LISA ‘05 days 3 and 4: Strinking when the iron is hot
It has been an interesting few days at the LISA conference in San Diego. I learned more than I will probably ever use with CFengine in the Advanced Topics in Host Configuration and Maintenance with Cfengine talk, followed in the afternoon by the very informative Solaris 10 Security Features Workshop. I feel as though I actually could comfortably start using Solaris 10 and containers, something that I’ve been meaning to get around to.
Today was a general track day. I went to a bunch of refereed papers talks, then I drank from the LISA knowledge fire-hose that is known as “Hit the ground running” and learned way more about AFS and VOIP than will ever be useful to me.
Come nightfall on wednesday, I prepared for my Virtualization in Production BoF. I came 15 minutes early, and the room was already half-full of people interested in just virtualization. Two employees from XenSource were there, along with three or four people from VMware, ready to field questions. Come 7pm, the room was full. I expected about 10 people, but over 100 attended! It was a very informative workshop, with exchanges about VMware, Xen, and UML. About 36 people joined my virtualization mailing list, so the post BoF discussion can continue. People actually thanked me after the BoF for suggesting the talk, wondering why there were no talks on Xen during LISA: the one place perfect for such a topic.
After the BoF, I had a great conversation with a Sun N1 developer about his project. I find it very interesting that Sun is using Xen in their grid product, showing that Sun really does know the line between containers and virtualization when it comes to large computational tasks. I’m going to do a bit of digging around between the refereed talks I went to and the N1 discussion I had: I think I may have a new idea for a thesis project.