Flair

Silly simple lies
They made a human being out of you...
"Flair", Josh Rouse

Thursday I gave my Lightning Talk. I prepared for it by writing it out, then rehearsing a couple times in my room to get it down to five minutes. I think it helped, since I got in about two seconds under the wire. I think I did okay; I'll post it separately. Pic c/o Bob the Viking:

Some other interesting talks:

• @perlstalker on his experience with Ceph (he's happy);

• @chrisstpierre on why XML is good for (it's code with a built-in validator; don't use it for setting syslog levels);

• the guy who wanted to use retired aircraft carriers as floating data centres;

• Dustin on MozPool (think cloud for Panda Boards);

• Stew (@digitalcrow) on Machination, his homegrown hierarchical config management tool (users can set their preferences; if needed for the rest of their group, it can be promoted up the hierarchy as needed);

• Derek Balling on megacity.org/timeline (keep your fingers crossed!);

• a Google dev on his experience bringing down GMail.

Afterward I went to the vendor booths again, and tried the RackSpace challenge: here's a VM and it's root password; it needs to do X, Y and Z. GO. I was told my time wasn't bad (8.5 mins; wasn't actually too hard), and I may actually win something. Had lunch with John again and discussed academia, fads in theoretical computer science and the like.

The afternoon talk on OmniOS was interesting; it's an Illumos version/distro with a rigourous update schedule. The presenter's company uses it in a LOT of machines, and their customers expect THEM to fix any problems/security problems...not say "Yeah, the vendor's patch is coming in a couple weeks." Stripped down; they only include about 110 packages (JEOS: "Just Enough Operating System") in the default install. "Holy wars" slide: they use IPS ("because ALL package managers suck") and vi (holler from audience: "Which one?"). They wrote their own installer: "If you've worked with OpenSolaris before, you know that it's actually pretty easy getting it to work versus fucking getting it on the disk in the first place."

At the break I met with Nick Anderson (@cmdln_) and Diego Zamboni (@zzamboni, author of "Learning Cfengine 3"). Very cool to meet them both, particularly as they did not knee me in the groin for my impertinence in criticising of Cf3 syntax. Very, very nice and generous folk.

The next talk, "NSA on the Cheap", was one I'd already heard from the USENIX conference in the summer (downloaded the MP3), so I ended up talking to Chris Allison. I met him in Baltimore on the last day, and it turns out he's Matt's coworker (and both work for David Blank-Edelman). And when he found out that Victor was there (we'd all gone out on our last night in Baltimore) he came along to meet him. We all met up, along with Victor's wife Jennifer, and caught up even more. (Sorry, I'm writing this on Friday; quality of writing taking a nosedive.)

And so but Victor, Jennifer and I went out to Banker's Hill, a restaurant close to the hotel. Very nice chipotle bacon meatloaf, some excellent beer, and great conversation and company. Retired back to the hotel and we both attended the .EDU BoF. Cool story: someone who's unable to put a firewall on his network (he's in a department, not central IT, so not an option for him) woke up one day to find his printer not only hacked, but the firmware running a proxy of PubMed to China ("Why is the data light blinking so much?"). Not only that, but he couldn't upgrade the firmware because the firmware reloading code had been overwritten.

Q: How do you know you're dealing with a Scary Viking Sysadmin?

A: Service monitoring is done via two ravens named Huginn and Muninn.