Notes from this years Australian Linux Conference (amusingly being held in Dunedin, New Zealand). This isn't intended to be comprehensive in any way, just a list of the things that I thought were interesting.
VoIP for Sysadmins
- Sending faxes is hard because small errors can result in the entire fax being rejected, T.48 is the technical solution but not widely supported.
- SIP is much easier to work with then H.232 because it doesn't involve decoding ASN.1.
- No one has tele-permitted the Digium line cards, so there is still no legal way to role out Asterisk as a PSTN gateway in NZ.
Ubuntu and Debian
- Key point seems to be that Ubuntu is trying really hard to work with Debian, but Debian (as always) is difficult to work with due to the wide range of strongly held opinions by the Debian developers.
- Ubuntu only has 36 developers, they are eager for more.
- Ubuntu doesn't have maintainers for packagers, everybody helps look after everything.
- Launchpad is Ubuntu's bug tracking database, it's intended to be capable of integrating with "all the bug databases in the world" but isn't yet open source so people are bitching. Apparently it should be open sourced at "some point".
What is Manageability?
- Knowing things break before your users do is good (duh).
- Monarch is supposed to be a good configuration front end for Nagios.
Introduction to Perl 6
- Damian Conway is a good speaker.
- Perl 6 seems to continue Perl's tradition of doing things in many different ways with the shortest syntax possible.
- Lots more introspection capabilities. Variables to look into compile time and run time settings and built in Data::Dumper type functionality with a .perl() extension to objects.
- Junctions are crazy. They all you to say things like "if (any(@list) > 10) {...}" which means that if any of the values in "@list" are greater then "10" do whatever. This can be used the other way around like "if ($x|$y|$z > 10) {....}" which means that if $x, $y or $z are greater then then then do whatever. It gets wacker from there ...
- I fear the code that Milton will inflict upon us with Perl 6 ...
Monitoring Networks with Cacti
- Damn, missed most of this.
- Quick walk through here: http://debiana.net/using_cacti.html
Managing Networks with WBEM
- Stands for "Web Based Enterprise Management", designed to be a replacement for SNMP
- PyWBEM useful module for doing stuff.
- Looks interesting but probably not for a couple years until it's more widely supported in vendor hardware.
And the required mark of how interesting the talks for the day were, here's a collage made of all the images scrapped off of the wireless network during they (more recent stuff on top):