Handshake Drugs

And if I ever was myself,
I wasn't that night...
"Handshake Drugs", Wilco

Wednesday was opening day: the stats (1000+ attendees) and the awards (the Powershell devs got one for "bringing the power of automated system administration to Windows, where it previously largely unsupported"). Then the keynote from Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP and yeah. He went over a lot of things, but made it clear he was asking questions, not proposing answers. Many cool quotes, including: "TCP/IP runs over everything, including you if you're not paying attention." Discussed the recent ITU talks a lot, and what exactly he's worried about there. Grab the audio/watch the video.

Next talk was about a giant scan of the entire Internet (/0) for SIP servers. Partway through my phone rang and I had to take it, but by the time I got out to the hall it'd stopped and it turned out to be a wrong number anyway. Grr.

IPv6 numbering strategies was next. "How many hosts can you fit in a /48? ALL OF THEM." Align your netblocks by nibble boundaries (hex numbers); it makes visual recognition of demarcation so much easier. Don't worry about packing addresses, because there's lots of room and why complicate things? You don't want to be doing bitwise math in the middle of the night.

Lunch, and the vendor tent. But first an eye-wateringly expensive burrito -- tasty, but $9. It was NOT a $9-sized burrito. I talked to the CloudStack folks and the Ceph folks, and got cool stuff from each. Both look very cool, and I'm going to have to look into them more when I get home. Boxer shorts from the Zenoss folks ("We figured everyone had enough t-shirts").

I got to buttonhole Mark Burgess, tell him how much I'm grateful for what he's done but OMG would he please do something about the mess of brackets. Like the Wordpress sketch:

commands:
  !wordpress_tarball_is_present::
    "/usr/bin/wget -q -O $($(params)[_tarfile]) $($(params)[_downloadurl])"
      comment => "Downloading latest version of WordPress.";

His response, as previously, was "Don't do that, then." To be fair, I didn't have this example and was trying to describe it verbally ("You know, dollar bracket dollar bracket variable square bracket...C'mon, I tweeted about it in January!"). And he agreed yes, it's a problem, but it's in the language now, and indirection is a problem no matter what. All of which is true, and I realize it's easy for me to propose work for other people without coming up with patches. And I let him know that this was a minor nit, that I really was grateful for Cf3. So there.

I got to ask Dru Lavigne about FreeBSD's support for ZFS (same as Illumos) and her opinion of DragonflyBSD (neat, thinks of it as meant for big data rather than desktops, "but maybe I'm just old and crotchety").

I Talked with a PhD student who was there to present a paper. He said it was an accident he'd done this; he's not a sysadmin, and though his nominal field is CS, he's much more interested in improving the teaching of undergraduate students. ("The joke is that primary/secondary school teachers know all about teaching and not so much about the subject matter, and at university it's the other way around."). In CompSci it's all about the conferences -- that's where/how you present new work, not journals (Science, Nature) like the natural sciences. What's more, the prestigious conferences are the theoretical ones run by the ACM and the IEEE, not a practical/professional one like LISA. "My colleagues think I'm slumming."

Off to the talks! First one was a practice and experience report on the config and management of a crapton (700) iPads for students at an Australian university. The iPads belonged to the students -- so whatever profile was set up had to be removable when the course was over, and locking down permanently was not an option.

No suitable tools for them -- so they wrote their own. ("That's the way it is in education.") Started with Django, which the presenter said should be part of any sysadmin's toolset; easy to use, management interface for free. They configured one iPad, copied the configuration off, de-specified it with some judicious search and replace, and then prepared it for templating in Django. To install it on the iPad, the students would connect to an open wireless network, auth to the web app (which was connected to the university LDAP), and the iPad would prompt them to install the profile.

The open network was chosen because the secure network would require a password....which the iPad didn't have yet. And the settings file required an open password in it for the secure wireless to work. The reviewers commented on this a lot, but it was a conscious decision: setting up the iPad was one of ten tasks done on their second day, and a relatively technical one. And these were foreign students, so language comprehension was a problem. In the end, they felt it was a reasonable risk.

John Hewson was up next, talking about ConfSolve, his declarative configuration language connected to/written with a constraint solver. ("Just cross this red wire with this blue wire...") John was my roommate at the Baltimore LISA, and it was neat to see what he's been working on. Basically, you can say things like "I want this VM to have 500 GB of disk" and ConfSolve will be all like, "Fuck you, you only have 200 GB of storage left". You can also express hard limits and soft preferences ("Maximize memory use. It'd be great if you could minimise disk space as well, but just do your best"). This lets you do things like cloudbursting: "Please keep my VMs here unless things start to suck, in which case move my web, MySQL and DNS to AWS and leave behind my SMTP/IMAP."

After his presentation I went off to grab lunch, then back to the LISA game show. It was surprisingly fun and funny. And then, Matt and I went to the San Diego Maritime Museum, which was incredibly awesome. We walked through The Star of India, a huge three-masted cargo ship that still goes out and sails. There were actors there doing Living History (you could hear the caps) with kids, and displays/dioramas to look at. And then we met one of the actors who told us about the ship, the friggin' ENORMOUS sails that make it go (no motor), and about being the Master at Arms in the movie "Master and Commander". Which was our cue to head over to the HMS Surprise, used in the filming thereof. It's a replica, but accurate and really, really neat to see. Not nearly as big as the Star of India, and so many ropes...so very, very many ropes. And after that we went to a Soviet (!) Foxtrot-class submarine, where we had to climb through four circular hatches, each about a metre in diameter. You know how they say life in a submarine is claustrophobic? Yeah, they're not kidding. Amazing, and I can't recommend it enough.

We walked back to the hotel, got some food and beer, and headed off to the LOPSA annual meeting. I did not win a prize. Talked with Peter from the University of Alberta about the lightning talk I promised to do the next day about reproducible science. And thence to bed.

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

A: When describing multiple roles at the office, says "My other hat is made of handforged steel."