BrianPowell’s Blog

I have been studying for a little while now in preperation for taking the RHCE Exam. My initial goal was to have it completed before the Red Hat Summit, but a rather large Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementation that consisted of an HP 7000 series Blade Center, Clustering, Virtualization and LeftHand Network SANS had me real busy over the past month which pushed my goal back a bit, now that this job is coming to a close I intend to get back into the swing of things with my RHCE Cert.

With summer now here and the kids finally out of school we do plan to travel a bit (while the weather is good, and here in Buffalo, NY that timeframe is short ) so my new goal is taking the exam towards the end of August or the beginning of Sept.

Unfortunately late Friday afternoon June 20th, my hosting provider decided to dissappear. At first I thought it may be a simple network issue so I figured I would wait until Saturday, since I only have personal stuff hosted with them, to see if it came back up before submitting a ticket. Well Saturday rolled around and still no website so I submitted a trouble ticket only to wait another 12 hours before it was responded to stating “We are working on the issue”. After numerous requests and 5 days of downtime without so much of a peep as to what was going on and when to expect service to be restored, I decided to relocate to a new host, so now the site is back and should be updated (Now that I can access it) frequently.

Today I spent most of my time at FudCon where we continued working on Testopia setup and configuration for tomorrows BarCamp, which unfortunately I wont be able to attend as my flight home leaves later today.

My overall thoughts of attending my first Red Hat Summit and my very first Fudcon was it was very well worth the time, I learned alot and got to meet many of the people I have only interacted with via irc. I will be sure to attend next years event as well as look forward to getting to another Fudcon.

Todays KeyNote speakers were Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President Red Hat Engineering. He spoke about various topics from how Fedora is the foundation to RHEL, where virtualization technology is headed to Red Hat MRG.

Next up was Boyd Davis, Intel General Manager, Server Platforms Group. The topic of discussion was what Intel will be doing in the future and how they are going to get there. Personally I prefer AMD and would have rather seen that topic but overall at least I know what AMD is up against.

Last but surely not least was Joel Cohen, Co-creator of The Simpsons. One might ask what in the world is he doing at a Red Hat Summit? Well it ends up that the animations that are are used in the episodes are rendered using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora machines. Plus we got to see some clips from The Simpsons episodes which was a real blast!

The following is the list of presentations I attended today, along with a summary of the topic and my thoughts.

“Cobbler: Provisioning for bare metal and virtualization” presented by Michael DeHaan - This topic covered the very cool Cobbler provisioning system as well as what features to expect in the future. Michael is very passionate about Cobbler as you could easily see his excitement while presenting. I have already used Cobbler for blade deployments and I also currently use it for Fedora Rawhide Release Testing (though I will be trying out the use of Snake for “Banshee”) I am looking forward to Cobbler expanding it’s provisioning capabilities to Windows in the future! 2 Thumbs Up!

“oVirt: An Open management framework for virtualized environments” presented by Hugh Brock and Perry Myers. This presentation gave an overview of what oVirt is, what can be done with it and how to do it. It also covered some roadmap features that will be added in the future. I just recently cam across this project about 3 weeks ago while searching for a management interface for RHEL virtual machines. I intend on testing this out to see if it currently fills a void I have as soon as I get the chance. 2 Thumbs Up!

“Fedora Packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux” presented by Karsten Wade. This presentation covered EPEL which is basically a RHEL repository maintained by Fedora. I already use EPEL for certain systems so I was mainly there to support the project as a member of the Fedora Community. 2 Thumbs Up!

The remaining of the day I spent at the FudCon, where a group of QA Release Testers walked through a  demo of Testopia for making the test cases and reporting much easier that it is currently. More to come on this tomorrow as I will be spending all day at Fudcon and the QA Release Testers will continue to work on getting this ready for Saturdays BarCamp.

Today was the first of presentations.

Starting off the KeyNote Speakers was Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. He spoke of what Red Hat is going to be doing and what direction they are headed in the future.

Next up was the CIO of Harvard Medical School, Dr. John Halamka. This guy is the medical geek (not a bust on him) of all geeks, he even has a RFID implant! While I didnt follow all of the medical lingo he was speaking about I did follow what they were doing with Linux in the Medical fields in regards to “mobile shared medical records”.

Last but not least was IBM’s General Manager of Enterprise Systems Division, Jim Stallings. He spoke of how IBM embraced Linux and Red Hat from the very beginning and how they will continue to channel funds and support.

Here are the presentations I attended today, a summary of the topics discussed and my thoughts on them.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux update and roadmap” presented by Daniel Riek and Andy Cathrow. -   This presentation covered the life cycle of RHEL and what was on the horizon. The presentation was very good and informative and covered the topic well. Even a Fire Alarm going off (which turned out to be a false alarm), hardly drew anyone away from the room… Now thats a captive audience!  2 Thumbs up!

“Cluster failover for any application demonstration: A high availability cluster installation.” presented by Thomas Cameron and Lon Hohberger. - I was particularly interested in this presentation as I had just completed a 9 node cluster installation with SAN shared storage at a customers site and since that was the first “official” one I have completed I wanted to see if I did everything correctly. Low and behold it turned out that I performed everything that was presented here. I did do things a little differently but in the end it was the same. Very good presentation and had working demos to backup the process. 2 Thumbs up!

“Best practices for implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and virtualization in the enterprise.” presented by Jan Mark Holzer and John Shakshober. - Like above I was particularly interested in this topic since most of what I anticipate doing at my current employer revolves around this topic, and also another self check for what I have already done and some possible new info for future installations. The presentation pointed out specific config settings (which I noted for future use) and I may have finally got my hands on the Para-Virt Windows drivers I have been waiting on for the past month. (Still dont have them physically but Jan Mark Holzer assured me he would email them to me) Very informative! 2 Thumbs up!

“Diagnosing and troubleshooting problems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and virtualization. presented by Jan Mark Holzer and John Shakshober. - Again I was particularly interested in this topic for the reasons noted above. This presentation covered some of the stumbling blocks and hurdles that may occur with RHEL and virtualization. Very good coverage and information of a broad range of potential problems and issues. 2 Thumbs up!

“Func: The Fedora Universal Network Connector” presented by Michael DeHaan and Adrian Likins. - While a fairly new project func has a pretty good following and development seems to moving along at a rabbits pace. The presentation was good and covered everything from what func was, why it was created, to working module example uses. I look forward to using this in the very near future (after I learn Python!). 2 Thumbs up!

Overall today was very informative and I learned alot. In my opinion after the first day the event fee is more than worth it after just the first day! I am really looking forward to tomorrow.