Day 3 - New toys, short(er) presentations

Opening keynote/opening session

Dan has gotten quite informal with this and it goes pretty fast. The keynote started late (people still registering), so it was brief and just welcomed everyone, mentioned some evening activities (including the BSDcert beta tonight), what to after the conference on Sunday, and the fact that pgcon is on next week.

First session - Coverity

Code audit and testing software. Davis Maxwell gave this talk. While the coverity product is commercial, the company thinks that open source software would benefit from their tool as well, especially as they use open source software as well and ran across some interesting things in some libraries they use. David goes around to conferences talking about the tool and engaging open source software developers in trying the tool, hopefully using the tool. More info can be found in teh proceedings (I hope), and there was also an interesting story from Wietse Vename regarding the tool finding unexecuted code in postfix. If I was a programmer, I’d be looking at the tool. It looks like it will save you some serious runtime bugs.

Day 2 - much quieter. No interruptions from work, just my own distractions from filming the talks.

Morning: Bacula - network aware backups

It’s amazing that I have never seen Dan’s talk before, given how long I’ve known him. I always skipped it as “I know this stuff,” so it was interesting to go over it from a fresh point of view. I’m now going to implement it internally on my home network. Who knows, it might even lead to some other contracts. Don’t forget, it has data encryption and runs over TLS.

This was originally the About page for the site. A few things have changed over time, as I have adapted to meet the changes. You should see the original from the first web page.

What is ovSAGE?

ovSAGE is a recognized local affiliate of the System Administrator’s Guild (SAGE) and the League of Professional Systems Administrators (LOPSA),  founded in 1998 in Ottawa, Ontario. We are primarily a group of system administrators from around the National Capital region that meet once a month to be social, get a heads up on new ideas, technology, and to have a little fun. Ideally, we will be inviting vendors in to demo technologies that we could use in our daily employment, have training sessions, and bring in some of those nasty problems that we all run into, and try to find an answer.

Day 1 is completed - so far so good. Other than some difficulties with the room wiring, causing me to miss most of the morning session on VOIP, things went well. Maybe I can get a copy of the slides to go over. On the plus side, the wireless networking was flawless after I took a shortcut to solve the room jack issue.

I did manage to take a photo of the presenter and a shot of the room on my PDA, so that will get posted eventually.

It appears that I’ve managed to get myself volunteered for the wireless networking for BSDcan. That’s interesting, especially when I haven’t set up a network for a conference before. Luckily, I’ve been able to get some assistance from the previous wireless maintainer.

In the past, the conference used NetBSD for the gateway machine and standard NAT and dhcp to provide the networking, so I went with the old standard. This is interesting simply because I haven’t used NetBSD before. It was a quick download and install, although it doesn’t install bash by default. Now BSD uses a ports collection - probably where Gentoo got the idea for a source repository. It wasn’t intuitively obvious how to add software, but a quick net search showed that all I had to do was install the package list (example given) and go to the correct directory and type ‘make install’. It actually worked first try - much easier than gentoo was :)