Day One at LinuxCON: Open Cloud Mini-Summit - and Cannoli

Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Sunday, August 8th, 2010 had three claims to fame. It was:

• One day after the 60th anniversary of my birthday, and I thank all the people that sent birthday greetings. It is nice to have so many friends who took the time to do this simple act.

   

• Father's Day in Brazil, and I thank all those that sent me Father's Day greetings. As someone who has no children, they meant a lot to me.

   

• The start of LinuxCON North America 2010, held at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts.

   

LinuxCON actually starts on Tuesday, August 10th, but is preceded by a series of Mini-Summits. Father's Day therefore started by getting up an an unusual hour to take a bus into Boston in order to arrive at the hotel and attend the first of the Mini-summits, one on “Open Cloud”, facilitated by John Mark Walker.

The “Open Cloud” mini-summit was populated by a small, but highly international group of people. With about eight attendees we had representatives from seven countries.

John Mark started by giving an overview of the Open Cloud Initiative, an emerging organization much along the lines of the Open Source Initiative, which is trying to establish guidelines of what makes a cloud “Open” and how to keep your cloud “Open”.

At John's request I then gave a talk about Project Cauã, and received some good feedback on some of the issues and some software that might be useful in establishing servers for Project Cauã.

After that the discussion opened up and the participants contributed their experience with various packages of software for managing large amounts of data (DRBD, GlusterFS, Ceph), discussions about managing packages and distributing them (cfengine, Puppet, Cobbler), discussions about monitoring systems (OpenNMS, Nagios), and many other types of software.

Upon mutual agreement the formal Mini-Summit ended a bit earlier and the participants retired to the hotel bar to continue discussion, which lasted for about two beers, when John Mark had to leave for the airport.

After that, I offered to take the remaining participants (who by this time had expanded to include a member from Finland.....no...not THAT member, a different person) on a tour of Boston.

We traveled by subway to the oldest subway stop in the United States (Park Street, Boston), saw a bit of Boston Common, some churches where various historic events happened, and ended up in Boston's Italian North End for a great dinner and cannoli for desert. The line at the bakery for the cannoli was about a fifteen minute wait and extended through the store and out onto the street. Then we walked back to the hotel and ate the cannoli in the bar.

What a great way to end Father's Day!

On Monday I will be attending the KVM Mini-summit, and on Tuesday try to balance talks from KVM and the main conference itself.

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