Scott Murphy’s blog

I have been shamed into posting...

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:05:56 -0500

I just got back from the LISA '09 conference in Baltimore. For those who do not know what that is, it originally meant Large Installation System Administration. There are heated debates on what comprises a large system now, so the expanded name is a bit of a misnomer. If you support customers, have servers to manage, possibly some infrastructure thrown in and there are "business needs" involved, then you qualify.

There is really no adequate way to explain LISA. You need to be there and absorb it. I have missed seven of these in a row and I'm not sure why, as this is where the ideas are. If you maintain (production, quality assurance, development, sandbox, etc.) systems, this is where you will hear about the issues, the problems, the solutions and be able to tap into the best minds in this section of Information Technology.

The number of attendees varies quite a bit depending on the economy - a large number of academic institutions attend and they don't have the budgets of private business or government agencies, so that is one factor. This year was near a thousand attendees if I remember the numbers correctly. There have been much bigger ones, but this is still a respectable showing.

The conference typically goes on for 6 days of mixed training and technical sessions. In addition, there is a mini trade show, evening events and informal Birds of a Feather (BOFs) sessions where people with an idea or a problem get together to brainstorm.

I'm not going to go into the week I was there in any detail, as it would be a small novel (non-fiction) and this is just a short posting. I'll be posting much more info later on my more technical site/blog which is currently low volume and really low readership.

I do have this to say. LISA is attended by the best and friendliest group of technology geeks I have ever met and the community is amazing. If you have the chance, visit the USENIX site LISA '09 and view some of the talks or the keynote.

If you are a system administrator and are looking to be a member of a professional community, feel free to visit the League of Professional System Administrator's site and find out all about it. You may also wish to visit USENIX's SAGE Special Interest Group. This is where LISA was conceived and implemented.

The real reason for this post is one of the BOFs I attended... all about blogging, specifically system administration and technology in general. It was a lively discussion and part of it was a short discussion on comment spam and managing it. My other site is locked down due to a rather large amount of comment spam which took ages to clean up and as a result, I felt it necessary to lock it down. Post discussion, I have decided to open it up again. This will happen after I upgrade the software, and fix up the legacy data and include it. It doesn't have a lot of technical merit, but it does have history and at least shows how long we have been at it.

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Post BSDCan Blues

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:27:50 -0400

The conference is over, and it's time to return to the mundane. It was a good time - formal talks, social activity and lots of idea exchanges. Actually a very good time. If I was independently wealthy, I'd probably spend most of my time attending conferences. I hear BSDCan 2010 will be on for next year, so at the very least I have that to look forward to.

I did not attend any of the highly technical presentations, as I'm effectively a BSD newbie (well, I used it for years in the 80's), but I don't really have much experience with the modern versions. That is a task for this year. I have the iso images, vmware, enough physical machines to brown out the neighborhood and time to learn.

I've been lurking for ages and not really gotten involved except at the periphery, so it's time to jump in and help out. I guess I should play up my strengths first and get involved on the sysadmin side and see where that leads me. Could be fun, might be more work, but I will not know until I get started. Cat and Leslie's talk on open source involvement was enough to get the desire woken up, so it's time to see if I can contribute something other than the occasional blog post.

Not too much to say beyond that. I spent a lot more time talking with the attendees than I normally do, so I never managed to take my plethora of photos. I think I only have 13 that were even worth posting and some of them are a little out of focus. Next year I'll do better.

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BSDCan 2009 is on.

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:45:53 -0400

It appears that I only blog here around BSDCan. I'll have to do something about that someday.

As of Monday, it's back to freelance consulting. I've left the corporate world behind again and I am going back into the trenches. It was a good year and a bit, but the security work never managed to be the real focus of the job.

Enough of that noise. BSDCan 2009 - a little smaller this year, might be something to do with the economic downturn or whatever buzzword meets your requirement for defining the rather "interesting" situation we all find ourselves in these days.

Today was the second day of tutorials, and official registration day for the conference. Dan managed to do an excellent job again of getting this set up and running, I don't know where he finds the time.

I managed to attend Michael Lucas' netflow session and it was very informative. I could have used the info about 3 months ago - better late than never.

Tomorrow should be a full day and there are lots of sessions. Even if you don't attend, the list of events is pretty impressive. Check it out at http://www.bsdcan.org

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BSDcan 2008 is almost upon us...

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:16:16 -0400

BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, has quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.

BSDCan 2008 will be held on 16-17 May 2008 at University of Ottawa, and will be preceded by two days of Tutorials on 14-15 May 2008.

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Sparse postings, useful content optional

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:23:32 -0500

I've given up the life of the free-lance consultant for the time being to take on a security officer role. It should be very interesting once I get the current crop of impending doom cleared from my plate and actually get involved in drilling into the corporate offerings and policies.

If I'm real lucky, I even get to start playing with all the good toys. Pen tests, vulnerability scans, patch management, etc. Should be a lot of fun (from a technical point of view) and hopefully I'll find it a pleasant change from Systems Administration, Network Design and Data Center Design.

The meetings, verifications and other administrivia will counterbalance the techie portions, but that's the price you pay to play in the field. Still, should make for a new and exciting career change.

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Leopard Server - nice for a small office, nicer for podcasting.

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:12:59 -0500

I just spent a day at an Apple event - Leopard and Leopard Server technology show. I thought I'd be a little bored, but I did want to see leopard server and actually look at an Apple X-Serve. It appears that my Mac Pro is effectively the same thing. The more interesting thing is the price. At around $3500, you would think it's very pricey. If you discount the Leopard Server Unlimited software at $999, you are at $2500 for a pretty slick rackmount (which is about the same as a similar MacPro).

This OS is designed pretty effectively to provide a business infrastructure. The $500 version is similar to MS Windows Small Business Server, but it's limited to 10 users - the $999 version is unlimited. You get some pretty impressive integration and a few extras, so it's pretty much a comparable offering to Small Business Server Premium.

There is nothing in here that you can't do with Open Source, but it is nice to see it all wrapped up together in a unified package that actually seems like it was designed that way. If you think about it, you'd spend at least that much on getting someone to implement the unification if you wanted to go Open Source, so it's not such a bad deal.

I'm not going to get into price comparison or feature comparison. I just happened to like what I saw.

If there was a truly killer app that comes with the server package, it's the app called podcast producer. I can't do it justice, but a very short and simplified description is that it is an automated work flow system for producing podcasts. I've been spending quite a few hours just producing the audio portion of the BSDCan 2007 conference and once you are in the zone, it takes a good 30 minutes to set up and produce one single episode. Lets see... 2 days of 3 rooms with 6 sessions is about 16 hours once everything is in place.

Just doing a cost of my time, I could easily justify the limited version on my desktop just for this alone and save time if I do the audio again in 2008.

In other news, I was lurking on the OCLUG IRC and saw reference to the ship that ran aground in Antarctica...

The MS Explorer, an adventure travel ship operated by a Toronto company, was on a 19-day cruise off Antarctica when it hit an iceberg on Nov. 23.

The full article is available online.

I find it amusing that the MS Explorer is listed as threatening penguins (think for a few seconds).

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LinuxFest 2007 (Toronto)

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:19:23 -0400

I'm a little slow posting, as I have been too busy to post (read catching up on sleep from 5 days of too little sleep). I attended the inaugural linuxfest last weekend, well, the conference/fest was on Saturday with a early-bird party Friday night. I couldn't make it, as I was visiting with family and had been driving half the day.

I wasn't trying to get to too many things, as my expectation level was not very high, this being a first conference and everybody being new to it. The slow to update website probably had a lot to do with my expectation level. In fact, it went off much better than I expected and I'll be going back next year.

I went to two sessions on Joomla! (one was a community meeting and the other was a practical hands on install session with basic configuration). After that I spent some time at the mini trade show (the BSD folks were there as well) which was pretty good - open source projects as well as companies such as RedHat and IBM. You can see the full list at the website. I also went to an Open Source Advocacy Town Hall type meeting which seemed to be mostly about how do we get the word out (my opinion would be more how do we fight the apathy of end users) and had to leave early - the LPI people were putting on an exam and I was getting my proctor training.

After that, I went to the closing Keynote by John "Maddog" Hall. I believe the distilled essence was something like "We make too much crap that uses too many resources. We need a better way. Let's all do something about it" I'm probably missing an item or two, as the presentation was about an hour long and had a lot of slides. It was pretty interesting and I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the presentation. There was a post conference reception an hour or so later that I also skipped.

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Audio was easy...

nobody@vox.com(Scott Murphy) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:29:14 -0400

Well, the audio so far was pretty easy. I'm not an audio engineer, nor do I have the patience for it. The audio for the conference was originally recorded as wav files on a cd recorder for each session, so given what t he microphone the speaker is using hears and the gear being used, a trim and some additions are all it gets.

I suspect that the video I shot will prove to be a little more difficult. It's captured on one of those Sony HDD cameras, so the file is a compressed mpeg4 to begin with. The good news is that iLife '08 on my mac sees the video from the camera with no problem. The downside is that the silly camera must use a DOS file system, as the files are all limited to 2GB each, so I may have to do a number of cuts and joins to get it all put together properly. These will also be posted in video podcast format for space reasons.

With some luck, maybe before the end of November.

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