Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two

The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the 'fathers of the internet', having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

Vint discussed some of the history of the internet, pointing out how much of the current state of the internet still reflects the original architecture, and covered some of the mistakes that were made in light of what we know today - for example, the current scarcity of IPv4 addresses and the security and privacy issues that have arisen with today's social internet.

After breaking for morning tea, the second day of miniconfs followed.

Miniconfs Schedule:

• Systems Administration
• Multicore and Parallel Computing
• Mobile FOSS
• Data Storage
• Research and Student Innovation
• Libre Graphics Day
• Open in the Public Sector
• Rocketry

I chose to spend the day in the Systems Administration miniconf, starting with a presentation by Devdas Bhagat on Implementing DevOps in the Real World. Devdas explained how DevOps is not about technology, nor process, but about culture and how to implement this cultural change. Following Devdas was a fascinating presentation on system time keeping and time sources by Julien Goodwin in his Brief History of Time Sync. 

Other highlights included an update of Samba 4 features by Andrew Bartlett, a brief presentation on how to set up a HA cluster in 20 minutes by Sander van Vugt and an excellent summary of the features of Cgroups by Steven Ellis.

After the conference proper the conference speakers were given the opportunity to network at the Speakers Dinner, held in the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre.