat and Debian-based systems.

When a server is used in production, you want every possible level of fault tolerance. Ethernet bonding allows you to create redundant NICs on a server so that you can lose a NIC, a ethernet cable, or even potentially a switch, without downtime. In this talk Kyle will introduce the concept of ethernet bonding, discuss the different bonding modes, and describe how to set up bonding on Red Hat and Debian-based systems.

Speaker: Kyle Rankin

Downloads

http://bit.ly/e8YJrS

Presentation

Day:

Sunday, February 27th

Time:

11:30am

Room:

La Jolla

Decentralized Collaboration with Open Source Tools: Technical and Cultural Implementation

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

A collection of simple open source communication tools can coordinate thousands of decentralized contributions.

Beginner

The Unix design philosophy of modularity - simple parts that do one thing well - applies to communication as well as code workflows. We'll give a live demonstration of how a collection of simple Open Source communication tools are used by the Fedora Project to coordinate thousands of contributions to a complex, fast-moving and large-scale technical project in a decentralized manner.

This talk is a live version of a recurring Fedora Classroom session taught both online and in-person at classrooms as part of the first-day curriculum for POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, a week-long cultural immersion workshop for university faculty looking to get their students involved in open source communities). The Unix design philosophy of modularity - simple parts that each do one thing well, connected by clean interfaces - applies to communication workflows as well as code ones. We'll give a live demonstration of how a collection of simple open source communication tools are used by the Fedora Project to coordinate thousands of technical and nontechnical contributions on a technically complex, rapidly moving, large-scale Linux distribution - all in a decentralized manner. Although each tool by itself is simple to learn and use, the magic comes in the interactions between these tools and the communication culture it makes possible in the communities that fluently use it. We'll go through both technology usage and cultural norms, with publicly available slides and resources for full tutorials and setup instructions for each tool available to all attendees by the start of the presentaion. We'll also explain how this ecosystem of tools can be deployed in your internal infrastructure and applied to communications within a school or industry team. Tools covered: * IRC: synchronous communication * supybot / IRC bots: synchronous context-bridging * etherpad: synchronous text editing * mediawiki: asynchronous text editing, documentation * ticket trackers: asynchronous task-tracking * blog planets: asynchronous context-providance * Classrooms: structures for synchronous community teaching

Speaker: Robyn Bergeron

Downloads

http://swarm.conferencebywire.com/web/guest/my-conferences-page/?parameterAutoLo...

Presentation

Day:

Sunday, February 27th

Time:

3:00pm

Room:

La Jolla

Scalable Virtualization with Ganeti

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:01:23 +0000

Ganeti is an open source project which offers many solutions to simplify a clustered virtual machine environment. This session will walk through Ganeti covering its basic design goals/features, installation architecture, and production implementation.

System Administrator

Ganeti is a clustered virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies (such as Xen or KVM). This talk will discuss a case at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) where we had scaling, performance, and reliability issues with our existing VM infrastructure. We will also cover overall design, features, and basic operations of Ganeti.

Whether you need a simple scalable development virtual machine environment or need to deploy a large cloud production environment, you need a tool that is easy to use, deploy, and maintain. Ganeti is a clustered virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM. It is similar to libvirt in many aspects, but different in others such as its built-in cluster support using DRBD. The focus will be on a use case at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) where we were faced with scaling, performance, and reliability issues with our existing VM infrastructure. I’ll cover the overall design and features of Ganeti along with the basics of installing it. Additionally I’ll walk through some of the basic operations you may encounter (deployment, failover, expansion, hardware failures, etc). I'll also cover some tools that we are using to help manage our clusters.

Speaker: Lance Albertson

Downloads

http://bit.ly/hqvxgv

Presentation

Day:

Saturday, February 26th

Time:

6:00pm

Room:

Century AB