The White Trash Period Of My Life

Careful with words -- they are so meaningful
Yet they scatter like the booze from our breath...
"The White Trash Period Of My Life", Josh Rouse

I woke up at a reasonable time and went down to the lobby for free wireless; finished up yesterday's entry (2400 words!), posted and ate breakfast with Andy, Alf ("I went back to the Instagram hat store yesterday and bought the fedora. But now I want to accessorize it") and...Bob in full Viking drag.

Andy: "Now you...you look like a major in the Norwegian army."

Off to the Powershell tutorial. I've been telling people since that I like two things from Microsoft: the Natural Keyboard, and now Powershell. There are some very, very nice features in there:

• common args/functions for each command, provided by the PS library

• directory-like listings for lots of things (though apparently manipulating the registry through PS is sub-optimal); feels Unix/Plan 9-like

• $error contains all the errors in your interactive cycle

• "programming with hand grenades": because just 'bout everything in PS is an object, you can pass that along through a pipe and the receiving command explodes it and tries to do the right thing.

My notes are kind of scattered: I was trying to install version 3 (hey MS: please make this easier), and then I got distracted by something I had to do for work. But I also got to talk to Steve Murawski, the instructor, during the afternoon break, as we were both on the LOPSA booth. I think MS managed to derive a lot of advantage from being the last to show up at the party.

Interestingly, during the course I saw on Twitter that Samba 4 has finally been released. My jaw dropped. It looks like there are still some missing bits, but it can be an AD now. [Keanu voice] Whoah.

During the break I helped staff the LOPSA booth and hung out with a syadmin from NASA; one of her users is a scientist who gets data from the ChemCam (I think) on Curiosity. WAH.

The afternoon's course was on Ganeti, given by Tom Limoncelli and Guido Trotter. THAT is my project for next year: migrating my VMs, currently on one host, to Ganeti. It seems very, very cool. And on top of that, you can test it out in VirtualBox. I won't put in all my notes, since I'm writing this in a hurry (I always fall behind as the week goes on) and a lot of it is avail on the documentaion. But:

• You avoid needing a SAN by letting it do DRBD on different pairs of nodes. Need to migrate a machine? Ganeti will pass it over to the other pair.

• If you've got a pair of machines (which is about my scale), you've just gained failover of your VMs. If you've got more machines, you can declare a machine down (memory starts crapping out, PS failing, etc) and migrate the machines over to their alternate. When the machine's back up, Ganeti will do the necessary to get the machine back in the cluster (sync DRBDs, etc).

• You can import already-existing VMs (Tom: "Thank God for summer interns.")

• There's a master, but there are master candidates ready to take over if requested or if the master becomes unavailable.

• There's a web manager to let users self-provision. There's also Synnefo, a AWS-like web FE that's commercialized as Okeanos.io (free trial: 3-hour lifetime VMs)

I talked with Scott afterward, and learned something I didn't know: NFS over GigE works fine for VM images. Turn on hard mounts (you want to know when something goes wrong), use TCP, use big block sizes, but it works just fine. This changes everything.

In the evening the bar was full and the hotel restaurant was definitely outside my per diem, so I took a cab downtown to the Tipsy Crow. Good food, nice beer, and great people watching. (Top tip for Canadians: here, the hipsters wear moustaches even when it's not Movember. Prepare now and get ahead of the curve.) Then back to the hotel for the BoFs. I missed Matt's on small infrastructure (damn) but did make the amateur astronomy BoF, which was quite cool. I ran into John Hewson, my roommate from the Baltimore LISA, and found out he's presenting tomorrow; I'll be there for that.

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

A: Prefaces new cool thing he's about to show you with "So I learned about this at the last sysadmin Althing...."