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LinuxWorld Expo Wraps Up
lisah writes "LinuxWorld Conference & Expo drew to a close yesterday with a handful of final talks and presentations. Newsforge has a rundown on the end of the event. Christina Noren, vice president of product management with Splunk, gave a talk entitled 'Troubleshooting Linux and the Open Source Software Stack.' Among her suggestions were the use of centralized logging systems, allowing users access to logs for researching their own problems, and logging successes and failures to establish a baseline. Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a presentation that focused on doing kernel version control with Quilt, Ketchup, and Git. Though turnout was low as conference attendees got an early start to the airport, the talk was followed up by a lively Q & A about general kernel development. Questions ranged from the Resier 4 situation to who will eventually succeed Linus. The next Linux World Expo will be held February 14-15, 2007, in New York." Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Looks like the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit is being held in NYC, _not_ the Expo... they're not the same thing.
Isn't that, to some extent, a security risk? I'm not sure exactly which logs the speaker suggested making public, and if she proposed a system for filtering potentially sensitive log data (when users log in/out, for instance), but making logs read-only for root is one of the most common Linux security tips I run across.
More importantly, in a large multi-user setting, why should users be expected to do their own troubleshooting at such a low-level? How trustworthy will user log analysis be for a sysadmin?
I know that most linux geeks are stereotypically single, womanless (or manless?) and have no family/lover obligations... but does that justify having LinuxWorld on Valentine's Day?
I bet if they called it "Lexpo", alot more people would show up.
Well duh, logging software vendor recommends a central logging system! News at 11... In other news, Mcdonalds recommends a healthy hamburger, and Coca-Cola recommends sugary carbonated beverages...
I've tried Splunk... downloaded the free demo and put it on my central syslog server. I was pretty unimpressed. Their AJAX interface, while it does allow Firefox style "real-time" log parsing, was clunky and bloated and makes browsers slow to a crawl, even on a fairly decent 2 ghz Centrino laptop with a gig of memory. No thanks... I've been using a free log parser called php-syslog-ng for a while now and it works great... I dump all of my log files using syslog-ng to a MySQL database and I can query them however I want with php-syslog-ng, or at the mysql client command line interface if I feel like being a real masochist...
Splunk is a problem looking for a solution. Centralized logging has been solved many years ago by many free and commercial products. Just bolting an AJAX interface on the front of your log collecting machine does not make you worthy of thousands of dollars of my money...
[/rant mode]
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Sounds like the worst law firm ever.
In all, was still worth it, just wasent as fun as it was in previous years.
You also might ask your favorite vendors to speak up on the subject. The Show Director tells me that the reasons for the change is complaints from exhibitors about too many students.
It seems a little ridiculous that a 17-year old kernel hacker would be turned away at the door by Linuxworld. I gather that this is a bone tossed to vendors complaining about poor sales at the Expo, but it strikes me as being fairly short-sighted... in the computer biz, you really want to get 'em while they're young, before they settle in on a particular OS.
It's a shame that RHEL4 advanced server doesn't have working firewire out of the box. Even when I tried to compile firewire for the kernel I got an error. Same with a simple make mrproper for the default kernel. Hopefully RHEL5 will.
Camraderie seemed to be running pretty high, over in the non-profit corner (wrapped around the slashdot lounge, which was a bunch of laptop zombies on slashdot beanbag chairs)... it seemed like there was a lot of action at the Debian booth, the postgresql booth, and so on (though there was no perl foundation presence this year, not sure why). Lots of people were passing out free CDs for this-and-that.
Out in the corporate world, there was a pretty elaborate demo of Suse 10 handled by Novell: a class room layout with enough laptops setup for a few dozen people to play along with the demos. These demos were extremely slick, very impressive... it's too bad RedHat ("linux isn't ready for the desktop") wasn't present at the Expo. Running Suse might seem like an excessive compromise with proprietary software (it does to me -- it looks like I'm going with Knoppix and Kubuntu these days) but there's no question it would be better than being locked into the offerings of Windows or Apple.
In the light of these Suse 10 demos, the OpenSuse project -- which had a small booth off in the aforementioned corner -- seems very interesting. They were passing out disks that apparently included a few non-"open" components though (flash, etc).
The O'Reilly booth had it's fair share of people browsing, though there didn't seem to be all that much excitement about their present offerings, at least not to my eye. They had a nice series of talks going that I appreciated (e.g. two seperate talks by Bill Childers and Kyle Rankin, the authors of the new Ubuntu Hacks).
Out in hardware land, there was a nice array of server hardware (e.g. impressive booths by Tyan and Supermicro) ... I always appreciate this kind of thing, because not being a sysadmin type I don't often get that close to high-end hardware like this.
Emperor penguin was in the house, with demo models of all of their laptop models. Still no AMD64 versions, I'm afraid: apparently they're waiting for Dell to get on it...
It seemed like the general theme out on the floor was "virtualization"... I was hanging around with a friend of mine, listening to a sales pitch on the subject (by EMC, I think), trying to figure out what was so cool about it, but without much success. Hardware is cheap enough that it wouldn't seem all that onerous to stick with one box per OS installation... and after all, you can run NFS if you want to use large disk arrays more efficiently. But everywhere I turned someone was talking about it... Bill Childers mentioned in passing that his company had gotten a 12 to 1 reduction in servers by using vmware (which has a freeware version, but is not free/open), and one of the Debian folks was talking about how it's really good for some random legacy app that needs a particular platform that otherwise you wouldn't want to run.