Business

Four years ago I needed a new four-line phone system for my home business and the choices were astonishingly limited. After finding that the only reasonable four-line cordless phone system cost over $2000,I discovered Asterisk, a Linux based open source PBX and decided to risk that path. Along the way I've learned a few things I think are worth knowing before jumping in.

This talk is a live version of a recurring Fedora Classroom session taught both online and in-person at classrooms as part of the first-day curriculum for POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, a week-long cultural immersion workshop for university faculty looking to get their students involved in open source communities). The Unix design philosophy of modularity - simple parts that each do one thing well, connected by clean interfaces - applies to communication workflows as well as code ones. We'll give a live demonstration of how a collection of simple open source communication tools are used by the Fedora Project to coordinate thousands of technical and nontechnical contributions on a technically complex, rapidly moving, large-scale Linux distribution - all in a decentralized manner. Although each tool by itself is simple to learn and use, the magic comes in the interactions between these tools and the communication culture it makes possible in the communities that fluently use it. We'll go through both technology usage and cultural norms, with publicly available slides and resources for full tutorials and setup instructions for each tool available to all attendees by the start of the presentaion. We'll also explain how this ecosystem of tools can be deployed in your internal infrastructure and applied to communications within a school or industry team. Tools covered: * IRC: synchronous communication * supybot / IRC bots: synchronous context-bridging * etherpad: synchronous text editing * mediawiki: asynchronous text editing, documentation * ticket trackers: asynchronous task-tracking * blog planets: asynchronous context-providance * Classrooms: structures for synchronous community teaching

Whether you need a simple scalable development virtual machine environment or need to deploy a large cloud production environment, you need a tool that is easy to use, deploy, and maintain. Ganeti is a clustered virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM. It is similar to libvirt in many aspects, but different in others such as its built-in cluster support using DRBD. The focus will be on a use case at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) where we were faced with scaling, performance, and reliability issues with our existing VM infrastructure. I’ll cover the overall design and features of Ganeti along with the basics of installing it. Additionally I’ll walk through some of the basic operations you may encounter (deployment, failover, expansion, hardware failures, etc). I'll also cover some tools that we are using to help manage our clusters.