This morning Squidward decided that he was going to move out from Bikini Bottom and away from this madness so he phoned the estate agent and she said it would be no problem to sell his house as long as his neighbours where okay. "Oh dear" thought Squidward. So he decided on a plan; to tell Spongebob that it was opposite day so he was going to act crazy all day and Spongebob should play the straight man. It worked for a bit but as usual Spongebob had to take things to far and when the estate agent turned up hilarity ensued. Suffice to say that Squidward will never leave Bikini Bottom. I then left for the conference.

Last night was the conference dinner. Google had subsidised some of the meal which is nice of them and we where booked into the Cave, under South Bridge with the cows bottom sticking out the wall. Meal was good and the talk by Charles Yarnold was great. I think he has one of those geek dream jobs hacking crazy inventions for Gadget Geeks on SKY.

First up this morning was Simon Phipps talking about how the OSI is adjusting itself to the changing climate of opensource. They are moving from a board of 10 members to more of an open organisation with many members. Currently taking in open projects like Plone, KDE, Mozilla, Apache, Creative Commons and Debian but also hoping to accept personal and corporate memberships in the near future. Also starting to act a guiding voice for business and government to try and skew the conversation back from the corporations that are trying to preserve their older business models at all costs.

http://openrightsgroup.org/ - They are one of the few voices that are speaking to government in defence of public rights. If you think their language is too strong then you can only imagine what is being said behind closed doors on the other side of the argument.

Tariq Rashid gave a great talk about all the work that is being done inside government to level the playing field when it comes to opensource and standards inside government. They are laying down the law, quite literally in some cases, about how open software should be considered for all purchases. Whilst his language was obviously designed to appeal to political and corporate interests I can't help feel that the constant focus on the free as in beer angle is not all that needs to be stressed. I think he has a massive job though so whatever works I suppose.

A quick break and some more fluids and it was back in to a talk on OpenAFS. I always knew it was cool and even had a go at setting it up once but I think it's a large investment. Interesting to see that he said that the move to git for version control has really upped the involvement levels and what is quite an old distributed filesystem is looking very suitable for modern requirements. They are adding mobile clients and a web interface is working right now.

A small violin performance before a talk on ldap performance from Howard Chu. Always impressed with people who can actually play and in front of an audience. The improvements to openLDAP by ditching all their caching layers and just going for a memory mapped storage database where impressive not only from the massive improvements in speed but also ditching a lot of the need for tuning. Reminded me of some of the stuff I was reading about Varnish cache. Looks like that it the LDAP server to look at. He also said that he ported the database backend to sqlite among other things and it made a huge improvement there too.

After lunch and some time in the sun it was a talk about Rudder which is another config management tool but this time it's all about simplicity of use. There are still configs that you apply to nodes but this config can be done in a nice web front end and the software builds CFEngine templates that are automatically pushed to the correct clients. It is quite a complete system allowing with packages for the clients logging and monitoring all built in.

Another configuration talk now and I must admit I was flagging a bit now which was a shame because this was quite an interesting concept. We currently provision servers by stating a configuration that is supposed to be running on them but with no concept of any sort state. I can change a server to turn off a service on one side and then bring it up somewhere else but if I want to manage the loadbalancer to make sure that the service is never interrupted then I have to do that manually. Herry Herry's concept was to add some rules that allow you to say things like: Don't turn off that service until the other one is up and the loadbalancer has switched over. He was concentrating on creating a language to encapsulate your rules and a compiler to create a set of steps required to make things work in the right order. It is just a test tool right now but I can see it being a great addition to puppet.

Then the Ligtning talks, just 5 mins so just one line...

Tech Talk PSE - HTML based presentation tool, that can include shell.

pairvm - drbd based server centre fail over for kvm. ( might want to look at ganeti)

time travel for linux - systemTap script to lie to the application about the date being 2038 to test what happens at the end of a pension.

cisco firewall issue - SAC packets id rewritten by firewall - tcpdump rewrites the numbers again.

Machination app store for machine config: users can select apps for their servers.

postgresql update - power management DB sleep when idle and performance is much faster. 9.2 in september.

virtulization concidred harmfull. - we don't need VM's just run Unix processes. Sort of an anti-talk about everything being said!

Samba 4 update - Full AD support is there and now. CIFS clustering. WAN proxy. Preview for release in April.

Your judgment sucks - Humans are buggy as well.

That's it. I am off to the doctor