Thu 31 Jan 2008

linux.conf.au ... part 1

[I'm quite behind on a lot this month, due to a bit of unforseen downtime, but I want to get this down whilst it's fresh.]

Currently at linux.conf.au, feeling a bit rushed, but enjoying it now I'm here.

Have my tutorial this morning and it seemed to go reasonably well. I realise as I was writing the slides last week that, as usual, I'd vastly overestimated the amount of stuff I'd be able to cover in 90 minutes. I miss the three hour tutorial slots we used to have at this conference. Still, enough people showed up that they were sitting in the aisles: always a good stroke for the ego.

My talk was nominally about website server performance and I tried to structure things to give people a sense of the problems they have to identify and face. The entire field is pretty large, so I stayed away from too many specifics and concentrate on the attitude and approach that is required to understand and solve problems. Although the slides won't make a lot of sense if you weren't at the talk, they're available online for those who did attend and want to remember which tools I mentioned.

The talk was video taped and they gave me a microphone this year (vast improvement on last year), so it should be available online eventually.

Somebody asked, quite reasonably, if I blogged about the stuff I was talking about and, indeed, I should do more of that stuff. There are a lot of examples of good problem solving, both pre-emptive and after the post facto changes that sites have made, both large and small. I'll try to write some articles about that sort of thing over the coming months. Sharing experiences in the sysadmin/operations arena seems to be a good way to get the knowledge spread around.

The conference generally has been fun, although I only flew down yesterday (missing the mini-conferences on Monday and Tuesday). It was nice to hear Stormy Peters speak at the keynote this morning. Not sure I entirely agree with her conclusions, but her groundwork was sound and it provided food for thought. Val Henderson's talk on her clusterfs project was worthwhile, too. She's a good presenter and filesystem theory and practice is full of interesting algorithms and data structures.

Oh, I was lucky enough to get an OLPC in the giveaway yesterday, so I now have a nice little XO to play with.

More later.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au