old habits die hard

Yesterday, I attended to the ‘Red Hat Tech Happy Hour‘ event hosted on the ‘Centro de Novas Technoloxías de Galicia‘, located in Santiago de Compostela.

This kind of events are normally developed in Madrid, where Red Hat (RH) maintains their satellite offices here in Spain, so it was a good opportunity to know about the latest products being marketed and sold by the North Carolina company here at home

In brief, this event focused on building virtual data centers (pros and cons) and how some major companies are using this kind of technology.

After the (expected) product portfolio introduction, it was easy confirming about the RH business based on integration and management of open technologies splitting its portfolio among different lines:

* Products (server vs client)
* Systems management (RH Network)
* Storage management (GFS, Cluster Suite)
* Security management (Directory Server Certificate System)
* Services (professional, learning and support)
* Corporate middleware (JBoss stuff)

Maybe the big technical shift in virtualization for RH in the middle term will be “forgetting” about Xen and switching to KVM, a more efficient and better designed virtualization solution from my point of view in this moment.

By the way, we comment about the recent acquired companies by RH, as the Israeli Qumranet (September 2008) with great expertise in KVM and desktop virtualization technologies. Without any doubt, all this expertise and internal developments will be translated in better web management tools as we checked for some beta tools being used in live demos.

Along the event, we talked about several RH reference customers using virtual data centers such as Amazon or DreamWorks or how RH is improving SPICE in order to get a better user experience in desktop virtualization.

Good time with the RH friends!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS) is gone and nearly two weeks later I am reporting … yup!

In any case, I couldn’t attend the whole GCDS. I left Gran Canaria on Tuesday but the rest of Igalians attended to the whole event. As usual, Berto reported his personal impressions and it is always enough for me when I need to keep me up to date. Thank you Berto!

It was a pity, I couldn’t enjoy the GCDS final days although I saw a lot of known faces in the summit and I have to say it; I enjoy a lot when I listen to Federico talking. He is really a captivating speaker

To go forward reporting on those five days, I have to say I liked several talks. In any particular order I would like to highlight the following ones …

* Robert Lefkowitz: “Liberal Software” (keynote)
* Walter Bender: “The Sugar learning platform and the future of the desktop” (keynote)
* Owen Taylor: “Introduction to the GNOME Shell”
* Thorsten Prante: “GNOME Zeitgeist”
* Alexandra Leisse: “Managing the Unmanageable, or: Community Building 101″
* Kate Alhola: “Animated UI technologies in maemo 5 (Fremantle)”

Mark Shuttleworth was at GCDS too, and besides taking a photo with us , he agreed to give an interview about GNOME 3.0. You can read here.

In brief, good hacking time with great people!

Yesterday we enjoyed a great inauguration party. Thank you everybody!

from Quique’s gallery

Check more pics here, here or here

This last Thursday I enjoyed two Stallman’s lectures in Vigo. Some mates blogged out about it in their blogs so you can know every detail in this event easily if you are interested. If you don’t know I am talking about you can read the last Juanjo’s or Joaquim’s post in order to get the full details

In this event I listened the Stallman’s message and his particular way to spread it with huge curiosity. He got some really interesting momentum in the lectures although I would like to highlight the Q&A time where he answered several interesting questions indeed. Specifically, he shared his thoughts and insights on the software libre movement (SLM) and how it fits in the software libre industry currently. Thereby he flied over hot topics such as the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, SaaS and the SLM or the GPL’s last version among others.

I have to recognize I was surprised when he talked about the GNU/Linux integration and how he was disappointed when the GNU project took off like a rocket with the Linux kernel on board while the different communities identified the GNU project with the kernel only calling it Linux alone instead GNU/Linux.

Stallman talked about the Linux community too and how the distributions share this piece of software and how their decisions, particularly those ones related to non free drivers and firmwares impact every distribution and the movement itself.

Last, but not least, he talked about his experience making decisions and how he made one difficult decision between the micro and monolithic kernel design and how it changed a lot of things in the project’s history.

This last Thursday Ernst Leiss gave a direct speech here at A Coruña. He used his classic presentation titled “Software Under Siege: Viruses and Worms” and, this time, I was able to attend and enjoy every comment

Ernst Leiss wrote “Principles of Data Security” (1982, Plenum) and “Software Under Siege” (1990, Elsevier) among other several reference works targeting digital information security so it was a great opportunity to discuss with him in person about some really interesting topics regarding to undecidible problems and detection algorithms, adding time variable on the Cohen’s seminal work or discussing about the infection routine for the Jerusalem virus (a 22 years old virus!)

On the other hand, we had some time to comment on the antivirus industry and its current research lines.

Awesome speech!

Two Mondays ago, I came back from Brussels together with good friends (… I posted here about our trip to FOSDEM and  you can find another Igalians‘ posts about it here, here, here and here too!) so in this post just only I’d like to talk about the technical talks which I could see there.

In the first place I could attend to Magnus Hagander talk about what’s coming in PostgreSQL 8.4. It was a very really interesting talk covering practical examples and cutting-edge SQL showing the new features.

Regarding to database track I had selected Replication, Replication, Replication, by Simon Riggs, and Filesystem I/O From a Database, by Selena Deckermann, but I couldn’t attend due to the extreme parallelization on FOSDEM. OWASP Testing Guide v3 and Secure Software Development was my second talk indeed. This speech showed the OWASP testing methodology and how it can be used in order to implement a software development lifecycle with security in mind. Matteo Meucci gave us a tour all around the project with focus on web application security.

My next choice was Lenz Grimmer who talked about HA with his talk called MySQL High Availability Solutions. He showed some topologies, tips, pointers and so on. I liked this talk really.

With Upstart and its future roadmap I reached Ext4 where Ts’o discussed about the history of ext4, its features, advantages and some really interesting benchmarks. Maybe in this presentation I’d like to highlight his comments on multi block allocation, delayed allocation and extents. Amazing speech!

Arrived in Brussels after a long trip due to some unexpected delays in Madrid. At last among airports and flights it went by six hours

After checked in at the hotel we visited Grand Place, had dinner in a belgium restaurant and went to the beer event where we tasted the flavour of different beers with good folks. Now it’s time to sleep, it’s 4:40, so see you in FOSDEM tomorrow!

Information security, network attacks, network defense and vulnerability management were the main topics this past weekend at Master on Free Software. Two days talking and playing with advanced networks attacks and defenses together with vulnerability management at Vigo (great city!)

As you know, the last year we handled different attacks and techniques showing practical countermeasures in order to get more secure configurations for our systems, so this year we decided to complete this approach including the best security management practices for persons in charge of security strategy and tactic in organizations.

In detail, we covered the following topics:

• Benefits of good security practices
• Security methodology
• Risk analysis and defense models
• Network architectures
• Network device security
• Integrity and availability architecture

Vulnerability management was a hot topic too. We introduced responsible disclosure and how it relates to the free software community …

9 days to FOSDEM … yes, this year I’ll travel to the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium) in order to attend to FOSDEM meetings.

Today, I was reviewing the grid and seeing some numbers. We’ll enjoy 263 talks in 20 rooms (in parallel) with 258 speakers covering really interesting topics (keynotes, security, kernel, systems, languages, availability, fault tolerance, embedded… there is a great deal of choice, it sounds really fine!

This last friday I taught Linux networking at Master on Free Software. As you know it’s the second edition and this time I was in charge of setting the basis of Linux networking for the new students.

In this lesson we saw, other than typical configurations and trouble shooting, some theory covering the current networking models (concepts, protocols, applications and so on) and a full revision about the networking stack implementation together with source code for the Linux kernel.

Reviewing the planning, security is the next battlefield …