Talks (was: Re: [YLUG] A basic question)

[Alex Howells]

On 28/12/2007, Harry Mills <mail at hjmills.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm interested in most stuff - what are your interests?

Pretty much anything which can be applied to system administration, so
stuff like:

  *  Scalable spam prevention  -  anyone with a working solution
      capable of handling *lots* of mails per day?  What software are
      you using to accomplish it?  Any particular "tweaks" you came
      across during testing which weren't well documented?
      Is there an individual quarantine per user/domain, perhaps
      accessible through a web interface?

  *  Scalable web hosting  -  deploying WWW services behind load balancers
      and utilizing technologies like caching on dynamic content.
      Would be particularly interested in hearing from someone who's
      deployed a Ruby on Rails application in such a manner, given that
      it appears such a c*nt to deploy in any sane fashion :-)

  *  Centralised management - anyone with 10+ systems probably knows how
      much of a pain doing regular upgrades can be ;)  Adding accounts to
      all the systems, ensuring 'old' accounts *are* deleted from all the
      hosts; it's a regular pain in the arse :)  Particularly interested
      in hearing from anyone using LDAP with SSH+LPK on Debian/Ubuntu,
      although tactics for accomplishing the same using a tool like Puppet
      or CFengine would also be cool :)

  *  Firewalls - minimo or maximo?  Anyone want to play devil's advocate
      on whether all systems should run a firewall? :)  Prepare for heckling.
      For those systems *with* a firewall, do you `-P INPUT DROP` and go
      from there; or is your preference to operate just a blacklist?
      If you don't advocate a firewall for the average system, why?

             <.. insert more geeky system'y stuff here ..>

I'm also open to interesting talks on other stuff ;)  Some of the
above I've done a little/lot of before and am thus looking for a fresh
viewpoint and some new ideas to take home, other stuff I'd like to do
in future.

Oh, and the not-so-system-admin ones:

  *  Release Engineering - just how difficult is getting a new distribution
      release out the door?  Last minute security blockers, developers not
      delivering on time?  Does that really change within a company where
      all the work isn't voluntary and unpaid?  Any tips or tricks to speed
      up or automate the process; any tips or tricks to "managing" the whole
      shebang so key trains of the process aren't dependent on one guy/girl?

  *  Continuous Integration - rather related to the above, I'm curious how
      people use methodologies like CI in the "real world" ;)  I know that
      Debian has buildd, for example, but what are the benefits and limits?

  *  Web Development Languages - someone advocating Ruby vs. another person
      talking up PHP would be a hoot :)  It'd be particularly interesting
      if the same people had deployment experience, not just development --
      my lay understanding is that Ruby is a pain in the arse to deploy if
      you're looking to handle >250 concurrent users, and PHP has the rep
      for being easier to deploy, but easier to "break" (more sec. vulns).
      Does something like Suhosin and suPHP address these concerns? What're
      the performance impacts of both, given suPHP requires php-cgi, etc?

Um, cool hardware projects would be neat too.  Anyone got a working
setup with >1 tuner to record TV in Linux?  What're you using in terms
of cards and software?  Embedded hardware like an EFIKA - anyone got
one?  What're you using it for?

                          <END WISHLIST>

Thank you Santa!
Alex