Linux World Expo – Day 2
On day 1 (yes, I know this article is about Day 2, but I finished the Day 1
report before heading to the BOF), I attended the PostgreSQL BOF. It was there that I finally
met Bruce Momjian. Does anyone else think he looks just a little bit like
Bob Vila?
Bruce spoke about the
increase in PostgreSQL popularity as evidenced by the number of speaking
engagements over the past few years.
20022 talk
200315 talks in 10 countries
20056 talks by end of Feb
The current state of affairs indicates that in order to be taken seriously,
a conference which includes databases as a topic, must include a talk on PostgreSQL.
PostgreSQL support is widely available in more than 8 countries around the world.
Vendors are taking up PostgreSQL because of the very friendly license. It is cheaper
to take PostgreSQL and modify it to meet your customer needs than it is to buy a
proprietary database. More importantly, you can actually hire people who can do
this type of work.
I also met Jan Wieck (aka JanniCash) who
has been working on a replication solution. He has high goals, but they are
admirable and demonstate what I would like in a replication solution. Existing solutions
work fine if you have one master and never promote a slave when the master dies.
But in enterprise solutions, you want to be able to fail over to a slave, and then
“fail” back to the master when it is repaired. You also want to be able to bring
a new slave into the cluster without affecting the uptime of the other systems.
In other words, you want to add slaves without taking down the master and the other
slaves. You also need to bring the master back up to the current
status and then promote it back to be the master.
I’ve been sufficiently impressed by what Jan is doing that I want to get involved
with his replication project. What he’s doing is the type of thing I’d like to
get involved with. Clusters, replication, and fail-over are pet interests
of mine.
Lost in the subway
I got lost last night in the New York subway. I wasn’t technically lost.
I knew where I was at all times. I also knew where I wanted to get to.
I just didn’t know how to get there. I left the
Javits Center at 7:10, and walked
east on 34th until I got to 8th Avenue where I entered the
subway. Unfortunately,
I was in the wrong subway. I actually wanted the red line (a 1 or a 2 train)
to get over to Brooklyn. So… I experimented with finding the right train
and the right subway. I got to George’s place at about 8:40.
George, Micheal, and Don were there, waiting for me. George is opening a
restaurant soon. Or he should be. He prepared a meal which was
enjoyed by all. The chicken was great, so was the wine.
Found in government
I attended the “Open Source in US and International Government” talk this morning.
Sadly, they did not mention Canada. I am sure this was not malicious. They just
didn’t know about GOSLING and the
great progress they are making.
There were about 40 people at this talk. They heard about OS in the
US Department of Defense from Terry Bollinger. He had the following
analogies or explanations of the various licenses:
GPLSchoolhouse – community built, once a schoolhouse,
always a schoolhouse
BSDPublic lease
LGPLLiberal Lease
In 2002, there was a study on US DoD Open Source use. It was DISA sponsored.
They found:
- 251 uses of Open Source
- 115 applications were identified
In addition, Open Source was used for Infrastructure Support, Software development t,
Security, and Research. OpenBSD was being used for Firewalls and
Open Source was proving to permit rapid response to cyber threats.
Terry also mentioned that Open Source ensures that there are no secrets. The
software can be examined and proved to be doing exactly what it claims to be
doing. This is proving to be increasingly important as more and more
governments become wary of what others are doing.
Peter Gallagher, from devIS said that
Open Source use by government is inevitable. He stressed that COTS
(commercial off-the-shelf) is not incompatible with Open Source. A COTS
solution can be Open Source.
Peter mentioned that the US Department of Labor has over 50 websites
which use Open Source. The Department of State has been using Open Source
since 1999. Peter says his company is able to reduce their quotes to clients by
10% because of Open Source use. Government departments are finding the Open
Source licenses very attractive because of the reduced procurement issues and the
lessened of license compliance costs. In addition, once an application
is bought and paid for, it can then be reused by other departments because of
the Open Source license. Reuse reduces costs.
Peter mentioned that what we should be asking the governments for is a level
playing field. Allow Open Source to compete in that environment and it will
win.
SELinux – also found in government
This version of Linux was produced by produced by the National Security Agency
(NSA). This Security Enhanced Linux
(or SELinux) includes
new features to provide new and stronger protection against
tampering and bypassing of application security. The good thing about this
is the features which NSA have created can be added to any OS.
I was impressed by what Peter Loscocco from NSA had to say. Very interesting project.
If you want to read more about Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and how
NSA overcame the limitations of traditional MAC, please read
this link.
NYCBUG BOF
I was at the NYCBUG (nice bug) BOF on
Thursday night. This was very well attended. We had users from at least
four different BSDs (many were OpenBSD users). Michael Welsh outlined the basic
ideals of the group, the most important of which was tolerance. Bashing is not
something the group believes in. Requests for help can be responded to with
RTFM only if supplied with the URL to the relevant documentation. The group
is here to help others. All very good ideas.
I think the group got off to a very good start. I counted over 45 people there.
Interest in BSDCan was high. A dozen people
expressed interest in coming up by train. I’d love to see a hack-a-thon on the
train. Someone could bring a hub, someone a WAP. Our own little network traveling
north-bound to Canada.
Bacula Demo
Interest in Bacula has been steady. So much so that I have been asked to give a demo
on Friday at 1:00pm. If you are interested, head out to the
BSDMall booth and see just how easy
Bacula is to set up and use.
Subway Demo
You will be pleased to hear that I made it through the day without any
embarrassing subway experiences. In fact, I was able to help a family
who asked me how to get to Penn Station. I actually knew the answer!
We were on the red line at 42nd street. Penn was the next stop.
It’s kind of ironic… Here I was on my 4th trip into the NYC subway
system, and I was already helping out others. If you think about it,
that’s pretty much how this website got started.