O'ReillyGMT - Tech News from 4 timezones either side of the Greenwich Meridian

Linux Open Administration Days, April 10-11, Antwerp, Belgium, Europe, Earth

Kris Buytaert writes:

On the weekend of April 10 and 11 the first Linux Open Administration days will take place in Antwerp, Belgium. Load days grew out of the common feeling with some of the system level Open Source guys that there was no real event for them in Belgium - yes there is Fosdem, which is the most awesome Open Source event around, but a real get-together of local Open Source minded System Administrators and System Engineers was something that surely could complement.

In a shortish 3 months, a core team of organizers found a location, a bunch of sponsors and created a pretty interesting schedule for it's first edition. With a mixture of international speakers from neighbouring countries and local speakers the Loadays schedule list topics ranging from System Monitoring, Backups, System Deployments (including both CFengine, Puppet and Chef speakers), on top of that there's some groupware, some identity management etc. In, short a mixture of everything important to Linux Open Administration, Loadays will have both regular talks, tutorials and open space discussions.

If you are around, drop in to say hi, to listen to some talks or even hang around for the pizza party and the pub later ...

UKUUG - 2 New Tutorials Announced - Zenoss & Erlang

The UKUUG have announced two new Tutorials in conjunction with O'Reilly.

On January 27th 2010 in London, we have Zenoss Introduction Workshop, led by Zenoss Master Jane Curry:

Zenoss provides comprehensive Open Source network and systems management.

The purpose of this workshop is to get delegates started with Zenoss. The product will be installed in a VMware environment and the main functions of Zenoss will be explored through a series of practical exercises, using a combination of real and virtual devices.

The workshop aims for at least 80% hands-on time.

• UKUUG members: (Individual & Academic) £310 + vat
• UKUUG members: (Commercial) £385 + vat
• Non-members: £430 + vat

Book now: online or booking PDF.
Prices include refreshments, lunch and course notes

On 3rd Feb 2010, we have Practical Erlang Programming, led by the founder of Erlang Training and Consulting and co-author of Erlang Programming, Francesco Cesarini:

Practical Erlang Programming covers the basic, sequential and concurrent aspects of the Erlang programming language. You will learn the basics of how to read, write and structure Erlang programs. The target audience are software developers and engineers with an interest in server side applications and massively concurrent systems.

The goal of this tutorial is a hands-on introduction to the theory and concepts behind sequential and concurrent Erlang programming, explaining the Erlang syntax, semantics and concurrency model. We conclude with an overview of the error handling mechanisms used to build fault tolerant systems with five nines availability.

In order to get the most out of this tutorial, you must have a good grasp of other programming languages. This will be a hands on tutorial. Make sure you come with your laptop having installed Erlang and your favourite editor.

Book now: online or booking PDF

• UKUUG members: (Individual & Academic) £160 + vat
• UKUUG members: (Commercial) £225 + vat
• non-members: (Individual & Academic) £220 + vat
• non-members: (Commercial) £295 + vat

It's worth booking early: bookings made before 31st December will incur VAT at 15% - after this date rate will revert to 17.5%

DevopsDays 09 - Gent, Belgium, October 30th, 31st 2009

The stupendous Kris Buytaert writes:

Over the past couple of years operations and deployment have become more and more important to the applications that you folks write. Sometimes people call the new trend Devops, others call it Agile System Administration or Devministration, but one thing is sure, today's Linux guy is different from the Unix admin 10 years ago. In the US, O'Reilly already started with Velocity, this year already in it's second edition, but in Europe we didn't really have an event catering for the much needed interaction between developers and system administration.

DevOpsDays 09, will try to change that, DevOpsDays 09 will take place in the lovely city of Gent in Belgium on 30th and 31th October. It will be a 2 day event hosted by IBBT where the first day will be a more formal conference featuring speakers such as Teyo Tyree from Reductive Labs of Puppet fame, Lindsay Holmwood of Cucumber Nagios fame, Chris Read, Matthas Skarin and different others. The second day of the event will be an OpenSpace event where the participants will determine the actual program.

Follow as DevOpsDay develops at @devopsdays

UKUUG Summer Conference 2009

The UKUUG, (the UK Unix User Group for the uninitiated), have lined up their Summer Conference for the 7th to the 9th of August 2009. The Conference will take place in Birmingham at:

The Conservatoire
Birmingham City University
B3 3HG
England

The Conference will be packed with fantastic talks, great tutorials and a superlative social programme. The schedule is still being developed, so you too can take part:

Call for Papers Would you like to give a talk at Summer 2009? We have a few slots available in the conference programme, please see the call for papers to see what topics we are interested in.

Book online on the UKUUG website to take advantage of the Early Bird prices.

OpenTech 2009: 4th July 2009 - This Saturday!

Countdown to Open Tech 2009. Open Tech 2009 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference and it is taking place this coming Saturday (4th July 2009) at ULU, Malet Street. This year's theme is one familiar to O'Reilly readers - Working on Stuff that Matters.

When: Saturday 4th July 2009
Where: ULU, Malet Street, London
Cost: £5 on the door
Register to attend and then Join the mailing list.

Josette and I will be there on the O'Reilly stand - drop by and say hello!

Request Tracker (RT) Tutorial - London, Tues 11th August 2009

O'Reilly UK and UKUUG have another fine tutorial scheduled for your delectation. In London, on Tuesday 11th August 2009 between 9.00 and 17.00, we give you Request Tracker:

Request Tracker (RT) is an enterprise-grade ticketing system. It is designed to help your organization track what needs to get done and what still needs doing. From basic customer service to advanced back-office workflows, RT is flexible enough to keep your processes smooth and effective.

Your Tutor: Jesse Vincent, the author of RT, co-author of RT Essentials:

Jesse Vincent is the author of RT and the founder of Best Practical Solutions, LLC, a company dedicated to open source tools to help people and organizations keep track of what needs doing, when it gets done, and who does it. Before founding Best Practical, Vincent worked as the systems lead for a now-defunct dotcom and as a software designer at Microsoft.

Book now: online or booking PDF.

More event details at ukuug.org/events/rt/.

UKUUG/O'Reilly Tutorials - 2 Perl Tutorials with Dave Cross

The great Dave Cross - O'Reilly author, Perl Superstar, the Coders' Coder - is running two one-day Perl tutorials in London on the 25th and 26th February 2009. Day 1 is an Introduction to Perl, Day 2 is Advanced Perl Techniques. Both will take place in:

The Caesar Room
Imperial Hotel
Russell Square
London
WC1B 5BB

and will be run in conjunction with the UKUUG and O'Reilly.

Day 1:  Introduction to Perl - 25th February:

This one-day course is an introduction to Perl for complete beginners. No knowledge of Perl is assumed, although attendees will have a slight advantage if they have some knowledge of at least one other programming language. At the end of the course, attendees will have enough knowledge to write a number of useful Perl programs, together with details of where to go for more information.

Syllabus:

• What is Perl
• Input and output
• Creating and running a Perl program
• Regular expressions
• Perl variables
• References
• Operators and functions
• Finding and using modules
• Conditional constructs
• Smart matching
• Subroutines

Day 2: Advanced Perl Techniques - 26th February:

Perl has come a long way since the "scripting language" which powered most of the world wide web in the 1990s. There are many ways to build applications in Perl. In this course we will look at some powerful techniques which are used by the best Perl programmers in the world. This one-day course is aimed at programmers who have been using Perl for some time but who may not be completely up to date with the latest Perl techniques. At the end of the course attendees will have a number of modern Perl programming techniques to their programming toolkit.

Syllabus:

• What's new in Perl 5.10
• Dates and times
• Testing (including coverage analysis)
• Database access with DBIx::Class
• Profiling
• Object oriented programming with Moose
• Templates
• Web application development with Catalyst

Book now: online or booking PDF.

Early Bird rates apply until the Jan 21st 2009:
Non-members: £295 + VAT
UKUUG members' discounted rate: £195 + VAT (These prices are for each tutorial).

NLUUG Autumn Conference and Embedded Linux Conference Europe

Armijn Hemel of the NLUUG got in touch to say that NLUUG will hold its autumn conference on November 6 2008 in Conference Center De Reehorst in Ede, the Netherlands. On November 6 and 7 there will be the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, in the same place. On November 6 visitors of the NLUUG autumn conference will have free entrance to Embedded Linux Conference Europe and vice versa.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/958732/
http://www.nluug.nl/events/nj08/

I asked Armijn a few questions about running two events at the same time:

How do the two conferences interoperate? Does having two conferences running simultaneously at the same venue cut costs and organisational headaches?

NLUUG has been organizing conferences since 1985 for professional users of open systems and open standards, so we have a well trained organisation and infrastructure. We have two conferences a year with a different theme for every conference. Recent themes were 'virtualization', 'security' and 'IP communication'. A few people on the board thought that 'mobility' would be a good theme, since they were on the road a lot of the time and saw the challenges and potential of mobile computing. One board member was already involved with last year's Embedded Linux Conference Europe and since the themes were really close together we decided to get the two conferences together. We have transferred a few of the speakers back and forth on the programme, because sometimes a talk would fit better in the other conference. Costs and organisational headaches were not the main reason to cooperate.
Getting a better conference for everyone was more important. Usually the NLUUG conference has 2 or 3 tracks with talks and the Embedded Linux Conference Europe has 2 tracks. Now we have (for one day) one conference with 4 tracks.

Are the conferences going to be in Dutch or English?

All of the talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe will be in English. Some of the NLUUG autumn conference talks will be in Dutch, some will be in English. Members of NaLUUG organisations (UKUUG, DKUUG, GUUG, USENIX) will get the same discounts as NLUUG members. Students can also get a big discount, as long as they bring a valid student ID card.

Using books sales as a metric, Embedded Linux is blossoming as a technology. Is it getting traction in places that were once resolutely proprietary?

I think that the mobile phone industry is a prime example, with OpenMoko, Android and the latest Motorola phones as prime examples. The fact that Nokia is very interested in Open Source Software is another clear sign. Several people of Nokia were visibly present at Akademy 2008 in Belgium (donating over 100 devices to developers) and OSiM 2008 in Berlin not too long ago.

Another area is TVs and other media devices. A large percentage of media players with a network connection (including storage devices that can stream content) that you can buy in your electronics store are based on Linux. Recent TVs from big vendors like Philips are also more and more Linux-based.

What kind of sponsorship are you looking for, and who should prospective sponsors contact?

At the conference (November 6) we will have an exposition, where we want to present a nice mixture of commercial companies and Open Source projects. If a company would like to sponsor a part of the conference or conference materials, they can contact the NLUUG office at buro@nluug.nl.

Tutorial: Building the network you need with OpenBSD's PF

Hot on the heels of the highly successful Using Moodle tutorial led by Helen Foster comes the second UKUUG/O'Reilly joint venture:

Building the network you need with OpenBSD's PF

This tutorial focuses on building the high performance, low maintenance network you need. Along the way we explore the whys and hows and cover all bases from the basic one machine configuration and basic local area networks, all the way up to configurations with traffic shaping and load balancing with "self-healing" networks and counter-measures against common problems such as DOS attempts and spamming.

A basic understanding of TCP/IP and some Unix knowledge is assumed. This tutorial will happen very soon after OpenBSD 4.4 is released and will be up to date with the latest release.

Who should attend? Those who use or are considering using PF on any BSD. It goes from the basics to advanced usage of the latest versions of PF, including traffic shaping using altq, and the supporting features for higher level services such as trapping spam via greylisting and http filtering, SSL proxying, and load balancing. PFs simplicity and ease allows those new to PF to understand it quickly, while refreshing the best practices in filtering for those who have used PF for years.

Tutor Biography: Peter Hansteen is a consultant, sysadmin and writer based in Norway. A long time freenix advocate, he is a member of the BLUG (Bergen (BSD and) Linux User Group) core group and current vice president of NUUG (the Norwegian Unix User Group).

During recent years a frequent lecturer and tutor with emphasis on FreeBSD and OpenBSD topics, and most recently the author of The Book of PF (No Starch Press, December 2007).

Please note places are limited and early booking is essential. Booking deadline is 20th November 2008.

Early Bird rate (up to 24th October)

• Non-members: £225 + vat (£264.38 inc VAT)
• UKUUG members: (Discounted rate)   £175 + vat (£205.63 inc VAT)

Standard rate (after 24th October)

• Non-members: £275 + vat (£323.13 inc VAT)
• UKUUG members: (Discounted rate)   £225 + vat (£264.38 inc VAT)

The above prices include FULL day tutorial, refreshments, lunch and a set of tutorial notes. For full details and terms and conditions, see the booking form

Book now: online or booking PDF.

Open Tech 2008 - Photos

Open Tech 2008 was a glorious success. In the region of 500 people staggered through the rain to ULU on Saturday 5th July 2008 to see some marvellous presentations. Thanks to organisers Sam, Ben, Emily and Etienne and the whole of UKUUG  for a great day.

I was there with my trusty camera (experimenting with its curious 'out of focus' setting - those blurry photos aren't incompetence - they're art!) which you can find on our GMT flickr page. Interviews to follow ...

www.flickr.com