SVLUG Meeting History

Topic: Petascale Filesystem Architecture - GlusterFS Case Study

GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing data in a single global namespace. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design, and can deliver exceptional performance for diverse workloads.

GlusterFS supports standard clients running standard applications over any standard IP network. Users can access application data and files in a global namespace using a variety of standard protocols. No longer are users locked into costly, monolithic, legacy storage platforms. GlusterFS gives users the ability to deploy scale-out, virtualized storage -- scaling from terabytes to petabytes -- in a centrally managed and commoditized pool of storage.

James Briggs attended the meeting and published meeting notes on his blog here, SVLUG: The Story of Gluster

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: As CTO and Co-founder, AB Periasamy sets the vision and strategy for the Gluster product platform. Prior to Gluster, AB served as CTO at California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling commodity cluster computing to supercomputing performance. He drove the adoption of cluster computing and GNU/Linux at enterprise data centers, and helped close strategic accounts at CDC. In 2004, AB led development of the world's second fastest supercomputer, "Thunder", for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

AB also serves on the board of Free Software Foundation of India. He is the author / contributor of various other free software projects like GNU FreeIPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), GNU Garp (Gratuitous ARP Daemon), biosconfig (edit/replicate CMOS parameters), librpci/hdb (RPC interpose for GNU Hurd) and Hymn/PlayFair (iTunes ripper), GNU Freetalk (Scheme-extensible messenger for Jabber, Google talk), and Freehoo (Scheme-extensible messenger for YahooIM). He holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.

Xen reuses many externals of open source projects, Qemu and Linux in particular. During the first years of existence, Xen accumulated a large number of changes to these external projects, but then struggled to upstream them.

In the last couple of years, the Xen community has been trying to remove the dependencies on downstream modifications, and establish better relationships with other open source communities. What is the current status of Xen in relation with other free software projects?

At the same time, Xen development proceeded at a fast pace, and several new features were introduced; this talk will go through one in particular: PV on HVM support in the Linux kernel. Traditionally, Linux has always run on Xen either as a pure PV guest or as a virtualization- unaware guest in an HVM domain. Under the name "PV on HVM", work has been done to make Linux aware that is running on Xen, and enable as many PV interfaces as possible, even when running in an HVM container.

Stefano Stabellini is a Senior Software Engineer at Citrix R&D (formerly XenSource, Ltd.), working on the open source Xen Platform team. He has been working on Xen since 2007, focusing on several different projects, spanning from Qemu to the Linux kernel. He currently maintains libxenlight, Xen support in Qemu, and PV on HVM in the Linux kernel. Before joining Citrix, he was a researcher at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, working on mobile ad hoc networks.

Dr. Hamilton will discuss a brief history of the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, a 5,000 acre ecological reserve perched upon Mt Hamilton below the Lick Observatory -- and how technologies such as Ubuntu Linux, wireless networks, sensors, and imagers will transform our understanding of ecological processes and interactions of species and the environment. He will conclude with a brief discussion of the San Jose Climate Clock project.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Michael Hamilton is an ecologist, conservation biologist, and the reserve director of the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, a unit of the UC Natural Reserve System, located near Mount Hamilton in the Diablo Range, due east of San Jose, California. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology and ecology from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Michael is one of several founders, a past board member, and currently serves as scientific advisor for the Society for Conservation GIS, an organization with 3000 members worldwide that trains and supports academic and NGO professionals involved in nature protection and conservation biology using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. His professional activities have taken him throughout the United States and Mexico, and to many continents and countries including Europe, Africa, Australia, South America, and French Polynesia.

ATA over Ethernet (AoE) is a network protocol designed for simple, high-performance access of SATA storage devices over Ethernet networks. It is used to build storage area networks (SANs) with low-cost, standard technologies.

Learn about a new storage infrastructure that eliminates bottlenecks such as costly controllers, addresses the right user requirement with the right disk solution, and can scale to petabytes using the same platform, with linear scaling cost and performance.

John Masci is a Solutions Engineer with Coraid. He has worked as a Sr. Solutions Engineer at EMC, and was an integral part in the development of VCE, the joint venture between VMware, Cisco, and EMC.

Jesse told us about how RSS works from the inside out, some of the history and politics around RSS, and how one can "grab" RSS information or publish RSS feeds. Jesse described how the various fields of information in "Web feeds" are used, and how the standards groups have evolved RSS over the years.

John gave us a lot of information about his work in content distribution, from the mid-1990s up to the present.

The economy is rough. Jobs are temporary at best. Is this the time to start your own business, or help someone else do it? Is LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) the best route? Or do you see it failing?

One BSD philosophy is "always allow enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot". The speaker demonstrates a working business and support sites, and "how to allow enough rope", showing:

• What you can do with just the basics
• How to install MySQL and needed components
• What other material is available

Some basic scripts will be available.

Ever notice that Web page loads are still slow, and your browser still segfaults, despite software improvements? It's not really your fault. Many Web site are now weighed down with spurious content to track and log what you do and where you go, and that's not even counting the outright malware. However, it turns out there are fairly easy measures users can take to fix the situation, get your performance back, and protect your privacy. Rick Moen will detail those, explaining some of the ways the Web went wrong and how to fix them.

Rick Moen is a longtime senior system administrator and member of SVLUG's Web Team, who also runs nearby Linux user group CABAL, meeting at his and his wife's house in West Menlo Park, and has been fooling with various Unixes since the 1980s.

GNU Wget is a utility to retrieve content from Web servers. It supports downloading via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, the most popular TCP/IP-based protocols used for Web browsing.

Its features include recursive download, conversion of links for offline viewing of local HTML, support for proxies, and much more. It appeared in 1996, coinciding with the boom of popularity of the Web, causing its wide use among Unix users and distribution with most major Linux distributions. Written in portable C, Wget can be easily installed on any Unix-like system, and has been ported to many environments including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, MorphOS, and AmigaOS. It has been used as the basis for graphical programs, such as GWget for the GNOME Desktop, KGet for the KDE Desktop, and VisualWget for MS-Windows.

Micah Cowan was maintainer of Wget between mid-2007 and early 2010. His talk will discuss:

• What is Wget?
• My history with Wget
• How to use Wget
  • Restartable downloads
  • Website archiving/recursive downloads
  • Fine-grained controls over which links to follow
  • Content conversions for local browsing
• Wget shortcomings
• Lessons learned while maintaining Wget
• Issues unique to maintaining a GNU project

In addition to having maintained GNU Wget for a time, Micah Cowan also briefly co-maintained GNU Screen (the terminal multiplexer), and is the current maintainer and author of GNU Teseq. Other interests include digital typography, the Japanese language, video games, piano music, and his wife and three children.

MeeGo is a mobile platform founded by Intel and Nokia under the auspices of The Linux Foundation. The MeeGo project aims to become a mainstream platform deployed in handsets, netbooks, tablets, and other mobile form factors. Let's look at the seeds for MeeGo success: an open project participated in by multiple players, a standard Linux stack made of brilliant upstream projects, an architecture optimized for Intel/Atom and ARM processors, the regular free software platform development model, and a Qt environment targeted to mobile application developers.

Quim Gil works at Nokia as MeeGo advocate. He is co-coordinator of the MeeGo Community Office, and he focuses on marketing and outreach activities through http://meego.com/. A professional journalist some time ago, he started a small Web development cooperative in Barcelona in 1995, and then a small free-software cooperative in 2003. After a short period fully dedicated to the GNOME project, in 2007 he joined Nokia and the Maemo team in Helsinki. He lives in Old Mountain View, now.

Blekko is a new Web search engine, currently in closed beta, offering more-focussed searching using "slashtags", tagging criteria used to refine queries, filtering search results efficiently to the specific sites of actual interest. Blekko will also offer the ability to change the way results are stored, plus an open, public Web-crawling and rank data policy. Greg's talk will focus on Map/Reduce done better, NoSQL database.

Greg Lindahl is CTO at Blekko. He was previously a founder at PathScale, where he was the architect of the InfiniPath low-latency InfiniBand HCA, used to build tightly-coupled supercomputing clusters. Prior to PathScale's founding in 2001, Greg worked on commodity Linux clusters at HPTi, including the 1999 Forecast Systems Lab system, which was the first time a Linux cluster won a conventional supercomputing procurement. Greg started using Linux in 1996, while working on the Legion "grid" distributed OS project at the University of Virginia, and you can trace the history of his Linux laptop usage from the guides he's written at linux-on-laptops.com and tuxmobil.org.

Think you know a lot about bash? Wish you did? Don't know more than a few basics of shell scripting? Wondering why people still use the command line? (Did you know bash runs on the iPhone?) Have you seen the latest features in bash 4.0 and 4.1? Here's something for everyone, by the guy who wrote the book on bash. (OK, one of the guys, who wrote one of the books - O'Reilly's bash Cookbook). Come and enjoy an evening of tech tips and top 10s, how tos and how not tos. It promises to be a real bash!

Carl Albing writes software for some of the biggest and fastest computers in the world. A software engineer for Cray, Inc. and an independent consultant, he is comfortable programming with C, Java, bash, and much more. Carl is co-author of two books, one on Java development on Linux and his latest, the O'Reilly "bash Cookbook" (now in its third printing).

A software consultant, manager, analyst, and programmer with an amazing breadth of software experience, Carl has worked with companies in the US, Canada, and Europe. He has worked for large companies and small startups, in technical as well as in managerial and marketing roles. Carl's software products, past and present, involve the design and development of distributed computing software, medical image processing applications, compilers, medical devices, Web-based factory floor automation, and more.

Hypertable is an open source, high performance, distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable. It differs from traditional database technology in that the design emphasis is on scalability on commodity hardware, as opposed to support for ACID transactions and the relational model. Hypertable supports massive sparse tables of data, sorted by a single primary key, a design that has proven well-suited for scalable Web 2.0 applications. This presentation will include an architectural overview, demo of the system, performance studies, and some details of Baidu's deployment. Due to a mix-up, this presentation did not occur on the scheduled date and is being rescheduled.

Doug Judd has two decades of software engineering experience, primarily in the area of distributed computing and information retrieval.

He joined Inktomi's Web Search division in 1997 where he held both engineering and management positions. During his five year tenure, he designed and developed large-scale distributed systems, including significant pieces of the crawling and indexing software. Doug later joined Kosmix, Inc., where he built Web crawler and scaled it to a billion documents.

Doug earned a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1992, and holds four patents in search technology.

SMB/CIFS networking project has been making great strides in features and enterprise integration, notably integration into Active Directory and OpenLDAP environments, and management via the webconfig interface. Our speaker will update us on the status of the Samba3 and Samba4 branches, including a live demonstration of Samba3's integration into a cutting-edge Linux network and gateway distribution called ClearOS, providing a packaged business platform for small/medium businesses with distributed offices. We'll hear of experiences gained from deployments of Samba and OpenLDAP in sites with up to 4200 users and multiple offices. Focus of the presentation will be on showing that open source solutions don't need to be difficult to use and deploy, and that with proper implementation they can offer a compelling business opportunity.

John H. Terpstra is CEO/President of PrimaStasys, Inc., a company that mentors Information Technology companies and facilitates profitable changes in practices. John is also CEO of Fabuluss Software, Inc., a company working to popularize next-generation desktop productivity enhancements.

He is a member of the formation committee of the Desktop Linux Consortium, and a long term member of the Samba Team.

John is a well known contributor and visionary in the open source community, with a very active commercial focus. He a member of the Open Source Software Institute Advisory Board. He has worked with the LSB, Li18nux (now OpenI18N.Org), and is best selling co-author of The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide. He has other books in production.

John has worked with The SCO Group (previously Caldera, Inc.), and TurboLinux, Inc., in VP-level positions. Prior to moving to the USA in 1999, John founded and managed Aquasoft Pty Ltd. (Australia) for 10 years. He has a Graduate Diploma in Marketing (with Credit) from UTS Australia, and an Applied Science Certificate in Chemistry from QUT (Australia).

Just as high-level languages have evolved over the past 50 years, so has assembly language. Alas, assembly language has been unfairly demonized by software engineers whose main experience with assembly language was in a college or university assembly language course, being taught with an assembler whose feature list came straight from the 1960s. This talk will discuss why assembly language is still relevant, and will describe a more modern implementation of assembly language (HLA - the High Level Assembler), emphasizing the portability aspects of HLA.

Randall Hyde is the author of Write Great Code, Volumes 1 and 2 (No Starch Press) and the co-author of MASM 6.0 Bible (The Waite Group). He has written for Dr. Dobb's Journal, Byte, and various professional journals. Hyde taught assembly language at the University of California, Riverside for over a decade.

Many Web sites mix secure and insecure content on the same page, as does Facebook. This makes it possible to steal all the data entered on such a page easily, using Moxie Marlinspike's SSLstrip tool. Sam will explain and demonstrate this attack.

Slowloris is a very new layer 7 denial-of-service attack created by RSnake that stops Apache Web servers completely with very low bandwidth -- one packet every 2 seconds. The Apache developers were notified of this vulnerability, and decided it was unimportant and not worth patching. Sam will explain and demonstrate this attack, and discuss various ways to protect your Apache HTTPd servers.

Complete instructions, so that anyone can easily set up both these attacks on their own machines, will be discussed.

Sam Bowne has been teaching computer networking and security classes at City College of San Francisco since 2000. He has given talks at DEFCON and Toorcon on Ethical Hacking, and taught classes and seminars at many other schools and teaching conferences.

Slow is the new black! The "netbook" craze, with machines like the ASUS Eee family, has raised a lot of interest in small and relatively slow hardware. Even if you don't have a shiny new netbook, what about that older laptop sitting in your closet... that one that you stopped using because it was too slow? Maybe you've wondered if there's a way to bring that old hardware back to life?

This talk will cover ways of configuring a modern Linux distribution such as Ubuntu to run efficiently on slow CPU, low-memory machines. You'll see how you can get big performance gains from areas such as:

• speeding up the boot process
• options for lightweight window managers
• performance tools that can help you find bottlenecks
• tuning your kernel
• finding lightweight alternatives to big applications

Mobile operating systems based on Linux range from full implementations of GNU/Linux like Intel/Nokia's newly announced MeeGo collaboration, to platforms like Palm's WebOS and the Google/Open Handset Alliance's Android, which contain little which is familiar to Linux users beyond the kernel. In addition, Nokia has open-sourced Symbian, which is not based on Linux at all. How "open" and "free" are these operating systems, and what challenges and opportunities do they present to developers and users? Android is winning the battle for market share, but does not have familiar facilities like X11 or even most of libc. In response, the Replicant Project has undertaken to create a GPLed operating system for the HTC G1 Dream phone.

The Internet enables ideas about how communities can self-organize to spread rapidly and globally, along with the infrastructure required to power a group, enabling "freely franchiseable" models like LUGs, BarCamps, DevHouses, hackerspaces, etc. In this sense, the infrastructure for the community is communicated as an idea virus, or meme - a sort of cultural "grey goo". Maintaining a sufficient consistency of the idea such that global community "identity" is coherent is a challenge, leading to discussions of Community Marks and other novel forms of trademark. Models vary wildly in this level of control, from the Catholic Church through TEDx and all the way through those who self-label as "anarchists". These models often lead to friction with existing, slower-moving establishments such as governments, to whom these forms of organization are alien and subversive. Examples and mild historical perspective will be provided; the talk hopes to at the least to stir discussion about effective ways to spread positive community concepts.

Mark Terranova will be giving a talk about what is new in Ubuntu Linux's newest release - version 9.10 AKA Karmic Koala, and about the upcoming 10.4 "Lucid Lynx" release due out in April. He will also speak some about his experiences with local tech stuff.

Mark Terranova is a "West Coast Community-Developed-Software guy". Mark has regularly taught many types of computer classes, specialising in the benefits of Linux and cross-platform software.

He has been involved with spreading Ubuntu for a while, having helped organize Ubuntu release parties and other tech events that make it fun - using beer, BBQ, and other ways to create a fun community - and has spent much time in Portland, Oregon working with FreeGeek.org. Their unique style helped him learn how to involve more people in computing.

This knowledge has helped him in his role as co-founder of Gidget Kitchen (GK): "Gidget Kitchen donates computers, generally using Ubuntu, to groups and individuals." GK strives to make modern technology simple, empowering, and easy for everyone to understand. The only requirement is "the ability to play well with others."

Mark blames his interest in technical things and electronics on his father Michael: "He gave me a Commodore 64 and helped me get my amateur radio license (N6TBD) at an early age".

There are two main SCSI Target Frameworks available in Linux: SCST and STGT. STGT performs the majority of its functions in userland, and has limited target-mode driver support. SCST, on the other hand, has very extensive in-kernel support, and has target mode driver support for FiberChannel, SAS, iSCSI, Infiniband, and so forth.

Richard Sharpe will present information on how to build and install SCST, as well as how to code device handlers and target-mode drivers using SCSI LLDs like scst_local, the Marvell SAS target driver. He will also talk about implementing a virtual tape library using SCST.

The originally scheduled speaker for this meeting turned out to be unavailable, such that the meeting was cancelled and the presentation postponed to a future date subject to speaker's availability.

Eddy will be looking at the current state of packaging across distros (Ubuntu, Gentoo, rPath), lessons learned, and what's next.

"opythonista, djangonaut, ubuntero, catholic choir-boy."

Eddy currently works as a lab engineer at Cisco Systems, was educated at Universitas Bina Nusantara in Jakarta, Indonesia, and California State University East Bay, and is a resident of Hayward.

This talk is a light overview of virtualization technologies with a more in-depth look at Xen, given by and targeted towards the hands-on system administrator. Topics will include:

• Virtualization and consolidation: Buzz aside, what are my choices for consolidation, and what are the trade offs between the different virtualization technologies, and consolidating without virtualization?
• Virtualization and server management: What tools does virtualization enable that can make the sysadmin's job easier?
• What about virtualization can make the sysadmin's job harder? How many of these benefits can I get without shared storage? If I do have shared storage, what added benefits can virtualization give me?
• Overview of the Xen hypervisor and device architecture: What does the sysadmin need to know, and how to get good I/O performance out of a virtualized system?
• Protecting and fairly allocating resources: How to give people what they are paying for? We will go over the sysadmin-level details of fairly allocating RAM, CPU time, network bandwidth, and disk bandwidth, in environments where users are not always cooperative, and where some virtual servers should be allocated more resources than others.

Luke S. Crawford has been working with Xen in a production environment since late '05, renting virtual private servers to people from all over the Internet at Prgmr.com.

He has also spent significant time with larger corporations, helping to virtualize the corporate environment. Luke and Chris Takemura are nearing completion of The Book of Xen, to be published by No Starch Press in September 2009.

Parrot is a register-based virtual machine, developed in C and intended to run a variety of dynamic languages efficiently, starting with but not at all limited to Perl 6, using just-in-time compilation for speedy operation and minimum overhead. Serendipitously, it's ended up being small, efficient, and flexible enough for most interpreted languages. It also recently reached production status.

Allison Randal is a linguist, software developer, chief architect for the Parrot virtual machine, Perl Foundation Board member, coauthor of Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, Second Edition and of some of the Perl 6 Synopses, and editor of various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks: Tips & Tools for Programming, Debugging, and Surviving and Programming PHP. She also serves as Program Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, and is employed by O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly and Associates).

Akkana Peck will demonstrate tips, tricks, and techniques for using GIMP to improve your digital photographs and Web images, and to create cool art projects such as greeting cards. She'll also demonstrate some of the new features in GIMP 2.6.

Akkana Peck is a freelance programmer and the author of the book Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional. She has been an open source software developer for some 20 years, as well as a longtime member of the GIMP community, and has contributed to GIMP, Mozilla, and an assortment of other projects. Her Web site is http://shallowsky.com/.

Earth Treasury and partners are starting to create digital textbooks. In the past, most such efforts have either been PDFs or software of very limited utility. How can we create more powerful learning materials on the base of software in Sugar on the OLPC XO and other Linux platforms? What licenses should we use? What is the impact of Freely licensed learning materials? Who is writing these digital textbooks?

Edward Mokurai Cherlin has been a mathematician and computer scientist, a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea, a Buddhist monk, a high-tech market analyst, a tech writer, a Free Software development manager, and a serial NGO founder. His two most recent NGOs are the Open Voting Consortium (Founding Member), and Earth Treasury (Founder). Earth Treasury has set itself the task of creating an informed network of networks including a billion children, along with their teachers, family, and friends, for economic growth, social development, and world domination of Free Software.

While you might not be able to tell at a cursory glance, much has changed behind the scenes on a modern Ubuntu system, from what you might be used to if you have used Linux for years. For example, did you know Ubuntu is phasing out the System V init? That you can't loopback-mount the initrd? In this talk, Kyle will discuss the current changes Ubuntu is making to what we might consider the traditional Linux system. There's a little something for everyone on the talk: For Linux newcomers who are curious about what's under the hood, Kyle will cover the traditional and modern boot process, including how init works, and follow up with a guide to where important files are in Ubuntu. For the experienced Linux user, Kyle will show you how (and why) things have changed, and where you can look now when you want to, for instance, change the default runlevel on an Ubuntu system.

Kyle Rankin is a systems architect for Quinstreet, Inc., the current president of the North Bay Linux Users Group, the author of Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks, and Ubuntu Hacks, and has contributed to a number of other O'Reilly books. Kyle is also a columnist for Linux Journal, and has had articles featured in PC Magazine, TechTarget, and other publications.

The Digital Tipping Point is a documentary film that will explore how the culture of sharing is spilling from the world of open source / free software Software into the broader global culture. All video collected for the film is available from the Digital Tipping Point Video Collection at the Internet Archive under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.

Christian Einfeldt is an attorney in private civil practice in San Francisco, and producer of the upcoming documentary "The Digital Tipping Point".

OpenStreetMap is an open source project to collaboratively map the entire world. OpenStreetMap is both free and Free, allowing open access to geodata. There are over 70,000 participants in OpenStreetMap worldwide, and community members are using the data to create a variety of maps, such as opencyclemap.org and openrouteservice.org. The project's volunteers are working to increase participation here in the US. This presentation will focus on the past, present and future of geodata, OpenStreetMap goals, as well how people can get involved.

Sarah is the community ambassador for OpenStreetMap in the Bay Area. As community ambassador, she works to engage a wider range of participants in OpenStreetMap, by organizing mapping parties, speaking engagements, and collaborations with community groups. She is also working to develop a curriculum using OpenStreetMap's data and tools.

As a grad student at SJSU, Tom worked on Wireless Mesh Networking and Mobile Ad Hoc Networking. The talk will compare solutions like OLSR and Microsoft's sorta open-source Mesh Connectivity Layer (though it doesn't run on Linux). He will discuss why WDS is not sufficient and a mesh protocol is needed, and discuss the lack of openness thus far in 802.11s even though it is included in the OLPC, as well as other, lesser-known security issues.

After getting his BS in Computer Science at UCSC in 2003, Tom Belote has already had a distinguished career: systems administration and software development for Premier Consulting, Tarantella, Cryptine Networks, EmailLabs, and Digisense, followed by his current job as software engineer at Untangle, Inc. His expertise lies in a number of areas: ActiveDirectory integration, network gateway access and security, Java, ExtJS, JSON-RPC, PHP, and Ruby on Rails.

Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. Dr. Gosling has been one of the best-known software developers of the current age. Come to get his views on multiprocessor support and virtual machines, in which areas he was a pioneer, the Java programming language, which he invented, and more.

James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems, and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a port of the 'Emacs' text editor to Unix systems. At Sun, his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine.

If you find yourself performing rote tasks on a large number of files, consider writing a script to do your work for you. Whether you're updating a directory full of symbolic links, or making bulk edits to a group of text files, or any other tedious manual task, there is a myriad of opportunities on Linux for automation via scripting in languages such as Perl. In this talk, Bill will review some useful tips and basic Perl scripting techniques for automating tasks under Linux, revealing key aspects of the Perl language and features such as regular expressions, along the way. Learn how to identify and install Perl modules, including using your Debian or RPM packaging system to keep them up to date. No prior Perl knowledge is required.

Bill Ward has been programming in Perl since 1993 in the system administration and Web development fields. He has been teaching Perl since the late 1990s, first at De Anza College and later as his own company, Bay View Training. He also works at Oracle, as a software architect in the Infrastructure Systems Development group. He was the founder of PenLUG in 2003. His company is offering Perl training classes open to the public in October in Sunnyvale, CA, and in November in Plano, TX, and he is available for private Perl coaching or on-site training classes.

Using Xen to provide Virtual Private Servers to anyone who can pay $5/month.

Chris is a recent graduate, occasional Xen consultant, and itinerant writer. Currently he's biking about the Bay Area doing the occasional bits of documentation, Web design, and programming, in search of the perfect sofa. Luke has been working with virtualization since before it was cool, selling virtual servers based on FreeBSD jails before diving headfirst into Xen. He currently works as a consultant, helping a local Fortune 1000 company virtualize hundreds of servers. His many interests include virtualization, market inefficiencies, pervasive computing, novel input devices, anti-spam systems, IPv6, SAN storage, and ESD protection. (Luke firmly believes that static discharge blew up the Hindenberg. It could happen to you too.)

Chris and Luke work together on a Xen hosting venture at prgmr.com testing out new and interesting technologies on a flock of patient guinea pigs. Their motto is "we don't assume you're stupid."

Technological and sociological issues on the scale of a 325k volunteer node system like Folding@home. The upcoming infrastructure to take to tens of millions of nodes with integrated storage - Storage@home on Cosm. Issues in the design and tools for handling kilo-core systems (SMP, Cell, GPU and beyond) without going insane while maintaining portability and future-proof libraries - Thalweg.

In other words... how to write a vectored multi-core clustered distributed system run by random people on the Internet that gets science done, and other random musings.

Adam L. Beberg has been building distributed systems since 1990. He founded Mithral Communications & Design in 1995, which is the home of the Cosm distributed computing tools. In 1997 he was a founder and president of distributed.net until 1999, during which RC5 was cracked once and DES was cracked twice - the second time in 22 hours with the additional help of the EFF's Deep Crack. In 1999 he met Vijay Pande and collaborated on Folding@home, leading to the use of Cosm as the network library in Folding@home. He was also honored as one of MIT Technology Review's TR100 top young innovators of 1999. He has worked and spoken extensively in the areas of distributed computing, storage, and computer security. With a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, he has been at Stanford since 2004 working on a PhD in Vijay Pande's lab working on next generation distributed computing methodologies, after which he will find a nice day job in academia and start his epic quest for tenure.

IEEE Task Group S is currently defining a new 802.11 amendment to provide mesh networking services at the MAC layer. open80211s is an open-source implementation of this emerging standard, supported in the mainline kernel since 2.6.26. This talk will provide an overview of the mesh networking protocol, implementation details, capabilities, limitations, and future improvements. The second half of the presentation will include a hands on tutorial on how to use the mesh on common laptops. Note: Attendees are requested to please bring their Linux laptops with wireless chipsets compatible with the Zydas zd1211rw or Broadcom b43 drivers, to participate in a demo of open80211s mesh networking. Helpful links: 1, 2, 3

Javier Cardona is the CEO of cozybit, Inc., an engineering consulting firm in the field of wireless communications. Javier co-founded the company in 2004 to create a place where Linux engineers could fully develop their technical abilities and have a life too. Thanks to cozybit, a large number of electronic devices, from children's laptops to digital pens, can talk to each other. Prior to that, Javier developed embedded software for over ten years, in France, US, UK, and Switzerland, for a wide range of applications, from industrial safety to wireless networking. Javier holds a Telecommunications Engineer degree from UPC, and a Master of Engineering from Alari, Switzerland.

In June's meeting, Alan DuBoff of Sun Microsystems spoke on the new release of OpenSolaris, formerly known as Project Indiana. In addition, Alan also discussed some of the open source software currently being developed between Sun and the communities. Such software includes Virtual Box, OpenOffice, MySQL, and Xen/Xvm. Alan gave us live CDs of OpenSolaris, so we can try it out! Thanks Alan and Sun!

At the time of the talk, Alan worked in the Solaris x86 IHV/OEM group, where he worked with both hardware and software vendors, as well as with the OpenSolaris community with part of his time. Alan has been working at Sun Microsystems for close to five years. Prior to working at Sun, Alan was a lead engineer on the Kerbango Internet Radio project, one of the early adopters of Monta Vista Embedded Linux.

Alan worked at VA Linux Systems (and VA Research before that ;-), where he wrote and maintained the backend of their order/entry system for about 1.5 years. He worked on WebVan for a year before going to VA, and has been a consultant around Silicon Valley for close to 15 years, working at many large companies. Alan has been consulting to the high tech industry for more than 25 years.

Alan founded and is President of the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group (SVOSUG), which meets in Santa Clara, CA, at the Sun Microsystems Santa Clara Campus. He has run user groups with IBM, Microsoft, and Heathkit in the past, as well as being a long standing member in the BayLISA, SVLUG, Debian, and BSD communities. He has given presentations at LISA conferences, as well as OSCON, JavaOne, and SunNetwork.

Alan is currently involved in a project to port Flask / type_enforcement to OpenSolaris with a project called Flexible Mandatory Access Control (FMAC). This is the technology used in SELinux for Madatory Access Control (MAC).

CTL is a command-dispatching and control system for networks, coded in Java 1.5 (with 1.4 coming) and transported over SSH2 via JSch, supporting the Apache Bean Scripting Framework and Ant with support for multiple implementation languages. It also cooperates with Jobscenter for scheduled command execution, Reportcenter for report logging and reporting, and Design Workbench for an integrated model of all controller definitions.

slides for Alex's talk are available.

Alex Honor is a developer and open-source project-leader for ControlTier Software. Alex has been designing and implementing automation and administration solutions for over 15 years. He was head of architecture and system engineering at E*trade, where he led the scaling of infrastructure from one app on 3 nodes to dozens of apps across thousands of nodes in multiple datacenters. Alex has held engineering and operations management positions in government and startups always focussing on distributed systems. His current focus is on CTL, a next-generation automation framework, for system and application administration. Alex also provides design consulting to ControlTier's SaaS and ecommerce customers to automate their online operations.

The Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) is a non-profit organization that provides free electronics recycling. James spoke on the topic of giving computers to the needy through the diversion of machines from the waste stream, and the difficulty of placing free hardware in a world that was trained to expect zero-sum economic behavior. ("If it's free, then something must be wrong with it".)

He discussed the recent installfest (350 machines assembled), including lessons learned and plans for future fests.

James Burgett founded ACCRC to essentially make money off equipment that other people thought was obsolete garbage. Thirteen years later, he has reformatted, refurbished, and donated thousands of computers to folks who might not ever have the chance to own one.

The ACCRC offers workshops on how to refurbish and reuse junked equipment, and how to install and use the open source Ubuntu Linux OS, which is free for all.

Saving valuable equipment from the landfill, James explained, is not exactly profitable for the California Electronics Recycling Initiative, which encourages recyclers to mine and grind parts rather than refurb for reuse.

We learned why the ACCRC motto is "Obsolescence is Just a Lack of Imagination."

James Burgett is the founder and Executive Director of the ACCRC.

Ever wonder why people use fancy commercial file servers instead of plain old Linux? Two big reasons are: LVM snapshots don't scale well, and rsync replication doesn't scale well. Zumastor is a GPL'd effort to solve both problems; it consists of a device mapper target that handles efficient volume-level snapshotting of filesystems, and a userspace app that handles efficient replication of volume snapshots to remote machines. Dan Kegel described Zumastor in some detail, then walked us through how to set up a pair of Zumastor servers, before our very eyes. Read zumastor.org's excellent howto, and try it yourself!

Dan Kegel is another one of those Unix curmudgeons who learned how to design and program computers back when 8-bit processors were new, and still thinks vi is cool. He got root in '82. He is now happily employed at Google, recently helped get Photoshop CS2 running on Linux by improving WINE, and was elected release manager for WINE 1.0 at Wineconf '07.

Kyle is the author of Knoppix Hacks published by O'Reilly. Many of us use Knoppix as a live CD (or DVD) for rescue and administrative purposes. In this meeting, Kyle showed us some intermediate and advanced uses of Knoppix, including remastering.

Kyle works as a senior system administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area, and writes books and articles on Linux.

Do you run Linux in a virtualized environment? Do you experience performance and usability issues when doing so? If you answered yes, then the Open Virtual Machine Tools project can help.

The project is a collection of several kernel and user space components that dramatically improve the overall user experience for Linux and Unix guests.

We will describe how these components work together to provide several interesting features like drag-n-drop, clipboard sharing, improved network and graphics performance etc. Through this talk, we hope to connect with several users (both new and existing) as well as unearth new ideas and contributors to the project.

Adar Dembo is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware Inc. and the lead developer on the open-vm-tools project. He has enjoyed his brief forays into the Linux kernel and would like to become more active in the kernel community.

Elliot Lee has worked with open source since before it was open source, and helped start the GNOME and Fedora projects. He currently works as a software engineer at VMware, where he's helping ramp up the open-vm-tools project and develop cool new virtualization technologies.

Does your ticket system follow the 3 laws of entropy? You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game? As the lolcats say, "You're doing it wrong". A bit of restructuring your helpdesk and ticket process can support your need for staffing, reveal problem areas in your infrastructure or support process, and win you powerful allies in engineering and sales. Closing tickets is only the tip of the iceberg. A well-run helpdesk effort also includes good ticket granularity, priorities customized for your organization, maintainance and upgrade support in the queue, regular reporting, and providing proactive services. Most of these practices work well with virtual helpdesks as well, allowing them to be leveraged for open source projects as well as enterprise workgroups.

Strata R. Chalup started administering VAX Ultrix and Unisys Unix in 1983 in Boston, founded Virtual.Net in 1993, and spent the dot-com years building complex internet services for clients like iPlanet and Palm. She is a well-known instructor at Usenix and LISA conferences, and joined Tom Limoncelli and Christina Hogan as a co-author for the 2nd edition of "The Practice of System and Network Administration", published August 2007.

Untangle is a GNU/Linux appliance with functionality in the following areas: Spam Blocking, Web Filter, Protocol Control, Security, Virus Blocker, Spyware Blocker, Phish Blocker, Intrusion Prevention, Remote Access, Remote Access Portal, and OpenVPN.

The presentation showed how Untangle has been developed to be much more efficient than simply assembling individual applications to accomplish these networking functions. Untangle CDs were given to all who attended, about 65 people.

We raffled books from one of our sponsors, O'Reilly, and complimentary admittance to the Pearson Google Web Toolkit conference taking place in downtown SF, Dec 3-6.

slides for Dirk's talk (warning: 10MB PowerPoint) are available.

Dirk Morris is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Untangle, and visionary behind the Untangle Gateway Platform.

Prior to Untangle, Dirk was Chief Architect at Akheron Technologies, where he invented the patent-pending High Bandwidth Transparent Vectoring used in the company's proxy firewall engine. He has also held positions as lead engineer at VerticalNet and H.L.L.C. Consulting, developing Java-based distributed monitor and intrusion detection systems.

Earlier in his career, Dirk worked on survivability simulations at CERT/CC (Computer Emergency Response Team), the renowned, federally-funded Center for Internet security operated by Carnegie Mellon University.

Dirk earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.

One underestimated and misunderstood problem of programming in general, and parallel programming in particular, can have a dramatic effect on performance: CPU memory and caches. This talk gave an overview of how memory actually works, how caches are used, the associated costs, and a few tips for using memory and caches more efficiently. This presentation accompanied the paper concurrently published by Linux Weekly News.

Ulrich showed how improper use of memory can yield performance compromises, sometimes resulting in several orders of magnitude worse performance.

Ulrich Drepper is one of the early Linux users. He has maintained C libraries for the last 12 years, and currently works for Red Hat, where he looks after all kinds of low-level technology.

In this presentation, Tapio taught us about the Nokia Internet Tablets, from both a hardware and software perspective.

We heard an overview of the Internet Tablet OS operating system's architecture and features, as well the secrets of the application development platform. For developers, this was a good overview to maemo, and a jumping-off point to starting work with maemo. The 770 and 800 platforms were discussed, as well as a roadmap for future development.

Tapio Tolvanen is currently a Senior Software Specialist - Architect for Nokia Multimedia's Convergence Products. Tolvanen has been defining architectures and guiding the development of several applications, creating engaging and compelling Internet experience on Nokia's first open source-based platform, maemo. Prior to this, Tolvanen has been developing several applications and products on Nokia's platforms, including Series 40, S60, and Maemo in Europe, Asia and the U.S.A.

In this presentation, Cricket discussed the types of threats name servers on the Internet are regularly exposed to, including cache poisoning ("pharming") and denial of service attacks. He described ten steps administrators can take to secure their Internet-connected name servers. His presentation is available on the Infoblox Web site.

Cricket Liu is author for O'Reilly and Associates of all of the publisher's books about the TCP/IP Domain Name System, including the seminal volume DNS and BIND, DNS on Windows NT, DNS on Windows 2000, DNS on Windows Server 2003, and the DNS & BIND Cookbook. As the latest step in a distinguished career, he is serving as VP of Architecture at Infoblox, a company that specializes in appliances that offer network services, including DNS and DHCP.

Richard Sharpe will introduce Data Robotics's Drobo, the world's first data robot. Drobo is a USB storage device that allows users to mix and match up to four SATA drives of different sizes, and allows for easy upgrading, all while protecting the user's storage. After a demonstration of its capabilities, he will then talk about how a Drobo can be used with open-source operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD.

The management protocol that allows a host to interact with Drobo will be explained, plus strategies for dealing with the fact that Drobo changes size will be suggested in the context of Linux.

Richard Sharpe is a software engineer at Data Robotics, Inc. Prior to Data Robotics, he worked at Mu Security and Panasas. He has also been active in the open-source arena, having been involved with both Samba and ethereal (now wireshark).

Robert's talk will cover why Vyatta was created, what services the community has access to, and an introduction to building routers and third party integration.

Robert has been working in the networking industry since 1994. Prior to joining Vyatta, he was CTO at InfiniRoute Networks, providing optimized long-haul VoIP transit to international long distance providers. InfiniRoute was the genesis of a merger with his previous company, Proficient Networks, where he was co-founder and held the role of Chief Scientist, designing Internet route optimization technology. Before joining Proficient, Robert held Senior Network Engineer roles at Telegis and Digital Island.

The talk will center on Barracuda Networks's delivery of network appliances to the market, company background, trends in threats, new spam management techniques, predictive sender profiling, and Barracuda's products.

Curt started running Linux in 1998 on his personal computer so he could program on his own time. At first, he was just looking for a cheap compiler, and free was great by his standards. He quickly learned about the freedom aspect of open source software, and has been a strong proponent ever since.

Curt has been with Barracuda Networks since 2004. He was graduated from Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington with concentrations in mathematics, physics, and computer science.

Aron will introduce Meldware Communication Suite, an open source, multi-platform groupware package for Linux. The presentation will give an overview of Meldware, its mail server, calendar server, webmail, and Web calendar, as well as its administration GUI.

The talk will cover technical details, including Meldware's flexible e-mail storage using any RDBMS or file system, and integration between the calendar server and popular clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Novell Evolution, and even Microsoft Outlook. The talk will wrap up with a demo, a brief description of the Buni.org communication software development community, and a call to action for better protocol standards in e-mail and scheduling.

Aron Sogor has served as lead engineer for variety of projects for companies in the telecommunication sector, including Vodafone and Windriver Systems.

In the past, he presented on subjects such as the open source development model and the Meldware Communication Suite at JavaOne, JBoss World, and AjaxWorld. He has also published on the subject of integrated personal information management at ITNG. He started using Linux in 1996, and has been an addict ever since then.

Seth will talk about how digital restrictions management (DRM) and related legislative and regulatory measures are excluding free software from interoperating lawfully with a new generation of commercial media products, and providing a pervasive excuse for hardware manufacturer secrecy. He will give updates on recent DRM developments, and discuss why even people who know how to break DRM should be concerned.

Seth Schoen has served for six years as EFF's first-ever Staff Technologist, bridging the technology and legal worlds. Prior to this, he wrote the so-called "DeCSS Haiku" to protest movie industry lawsuits against DVD decryption software. He has used Linux and free software since 1995, and has attended a variety of industry DRM meetings on three continents. He worked on EFF's successful challenge to the Broadcast Flag regulation.

This presentation will cover the design of VoIP for a small-business scenario. It will cover configuration and use of AstLinux, a custom Linux distribution centered around Asterisk, the open source PBX (private branch exchange). It will cover configuration and use of AstLinux using a bootable CD and a USB Flash key. Time permitting, there will also be a demos of the CentOS-based Trixbox Linux distribution, which supports many additional features such as logging, billing, CRM, etc.

Dr. Verna is Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the IS Dept. at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching a course in "Managing Open Source" for the last couple of years, and operates the useful news/comments site http://opensource.sfsu.edu/. He is also a frequent speaker at Linux conferences worldwide.

The MIT $100 laptop being made and marketed by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) is the center of the largest charitable and human rights programs in history, and the largest Free Software project focused on education. Ed will briefly describe the planned hardware and software, and then talk about the way the program is intended to work, how you can join in, and some of the likely results. Questions and suggestions are welcome.

Edward Cherlin is a generalist and activist who has organized an anti-spam organization, led development of free APL software, and won a Korean classical music contest as a Peace Corps Volunteer. When he wrote a guide to the Internet almost fifteen years ago, there were three questions he couldn't answer: 1. How to get rid of spam; 2. How to display all the languages on the Web correctly; 3. How to get the rest of the world on the Net. Now that we have answers, Ed feels like a character in a John Brunner novel.

The Eclipse Development Environment is an extensible open-source toolkit and integrated development environment, written in Java, for rich-client development in C++, Java, and over a half-dozen other languages (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, and more) via its well-developed plug-in mechanism. Ewa will discuss the community ecosystem and resources for Eclipse plug-in development, and then will demonstrate use of that plug-in framework and the popular Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) kit on Linux.

Ewa Matejska is a Sr. IDE Engineer at PalmSource and a committer to the Eclipse DSDP (Device Software Development Platform) project. She has been involved with the Eclipse community for the past two years, and is currently working on the Eclipse-based Access Linux Platform Development Suite.

The GNU Project's "GDB" is the standard source-code debugger. It's portable across all Unix-like platforms, and supports coding in many programming languages. It permits tracing and altering of program execution, monitoring/modification of variables, calling functions independently of the program's normal behaviour, and even remote debugging via a client/server mode. There are a number of (optional) graphical and other front-ends (including Eclipse, subject of our December talk), and add-ons such as detectors for memory leaks.

Michael will give an omnibus view of GDB -- how it works, how to get the most use from it, and a bit of what it's like to work on a publicly maintained open source software project.

Michael Snyder is an active member of the public GDB maintainer's group. He has worked on debuggers for 15 years, and on GDB for ten; first at NeXT, then at Cygnus, Red Hat, and currently at PalmSource.

The topic will be the re-birth of Ingres to the open source community — along with the technical details behind Ingres and what makes it* different from other RDBMSes in the open source market. Bill will also review what Ingres Corp. is doing with Linux, and its efforts to make developing on an open source stack easier.

Bill Mamoin is Senior Vice-President of Worldwide Engineering for Ingres, having arrived with 20 years' experience with Oracle database architecture management. Most recently, he served as VP in Oracle's Server Technologies division, where he was responsible for its collaboration software, including content services and records management.

For more than ten years, he led Oracle's work in data security, including pioneering work within the US and international ISO bodies, along with scalability work on Oracle 7 and 8 releases that helped achieve record database scalability measures.

Join us as the authors of No Starch's upcoming book "Linux Appliance Design" describe the components used in the book's sample appliance. The talk will focus on what each appliance component does, why you might want the component in your appliance, how the component ties to the other components, and how to install can configure the component.

Topics to be covered in the talk include:

• Appliance architecture
• Run-time access: How to talk to a running daemon
• logmuxd: How to use logging to respond to events
• An AJAX-powered Web interface
• Framebuffer and LIRC interfaces
• A sample front-panel interface
• A command-line interface
• An SNMP interface

You can preview the book and its sample appliance at the book's Web site: www.linuxappliancedesign.com

Bob Smith, Graham Phillips, and Bill Pierce are authors of the upcoming No Starch book Linux Appliance Design. Bob was the founder of Venturi Wireless, and has over ten years of experience with embedded Linux. Bob currently works for PalmSource.

Graham's area of expertise is user interface design for embedded systems. He designed the AJAX-based Web interface for Laddie, the book's project.

Bill is currently a lead software engineer at Electronics for Imaging (efi.com), where he works on control software for printer controller appliances. Before joining EFI, Bill spent 11 years as an embedded systems engineer at BAE Systems.

Jack Lo is Sr. Director of R & D at VMware. Jack manages the VMware virtual machine group, which is responsible for the virtual hardware platform across VMware's products. Prior to joining VMware, Jack was at Transmeta Corporation for 5 years, where he held several engineering management positions, the most recent being Director of Software Engineering. Jack received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1998, and B.S./M.S. degrees in computer science from Stanford University.

OpenSolaris, which was launched on June 15, 2005, is Sun Microsystems's flagship Unix operating system for its entire product line from small systems to large clusters, and is fully under a genuine open source license, CDDL, a variant of the Mozilla Public License. In that sense, OpenSolaris serves as the Fedora to Sun's Solaris OS; new Solaris versions will be based directly on it, but it's also fully available for third-party distributions such as Schillix, Belenix, and Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris. Stephen will talk about OpenSolaris's development, status, and prospects for the future.

Stephen Lau is an expatriate Englishman now living in the Bay Area, who, after studying high-performance computing in San Diego, has spent the last few years working for Sun Microsystems as part of the OpenSolaris kernel development team, and occasionally getting away to enjoy the outdoors or watch football (the real, World Cup variety), in which category he's a Manchester United fan, and hopes to build an HDTV MythTV box for home, this summer. He's also been working to convert Sun from its proprietary Teamware source-control management tool to Matt Mackall's phenomenally successful open source SCM, Mercurial.

Free software is so important to the EU that it funds many anthropological studies of the free software community. Val Henson will present the results of the latest study, this one focused on discovering why women make up about 30% of commercial software developers but less than 2% of free software developers in the EU. The study reveals some aspects of the free software culture that not only drive off potential contributors, both men and women, but also reduce the quality of the resulting software. As a bonus feature, Valerie will also present a brief guide to selecting and tuning Linux file systems.

Val Henson gets paid to hack the Linux kernel by Intel. She works in many areas of operating systems, including memory management, networking, and file systems and was one of the key architects of ZFS, the new Solaris file system. She has published several papers and helps organize conferences such Ottawa Linux Symposium, FREENIX, and USENIX General Technical conference. She has been a leading member of LinuxChix since 2001 and is actively involved in encouraging women in computer science. In her spare time, she hikes and travels extensively.

SageTV LLC offers an innovative "SageTV Media Center" PVR/media center solution on both PCs and TVs, and supporting multiple tuners, networking, intelligent recording, rich interactivity, and high-quality display on even low-cost systems. The PC version was released first on MS-Windows and now on Linux, where it benefits from Linux's superior "always-on" operating characteristics and ground-up focus on network support. (Also, unlike many competitors including TiVo, SageTV's products so far store their data in accessible, freedom-friendly, non-DRM-obscured MPEG-2 format — though the firm is obviously caught in the crossfire of commercial interests, and some accomodations to Hollywood seem likely.) CEO Machado will demonstrate Media Center, describe his firm's experience bringing it to Linux, and solicit feedback on how it can be made even better.

Mike Machado is CEO of SageTV, provider of the award winning SageTV Media Center software for Linux and Windows. SageTV is working to bring powerful, affordable, and reliable PVR/Media Center capabilities to the latest consumer electronics and IPTV embedded set-tops and connected devices, as well as Media Center-focused PC hardware.

Previously he was VP Technology at Software.com, provider of scalable and reliable carrier-class e-mail and webmail software to ISPs, Web portals, and mobile telephone messaging providers. Prior to that, Mike was founder / CEO of Mobility.net, likewise providing webmail software to ISPs and Web portals.

Automated software processes are an important part of your software project infrastructure: They are the scripts and programs that perform checkouts, software builds, regression tests, release packaging processes, code branch health checks, and other such automated file manipulations. Although programmers have traditionally created automated processes using manual craft labor, it is now possible to generate and execute such processes using automated smart process generators & scalable execution systems, with essentially no human labor. Because human errors are removed from the system (along with human labor), process error rates drop dramatically; product cycle times speed up accordingly.

E.g., during a five-month period (Nov. 2004 to Mar. 2005), Codefast's developers made 7,688 check-ins to a code base of 1M lines of C, running on 20 platforms, and had zero build failures on Codefast's GNU Linux platform. Zero build failures equates to perfect six-sigma build-process quality. This talk gives highlights of Codefast's story, summarizing Production Automation concepts, goals, solutions, and results; it gives Codefast's conclusions and expectations for the future. Attendees will be able to pick up a free copy of Kevin Jameson's second, easy-to-read book Software Lifecycle Automation, at the presentation.

Software-productivity researcher Kevin Jameson has spent almost 25 years researching and implementing smart, automated software systems to improve software-development team productivity. Kevin was the original founder of Codefast in Canada, before the company was re-formed as a Silicon Valley VC-backed company; he's currently responsible for the technology vision of modern Codefast products. Kevin has authored two books in the field: Multiplatform Code Management (O'Reilly, 1994) and Software Lifecycle Automation (2004). He's written numerous technical articles and papers, spoken at various international software conferences, and authored more than 25 USA and Canadian patents and patents-pending in the field of software lifecycle automation. Kevin has a bachelor's degree in general science, and a master's degree in software engineering from the University of Calgary.

AMANDA is a popular open-source backup and archiving package. AMANDA uses native tools, and can back up a large number of machines running various versions of the Linux, Unix, or Microsoft Windows operating systems. This talk will discuss the state of AMANDA, and also new project developments. For more information, please see http://wiki.zmanda.com/.

Paddy Sreenivasan is a core AMANDA developer, working at Zmanda, Inc.

This presentation introduces XML11, an abstract windowing protocol inspired by the X11-protocol develop by MIT. XML11 is an XML-based protocol that allows asynchronous UI updates of widgets to an end-device. To overcome high-latency connections, XML11 allows migration of application logic to the end-device. The prototype implementation of XML11 runs in any standard Web browser without Java capabilities on the client-side, and replaces AWT/Swing on the server-side. This also allows us to expose legacy AWT/Swing applications as Web applications.

Ultimately, XML11 can be used for writing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications without requiring any JavaScript knowledge. The prototype implementation of XML11 is released under the GPL and available at www.xml11.org.

Arno Puder received his masters and Ph.D. in computer science, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University. He is one of the founders of the MICO CORBA implementation. His special interests include distributed systems, middleware architectures, and ubiquitous computing environments.

JXTA technology is a set of open protocols allowing any connected device on a network, ranging from cell phones and wireless PDAs to PCs and servers, to communicate and collaborate in a P2P manner. JXTA peers create a virtual network where any peer can interact with other peers and resources directly, even when some of the peers and resources are behind firewalls and NATs, or are on different network transports.

Henry Jen is a Sun Microsystems engineer working on the JXTA project.

This month, we'll have multiple short presentations by SVLUG members about projects they use or are involved in.

• Micah Dowty will be presenting "CIA: A real-time window into the open source world".
• Bill Kendrick will be presenting the "State of Tuxpaint".
• Andrew Chant will be presenting "SSH/SSL/GPG/DES/RSA/AES/WTF? Demystifying commonly used security protocols and encryption", and hold a PGP/gnupg key signing at the end. (Important: Participants should read keysigning procedures in advance.)

The Sync4j Project is an open source initiative to deliver a complete mobile application platform implementing the SyncML protocol. SyncML defines a standard way to synchronize data and remotely manage devices. Sync4j has more then 10,000 downloads per month (as of March 2005).

Fabrizio Capobianco is CEO of Funambol, the company behind Sync4j. Prior to getting involved in open source, he founded two startups (the first Web company in Italy, back in 1995). At the end of 1999, Fabrizio moved to Silicon Valley, where he started working for Tibco Finance, as Director of Brokerage Systems. Since 2000, Fabrizio has had a monthly column in the magazine Wireless. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Splunk, based in San Francisco, makes a Web-based AJAX-enhanced search engine that allows system administrators and programmers to search all their incoming log files in real time (any type of log files: Sendmail, Cisco, MySQL, syslog, etc.) with a Google-like interface. It's a powerful tool to allow people to 'see' inside their systems as they are running.

Prior to joining Splunk, Patrick McGovern managed SourceForge.net for five years for VA Software / OSTG.

Kyle Rankin of NBLUG is author of Knoppix Hacks for O'Reilly and Associates. As such, he's eminently qualified to give a technical talk for SVLUG about this wildly popular live CD distribution, and its use to troubleshoot, repair, upgrade, disinfect, and generally be productive without relying on the installed system or overwriting that system with Linux itself.

Galago is a desktop presence framework, designed to transmit presence information between programs. To put it in simpler terms, it takes information on who is online and their away/idle states from an instant messenger (such as gaim) or other similar programs and lets other programs (such as Ximian's Evolution) to make use of it.

The advantage of such a framework is that it brings your programs closer together. When you receive an e-mail from a friend who is in your buddy list, you'll be able to immediately tell their online status, for example.

Galago is desktop-neutral, and will in time provide easy to use widgets for Gtk+ and Qt applications. Currently, Gtk+ widgets are available in our Subversion repository under the module name libgalago-gtk. Qt widgets will be available in time.

Federated Identity Management allows individuals to use the same identification to sign on to the networks of more than one enterprise, in order to conduct transactions.

Partners in such a system depend on each other to authenticate and vouch for their users, without needing to adopt the same tools for directory services, security, and authentication.

The Liberty Alliance Project (http://www.projectliberty.org/ ) is the only open body working to address the technical, business, and policy challenges surrounding identity and Web services. The Alliance is made up of over 150 members representing a variety of industries from around the world, maintains an open membership policy, and collaborates with other standards bodies.

LAP's specifications for FIM and Web services are built on open protcols, and are device and platform agnostic.

Atul Tulshibagwale is co-founder and CEO of Trustgenix, Inc., a leading provider of standards-based Federated Identity Management software. Mr. Tulshibagwale is a recognized industry expert on secure Web payment, authentication, and privacy technologies for wired and wireless networks. Prior to founding Trustgenix, Mr. Tulshibagwale was a technology leader for five years at VeriSign, where he developed several digital identity and payment products, including Qualcomm BREW "3G Code Signing" Services, GoSecure! for Microsoft Exchange; the Personal Trust Agent; and Personal Trust Service. Previously, Mr. Tulshibagwale was co-founder of Entevo, an Internet security software firm that was acquired by BindView Corporation. He was also a supercomputing expert at the Indian Center for the Development of Advanced Computing. He holds an M.Tech in Computer Science from University of Pune, India.

Mr. Weinberg provided an introduction to the Open Source Development Lab, its initiatives (Carrier Grade Linux, Data Center Linux, and Desktop Linux), an update on how Linux is doing in the marketplace, and insight into the Linux kernel development process. He closed with a call to action — how SVLUG can members work with the OSDL and participate in their initiatives and lab activities — and has kindly provided SVLUG with a copy of his lecture slides.

Bill Weinberg brings over 18 years of open systems, embedded, and other IT experience to his role as Open Source Architecture Specialist and Linux Evangelist at the Open Source Development Labs, where he participates in OSDL initiatives for Carrier-Grade, Data Center, and Desktop Linux.

Prior to OSDL, Bill was a founding team-member at MontaVista Software, and helped establish Linux as a favored platform for next-generation intelligent device development. In his extensive and varied career, Bill also worked at Lynx Real-Time Systems, Acer Computer, and Microtec Research.

Today Bill is known for his writing and speaking on topics that include Open Source licensing, international adoption of Linux, embedded/real-time computing, application porting/migration, and Linux-based consumer electronics and handheld applications. He is a regular contributor periodicals such as E.E. Times, Applied Computing, LinuxUser, Elektronik, and Embedded Systems Europe, and has been a featured speaker at Intel Developer Forum, ESC, and LinuxWorld.

OSDL — home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux — is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of IT industry leaders, OSDL is a non-profit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world.

OSDL's founding members are IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC. It's currently made up of 75 members from more than 10 computing industry segments.

The Linux Terminal Server Project is an add-on package for Linux allowing numerous low-powered "thin client" terminals to connect to a Linux server. Applications then run on the server, while accepting input and displaying output on the thin clients. An office or computer lab can be constructed using one powerful server and many inexpensive thin clients — old PCs, for example. Configuration and upgrades are then centralized at the server, rather than distributed to numerous expensive desktops.

K12LTSP, a popular solution for schools with limited budgets, is a distribution of Linux based on Red Hat Fedora and the LTSP packages. Steve Hargadon recently completed an installation of K12LTSP at a charter school in Hawaii, and is currently working with the Canadian government to install thin client labs in 2,000 schools in Kenya, Africa.

Steve Hargadon has recently completed installations of K12LTSP in schools in Hawaii, California, Utah, and Illinois. He is currently working with the Canadian government to install thin client labs in 2,000 schools in Kenya, Africa. His company, Hargadon Computer, Inc.,* also sells K12LTSP pre-installed servers and refurbished (recycled) workstations at www.technologyrescue.com.

Donald Becker, Chief Scientist of Scyld Software and CTO of Penguin Computing, has consistently challenged conventional wisdom — from the early days of his Beowulf Project at NASA through to the creation of Scyld as a commercial entity and the introduction of the Scyld Beowulf distribution. By upsetting expected beliefs, Donald has maintained a continuum of innovation in the Linux arena that continues to address unmet needs today. Ten years ago, it was widely believed that only custom--esigned vector architectures could solve supercomputing problems.... Along came Beowulf, which solved such problems using a connected cluster of commodity systems, based on Linux — at a time when many who had not explored Linux either ignored it or grouped it with other "toy" systems. In fact, at the first cluster systems conference in 1997, the widely held belief was that Microsoft held the future of all software in its hands. Fast forward to 2000, when Scyld introduced a prototype of a Unified Cluster System, which completely changed the approach to building clusters by using a full installation only on a master node, with compute nodes running only applications. Donald's talk will look back on this history of challenging conventional wisdom, and how it has contributed to the startling growth in Linux clustering; and he'll also offer a glimpse of a future where, he believes, clustering will be the natural evolution of the computing ecosystem.

Donald is an internationally recognized operating system developer, and the original inventor of Beowulf. In 1999, he founded Scyld Computing and led the development of the next-generation Beowulf cluster operating system, which is the cornerstone for commodity-based high-performance cluster computing. Prior to founding Scyld, Don started the Beowulf Parallel Workstation project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Don's work in parallel and distributed computing began in 1983 at MIT's Real Time Systems group. He is known throughout the international community of operating system developers for his contributions to networking software, and as the driving force behind beowulf.org. He is the co-author of How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters. With colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 1997 Gordon Bell Prize for Price/Performance. Don holds a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scalix produces a Linux e-mail server that supports shared scheduling and advanced e-mail features, delivering desktop-grade productivity to users running Outlook and/or popular browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Scalix's messaging server can run side by side with both mainstream proprietary systems, such as Microsoft Exchange, and open source applications, bridging the two worlds and integrating with a company's existing IT infrastructure.

Steve Martensen is Senior Messaging Specialist at Scalix. He has been in the messaging industry since 1991, first working for Lotus Development on cc:Mail, then on to Lotus Notes, then focusing for several years on messaging migration, and now at Scalix for the past two years. He wrote and developed the Exchange to Scalix migration process.

GOSSiP (Gossip Optimization for Selective Spam Prevention) is a distributed, peer-to-peer reputation management system. It tracks the behavior of e-mail senders, and shares senders' reputations among participating mail servers. These reputations may then be used by mail servers as part of a comprehensive program to combat unwanted e-mail.

Mark C. Langston has been doing systems administration for more than 10 years. In that time, he has worked for small groups and huge companies. He has worked in academia and industry, for startups and long-established companies, and for salaries ranging from below-subsistence to obscene in size. He's worked his way from the most junior of technical employees to Chief Technical Officer and corporate board member. He is on the advisory committee for the Linux Professional Institute certification, and is an active member of SAGE and USENIX.

Dror Harel came to Qlusters with over 14 years of experience in managing the development of innovative software products. Before joining Qlusters, Dror held a senior product management position at Sanctum, Inc., where he drove development of the company's security software products. Previously, Dror had been Vice-President of Quality and Product Integration, and Vice-President of Product Management at Veon, where he oversaw the development of Web authoring and interactive multimedia products. When Veon was purchased by Philips (Royal Philips Electronics) in 2001, Dror assumed a senior position on their audio/video streaming product management team.

Prior to his civilian experience, Dror served eleven years in the Israeli defense force, eight of them as Commander of an elite R&D unit.

Harel holds a Computer Science and Economics degree from Tel Aviv University.

Valerie will give a review of UNIX file systems, focussing on Linux file systems, the evolution of file system design, and various approaches to solving the problems of performance, consistency, and recovery.

Valerie will also briefly discuss LinuxChix, a community for women in Linux. The membership ranges from novices to experienced users, and includes programmers, system administrators, technical writers and people who just like Linux.

Valerie Henson works at IBM as a Linux kernel developer, and has served on program committees for FREENIX, the USENIX Technical Conference and Ottawa Linux Symposium. Most recently she worked on ZFS, a new file system for Solaris. Valerie became interested in women in computing after wondering where all the other female Linux kernel developers were.

John Ousterhout is Founder and CEO of Electric Cloud. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language, and is also well known for his work in distributed operating systems, high-performance file systems, and user interfaces. Ousterhout's prior positions include Founder and CEO of Scriptics Corporation (acquired by Interwoven), Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley. He received a BS degree in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Ousterhout is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has received numerous awards, including the ACM Software System Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.

Golden is a frequent speaker and writer on Information Technology topics, and has contributed to or been featured in major industry publications such as InfoWorld, eWeek, LinuxWorld, SDTimes, Computerworld, O'Reilly LAMP, Open Enterprise Trends, Enterprise Architect, and IEEE Software. He is the author of Succeeding with Open Source (Addison-Wesley, August 2004), which has been has been described as presenting "some of the most valuable, practical advice I have seen on how to transform use of open source software from an accidental process into a powerful strategy for gaining an edge on the competition" (Terry Bollinger, author of the MITRE Corporation study "Use of Free and Open Source Software in the U.S. Department of Defense"), and a book that "walks you through every step of the evaluation process, and provides vital insights into the risks and benefits of making the open-source decision" (Kevin Bedell, Editor-in-Chief, LinuxWorld magazine).

John H Terpstra is CTO/President with PrimaStasys, Inc. He works with businesses to realign information technology practices with business goals. He is a member of the formation committee of the Desktop Linux Consortium, a long term member of the Samba Team (a major Open Source project), and a well known contributor and visionary in the open source community with a very active commercial focus. He is a member of the Open Source Software Institute Advisory Board. He has worked with the LSB, Li18nux (now OpenI18N.Org), and the LPI — and is a best selling author of :

• The Official Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide, ISBN: 0131453556
• Samba-3 by Example, ISBN: 0131472216
• Hardening Linux, ISBN: 0072254971
• OpenLDAP by Example, ISBN: 0131488732

John has worked with The SCO Group (previously Caldera Inc.) and TurboLinux Inc., in VP-level positions. Prior to moving to the USA in 1999, John founded and managed Aquasoft Pty Ltd (Aust.) for 10 years. He has a Graduate Diploma in Marketing (with Credit), UTS Aust. and an Applied Science Certificate in Chemistry, QUT (Aust.).

(from his bio at mvista.com) James Ready, with over 25 years of technical and entrepreneurial experience, is a recognized authority in the embedded systems and real-time software industry. Co-founder of Ready Systems, he pioneered the development of the first commercially viable, real-time operating system (RTOS) product - the VRTX real-time kernel. Ready Systems, founded in 1980, merged with Microtec Research in 1993, went public in 1994, and was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1995. During this period, James served as Ready Systems' President, and as chief technical officer (CTO) at Microtec/Mentor. James founded MontaVista in 1999 to provide the Linux operating system to the embedded systems market, and to offer embedded-system expertise to the open source Linux community. Jim got his BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and his MA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976.

Tom Fulton is a Senior Systems Engineer for Novell/SUSE Linux in San Jose. Tom is also an SVLUG member, and joined the SBAY Speakers Bureau, which schedules speakers for SVLUG, BAFUG, PenLUG, and LUGoD, at the time he signed up to speak. He originally made this Introduction to Snort IDS presentation at Novell's Brainshare conference, and has been presenting the topic to several user groups. He will also talk about Snort IDS at the High Technology Crime Investigation Association in Washington DC, in September.

Chander Kant is founder and president of LinuxCertified, Inc, a leading provider of Linux laptops, training, and services. Chander has been involved with the technology and business sides of Linux in many different projects. As a key member of the open-source community, he is very enthusiastic about enabling Linux as a mainstream operating system. Prior to founding LinuxCertified, Chander was Director of Business Development at VERITAS software, where he was responsible for high-availability clustering products. Chander was also involved in architecting high-performance Linux compute servers at SGI. Chander is a co-author of "Linux Compute Clusters", an on-going open-license book.

(excerpt from his bio at rosenlaw.com) Lawrence E. (Larry) Rosen is both an attorney and a computer specialist. As an attorney, Larry's specialty is technology, but he is also a skilled litigator and negotiator, and is a legal advisor to individuals and companies throughout the world. He also has extensive experience teaching computer programming, and has been a department and product manager in the computer and communications industries.

Larry is very involved in the open source community. He is the general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and served as its executive director. OSI reviews and approves major open source licenses, several of which were written by Larry. OSI manages and promotes the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified open source software certification mark and program. Larry often publishes and speaks around the world on open source licensing and patent issues.

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages. He created Python in the early 1990s at CWI in Amsterdam, and is still actively involved in the development of the language.

In 1995, he moved to the US; first to work for CNRI in Reston, VA as a researcher, then for Zope Corporation as Director of PythonLabs, and, since 2003, after a move to the SF Bay Area, for Elemental Security.

His home on the Web is http://www.python.org/~guido/.

As Linux cluster computing continues its high rate of adoption, more and more organizations are faced with data management challenges posed by emerging distributed computing approaches. Large-scale cluster and grid computing approaches are based on the ability to decompose a compute workload into thousands or millions of tasks, each of which is executed independently (or almost independently). This strategy requires the creation and management of data partitions and replicas that are used by the compute nodes. Management of these partitions and replicas poses a number of operational challenges, especially in large cluster and grid computing environments, and in environments where core datasets change regularly.

This presentation will identify and explore these challenges, and will present solutions drawing on common approaches used in implementing "high throughput" applications. Examples will draw from multiple disciplines, including life sciences, earth sciences, and government and commercial applications.

Bruce Moxon is the Vertical Marketing Manager at Panasas, a high performance, next-generation storage networking company, where he works with customers, industry experts, and hardware and software partners to help Panasas deliver on the promise of shared storage cluster computing solutions for high throughput applications. Mr. Moxon's experience in high performance computing and very large database (VLDB) systems affords him a unique perspective critical to the success of these data-intensive solutions. He recently architected, designed, and implemented a high throughput computational pipeline and analytical data warehouse for Perlegen Sciences' 100+ TB human genome variation (SNP) repository. Mr. Moxon also teaches Bioinformatics and Computer Science courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension program.

Peter Thoeny - Peter@ThoenySTOPSPAM.com, software developer with over 15 years experience, with interests in corporate collaboration, Web technology and UI design. Peter is the author of the open source collaboration software TWiki, managed the project over the last four years. Peter was graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He lived in Japan for 8 years working as an engineering manager for Denso, the largest auto electric parts supplier in Japan. Now Peter is in the Silicon Valley for 5 years, managing the Engineering Operations group at Wind River.

On 12 December 1991, Paul Kunz installed the first Web server outside of European SLAC.  Today, if you do not have access to the Web, you are considered disadvantaged.

Before it made sense for Tim Berners-Lee to invent the Web at CERN, there had to a number of ingredients in place. Paul will present a history of how these ingredients were developed, and the role the academic research community had in producing them. In particular, he will address the roles played by big science, including high energy physics, in giving us the World Wide Web and the Internet as we know them today.

Paul Kunz received his Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1968, and first went to CERN that year to do an experiment as a member of the Saclay group.  In 1971, he went on to Michigan State and worked on one of the first experiments at Fermilab.  He joined SLAC in 1974 where he has been ever since.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Kunz invented the 168/E emulators and the concept of event processing via parallel processor farms.  Dr. Kunz has been a pioneer amongst physics colleagues in adopting new computer technologies.  Examples include his move to UNIX and object-oriented programming over ten years ago.  Lately, he has been giving a course, "C++ for Particle Physicists," a course that has now been held fifty-one times all over the world for more than 1700 students.

An in-depth look at a cluster filesystem for Linux designed for database operations and the future direction of the project to move towards designing a general-purpose cluster filesystem. Including a demo and a description on how to set up a homebrew cluster for real cheap using Firewire storage.

Wim Coekaerts is Director of Linux Engineering Corporate Architecture for Oracle Corporation. His group looks at how Linux needs to evolve and how Oracle can contribute to ensuring large enterprise companies can adopt it quickly. Within Oracle's "Linux kernel group," Mr. Coekaerts is involved in prototyping and doing research in clustering technologies in Linux as well as single node features.

Guy Sotomayor, Platform Software Architect at Digeo, will demonstrate Digeo's Moxi Media Center. Moxi is a Linux-based super set-top box that incorporates a wide range of capabilities such as DVR (Digital Video Recorder), HDTV, Internet/router/firewall/gateway capabilities, DVD playback, the management of music playlists from your CDs and computer, and digital photo viewing. Also, through one simple menu, the consumer can access all this entertainment throughout the home.

Guy Sotomayor is a platform architect at Digeo, Inc. Guy manages the system software and build teams, and is chiefly responsible for the development of Linux OS for an embedded platform and the tools to support it.

Most human-computer interaction work has focused on end users of computing systems. Another important class of computer users, however, is the cohort of administrators who design, build, maintain, and troubleshoot computer systems. These highly-expert users are vital for the operation of our "e-everything" world, yet little effort has gone into studying their work and developing tools that help them be effective. This is especially important because the labor associated with operating large computational systems is increasingly outstripping the cost of the technology itself.

Our research group is performing a series of ethnographic studies of system administrators in their work environments. This presentation will include results from these studies, as well as information developed at a CHI2003 workshop on system administration as users; this workshop brought together researchers, developers, and practitioners from industry and academia.

From this group and from our own work, a consistent set of paradoxes is beginning to emerge. First, tremendous effort has gone into the design of powerful GUI tools for system administration. Many tools have been developed and validated with established user-centered design methodologies. Yet field studies repeatedly find system administrators ignoring these tools and falling back on the standard command shell and least-common denominator tools such as 'grep' and 'vi'. Second, system administration is a highly collaborative activity, with a heavy dependence on instant messaging, email, telephone, and face-to-face interaction. Yet system administration tools rarely include collaboration aids, instead seemingly assuming that these workers toil away silently and alone. Third, effective operation and problem resolution requires an accurate mental model of how the system functions. "Situation awareness" theory dictates that a model starts with sensory input, develops with mental comprehension, and results in predictions of system behavior. Yet, large-scale systems have few and un-integrated sensing mechanisms, and are too complex for any single person to comprehend, resulting in unpredictable behavior.

This presentation will illustrate each of the three paradoxes with examples from field experience, and offer suggestions for how the HCI community can move forward to resolve them.

Rob Barrett is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California, where he works in the Services Research group that aims to bring value from human-computer interaction research to the IBM Global Services organization. His current work focuses on the user experience of system administration and human aspects of autonomic computing. Previous work includes an intermediary approach to designing Web applications, optimization of pointing devices, track-following servo systems for tape data storage, and atomic-scale imaging. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University and has earned masters and bachelors degrees in physics, electrical engineering and theology. He has over 40 refereed publications and 16 patents in fields ranging from applied math to physics and computer science.

Bastille Linux hardens an operating system by deactivating unused programs or functionality, tweaking security-related settings, and employing other standard "tricks" like chroot prisons to block or contain attacks. Bastille currently locks down five Linux distributions, HP-UX and Mac OS X. This talk will introduce Bastille and explore how it can be easily extended to include new functionality, requiring only minimal knowledge of Perl. In the process of understanding how Bastille works, we'll discuss and demonstrate what actions Bastille takes on a sample system. This talk should prove useful to non-programmers who want to understand how to harden an operating system by hand or with automated tools. It will definitely be useful to Perl programmers who wish to extend Bastille.

Jay Beale is a security specialist focused on host lockdown and security audits. He is the Lead Developer of the Bastille project, which creates a hardening script for Linux, HP-UX, and Mac OS X, a member of the Honeynet Project, and a core participant in the Center for Internet Security. A frequent conference speaker and trainer, Jay speaks and trains at the Black Hat and LinuxWorld conferences, among others. A senior research scientist with the George Washington University Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, Jay makes his living as a security consultant through Baltimore-based JJBSec, LLC, reachable via www.jjbsec.com.

Jay writes the Center for Internet Security's Unix host security tool, currently in use worldwide by organizations from the Fortune 500 to the Department of Defense. He maintains the Center's Linux Security benchmark document, and, as a core participant in the non-profit Center's Unix team, is working with private enterprises and US agencies to develop Unix security standards for industry and government.

Aside from his CIS work, Jay has written a number of articles and book chapters on operating system security. He is a columnist for Information Security Magazine and previously wrote a number of articles for SecurityPortal.com and SecurityFocus.com. He authored the Host Lockdown chapter in 'Unix Unleashed,' served as the security author for 'Red Hat Internet Server' and co-authored 'Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection.' Jay's currently finishing the Addison Wesley book, 'Locking Down Linux.'

Formerly, he served as the Security Team Director for MandrakeSoft, helping set company strategy, design security products, and pushing security into the third largest retail Linux distribution. He now works to further the goal of improving operating system security. To read Jay's past articles and learn about his past and future conference talks, take a look at his site at www.bastille-linux.org/jay.

The Zaurus line of PDAs from Sharp Electronics are powerful Linux-based handheld computers. Sporting fast CPUs and lots of RAM, dual expansion slots, built-in keyboard, and Java runtime environment, they are capable of handling a wide range of tasks: Addressbook and calendar; Web browsing; 3D video games with stereo sound; MP3 and video playback; voice recorder; Apache Web server with MySQL database; remote desktop control with VNC.

Bill Kendrick has ported a number of games to the Zaurus, and created the Unofficial Zaurus FAQ. He's currently president of the growing Linux Users' Group of Davis, near Sacramento.

Bill Kendrick is an open source software developer living in Davis, California, where he's the president, public relations officer, and webmaster of the local 350-member Linux Users Group.

He has written about 20 games for Linux and other platforms — his most recent being 'Tux Paint', a drawing program geared towards young children. Bill created, but hasn't had the time recently to maintain, the "Unofficial Zaurus FAQ." He is active in numerous online communities.

Adam Bertsch is a Sr. Systems Administrator at Sony Computer Entertainment, America. Adam is responsible for the Linux kit Web site in the United States and Canada, as well as evangelism for the Linux kit. Adam also pushes Linux within the corporate culture at SCEA, and works with the Research and Development group in a more traditional sysadmin capacity. Adam came to SCEA from VA Linux Systems in 2001, where he was a member of the Professional Services team working with security, high capacity/availability servers, and SourceForge(tm).

Jim Reese joined Google in 1999 as employee No. 18. Since that time, Jim has played a key role in managing the hardware and network infrastructure development to support Google's growth. Specifically, Jim directed the expansion of Google's server farm and network from 300 machines to the current number of more than 10,000. To manage all of these machines, Jim implemented a highly automated system for remotely administering and monitoring the entire cluster. Jim also contributed to optimizing Google's network to transfer the terabytes of data involved in the search engine index. Prior to joining Google, Jim worked as a neurologic and computer consultant for SRI International. At SRI, he helped to develop software for qualitative analysis of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the human brain.

Jim received a BA in biology from Harvard and an MD from Yale medical school. In addition to having been a singer and guitarist in a number of bands that have released several CDs, Jim is a trained neurosurgeon.

The astonishing success of free software systems in changing the face of the computer world — in under twenty years — has led many free and open source software advocates to see our movement as an unstoppable force. Created around the same time as the Macintosh, the GNU system has been said to have a comparable market share, even though it was largely created by volunteers. Apache has not just a plurality but even a majority of the Web server market, and Linux adoption continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

These successes in market share, corresponding successes in mind share, and a robust, growing, and increasingly sophisticated developer community can make the free software world look like a force of nature. Some unwary advocates now see the triumph of free software as a foregone conclusion, or an inevitability.

"Historical inevitability" is no more reasonable in engineering than it has been in other contexts. Free software has been viewed from the outside as an anomaly (or, sometimes, as a threat). It is increasingly the focal point of political struggles, and it is too early to say what the outcome of those struggles will be. I will review the story of the DVD Wars, the broader debates over copyright policy, current regulatory initiatives. I will also discuss new technologies such as software-defined radio and trusted computing, and emphasize that free software's future is far from assured.

Seth Schoen is one of the lead developers of the LNX-BBC rescue system (formerly the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card). He worked as a Senior Linux Consultant at Linuxcare for two years; he has also been an intern at Toronto Dominion Bank and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His long-time interest in civil liberties led him to his current position as Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. He has been active in the Bay Area free software community since he moved to the Bay Area in 1997 from Massachusetts.

Moshe Bar is the former co-project manager of MOSIX and the current project manager of openMosix. He has authored several books on the Linux kernel and clustering, and is co-author with Karl Fogel of the classic CVS book "OpenSource Development with CVS". Moshe has been a senior monthly columnist at Byte for the last four years, and wrote regular kernel columns in the past for Linux Journal and other publications. In 2001, Moshe Bar became CTO of Linux clustering start-up Qlusters, Inc. Moshe has a M.Sc and Ph.D. in computer science, and teaches advanced operating systems topics at Tel Aviv University and at the United Nations Atomic Agency's research institute ICTP, in Triest, Italy. He is furthermore a permanent researcher at the Italian National Institute of Particle Physics.

In this presentation, we will explore the development infrastructure that the K Desktop Environment (http://www.kde.org/) offers to novice programmers and expert software engineers.

Special emphasis is placed on the use of advanced software management tools, such as the KDevelop IDE.

The use of modern user interface development libraries such as Qt is demonstrated.

The presentation aims to give an overview of the fascinating possibilities the K Desktop Environment provides for programming desktop applications under Unix.

Charles Samuels is a KDE core developer, he is the author and maintainer of the KDE multimedia player Noatun. Charles works as a Software Engineer in Cupertino.

Roland Krause is a KDE power user and has contributed some code to the KDevelop IDE. Roland is a Senior Research Engineer in Los Altos.

Reiser4 is the fastest Linux filesystem (except when it crashes; it is also the newest;-) ), performing 50-100% faster than ReiserFS V3. It performs all filesystem operations as atomic transactions, and creates a foundation for a general-purpose atomic transaction kernel API. It is built on a plug-in-based infrastructure that makes it feasible to implement security attributes as just files with particular file features selected. It is highly scalable, due to the use of per-node locking in its balancing operations. Like version 3, it stores small files space efficiently (packing them using database-like tree algorithms), but its performance is much higher when it does so.

Microsoft is switching its focus from the browser to the filesystem, and is folding database and search engine functionality into the filesystem. Reiser4 is designed to serve as the storage layer in the Linux effort to counter that move, and, well, the performance of that layer is looking pretty good so far compared to NTFS.

Reiser4 employs dancing trees rather than balanced trees, and rejects the BLOB approach, which may make the talk of interest to database specialists.

Architect of Reiser4, ReiserFS.

Loadable modules made Linux configurable at run-time, a few years ago. Now, the hardware and, especially, the on-chip peripherals are following. The Virtex-II Pro FPGAs have up to four IBM 405 processor cores and up to 24 multi-gigabit transceivers integrated within their user-programmable logic fabric. This allows for very high flexibility, for system architects to integrate the on-chip peripherals they need in the most optimal way.

Peter is responsible for the embedded Linux project on the Virtex-II Pro FPGAs. Together with MontaVista, he integrates the device drivers for custom on-chip peripherals into the Linux kernel source tree. The main focus of his work is to bring together the high flexibility of the Linux operating system with the high versatility of the Virtex-II Pro architecture.

As part of his talk, Peter will explain how the hardware inside the FPGA device can be upgraded even after deployment, and how hardware functionality, similar to the Linux kernel modules, can be loaded or replaced at system run-time.

Peter will bring a ML300 Reference Platform running MontaVista Linux natively on the Virtex-II Pro FPGA. All the peripherals like Ethernet, UARTs, PS/2 for mouse and keyboard, TFT display and touchscreen are implemented as soft peripherals within the FPGA. As a fun application, Quake can be played on top of X11. The ML300 board serves both as a reference design and also as a development platform.

After graduating in 1994 from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Peter spent a few years at the Institute of Computer Systems of the same university in researching and prototyping Switcherland, an interconnected computing infrastructure based on switches and serial high-speed links offering scalability, guaranteed bandwidth, and QoS characteristics. After a short intermezzo at Elektrobit AG in Switzerland, he moved to the USA and joined Xilinx in late 2000. He is responsible for embedded software within the Systems Engineering Group, with a focus on embedded Linux and software tools for different platforms.

Peter got into Linux at a time when you needed a large pile of floppy disks to install a distribution, and kernel version numbers started with a zero. Being merely a user and administrator of his own Linux systems, he always liked the idea of having source code available for pure interest, and also as a source for adding additional device drivers to the Oberon operating system.

Aside from work, Peter likes to explore California together with his family. He plans to visit all the US states in the next few years — that means only 44 more to go.

The spec says "flexible, embedded, scales well, reliable, and your budget is whatever you can personally afford". Linux on a x86-based embedded system just happens to fit nicely...

Gizmocopter, a hovering rocket guidance software test platform, was a winner of the first Embedded Linux Journal design contest. http://gizmocopter.org

David Masten will be discussing the design and implementation of this Linux-based semi-autonomous flight control system. Several specific areas will be addressed, including; embedded hardware companies' binary drivers, the decision to go with a general purpose OS, how not to lead a software project, and real-time patches for Linux.

David Masten is a systems and networking administrator by day and a rocket mechanic nights and weekends. He is currently serving as President of the Experimental Rocket Propulsion Society, Inc. a non-profit research and educational group working on inexpensive launch vehicles.

David started playing with computers in 1982 with an Apple II and BASIC, and has since gone through many platforms and is now a happy Linux and BSD user. He has occasional delusions of finishing his Mechanical Engineering degree and getting a P.E. in aerospace engineering.

When he is not in front of a computer or building rockets, David can be found flying airplanes, studying economics and politics, or hiking.

As Linux continues its march into mission-critical use within major corporations, Linux systems administrators are being called upon to provide ever-increasing levels of reliability and uptime. A standalone Linux box already exceeds these metrics compared to most other operating systems. A heterogeneous infrastructure of mixed Linux and UNIX machines provides more challenges, and even Linux needs to be shut down now and then...

Scheduled maintenance windows are needed for certain disruptive tasks, such as redesigning your authentication architecture or moving your data center. This talk looks at how to prepare for and execute such scheduled maintenance windows. It covers why maintenance windows are useful, and what impact they have on running a site. It gives examples of maintenance windows at small and large sites. How to perform scheduled maintenance at high-availability sites is also covered.

Christine Hogan has worked in system administration for more than 11 years. Her experience includes academic institutions, Silicon Valley start-ups and large companies. She specializes in security, networking and project management. She co-authored the book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" and runs her own consulting company. She currently lives in London, UK.

John Thomas is a product manager, rapid application development solutions, for Borland Software Corporation. After several years in developer support for Borland C++ products, Thomas was named product manager in January 2001 for rapid application development solutions. He is primarily responsible for defining Borland's next generation Linux products.

Thomas is a dedicated C++ programmer and has developed a wide range of applications for several operating systems. He particularly enjoys 3d graphics, games programming, and writing business applications.

Sam is a researcher in Computational Sciences / Atmospheric Sciences at NASA Ames, where he is involved in a number of Linux-based projects. His current work is mainly in EEG pattern recognition and real-time data processing for brain-computer interface projects taking place at the NASA Ames Neuroengineering lab.

Sam will talk about the use of Linux as a part of the research projects that he has been a part of at NASA, what he is up to inside and outside of the space agency, and where a relative newcomer/outsider to the Linux community thinks this Linux thing is going.

Sam is a recent graduate from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science. He is currently serving a year-long stint at NASA Ames, before he begins work on an as-yet-unnamed technological development nonprofit he is co-founding in South America. In the future, he is most probably going to go to medical school.

Sam got into Linux in college as a result of dissatisfaction in not being able to really control his own computer, or understand what it was actually up to, with closed-source systems. He views Linux as the natural choice for research, and he believes that if more scientists were to view a computer as a highly developed and tunable rack of custom data acquisition and processing equipment, a lot of new imaginative and effective research could be done.

Aside from work, Sam has been an avid rugby player for most of his adult life. He also enjoys mountain biking and hanging out in really nasty bars. At one time in his life, he was fluent in Japanese and had plastic pants.

By using ATA drives in place of SCSI drives, storage costs are significantly reduced while 3ware's StorSwitch architecture increases the performance beyond that of the Ultra SCSI 160. Recently, with the introduction of 160GB drives from Maxtor, 3ware has broken the terabyte limit on a single 64 bit PCI card. This, coupled with 3ware's open source Linux driver, allows Linux system builders to create multi-terabyte systems for under a penny per MB, while getting the performance and features (such as hot swap and hot spare) users have come to expect in more expensive SCSI and Fibre Channel solutions.

Pete Kisich has over 10 years experience in system engineering and storage architecture. Previous to 3ware, he was Manager of the Platform Engineering group at Wells Fargo Bank. As a Sr. Storage Architect at StorageNetworks, Pete was part of the team which built the largest Global Storage Infrastructure in the world. He has worked extensively in SAN, NAS, and iSCSI storage networks in enterprise environments.

Pat Pejack, Sr. Applications Engineer

Pat has over 12 years experience in RAID and I/O Storage applications and technology. Previous to 3ware, Pat was a Sr. Field applications engineer at Adaptec where he gained over 10 years experience in RAID, SCSI, Fibre Channel, ATA, and Firewire storage applications.

For the past two years dLoo has been developing a new way of creating and sharing open source software. The result is a project called SpringBox.

Before the Web, information was trapped in proprietary databases and couldn't be linked together. The Web overthrew that model, and replaced it with a model in which information was public and linkable. These two traits made the value of the information available online grow exponentially.

Today, open source software is trapped on individual computers and can't be linked together. SpringBox makes it possible to build networks of software out of distributed units of code that live on the Internet. With SpringBox, open source developers can post code publicly in discrete units, like web pages, and other developers can create new discrete units of code that link to those units. In this way, SpringBox enables a Web of Software.

We believe SpringBox has the potential to do for open source software what the Web did for online information. Our presentation will discuss SpringBox, this new unit of code (the Symbol) and the way that Symbols can be used to construct an extensible Linux software environment.

Nile Geisinger is CTO of dLoo and the creator of SpringBox. Before working at dLoo, Geisinger worked at TimeDance and the Advanced Development Center at Ricoh. Geisinger is also a graduate of UC Davis with majors in Computer Science and Philosophy. In his spare time, Geisinger writes statements about what he does in his spare time. He doesn't expect to finish.

The objective of MPEG4IP is to remove barriers to streaming that exist because of companies who "embrace and extend" common standards -- and in doing so, break them. By comparison, MPEG4IP is being developed in consideration of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance specification for inter-operable streaming technologies.

MPEG4IP is an SDK available on SourceForge that includes an MPEG4-based encoder, decoder and server from which developers can create their own streaming solutions. Originally developed for Linux, MPEG4IP has been ported to FreeBSD, BSD/OS and Mac OS X by supporters.

MPEG4IP is not a Cisco product; However, Cisco developers started the project over a year ago by aggregating and enhancing existing open-source code, and creating new libraries.

Both speakers are Technical Leaders at Cisco Systems' Technology Center. The Technology Center focuses on development of new technologies and markets. Both have the MPEG4IP project as their primary job focus.

Bill May has over 15 years of industry experience and has held several positions during his eight years at Cisco. He has been involved in IOS as a developer in WAN and Infrastructure, was a Manager, and has worked on the IP/TV product. Prior to that he was in the telecommunications industry at companies such as T-Com, Cohesive Networks and Timeplex.

David Mackie has been working on standards-based streaming media for the past five years, and has 15 years industry experience. He has lead a variety of R&D projects centered around Internet technologies at such companies as The Wollongong Group, Bridge Communications, Network Computing Devices, FTP Software, Open Market, Books That Work, Precept Software, and now Cisco Systems.

• The original "Bootstrapping" paper and related works
• Description of the LISA talk
• Steve's personal page

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Steve Traugott helped launch the term "Infrastructure Architecture" in the systems administration community, and has campaigned for industry acceptance of this "SysAdmin++" career track for the last several years. He is a consulting Infrastructure Architect, and publishes tools and techniques for automated systems administration. His deployments have ranged from New York trading floors, IBM mainframe UNIX labs, and NASA supercomputers to web farms and growing startups.

Steve is also an active developer on CPAN, and is author of the IPC::Session, Mail::TieFolder, and IS::Init modules. He has long held a deep interest in improving organizations and human relations through the use of current communications technologies. He and his wife Joyce have recently founded TerraLuna.Org, a small volunteer group working to develop a trust model and codebase for non-hierarchical organizations.

• Infrastructure requirements and current implementation (Collab.net, Akamai, mailing list, projects, Issuezilla)
• OpenOffice.org and StarOffice: two different approaches to an individual productivity suite for Linux
• OpenOffice.org: a technical pitch (Rationale, History, data, architecture, tools needed and so forth)

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Max Lanfranconi is Senior Product Manager for Openoffice.org at Sun Microsystems, responsible for providing technical expertise to the Sun and CollabNet teams as well as the OpenOffice.org community in building the Open Source office suite.

Lanfranconi has held several positions at Sun since joining in 1998, including Senior Systems Engineer and Software Product Marketing Manager in Italy. Before joining Sun, Lanfranconi has been for 10 years with Banca Popolare di Bergamo, where he was involved in several R&D projects inside the IT department of the bank.

Simon Horman is a developer at VA Linux Systems, working on load balancing and high availability projects. Prior to this he was the senior technician at Zip World, an ISP in Sydney, Australia. He moved to Zip World after a stint at Open Systems Integrators where he implemented the network management system for the Optus cable TV network. For his honours thesis in computer science at the University of New South Wales he worked on using genetic algorithms to schedule the university examinations timetable. His main interest are computer networks and in particular how this makes information accessible to people.

We are leading a revolution in enterprise management! No more...

• closed, proprietary architectures
• two-year waits for the next release
• exorbitant pricing and expensive consultants

Steve is Chief Technologist at OpenNMS.org, is a certified OpenView and IT/O consultant and has taught OpenView Basics and Advanced OpenView to over 2000 students. Steve resigned his post at HP in 1992 (after 10 years) to pursue independent consulting and co-formed Onion Peel Software in 1994.

Greg Herlein, Project Director for Internet Telephony at Quicknet Technologies, will demonstrate a Linux-based Internet telephone call, and discuss the technologies involved. His talk will include an overview of the voice compression codecs and how they apply in Open Source projects, and go into detail about the most common signalling and audio protocols used today. Finally, he'll describe the goals and status of the OpenPhone Project and how other interested developers and users can contribute.

Greg Herlein has used Linux since 1994 to build out networks for business, data acquisition, scientific exploration, and fun. He's put Linux systems on remote mountain tops, on research ships at sea, and in more boring corporate settings. Greg was a key player in the process of Quicknet open sourcing their Linux drivers.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Unix passwords:

• how they're crypted
• how they're cracked
• how to choose virtually uncrackable passwords
• what the alternatives are

Schooled in Paris and bearing years of sysadmin experience, Marc Merlin works at VA Linux Systems, happily under the auspices of Taos Mountain.

The slides of the talk can be found here

Donnie spoke about how things are going with Red Hat, what they're focusing on improving, and so on. Your Web Content Coordinator arrived late to this meeting; if anyone has a better review paragraph, please send it to the web staff using the footer link.

Peter discussed Genesis, a work in progress that will analyze your hardware and create an optimized kernel on the fly. (Loaders means things like lilo, milo, syslinux, loadlin, etc., not installers like Red Hat)

He works in covert operations at Transmeta, and is the author of syslinux and auto-fs.

SHORT DESCRIPTION: As Linux gets GUI-er, you might be surprised at how much faster and more powerful the plain old command line (with a "%" or "$" prompt) can be in many cases. When should you type instead of clicking? Jerry will dip into UNIX philosophy and history and also will show lots of examples.

BIO: Jerry Peek is the lead author of "UNIX Power Tools" and other O'Reilly books. He has used UNIX since 1981. He's now an instructor and course developer at Scriptics Corporation. (But he won't say much about Tcl.)

A fundamental shift is occurring in the way applications are developed. Whereas in the past most applications were developed from scratch, in the future most applications will be developed by integrating existing components, devices, applications, and protocols. Scripting languages such as Tcl and Perl are ideally suited to integration applications; as a result they have been rising rapidly in popularity. In this talk I will discuss the integration revolution and explain the technical reasons why scripting languages are better suited to integration applications than system programming languages such as C++ or Java. I'll provide an overview of Tcl, discuss how this all relates to Linux, and argue that Tcl will play a major role in XML and other important future developments.

Download the slides in Applix Graphics or in tar.gz package of HTML formats.

It's the OS we all love to hate, but what is it really like? Is it bad, or just different? In this talk, Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers on Samba, gave a quick tour of some of the features and design of Windows NT that that UNIX users find bizzare or strange, and give a perspective gained in serveral years of porting POSIX programs to NT and also during the course of getting Samba to interoperate with it.

NEW! Download the slides in Applix Graphics or in tar.gz package of HTML formats.

Daryll Strauss
Topic: Linux High-End Video

Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison of Enlightenment discussed the Linux Desktop. This is like saying "Robert Oppenheimer will discuss explosives". Mandrake has been working on a number of interesting technologies, including

• XFree 4.0
• Xinerama - A multi-heading system for X that allows for screen spanning.
• Enlightenment, the one true desktop.

Rob Farber spoke about Scalable Linux Commerce and Content Sites.

The Open Source mindset is critical for developing highly scaleable sites in a legacy free environment. The limitations of trying to drag a legacy system onto the web are greater than just the limitations of the code -- they can hinder new perspectives on content and information management. This is presented in light of experiences launching one of the first Linux powered eCommerce sites in September 1997, as well as more recent sites.

That might sound pretty dry but it wasn't.

Brian Behlendorf, one of the leaders of the Apache group, the world's most popular web-server, discussed design decisions, the module structure, some interesting tricks, and planned improvements to the internals of Apache.

"Running an Effective Linux User Group"

...included people active in setting up LUGs across the country. More people might have attended if posted signs had not been taken down before the meeting began...

Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick described the history of Unix at Berkeley, a significant amount of UNIX^TM System V history, and all about the little devil *BSD fans know as their mascot.

Jim Dennis, the Security Guru, Answer Guy columnist for Linux Gazette, and longtime SVLUG member spoke of "the twelve steps to ensure a secure Linux system". Actually, we weren't keeping count. Jim is the head of Starshine Technical Services and has a book for Linux system administrators coming out later this year from Macmillan.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, creator of the GNU C Compiler (GCC), and a long-time advocate of free software spoke about history, philosophy and current issues in free software. ("Free" in this context means freedom, not necessarily a reference to price.)

Eric Allman, author of Sendmail, spoke about Sendmail, Inc's Open Source business model and the evolution of Sendmail, which is the #1 mail transport software on the Internet.

Phil Hughes, publisher of Linux Journal, shared some current developments with Linux and of his insights about where Linux might be going.

Paul Vixie spoke about the history and current developments with the Internet Software Consortium and future plans for his Open Source "BIND" nameserver software, used on almost all domain name servers on the Internet. "Vix", as he is known on the Net, also talked about results achieved from the anti-spam effort that he leads.

David S. Miller spoke about networking changes in Linux 2.2, specifically TCP/IP. Many performance improvements and the situations that led to their development were presented.

David S. Miller is considered one of the three most important Linux kernel developers (along with Alan Cox and Linus). David was largely responsible for both the Sparc port to Linux and UltraPenguin (an optimized port for UltraSparc).

Mitch Wyle, maintainer of Vim, and Ben Wing, maintainer of XEmacs, spoke about their editors histories and future directions. Comments on our mail list after the meeting indicate that the only loser was "pico", as Mitch's and Ben's descriptions of powerful features convinced some people to switch to a real editor.

Larry Wall, creator of the Perl language (a fourth-generation programming language which has the dominant position in web server-side software and Unix system administration), spoke about how he currently uses Perl, including automating his house.

Tim O'Reilly, Founder and President of O'Reilly & Associates, had recently served as moderator for the Open Source Summit and spoke about his vision for Open Source^TM software.

Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder and VP of Technology, spoke (on the day following the Netscape browser source release) about Mozilla's role in the Open Source^TM software community, and vice versa. Also speaking was Tom Paquin, manager of Netscape's Mozilla group. This turned into a media event as well, with many reporters present in the audience and many mentions of the SVLUG meeting in the international electronic media. Netscape-chartered buses took people after the meeting from Cisco in San Jose to the "Mozilla Party" in San Francisco.

See "Andreessen Sees Mozilla-Linux Upset Of Windows", media coverage at TechWeb. Or "Silicon Valley Tea Party" at Time.

photos by John Beale

Linus Torvalds, the original author of Linux, spoke about what he's currently doing in the area of symmetric multiprocessing support for the Linux kernel, and answered questions about current Linux 2.1 development status. See the article about this meeting from the June Linux Journal and Linux Gazette.

Also at the meeting, Dan Kionka was presented with a plaque in appreciation of his service as president of SVLUG (orginally the PC-Unix SIG) from 1988 to 1997.

See "A Finnish Subversive's Plan to Overthrow Windows", a tongue-in-cheek article by Tom Abate, San Francisco Examiner.

Bruce Perens, coordinator of the Debian Linux Distribution, spoke about Linux and free software in General. And...

Eric Raymond spoke about his paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which contains experiments and observations about what has made Linux successful, and had just been identified as the inspiration for Netscape's decision to release its browser source code.

H Peter Anvin spoke about his "autofs" kernel-based automounter for Linux.

Ian Kluft spoke about Linux's role in the SBAY.ORG community network. His presentation is available online at http://www.sbay.org/svlug-1997-12/

The 1998 presidential election was also held at this meeting. Ben Spade was elected President and Chris DiBona was elected Vice President.

Ben Spade spoke about using your Linux box as a gateway to the Internet.

Jeremy Allison spoke about the Samba 1.9.17 release.

Damian Ivereigh spoke about the print servers at Cisco Systems, which use Red Hat Linux, Samba and some in-house software to make a reliable printing system that has been deployed at Cisco sites worldwide.

Hans Reiser spoke about the ReiserFS file system for Linux. His presentation is available online at http://idiom.com/~beverly/reiserfs.html