Tech

My Schedule 09:00 How Will You Steer Your Open Source Career? Keynote Rikii Endsley 11:00 Delta Ansible: Keeping up With Changes and Deprecations Andrew Cziryak The guy next to me is SNORING! The guy next to me is SNORING! 13:00 Modern Puppet Session Steven Pritchard I walked out of the puppet talk. It was way over my head and things just weren’t making any sense I walked out of the puppet talk. It was way over my head and things just weren’t making any sense 14:00 An introduction to the Windows to Subsystem for Linux Rehgan Avon This girl has limited exposure to Linux, but seems enthusiastic enough to do an intro to WSL She’s encouraging the audience to participate, so she doesn’t get things wrong and has backup to answer questions This girl has limited exposure to Linux, but seems enthusiastic enough to do an intro to WSL She’s encouraging the audience to participate, so she doesn’t get things wrong and has backup to answer questions 15:00 Getting started with Infrastructure as Code Session Tim Quinlan 16:00 Holistic System Automation with Ansible Tim Quinlan 17:00 Lightning Talks AdvocacyTop 10 IT Commandments youtubePico8Redhat VDO (fs de-duplication)jqpatent trolls vs gnome youtubeJavaScript vulnerability tester eval-villianlets-encrypt cert transparencyMad Dog rant on Patent Troll youtubeburnout avoidancemore jq / gron / json/yaml schema Advocacy Top 10 IT Commandments youtube Pico8 Redhat VDO (fs de-duplication) jq patent trolls vs gnome youtube JavaScript vulnerability tester eval-villian lets-encrypt cert transparency Mad Dog rant on Patent Troll youtube burnout avoidance more jq / gron / json/yaml schema 18:00 Keynote Jon “maddog” Hall 50 years of *x, Why is it important, and where do we go from here? Other observations There are fewer vendors this year. Fewer vendors = less swag 😢 Got a free T-Shirt from Linode and signed up for another $50 credit with my hotmail address. Lunch was good (chicken, salmon and Brussels sprouts) but I can’t stop burping salmon registered to win an Oculus from Facebook with my planethawleywood address (Update: didn’t win 😢) This place is crawling with textbook nerds. Pocket protectors, neck beards, and a surprising amount of excess weight. Also, a depressing amount of MacBooks. The after party was nice, but held in a smaller room than it was in 2017. Build-your-own sliders and onion rings. I ate a couple sliders (sans-bun) before heading out early. I did not participate in the raffle, so there was no reason to hang out. All-in-all, it was another good time. I think the lack of sleep I got the night before affected me somewhat, and I also found myself sitting around between talks a couple of times (the speaking rooms were really warm and that combined with a topic I wasn’t really interested in made me sleepier) I did come home with 4 nice shirts! OLF 2019 Youtube Playlist

In 1998 I wrote the only piece of software I had intended other people to see. I wrote it in Visual Basic 4. It’s a guitar fret board mapping program. Pick a note and a scale and click a button. It’ll show you where those notes are on the fret board. It was fun and useful but really basic and lacked a lot of features. But I made it and I was proud to give it away. At some point a website called Harmony Central got a hold of it. I might have uploaded it or maybe someone else did, I don’t remember. In any event, Harmony Central was a very popular music site that contained a lot of resources for musicians including sheet music, tablature and software. Fret Master made it into the listing. ...

I spent two hours troubleshooting strange Apache behavior on a new VM before discovering SELinux was enforcing I always use CentOS in the cloud because it’s stable and awesome for server-grade applications (web server, webdav, samba…etc) I use Ubuntu or a Debian derivative on the desktop because the packages are more up to date and I don’t mind living on the edge at home. (Plus - interacting with CentOS and Ubuntu both on a daily basis keeps me sharp!) ...

Two weeks ago I stopped using TinyTinyRSS as my RSS feed reader. I love having self-hosted apps and the privacy and control they provide, but honestly I wasn’t real worried about someone snooping my RSS feeds or contaminating my OPML. I’ve been making a move back to some cloud-based apps recently to avoid the maintenance and backup space that my self-hosted apps require. I decided to try two popular feed readers and see how they compared. I left myself a reminder in Google Keep (see? NOT everything is self-hosted) to give it two weeks to decide which feed reader I was going to stick with. I disabled my TTRSS instance and opened two new tabs with Feedly and Inoreader ...

I have named my office “Fort Impostor” and this is my…manifesto. “The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of ‘real’ grown-ups who you believe – at some subconscious level – are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away, and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.” Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help ...

Attended talks: Command Line Tools, Clif Flynt Keynote: The Battle Over Our Technology, Karen Sandler (robo-lawyer) Lumina Rising: Challenging Desktop Orthodoxy, Ken Moore The ‘Onwards’ & ‘Upwards’ of Careers in Open Source – A Panel Discussion, Warner Moore, Cassandra Faris, Jason Green, Chad White Secure Cloud: Linode With Full Disk Encryption, Roberto C. Sánchez So What Is It Like to Work at Red Hat Anyways?, Steve Ovens Working in the Open, Jason Plum, GitLab Lightning Talks Keynote: A Brief History of an Open Source Company, Tarus Balog Missed Talks: Building Sustainable FOSS Communities, Mike Dolan LinkedIn Keynote: Who Cares if the Code is Free? User Experience & Open Source, Máirín Duffy A Short Tutorial on a Revision Control System for Sysadmins, Robert Threet What’s new in FreeNAS 11 Top 10 Easy Cybersecurity Wins for Linux Environments, Michael Contino Slide deck Getting Hit by an 18-wheeler: Privacy & Anonymity in the Modern Age, Cody Hofstetter Plaintext Accounting with the Ledger Ecosystem - Colin Dean Links: Think Penguin (booth) CoverMyMeds (booth, recruiting) Karen Sandler’s Keynote at GUADEC 8/2017 Five Minute RCS Tutorial Reference Revision Control System for Sysadmins above KDE at Ohio Linuxfest 2017(booth)

I made it to Cleveland Givecamp this year after many years of wanting to go but never having the guts. I added this to my LinkedIn page: Technical Volunteer, Cleveland GiveCamp Jul 2017 I volunteered at Cleveland GiveCamp and assisted “The Valentine Project” in refreshing their web presence. I served as site admin by managing hosting, DNS, loading the initial CMS and database and configuring email. I handled site security by configuring SSL and hardening user accounts. I also assisted with scrum-style checklists and documentation to deliver a finished product in just over 24 working hours from July 21-23, 2017. ...

Are you sure you want to ruin your entire day? (Y/N) Preface: This happened a couple of years back and has completely resolved since. It’s also one of those events that fellow sysadmins might relate to that make you go back and rethink (and rewrite) your backup scripts and policies involving production machines and how to not be stupid, in general. Today is the day after Easter. This past Good Friday was not… well… good. ...

I found what I believe to be the earliest reference of me using Linux on the internet. Via Google Groups, I had posted a question asking for help configuring X on Debian 1.3.1 (released July 1997): I hope I haven’t missed an obvious solution to this problem somewhere - but it’s slowly driving me mad… I’ve installed Debian 1.3.1 (older version, I’m sure, I’ve had the CDs for about a year) and am trying to configure Xwindows.I can successfully start XF86Setup and even get my intellimouse to work but I can’t seem to find a happy configuration for my Permedia 3000 graphics card. There is no preset for my card and I’ve tried to ‘hand-configure’ it but every time I finish configuring and XF86Setup exits and tries to fire up the server my monitor goes blank (even the power light goes from green to amber(stand-by mode) - the first 2 times I had no choice but to power off (OUCH!) and run e2fsk manually to recover - since then I’ve learned to exit Xwindows (Ctrl-Alt-Bkspc) blindly (the video never does come back - but at least I can hear the exit beep and shut down nicely)Obviously, I’d like to take full advantage of the capabilities of my card - but I’ll settle for just being able to see the screen :)If anyone can offer some advice as to where to start, I’d appreciate it! I’ve got ‘LINUX - The Complete Reference’ the book with all the HOWTO’s and stuff - although I don’t know if that’s totally accurate because of it’s age either (also about a year) but any refernces to HOWTO’s or web pages or just a message from somebody who has a Permedia 3000 card working under LINUX would be great!Thanks for helping…. ...

Ever have a really bad day? Or a bunch of bad days in a row? Me too. I’ve masked the names to protect the guilty. For a very long time I have been aware that stress can take a toll on your health. But in my experience, it’s never been immediate like it has lately. It started this past weekend with an on-call nightmare: I got two calls about Asterisk, (not my specialty) on Saturday. One guy just needed it started. He had rebooted his machine and now it didn’t work. Easy fix. But the call ruined my lunch. By the time I was done my frozen pizza was almost frozen again. ...