Ever needed to build a package quickly from a tarball or folder structure without having to write spec files or Debian control files? What about converting rpm’s to deb’s, deb’s to rpm’s, RubyGems to system packages, Python packages to system packages, or even all of the above over to full fledged Puppet modules?

fpm does all of the above for you. What’s more is that there are other open source projects, such as fpm-cookery, that allow you to define how to build packages from scratch with a single manifest, and have it build packages in a package format agnostic way.

We will be talking about how to get started, how you can use fpm-cookery to replace repositories of spec files and Debian related packaging files, and what a build system would look like with these two programs.

Bio:

Ian Paredes recently joined Amazon Web Services as a systems engineer for both the CloudFront and Route 53 teams. He’s worked in a variety of environments, with most of his experience being in administering high performance websites and automating entire stacks with configuration management systems. He has been in the industry for
three years.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Eric will be introducing MongoDB, an open source document-oriented database system. This cross-platform “NoSQL” database has been production ready for over a year. Come learn about this exciting alternative to relational database management systems.

Eric recently joined VAR Dynamics, a SaaS provider, as a systems engineer. He has been working in the web hosting industry as a systems administrator for the past twelve years.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

To avoid problems with obtaining a room block in the hotel we’ve gone ahead and reserved Friday and Saturday 15 & 16 MAR, 2013. Go ahead, put it on your calendar, you know you want to.

Please spread the word!

Some questions to get the discussion going are:

• What is the difference between customer-facing services and internal IT? What can we do to take advantage of scale between them?
• What are your plans/ideas for handling the proliferation of mobile devices that need access to your network?
• What is better -  bring your own device (BYOD) or company provided device (CPD)?
• How do you handle authentication when many of the core IT services are being outsourced to external providers?
• How are you taking advantage of social technologies in your workplace?
• What are the 3 major changes you have see in IT in the last 5 years?
• What are the best ways to find new IT employees?
• Do you have information overload?  If so, how are you dealing with it?

———-

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

AB will provide an overview of global file systems and discuss how the Gluster global filesystem deals with the technical issues of meta data, locking, speed, and redundacy.

As CTO and Co-founder, AB sets the vision and strategy for the Gluster product platform. Prior to Gluster, AB served as CTO at California Digital Corporation, where his work led to the scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. He drove the adoption of
cluster computing and GNU/Linux at enterprise data centers and helped close strategic accounts at CDC. In 2004, AB led the development of the world’s second fastest Supercomputer “Thunder”, for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AB also serves on the board of “Free Software Foundation -
India”. He is the author / contributor of various other Free Software projects like GNU FreeIPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), GNU Garp (Gratuitous ARP Daemon), bios-config (edit/replicate CMOS parameters), librpci/hdb (RPC interpose for GNU Hurd) and Hymn/PlayFair (iTunes ripper), GNU Freetalk (Scheme extensible messenger for Jabber, Google talk), and Freehoo (Scheme extensible messenger for YahooIM). He holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.

———-

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

http://www.casitconf.org/casitconf12/Registration/

Deadline for Early Bird discount: Wednesday March 7th.

The full conference schedule is available now:

http://www.casitconf.org/casitconf12/schedule/

Featuring great tutorials such as:

Tom Limoncelli: Time management for System Administrators

Mike Pennacchi: Deep Packet Inspection using Wireshark

Nadine Miller: Technical Resume Writing

Aleksey Tsalolikhin: Sysadmin Basics: Power Editing with vi

and many more.

Register early!
We expect sessions to fill up as rooms have limited capacity.

Harvey will be talking about how to multi-boot systems from a USB drive
and the reasons you may want to do this. This is a useful technique
for Sys Admins who are in a small-medium support teams.

Harvey is a Univ of Wash pensioner who still does sys admin part-time,
short term, so far not at UW. I am co-leader of Univ of Wash Retirement
Association Computer Interest Group.

———-

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Outstanding end-user support is not just a matter of having great technical knowledge. Successful IT pros build great careers by also understanding the importance of human-relations. Part technologist, part psychologist, the exceptional IT professional understands that there is an art to using technology as the solution for workplace problems. This presentation will focus on helping IT professionals deliver great end-user support by knowing how to combine the technical aspects of the job with an empathetic (and occasionally sympathetic) ear. Don will also cover how to use emotional intelligence techniques to manage emotionally-charged situations, and he’ll conclude with a section on stress management.

Don R. Crawley is President/Chief Technologist at soundtraining.net, the Seattle-based I.T. training firm. He holds multiple technical certifications and is the author of five books on various topics for I.T. professionals, including “The Compassionate Geek: Mastering Customer Service for I.T. Professionals”. He has spoken before audiences in all 50 states, throughout Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

———-

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Come join us to hear from the attendees of the LISA ’11 conference things they thought were note worthy and that the rest of us might want to look into.

———-

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

In other words, test post is a test post.