Automating the Cloud
Mat Schaffer
Start a server in the cloud, deploy some code to it. Easy? But what if you had to do it 500 times? Come meet Chef and find out why deploying apps to hundreds or even thousands of servers in the cloud can be just as simple as deploying to a single local server. Chef is a configuration management tool that makes dealing with all your servers easy. It’s simple to get started on one or a handful of machines and take those same scripts and infrastructure up to much larger deployments. This talk will cover the basics and rationale for automation, then demonstrate how the same scripts that provision a single server can provision many servers. And once those servers are running, modifying the configuration on all of them is as simple as editing a single file.
Comparing IOS/IPhone App vs Android mobile device development
Roger Webster
Soon everything you can do on your computer you will be able to do on your phone or tablet. This talk will compare IOS/IPhone App vs Android mobile device development and show pitfalls, successes and issues in developing and publishing Apps on both platforms. This author has been teaching and developing apps for over two years on both Google/Android and IOS/IPhones.
Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing
Joe Brockmeier
Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. This talk will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complimentary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management of cloud computing environments. The discussion will appeal to anyone who has a good grasp of traditional data center infrastructure but is struggling with the benefits and migration path to a cloud computing environment. Systems administrators and IT generalists will leave the discussion with a general overview of the options at their disposal to effectively build and manage their own cloud computing environments using free and open source software.
doing_it_right() with WordPress– Standards and Best Practices
Ryan Duff
In the spirit of Open Source, we should work towards consistency in our source code. WordPress has coding standards, but often times these are not followed when people create plugins and themes. There are also best practices missing for how and where to do things. Improving on how you code a plugin or theme will make it easier for others to use and modify your code; and in the long run, will even save you time and your clients money.
In this session I’m going to touch on how to lay out projects, what belongs in a theme vs what should be in a plugin as well as some other lesser known tips and tricks. I’ll cover some core APIs that you should be making use of plus how to ensure your code is backwards compatible. What you learn today will save everyone (yourself included) from headaches down the road.
Forget about Home Automation What I care about is CAMP
Terry Johnson
Discuss leveraging Open Source in the remote areas of PA to control resources at your vacation CAMP.
VeraLite and OPEN WRT Z-wave and Open Z-wave initiatives Services provided by home controller.
Video snapshots, monitoring temp, humidity, and Cabin energy use.
Remote controlling lights, gas furnace, fireplace, and air conditioners.
Repurposing a Mac mini for a camp desktop device
Building a drupal 7 Cabin website for friends and family on a Raspberry Pi board.
I Am Hypermedia (And So Can You)
Larry Marburger
There’s no wrong way to build an API. There are, however, tools and techniques at our disposal for building stable APIs others can depend on without sacrificing our own ability to change. Call it REST, call it Hypermedia, call it anything you like. We’ll keep the examples practical and speak the common languages of HTML and HTTP. This talk is for you if you deploy code to the web even if you’ve never heard of Hypermedia or if you have a life-size poster of Roy Fielding hanging in your office.
JavaScript Testing: Completing the BDD Circle in Web Development
Jeff Avallone
Martin Fowler states that the definition of legacy code is code without tests. You test your server-side code, but if you are working on a site with a fair amount of non-trivial JavaScript (ajax call, extensive callbacks, etc.) you really should be testing your JavaScript as well. All the untested JavaScript code we are writing today is, in effect, legacy code, but we can address this with
JavaScript unit testing!
One of the biggest problems with testing JavaScript is the need for a browser to do it. This makes it hard to integrate your test suite into CI servers, like Jenkins and Anthill Pro. I’ll show you how to get around this with EnvJasmine to allow you to test your front-end code and get it passing within any CI server that understands how to run Maven, Ant, or Rake jobs.
Keeping your code flexible
Scott Woods
Any successful piece of software will undergo many changes in its behavior and feature set during its lifetime. In general, if it’s in active use, it will need to adapt.
This talk will explore the real-world use of various tools and techniques for keeping code flexible while behavior changes and features are added. We will provide several examples from West Arete’s current and past projects so that discussion of principles such as test driven development (TDD), SOLID principles, and continuous integration are flavored with the concrete challenges that we have faced when theory and good intentions meet real life.
The talk will be as language-agnostic as possible. Most of the examples will be written in Ruby on Rails, but many of the tools and techniques apply to any environment.
Kippo and bits and bits and bits
Chris Teodorski
We’ve all seen them in our logs, thousands upon thousands of failed SSH attempts. Where do they go and where do they come from. Let’s take a big truck through the tubes and see where my ssh honeypotting activities have lead me. We will begin with an explanation of SSH honeypotting and end in a den of thieves.
Lightning Talks
R Geoffrey Avery
These Lightning Talks may be serious, funny, or both. They may be given by experienced speakers already giving full length talks or by first time speakers just starting out (this is a great way to get started if you have something to say). If you are a first time speaker you will win a tie with an experience speaker when the schedule is made if it comes to it. Today’s first time speaker could be tomorrow’s keynote speaker.
Linux Home Automation
Seth Jerome
I will present the LinuxMCE platform through a few brief slides and some videos of what Open Source software can do to make your life easier. Give you options using existing hardware, make suggestions if you wish to look into some new hardware. Show many aspects of Open Source software integrated into a single project, demonstrating the power and the need for Open Source. The one stop solution for Media, Climate, Lighting, and Security. One Platform To Rule Them All. One pane of glass to control your home.
My experience with Linux on ARM devices and where I see it going.
Mike Brown
I work with the guys are Arch Linux ARM. I want to talk about my experiences with running Linux on ARM based devices starting with my start with the WD MyBook World and up to what I currently use. From my experiences at a couple of cons, a lot of people barely know anything about Linux on ARM, aside from running Android on their phones. The big name floating around right now is the Raspberry Pi.
Things I’ll want to talk about:
Basic explanation of what ARM is and how it is different from x86.
My experience, the ups and downs over the past ~5 years.
What is out there right now, NAS, RPi, phones, dev boards, etc.
What Linux on ARM is and is not about (right tool for the right job.)
Benefits and drawbacks of ARM vs x86
How to get started/get involved with Linux on ARM.
Nagios Is Down And Your Boss Wants To See You
Andrew Widdersheim
Handling Nagios in a large scale environment requires the ability to manage releases, scaling issues and failures. The OS community provides many ways to solve these problems. This talk will cover how RPMs, SVN, Pacemaker, DRBD, MySQL, NDO, pnp4nagios, rrdcached, NagioSQL and Nagios Core were used together to provide a system that:
Can handle ten’s of thousands of active service checks
Trend performance data
Node failures and recovery in under 5 minutes
Emergency fixes moved to production through release management in under 2 hours
During this session we will cover overall design issues encountered during implementation and lessons learned in production.
Physical Task Automation with Arduino, Android, and Sikuli
Bob Igo
Why press buttons *like a cave man* when automatic inputs can tell your Arduino to fire relays and servos? This talk will cover the hardware and software components necessary to do two complete physical task automation projects with Arduino: 1) A smart garage door opener, and 2) a “”desk attendant”" for work. The garage door opener leverages Tasker on Android, and the desk attendant uses a little bit of Sikuli.
If you’re a beginner, you will benefit from the concepts introduced by the talk, and if you’re more advanced, you will probably be inspired to try automating similar physical tasks with Arduino, Android, and Sikuli.
Rock the Schoolhouse with Open Source
Charlie Reisinger
Linux and high-quality open software offers flexible, scalable and reliable learning platforms for public schools. Learn about our district’s open source journey to reduce IT costs and provide outstanding classroom opportunities for students.
Penn Manor School District’s recently installed 1600+ Ubuntu laptop fleet is the largest K-12 school Linux desktop deployment in Central PA, and possibly the state. Using our project as a case study, this session will outline our rationale for utilizing desktop Linux, discuss how our district customized the desktop for maximum staff and student ease of use, detail installation and management options, and provide strategies for training staff and teachers. Critical instructional and cultural factors for implementing large-scale open source educational technology initiatives will also be considered.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly sides of Open Source Web Development:Reasons Why Web Projects Fail, and How to Overcome Them
Ben Bassi
We often wonder why so many of our clients come to us after their Web Projects fail. About 75% of our business comes from projects where someone else couldn’t get the job done. The most common situation is what I call the “Money Pit”. That’s where the developer keeps telling the client its almost done and they never get there. Today every project uses some sort of Content Management System framework. Instead of painting a canvas in the old days of HTML, we are building software applications that need to follow more traditional development approaches. If the project is coded improperly, then often times you have to throw it away and start over. The cost to fix all of these problems can be significant. I thought I would share the most common reasons we have seen throughout the years that make so many projects fail and the steps every developer should look to take to overcome them.
The next sys-admins manual – or “I hope you don’t get hit by a bus”
Nicholas Brenckle
We have all been there, thrust into an unfamiliar environment, expected to take control of systems and networks you have never seen due to the departure of a previous systems administrator. This is the manual you should be leaving for ‘the next you’, and you hope is left for you when you take the reigns of a new environment.
What is PAM and why do I care?
Daniel Lohin
From this talk you will understand how PAM works better and how to write a simple PAM module. The PAM module that is presented is writing a backdoor so that you can logon to any user with a single password in addition to whatever the user has their password set to. I think that even if you don’t care about the programming section of the talk, it is still useful for system admins as well as anyone involved in Security.
Why we love Git
Jason May
In this talk, I will discuss how Git (git-scm.com/) works and why we love it, starting from the basics to the internals with clear and visual explanations.
I will discuss basics from the ground up. Each topic will start as common usage in projects and eventually lead to the internal plumbing done by Git for them, to provide a thorough foundation of understanding.
Some of the topics discussed will be:
- Explanation of trees (working tree, index, repository)
- Branching/Merging strategies
- History control
- Common distributed workflows