On the 25th and 26th of March I attended the UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference.
The first day I was a bit apprehensive, because of public transportation. Getting from Liverpool Street station to Great Portland Street on the tube turned out to be easy, and the conference really was right across the street from the station. But getting from Great Portland Street to London Bridge for the conference dinner actually required changing tubes! And then getting back to the house would require two tubes and a train! Lucky for me public transportation in London is significantly easier than the guesswork involved in navigating the public transit in some US cities. I didn’t get lost at all :)
The conference went well. Somehow I managed not to get any actual photos of the conference, it simply didn’t occur to me very often. Oops. And in spite of my intense shyness, I was able to meet some people. Ended up finding one of the only other Americans at the conference and having a chat. When Google had the bursary applicants and winners swing by their table I was able to meet a couple of women who were also attending the conference (even with these bursaries, the number of women attending was disappointingly quite low). I ended up taking the tube with the other bursary winner and her sister who had come along, and we arrived a bit early for a great dinner at the HMS Belfast so we got to explore the ship a bit. I was convinced into being social and talking at the dinner, which ended up being good, met some cool people who I hope to keep in touch with.
The conference talks themselves? There were a few that stood out as being very applicable to things I’m currently working on:
- System Monitoring Shootout – Nice overview, with closer inspection of HypericHQ, Zabbix, Zenoss and Nagios.
- Managing networks and systems with Zenoss – Presented by Jane Curry, who I was later able to have a chat with regarding open source services business models, and quickly about Nagios and its graphing abilities via a couple of plugins (must try!). Plus, Nagios plugins and agent work with Zenoss? Cool! Seems like this i worth a look…
- OpenLDAP Replication Strategies – The presenter was quite nervous, but I was able to snag some good tidbits. At work I’m about to tackle a replication project, I believe we used old slurpd in the past but these days it’s syncrepl that tends to be used. Plus I learned that the 2.3 to 2.4 replication should be possible, hurrah! Final testing almost complete…
- Open Source Virtualization – An Overview – Great presenter. To be fair, I love Xen, I love the tools, I love how it works, it’s fantastic, but the dom0 host support issue was getting me down. Lenny has chosen to continue support, but Ubuntu had dropped it (they will still support their guest kernels). Lately I’ve had to defend my use of Xen but the presentation showed that it’s still quite a contender to KVM, and not just because Xen runs on hardware that lacks the hardware virtualization bit (still important for us!). The presenter also explored the future for both technologies, and mentioned that some Xen support getting into the kernel may be possible in the future, thus making it easier for distros to support it.
- Servers on the Internet are exposed 24×7 to new and sometimes exciting threats. How can you limit your exposure to attacks – Wow, that’s a title! Much of the talk was “yep, we do that too!” which was a nice re-enforcement that we’re staying on top of the latest security tools out there, but as often the case with such talks, there are some things you learn or are reminded of. Nothing that can be implemented now with any of the infrastructures I help admin, but syslog servers, more complicated role-based access and config management (puppet? cfengine?) would certainly be worth considering on large deployments.
In all I’m very happy that I attended, it was a great opportunity. Oh and conferences are fun, I hope to be able to attend many more in the future!