UKUUG Spring 2007 Conference
19-21 March 2007 in Manchester
Talks
xensource: Xen: background, introduction and ethos
A speaker from xensource covering the background, introduction and ethos behind Xen, amongst other topics.
Alex Bennee: Running Legacy Applications on Commodity Hardware
Being able to take legacy apps onto commodity hardware is quite compelling solution for large data canters trying to reduce cost and power consumption. Alex talks about some of his work at Transitive Corporation, and the benefits and implications for System Administrators.
Owen Le Blanc: Xen virtual workhorses
Under the joint pressures to use fewer, higher quality machines, while ever increasing the number and reliability of services offered, Owen discusses how Xen virtualisation has proved extremely practical to solve these problems for his wide range of services.
xensource: Xen in a heterogenous world
Xen is used in a wide range of situations to solve various problems in new and innovative ways. This second xensource presentation gives an overview of a range of solutions.
Bret Giddings: Our experiences of virtualisation
In early-2006, the Computing Service at the University of Essex decided to dip its toe in the Virtual Server arena. Considering things like Microsoft Exchange servers as virtual servers, it was imperative that we went for a 'supported' vm infrastructure. However, we would also need to host strange things like Debian servers so could discount a Microsoft based solution. With only 2 VMware servers, it quickly became apparent that the solution worked extremely well for many of our services, and 9 months later is hosting 25 virtual machines (and growing) on 5 machines running Debian Linux, RedHat ES, Windows 2003 and Fedora. Our previously overflowing racks now have gaping holes where servers used to reside where lonely power cords dangle with no servers to plug in to! This talk will look at the architecture we have adopted, its strengths and weaknesses and whether we would adopt the same solution again if we were to do it now.
Poul Henning-Kamp: FreeBSD Jails
FreeBSD Jails are lightweight ways of restricting services and processes on a FreeBSD system. This short presentation covers the differences between jail and the heavierweight virtualisation discussed in this session.
Julian Simpson: Agile System Administration
Using Version Control, a unit testing framework, and other tools, it is possible to configure a server without manually applying the required changes directly. Both reducing configuration time and allowing "regression testing" to detect unintended or unauthorised changes and errors. This presentation discusses how this was done, and how it has worked out, allowing a focus on planning and delivering a good service, rather than applying changes by hand.
Stephen Quinney and Paul Anderson: Mass System Configuration
A structured approach to "System Configuration" is vital for the correctness, security, and efficiency of any large modern installation. Paul Anderson discusses some of the underlying principles as described in his new SAGE booklet (http://www.sage.org/pubs/14_sysconfig/). Stephen Quinney introduces the LCFG configuration tool and shows how it is designed to address some of these issues in practice.
Chia-Liang Kao: SVK - Version Control without the Headaches
SVK is the only distributed version control system designed from teh ground up to integrate cleanly with subversion. With SVK, advanced branching and mergeing and even offline commits are a breeze. Chia-Liang Kao is the creator of SVK, and a Managing Partner at Best Practical
Jonathan Worthington: Perl 6 — for perl programmers
There have been great advances in Perl 6 for people building large systems, such as the new object model and type annotations. What does this mean for those who use Perl to hack up quick and dirty 10 line scripts to solve one-off problems? Fear not - Perl 6 has not forgotten you! In this talk I'll look at some of the new syntax in Perl 6, with a focus on the bits that will make those quick and dirty jobs even easier.
Solaris Logical Domains and Solaris Zones
This pair of related talks from Sun cover two complementary
technologies.
o Logical Domains: virtualisation technology for Sun Fire T1000
and T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology that lets customers
run multiple OSes simultaneously with Solaris Containers.
o Zones: a virtualised operating system enviroment created within
a single instance of Solaris. Recent support has beened added to
allow for Brand Zones. This brings in the ability to run a Linux
enviroment within a zone on x86 platforms.
Jonathan Worthington : Implications for System Administrators
It's easy to get lost in the sea of terminology surrounding the Perl 6 project. What is it that you will actually be deploying when Perl 6 arrives? What is CPAN going to look like with Perl 6? What will come of Perl 5? What is the migration strategy for Perl 5 applications? All will be revealed!
Alasdair Kergon: Clustered Volume Management on Linux
Steve Whitehouse: GFS Clustered Filesystems
Gordon Ross: VMware servers Across Wales
The Countryside Council for Wales operate around 80 servers (real and virtual) across 17 sites throughout Wales. With this level of distribution, Gordon discusses the real benefits his group has seen from virtualisation.
Simon Wilkinson and Craig Strachan: Secure Filesystems
The School of Informatics at Edinburgh University is in the process of deploying a next generation, secure, networked filesystem for general computing use. This talk will present an of our experiences to date in this deployment. , discussing local requirements for a networked file system, an evaluation of contenders in this space, and the detailed performance and stability investigation of AFS vs NFSv4 that we performed, and why AFS was chosen.
We'll address the issues involved in deploying OpenAFS over a medium scale site. We'll talk about AFS database and filesystem architectures, and about disaster recovery and backup considerations. Finally, we'll consider the lessons learned from our pilot program, most of education issues of moving from a system with virtually no security, to one that requires valid security credentials to access at all times, and examine technical solutions to some of the problems this presents.
Poul Henning-Kamp: Varnish - The HTTP Accelerator
Varnish is a freshly written HTTP server side cache, which uses the latest tricks in high performance programming and delivers unparalleled content management features and control. By implementing all policy control in a domain specific language called VCL, Varnish avoids the "I wonder how these options interact" dilemma which plauge most programs using traditional mode based configuration files.
Robert Watson: How the FreeBSD Project Works.
The FreeBSD Project is one of the oldest and most successful open source operating system projects, seeing wide deployment across the IT industry. From the root name servers, to top tier ISPs, to core router operating systems, to firewalls, to embedded appliances, you can't use a networked computer for ten minutes without using FreeBSD dozens of times. Part of FreeBSD's reputation for quality and reliability comes from the nature of its development organization--driven by a hundreds of highly skilled volunteers, from high school students to university professors. And unlike most open source projects, the FreeBSD Project has developers who have been working on the same source base for over twenty years. But how does this organization work? Who pays the bandwidth bills, runs the web servers, writes the documentation, writes the code, and calls the shots? And how can developers in a dozen time zones reach agreement on the time of day, let alone a kernel architecture? This presentation will attempt to provide, in 45 minutes, a brief if entertaining snapshot into what makes FreeBSD run.
Tom Cosgrove: Third-Party Applications on OpenBSD.
While OpenBSD has had a ports collection for over a decade, it has recently undergone a complete infrastructural rebuild which now gives significant benefits in terms of reliability and upgradability of the system. In this talk, OpenBSD developers discuss the rewrite, the changes that have been made in the past few months, and some of the things that are to come.
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