Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

LinuxWorld Expo Wraps Up 48

Posted by Zonk from the penguin-today-gone-tomorrow dept.
lisah writes "LinuxWorld Conference & Expo drew to a close yesterday with a handful of final talks and presentations. Newsforge has a rundown on the end of the event. Christina Noren, vice president of product management with Splunk, gave a talk entitled 'Troubleshooting Linux and the Open Source Software Stack.' Among her suggestions were the use of centralized logging systems, allowing users access to logs for researching their own problems, and logging successes and failures to establish a baseline. Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a presentation that focused on doing kernel version control with Quilt, Ketchup, and Git. Though turnout was low as conference attendees got an early start to the airport, the talk was followed up by a lively Q & A about general kernel development. Questions ranged from the Resier 4 situation to who will eventually succeed Linus. The next Linux World Expo will be held February 14-15, 2007, in New York." Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

LinuxWorld Expo Wraps Up More

LinuxWorld Expo Wraps Up

Comments Filter:

  • From the article:

    Overall, LinuxWorld was a decent show, if a bit lacking in excitement. The quality of the talks was down a bit this year, with a Kroah-Hartman's talk Thursday being one of the obvious exceptions.

    Ouch.

    The next LinuxWorld will be held in New York, February 14-15, 2007.

    So get those tickets early, folks!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rbuck1 ( 996513 )
      No Nvidia. No ATI. One half the Moscone Conference Center, and in reality, only loosely arranged in that half. And the mood was upbeat only at the AMD and Intel booths, where their competition heasts things up. Most presentations were either embarassingly overamped or packed with already common features and/or knowledge. The Expo basically shows that Linux has passed from the creative to the corporate style meaning that the exhibitions turn largely into Sales Events as opposed to information stages. Is Lin

  • I'd hit it! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'd hit it! [splunk.com]

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > I'd hit it!

      I bet that just makes her whole day ...

  • Fact Checking (Score:5, Informative)

    by bewmIES ( 251890 ) on Friday August 18, 2006 @04:36PM (#15937156)
    Looks like the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit is being held in NYC, _not_ the Expo... they're not the same thing.

  • Giving users access to logs... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18, 2006 @04:38PM (#15937164)
    Isn't that, to some extent, a security risk? I'm not sure exactly which logs the speaker suggested making public, and if she proposed a system for filtering potentially sensitive log data (when users log in/out, for instance), but making logs read-only for root is one of the most common Linux security tips I run across.

    More importantly, in a large multi-user setting, why should users be expected to do their own troubleshooting at such a low-level? How trustworthy will user log analysis be for a sysadmin?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sled ( 10079 )
      Isn't that, to some extent, a security risk?

      Absolutely. One compelling reason for restricting access to system logs is the case of users who inadvertently enter their passwords when prompted for their login id. The password then becomes visible in plain-text to anyone with read access to the logs. World-read access is clearly a bad idea, but group-read for trusted individuals may be an acceptable compromise.

  • Name change? (Score:3, Funny)

    by thewrathoffluffy ( 920910 ) on Friday August 18, 2006 @05:10PM (#15937311)
    I bet if they called it "Lexpo", alot more people would show up.

  • Enough Splunk already (Score:5, Interesting)

    by illumin8 ( 148082 ) on Friday August 18, 2006 @05:35PM (#15937449) Journal
    Christina Noren, vice president of product management with Splunk, gave a talk entitled 'Troubleshooting Linux and the Open Source Software Stack.'
    Look, we know that Splunk bought several metric tons worth of banners from Slashdot a while ago, because I've been seeing their banners for days. Looks like a "slashvertisement" to me...
    Among her suggestions were the use of centralized logging systems, allowing users access to logs for researching their own problems, and logging successes and failures to establish a baseline.
    Well duh, logging software vendor recommends a central logging system! News at 11... In other news, Mcdonalds recommends a healthy hamburger, and Coca-Cola recommends sugary carbonated beverages...

    I've tried Splunk... downloaded the free demo and put it on my central syslog server. I was pretty unimpressed. Their AJAX interface, while it does allow Firefox style "real-time" log parsing, was clunky and bloated and makes browsers slow to a crawl, even on a fairly decent 2 ghz Centrino laptop with a gig of memory. No thanks... I've been using a free log parser called php-syslog-ng for a while now and it works great... I dump all of my log files using syslog-ng to a MySQL database and I can query them however I want with php-syslog-ng, or at the mysql client command line interface if I feel like being a real masochist...

    Splunk is a problem looking for a solution. Centralized logging has been solved many years ago by many free and commercial products. Just bolting an AJAX interface on the front of your log collecting machine does not make you worthy of thousands of dollars of my money...
    [/rant mode]
    • "Mcdonalds recommends a healthy hamburger"

      Wouldn't that have the opposite effect?
      • "Mcdonalds recommends a healthy hamburger"

        Wouldn't that have the opposite effect?

        No, a McDonald's hamburger generally makes me splunk very soon after eating it.

    • There are a lot of people who find Splunk very impressive.

      Take Corey Shields who runs OSL (Open Source Labs). OSL hosts many of the world's largest Open Source Projects: Linux Kernel, Firefox, Open Office, debian, etc.
      http://staff.osuosl.org/~cshields/?p=139 [osuosl.org]

      or perhaps Ben Rockwood sysadmin extraordinaire as well as OpenSolaris advocate:
      http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id= 637 [cuddletech.com]

      Not sure why your browser is slow on your laptop. Take a look at demo.splunk.com . Zippy on every browser I've tried.
  • Hmm, scheduling a conference on Valentine's Day?? I know we love Linux, but come on. V day is for 1)romancing a date or 2) sulking alone because of inability to procure 1. LinuxWorld, will you be my Valentine?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by NotBorg ( 829820 ) *
      Well I don't know about you but the rest of us nerds have nothing scheduled that day. No. We won't sell out to that commercial venture.
  • This is a badly framed story. There are multiple LinuxWorld per year (I went to the one this spring or so in Boston). Instead, the focus should be on that it was the last LinuxWord of the year. Also, where was this one? It's not in the top parent.

  • Quilt, Ketchup and Git? (Score:4, Funny)

    by stokes ( 148512 ) on Friday August 18, 2006 @06:49PM (#15937772)
    Sounds like the worst law firm ever.
  • One of the pre-reg gifts (I didn't go this year) was an iPod if you put out the $1,300 or so for the whole shebang (was about a $1,000 last year, I guess the $300 was probably for the iPod).

    My question for those who got iPods, did they include Linux drivers?

    • AFAICT iPod is just a USB disk. Not sure what kind of drivers would be needed that haven't been in the kernel for some time.
      • When I got the pre-reg letter stating the iPod was a gifty I thought there is someone clueless in merketing, offering as an incentive a device that does not (officially) support the platform that is the subject of the conference. It made me feel they were going after more of the PHBs crowd than the people who actually implement Linux (maybe others got the same gist and decided not to attend).

  • I went to the show... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by paulmer2003 ( 922657 ) on Friday August 18, 2006 @07:26PM (#15937918)
    ...and I would have to agree that the quality of the show went down. I went on Wednesday, the second day, and it seemed the people there were all pissed off. I just went as a linux enthuiast. There seemed to be much more crack headed salesmen and woman than usual. There was this guy from Motorola who was showing off the phone they made that has linux and they had a DDRish game running off of it and he was going up to everyone jumping around like he was on coke begging them to play. There seemed much less of just nice people there, although I have to say the Splunk people wre cool (stayed there and t alked with them for a bit) and the gnome people and a few others. But in general people were less 'nice' and shit. I was quite impressed with the SUSE Enterprise Linux that the suse guy showed me. He was one of the few 'cool' people whom I chatted up for a bit.
     



    In all, was still worth it, just wasent as fun as it was in previous years.

  • Age Discrimination by IDG (Score:5, Insightful)

    by doom ( 14564 ) <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> on Friday August 18, 2006 @08:32PM (#15938175) Homepage Journal
    IDG had a new policy [linuxworldexpo.com] this year for the LinuxWorld Expo:
    "Age Policy LinuxWorld Conference & Expo is open to business professionals only. No one under 18 years of age will be admitted."
    If this annoys you as much as it does me, you might be inspired to complain to the Show Director [mailto], PR Manager [mailto] and/or the Marketing VP [mailto].

    You also might ask your favorite vendors to speak up on the subject. The Show Director tells me that the reasons for the change is complaints from exhibitors about too many students.

    It seems a little ridiculous that a 17-year old kernel hacker would be turned away at the door by Linuxworld. I gather that this is a bone tossed to vendors complaining about poor sales at the Expo, but it strikes me as being fairly short-sighted... in the computer biz, you really want to get 'em while they're young, before they settle in on a particular OS.

  • will RHEL5 have firewire working out of the box? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by t35t0r ( 751958 ) on Friday August 18, 2006 @08:50PM (#15938245)
    It's a shame that RHEL4 advanced server doesn't have working firewire out of the box. Even when I tried to compile firewire for the kernel I got an error. Same with a simple make mrproper for the default kernel. Hopefully RHEL5 will.
  • I wonder how many fights broke out over text editors. "Emacs is better!" "Vim is better!" "?"

  • Quickie Review of the Expo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by doom ( 14564 ) <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> on Friday August 18, 2006 @09:38PM (#15938399) Homepage Journal
    Off the top of my head, some impressions of the Expo:

    Camraderie seemed to be running pretty high, over in the non-profit corner (wrapped around the slashdot lounge, which was a bunch of laptop zombies on slashdot beanbag chairs)... it seemed like there was a lot of action at the Debian booth, the postgresql booth, and so on (though there was no perl foundation presence this year, not sure why). Lots of people were passing out free CDs for this-and-that.

    Out in the corporate world, there was a pretty elaborate demo of Suse 10 handled by Novell: a class room layout with enough laptops setup for a few dozen people to play along with the demos. These demos were extremely slick, very impressive... it's too bad RedHat ("linux isn't ready for the desktop") wasn't present at the Expo. Running Suse might seem like an excessive compromise with proprietary software (it does to me -- it looks like I'm going with Knoppix and Kubuntu these days) but there's no question it would be better than being locked into the offerings of Windows or Apple.

    In the light of these Suse 10 demos, the OpenSuse project -- which had a small booth off in the aforementioned corner -- seems very interesting. They were passing out disks that apparently included a few non-"open" components though (flash, etc).

    The O'Reilly booth had it's fair share of people browsing, though there didn't seem to be all that much excitement about their present offerings, at least not to my eye. They had a nice series of talks going that I appreciated (e.g. two seperate talks by Bill Childers and Kyle Rankin, the authors of the new Ubuntu Hacks [oreilly.com]).

    Out in hardware land, there was a nice array of server hardware (e.g. impressive booths by Tyan and Supermicro) ... I always appreciate this kind of thing, because not being a sysadmin type I don't often get that close to high-end hardware like this.

    Emperor penguin was in the house, with demo models of all of their laptop models. Still no AMD64 versions, I'm afraid: apparently they're waiting for Dell to get on it...

    It seemed like the general theme out on the floor was "virtualization"... I was hanging around with a friend of mine, listening to a sales pitch on the subject (by EMC, I think), trying to figure out what was so cool about it, but without much success. Hardware is cheap enough that it wouldn't seem all that onerous to stick with one box per OS installation... and after all, you can run NFS if you want to use large disk arrays more efficiently. But everywhere I turned someone was talking about it... Bill Childers mentioned in passing that his company had gotten a 12 to 1 reduction in servers by using vmware (which has a freeware version, but is not free/open), and one of the Debian folks was talking about how it's really good for some random legacy app that needs a particular platform that otherwise you wouldn't want to run.

    • Re:Quickie Review of the Expo (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tweek ( 18111 ) on Saturday August 19, 2006 @10:44AM (#15940451) Homepage Journal
      "...not being a sysadmin type...:

      Because of that, I'll explain this:

      "Hardware is cheap enough that it wouldn't seem all that onerous to stick with one box per OS installation..."

      Hardware *IS* cheap. However, power,cooling and floor space is NOT cheap. At my last company we were spending over 40k a month in power alone for our servers. We weren't allowed to install any MORE servers because the datacenter could not provide any more cooling. With the exception of the IBM T42 Cabinet holding the pSeries gear, under VMWare we could have consolidated 5 racks of servers into 3. That would cut the square footage needs, the cooling needs AND the power needs.

      Virtualization is something that has been around for a long time (zOS, lpars on the pSeries). The x86 world has been sorely lacking this for a while. Hell Sun just got something in place with the last release in the form of Zones. You could do the same thing on HP Superdome gear ( I think ).

      So yes, hardware is cheap but the associated costs (power, cooling, real estate) and the sheer amount of things that can break on that many servers makes virtualization of the x86 platform the tastiest thing since sliced cheese.

Slashdot Top Deals

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Close