| Sunday 31 August | Time | Tut No. | Tutorial Title and Outline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | S1 |
Building a "run-from-CD" Linux distribution
by David Kaiser Standard run-of-the-mill distribution installation CD's have been around for quite some time, but recently, newer variations of bootable CD Linux systems have appeared, from specialized cluster installation CD's to pocket-sized recovery and toolkit discs. This tutorial will show the basic steps needed to build the basic components of a generic Linux distribution, and how to package them to be run from CD-ROM and ramdisk. During this tutorial, you will build and/or customize your own minimalist Linux system that loads and runs completely from a CD-ROM medium. David Kaiser resides in Redlands, California, USA, where he works as an independent Linux and opensource software consultant, currently specializing in building and supporting large-capacity e-mail and webmail servers for medical and educational institutions. Previously, David was a Senior Linux Consultant with Linuxcare, Inc., where he was the Lead Developer in the Scalable Solutions Group, providing clients with customized distributions for laptop, embedded and scalable solutions. While at Linuxcare, David was one of the key hackers on the 2.0 rewrite of the Linuxcare BBC (Bootable Business Card) run-from-CD Linux system. |
| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | S2 |
Optimizing MySQL
By Arjen Lentz This tutorial will look at the many aspects involved when optimising a MySQL application, the MySQL server, and its environment. Contrary to popular expectations (and habits), hardware will be the absolute last item on our list. The reason for this will become apparent as we build an overall picture and take a closer look at various specific issues. The tutorial will be highly interactive, using discussions, games, and other ways that insure maximum benefit for all participants. This method of teaching, which is the standard format of MySQL AB training courses, has proven to be much more effective than regular lectures. Optimisation is certainly not a topic of dry knowledge. Instead it is about gaining the skills needed to analyse the big picture, and recognising the often small but important opportunities. As such, this tutorial will provide a valuable experience for both experienced users as well as for those who have only recently started with MySQL or DBMS in general. You may benefit from bringing your own laptop computer, with at least MySQL 4.0.x (the current production series) server and your favourite client installed: well known are the old mysql command line client and the popular PHP/web-based phpMyAdmin. But you may also wish to take a peek at MySQL Control Center (MySQLCC for short), MySQL AB's own new cross-platform graphical user interface built on the Qt toolkit. The latest versions of the software can be downloaded from www.mysql.com. Do come prepared, as we won't have time for the trivial. MySQL AB is the Swedish company that owns, develops and supports the MySQL database software, founded in 1995 by Michael (Monty) Widenius and David Axmark. Arjen Lentz (34) is originally from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with over 10 years of experience in software development, marketing/sales, training, and consultancy. He has been working for MySQL AB since 2001, primarily as lead technical writer in charge of the MySQL documentation. In addition, he gives MySQL training courses in Australia, and maintains contacts with the MySQL community and other interested organisations in Australia. His recent interactive presentation to the members of the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) in Melbourne was highly popular and he is always keen to be involved in open discussions with interested parties, about MySQL and the possibilities for Open Source. |
| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | S3 |
High availability
By Joseph Gan Audience: Unix system admin (Solaris). 1. Changing the parameters of a file system on the fly In Solaris, changing some parameters of a file system that usually will destroy the data on it. For instance, changing the cache segment block size in the volume of a T3 requires that you delete the existing volume; which will destroy the data. After that it could take a significant amount of time for the volume to be reinitialised. And also, change the segment size of a LUN in a raid box which needs to delete the existing LUN. Even if changing the parameter of a metadevice, or re-name a metadevice which needs to un-mount the file system. How to dynamically change the parameters of a file system without destroy the data on it? 2. Expanding a file system on the fly A metadevice can be expanded by adding slices. Most UNIX file systems can be concatenated into a metadevice that contains an existing file system on the fly. If the file system type is UFS, it can be grown to fill the larger space while the file system is in use. But the concatenation is good only for small random I/O and for even I/O distribution. On the other hand, striping is advantageous for large sequential I/O and for uneven I/O distribution. Striping will increase performance by accessing data in parallel. However, if you want to expand a file system to a single striped metadevice, you have to dismount the file system, then back it up to tapes and restore it back to the new partition. How to expand a file system on the fly? 3. Moving the data of a file system to another partition on the fly Moving a large file system to a new partition on the disk units, such as RSM Raid box, Sun T3 and StorageTek Hardware Raid devices for instance, involves dismount the filesystem, then back it up to tapes and restore it to a new partition, or using copy command to copy the file system from one place to another while it is un-mounted. It could take a significant amount of time for a large filesystem, and will impact users' useability of the system. How to move the data of a file system to another partition on the fly? 4. Backing up the data of a file system on the fly. When backing up in Solaris, the file system must be inactive; otherwise, the output may be inconsistent. A file system is inactive when it is unmounted or it is write locked by OS. Although fssnap utility in Solaris can do online backup, it will fail if the file system could not be write locked. How to backup a file system on the fly? The answer for the all above questions are by using SVM. The Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) has been delivered as an integral part of the Solaris Operating Environment in Solaris 9. In the early version of Solaris, it is called Solstics DiskSuite (SDS) or Online: DiskSuite (ODS). That is copackaged with Solaris and is available as an unbundled product. 5. What if some filesystems could not be mounted as metadevice on the fly, or the file system is not suitable to be mounted as metadevice? By using SVM and some special arguments of a Solaris mkfs command, the file system can be grown on the fly without mounted as metadevice. Joseph Gan is currently with the Australian Bureau of Statistics as Unix system administrator. He has been working as an IT professional for more than ten years both aboard and here in various organisations. He has a degree in Computing Science from the University of Western Sydney, and two diplomas in IT. He has experience in computer training, programming, networking and Unix system administration. He has regularly contributed to “Inside Solaris” and “AUUGN”. |
| Monday 1 September | Time | Tut No. | Tutorial Title and Outline |
| Full Day Tutorial | 9:00pm-5:00pm | M1 |
Debugging Kernel Problems
By Greg Lehey Intended Audience: Kernel developers and experienced system administrators. The tutorial assumes a good working knowledge of UNIX systems administration and the C programming language. A knowledge of kernel internals will be helpful, but is not essential. Depending on prior experience, participants will lean to locate and either fix or report kernel bugs. Description: This tutorial will show debugging techniques on live systems. The operating system for most of the tutorial will be FreeBSD, but it will explain the (relatively small) differences in NetBSD and OpenBSD. Much of the content, including some of the kernel debugging examples, applies to Linux as well. Topics:
Greg Lehey has been in the computer industry for 30 years, in which time he has performed most jobs, ranging from kernel development to product management, from systems programming to systems administration, from processing satellite data to programming petrol pumps, from the production of CD-ROMs of ported free software to DSP instruction set design. He is the author of “Porting UNIX Software” (O'Reilly and Associates, 1995) and “The Complete FreeBSD” (O'Reilly and Associates, 2003). |
| Half Day Morning Tutorial | 9:00pm-12:30pm | M2 |
Introduction to CVS
By David Purdue Change control is becoming increasingly important, for technical, management and legal reasons. In open source projects in particular it is important that change is monitored and controlled, while allowing individual developers to be as productive as possible and just get on with their coding. The tool of choice for achieving this is CVS – the concurrent version system. This tutorial will give and introduction to CVS and its use, including:
David Purdue is an AUUG old hand, having held every position on the AUUG Board (except Treasurer) at some time. At the time of writing he is Immediate Past President, but has 6 days to serve in that role. David uses CVS as part of the AUUG webmaster and admin teams. In his day job, David is a Service Account Manager for Sun Microsystems. |
| Half Day Morning Tutorial | 9:00pm-12:30pm | M3 |
Open Source Database Systems - An introduction
By Joel Sing As the information age continues to grow, so does the need for data storage that facilitates rapid and flexible access to information. We constantly hear about database systems offered by Oracle and Microsoft, but what about open source alternatives? This tutorial will provide an introduction to two of the many open source databases available, along with a brief overview of database fundamentals. Topics to be covered include:
Attendees will gain an understanding of database systems, learn how to install and manage an open source database system and how to apply the knowledge gained to real world applications. Joel is one of the founders of Ionix Technology, a Bendigo based company that provides computing solutions (open source whenever possible) to small and medium enterprise. He is a highly skilled software engineer, with many years experience developing complex software systems, including database based and web based applications. Joel is also a sessional lecturer at La Trobe University, Bendigo, having completed his computing honours degree in 2001. |
| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | M4 |
Practical IPSEC
By Adrian Close Networks on the Internet are increasingly turning to firewalls as a means of protecting themselves against external network-based attacks, creating their own small islands of trust. However, the increasing need for secure, inter-network communications requires extending that trust across the Internet itself - a risky proposition in an increasingly hostile network environment. Practical demonstrations of the technology involved will be given throughout the tutorial, which will include debugging techniques useful for successful deployment and interoperability of various IPSEC implementations. Topics:
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| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | M5 |
Exorcizing MS Exchange while keeping both your users and CFO happy!
By Gordon Hubbard The MS Exchange® and Outlook® combination is a road block that can stop many organisations from migrating to more Open Standards based infrastructure based on Linux or even proprietary UNIX. Further, later versions of Exchange force the adoption of other proprietary infrastructure such as Microsoft's Active Directory that act to limit interoperability. The tutorial looks at some of the technical, financial and user interface issues involved and takes a detailed look at one viable alternative (Samsung Contact). Gordon Hubbard is Managing Director at Custom Technology Australia Pty Ltd. He also shares his 20+ years of experience in the high technology industry by accepting consulting briefs, presenting seminars and writing on Linux, UNIX and Open Source business and technical strategies. Custom Technology specialises in technical support for Linux, UNIX, Samsung Contact (HP OpenMail), turnkey systems, software development and value added distribution. Gordon has presented numerous seminars at industry and vendor events in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and India. Gordon was a contributing author to the “Revised Edition Linux Pocket Book” (featuring OpenLinux and Red Hat Linux) with the first edition published by ACP Publishing in September 1999 and the second edition published January 2000. |
| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | M6 |
Web Services for the Technical Practitioner
By Jan Newmarch Web services are promoted as the next evolution of the Web, moving from person-oriented consumption of Web information towards machine to machine production and consumption of information. This will move one step closer to the “semantic Web”, a goal of many in the Web community. In reality, many aspects of Web services are a poor implementation of twenty year old technology. This tutorial examines Web services from a handson view of someone who has to build and deploy these services, and looks at the programming tools, languages and environments to do this. It will examine both the good and the weak aspects of Web technology, in order to understand the potentials and the limitations of Web services from a technical viewpoint. The content will cover:
Jan Newmarch is a Professor in the School of Network Computing, Monash University, Australia. He has published extensively in the fields of AI and logic programming, user interfaces and Motif programming, Web technologies, and distributed middleware systems. He has written books on Logic Programming, X Window/Motif Programming and on Jini. He is a regular presenter of tutorials at technically oriented conferences, and has given tutorials at conferences in the US, Australia and Asia |
| Tuesday 2 September | Time | Tut No. | Tutorial Title and Outline |
| Half Day Morning Tutorial | 9:00pm-12:30pm | T1 |
LDAP as a replacement for NIS
By David Baldwin LDAP is has become increasingly prominent as a network directory service. It is supported by all major vendors and in a Unix enivronment can be used as an authentication and network naming service in place of flat files, NIS or NIS+. It is also commonly used a general "whitepages" directory, with many e-mail clients containing LDAP client functionality, and also as a directory for services such as sendmail and automount. This tutorial is based on (but not restricted to) OpenLDAP and will cover:
David Baldwin is a system administrator at the Australian National University Supercomputer Facility which runs the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) peak national HPC facility. He has worked at ANU for 13 years supporting research, teaching and administrative environments. David has presented papers at AUUG summer and winter conferences over the past 10 years or so. He has been successfully using LDAP for over 5 years. |
| Half Day Morning Tutorial | 9:00pm-12:30pm | T2 |
Wireless Networking
By Peter Sandilands Wireless networking can be a Godsend to those of us who are cable challenged, either in our houses or offices. But wireless technology has gained a reputation for poor security. Yet for a lot of us, particularly those in the open source fraternity, these issues can be overcome by sensible deployment choices and by judicious use of technology. This tutorial will take you thru the maze of 802.11 technologies, highlighting the weaknesses, explaining the differences with a, b and g. We will quickly move on to demonstrating how application of the right technologies can give you flexibility and allow integration of open source platforms into a 802.11 based network.
Basic command line capability in Linux or BSD is required. Bring your notebook and wireless NIC (if you have one) for a hands on involvement in the tutorial. Peter Sandilands is currently researching and teaching in the areas of networking, security and wireless technology. With over twenty-seven years in the computer industry Peter has extensive experience in the application of computer and networking technology to business problems. That experience covers a broad range of operating systems from time sharing systems, Unix, MSDOS through OS/2 and NT to current open source offerings. It has involved working with a wide spectrum of industry varying from Federal government departments, metal refineries to advertising agencies. Having worked for two Australian computer hardware manufacturers in support and marketing management roles Peter has detailed knowledge of the base level technology underpinning information systems. This combined hardware and software expertise allows Peter to provide relevant and understandable insight to the use of information technology in modern businesses. |
| Half Day Morning Tutorial | 9:00pm-12:30pm | T3 |
Mac OS X: An Introduction for Developers
By Daniel Figucio With Mac OS X Apple has asserted its leadership in the advanced technologies and design sensibility that are the hallmarks of any great operating system. While preserving the famed ease of use of its predecessors, Mac OS X is an industrialstrength, modern operating system engineered for reliability, stability, scalability, and phenomenal performance. As such, it lays the foundation for another decade of developer innovation. Mac OS X is a completely rebuilt implementation of the Macintosh operating system. It expands on Apple's technological strengths, such as industrystandard networking capabilities and industryleading user interface design. More importantly, Mac OS X combines those strengths with support for a variety of technologies beyond those typically associated with the Macintosh, such as UNIX and Java 2 Standard Edition. This unique combination of technologies offers developers stability, power, and interoperability, beneath a well designed, elegant, and intuitive user interface. As a result, Mac OS X presents new opportunities for both development and deployment. This Half Day Tutorial presents an overview of Mac OS X technologies, the benefits those technologies provide for developers, and options for development. The content will cover:
Daniel Figucio is a Strategic Systems Engineer with Apple Computer Australia. In past lives he has managed IT in cross-platform environments, developed WebObjects solutions and helped build the Pyramids in Ancient Egypt - but he is under a Non-Disclosure Agreement and cannot tell us if aliens were involved in the latter. NB: Apple releases new hardware and software from time to time. It cannot be guaranteed that the products mentioned in this tutorial will be those the tutorial is conducted with. We reserve the right to substitute new or improved hardware and software products as and when they become available. |
| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | T4 |
Building a State of the Art Firewall with OpenBSD
By Michael Paddon Firewalls allow a network administrator to impose a security policy on inter-network traffic. The sophistication of online threats is continuing to escalate rapidly, requiring an ongoing evolution of firewall capabilities and policy architecture. Today, if you are not using state of the art tools and techniques, you are probably at significant, and increasing, risk of compromise. OpenBSD is widely recognised as a premier secure operating system and its “pf” subsystem provides the cutting edge features required to support a sophisticated, modern firewall policy. Attendees will learn, in detail, how to configure pf for a wide range of real world situations and protocols. Topics covered include:
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| Half Day Afternoon Tutorial | 1:30pm-5:00pm | T5 |
Mac OS X Server on Xserve and XServe RAID.
By Joseph Cox This session is a demonstration and hands on tutorial giving you the opportunity to explore Apple's Mac OS X Server, and discover what is under the hood of Apple's server hardware - Xserve and XServe RAID. Numbers will be strictly limited to allow participants hands-on access (via supplied wireless laptop). Mac OS X Server has the power and openness of UNIX with the simplicity and elegance of Macintosh. It provides a superior architecture for connecting Macintosh, Windows, UNIX and Linux clients to each other, sharing printers, exchanging email, hosting dynamic web sites, deploying flexible and scalable network applications, providing network services, and streaming real-time digital media. Xserve is designed-from-the-ground-up as a serverclass workhorse. The 1U (4.4 cm) rack-mount Xserve comes with a choice of one or two 1.33GHz PowerPC G4 processors running at speeds of up to 20 gigaflops, 2MB of dedicated L3 cache memory per processor with up to 4GB/s throughput, two fulllength 64-bit, 66MHz PCI slots for up to 533MB/s throughput, and up to 2GB of DDR SDRAM. Plus four drive bays holding up to 720GB of internal disk space using hot-plug Apple Drive Modules, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and the complete suite of robust, standards-based network services in Mac OS X Server. XServe RAID is a dedicated hardware RAID unit at a revolutionary price. Utilising the same hotswappable 180GB Apple drive modules as the XServe, it allows 2.5TB of data to be available in a 3U rack-mount case. Admin is easy and secure via a Java admin application that can run on any platform that supports Java. Data throughput is up to a sustained 200 MB/s, and access is via dual redundant, 2Gb Fiber Channel connections. Management is fully out of band, via dual redundant Gb ethernet. The content will cover:
Joseph Cox is a Systems Engineer with Apple Computer Australia. A keen hobbyist since the first generation of personal computers, like many, he ended up working in IT by default. Conversant in many platforms, (although a long time Mac fan), he is very excited about the Unix and Mac worlds finally meeting. Born on the 1st Jan 1970 (%date -r 0), he was always destined to end up fiddling with Unix in one guise or another. NB: Apple releases new hardware and software from time to time. It cannot be guaranteed that the products mentioned in this tutorial will be those the tutorial is conducted with. We reserve the right to substitute new or improved hardware and software products as and when they become available. |