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Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: Tying up all those loose ends
Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: Tying up all those loose ends | linux.conf.au: Tying up all those loose ends |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 27 November 2007 | |
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Steve Walsh, who will be in charge of the networking for the 2008 linux.conf.au, has had the experience of wanting to use the net during a break at conferences which he's attended and being unable to do so; he has no intention of letting that happen to anyone who attends linux.conf.au in January. At the conference, world + dog will have access to the worldwide web; wireless connectivity will be immediate and then venturing out on the web will be through a portal where authentication will be needed. Walsh was elected to the Linux Australia commiteee at the 2007 conference. And sometime later a chat with chief conference organiser Donna Benjamin was the starting point for his decision to agree to being Mr Networking for the Melbourne conference. Walsh and his team of five plan to start physically setting up things on January 21, a week before the conference begins. Having worked at a number of technical conferences, he is happy with this kind of schedule which, he says, will give him and the networking team time to sort out any issues that arise. A web systems administrator at the Australian Catholic University, Walsh says he will be using two boxes, and running two or three virtual machines on each, with Xen being the virtualisation software of choice. The conference registration system, however, will continue to be hosted by IVT, the company owned by Linux Australia president Jonathan Oxer. Walsh expects to have to cater to a maximum of 700 people at any time during each of the five days of the conference proper (January 28 to February 1); on the sixth day, Open Day, he expects more numbers as exhibitors will also be using the network and is planning accordingly. He says he has no bias as far as the distribution used goes but points out that anyone would use a distribution with which he or she is familiar. He will be using a mix of CentOS (which is basically Red Hat sans the trademarks) and Debian/Ubuntu. The man designated as sanity officer for the conference, Peter Lieverdink, will be assisting Walsh. Walsh doesn't look like the archetypal geek; indeed, he is often turned away at liquor outlets because he is suspected of not being above the age limit - and this is his own admission! But at 32, he does have quite a few notches in his belt; he helped out with the wireless side of networking at the 2005 conference. At work, he has become more of a systems architect and after being at the ACU a little short of a year has inducted as many as 52 Linux servers into service. His interest in Linux was born at university when his instructor decided to use Minix for a course in operating system fundamentals which was part of his engineering degree. As Linux was the only free clone of Unix around, he started having a look at it right then. |
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