USENIX 1.0

I got home from LISA on Friday night. It's always a bit of a strange conference for me -- on the one hand, it's great to be around so many smart people interested in system administration, but on the other hand, it's really frustrating to have such a large group of smart people not really moving forward.

It's a stupid metric, but as an example, there is exactly one post on Technorati tagged with lisa2007 (other than my own), and it's by a person whose nick is that tag. Mark Hinkle also blogged about it, but he didn't tag his post such that you'd find it on Technorati.

The upside of this fact is that I can speak as badly as I want about the conference and the organization without much fear of repercussion, but the downside is that, well, no one's really talking about either one other than while at the conference.

USENIX is pushing me to write a booklet about Puppet, but I've demurred so far because their audience is too small. If they want a larger audience, they need to get this conversation going more, they need to encourage blogging, and, possibly most importantly, they need to declare a common tag that everyone can and should use when talking about LISA. Just this little reminder would get people thinking about blogging.

Toward that end, I've emailed next year's chair, Mario Obejas, about specifying an explicit tag for LISA blogging, along with awards for best sysadmin blogger and best LISA blog post. Maybe he'll say yes, and maybe it'll make a difference.

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 | Tags: conference, usenix, lisa, lisa07, lisa2007

Finding Other Puppet Users

I've been using TripIt for a few months now to manage my travel -- it's been great for handling details like arrival/departure times, confirmation numbers, addresses, and just about all the other crap you have to know but don't want to deal with when traveling.

I'm always looking for even better solutions, though, so I asked Dopplr for an invitation and got one last week while at LISA. Its focus is on figuring out when you and your friends will intersect in a given city, rather than on handling the details of the travel. It's somewhat frustruting having to manage two travel sites (hopefully I'll be able to use my TripIt schedule in Dopplr at some point, since Dopplr is more of a social network built around travel than a travel site), but it's definitely worth it at this point.

If you're interested in an invite to Dopplr, send me a note. I'm certainly interested in knowing when I'll be in a city with Puppet users.

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, dopplr, puppet, meetup, tripit, lisa, lisa07, lisa2007

LISA Progress Report

I'm at LISA again, in Dallas this year (which makes my fourth trip to Texas in the last few months). I ran a configuration management BoF on Tuesday night and a Puppet BoF last night. Both of them were well-attended, and we maintained good discussion through almost the entire two hours in both cases without having to resort to presentations, which I'm very happy about.

LISA itself doesn't seem to have changed all that much over the years. In fact, someone complained to me that USENIX should be prescribing antidepressants before the config-mgmt BoF because it hasn't changed since he was last there four years ago (he did allow that Puppet was a significant change, fortunately). I unfortunately agree -- we're still discussing what the term means and how we should move forward.

This year, the biggest source of discussion in the BoF was whether and how to support ad-hoc, manual administration in an automated world. Most people in the room who spoke up wanted their automation tools to support it, but to me it's like asking compiler writers to support writing in assembly when necessary. My perspective is that assembly is a separate problem; if you want to write assembly, then do so, but don't expect my compiler to know or care that you're doing so, and certainly don't expect my compiler to extract semantics from the assembly that you wrote.

I know I've barely been blogging, and I'm going to try to fix that. I've been moving painfully slowly on this latest release, and I'm embarrassed enough at the lack of progress that I haven't wanted to publicize that, but I realize that that's a big mistake; I should instead be advertising what I'm doing and what problems I'm having (and solving), so people can clearly see what's being accomplished, even if it isn't in the form of a release.

So, hopefully, I'll start blogging more, including discussion of what's going on development-wise.

I'm also planning on blogging the test Puppet scripts that I write - these are simple scripts that I use to verify behaviour manually. For instance, here is the code currently at ~/bin/test.pp:

class yayness {
    $testing = funtest
}

class other {
    include yayness
    $value = $yayness::testing
    notify { "my value is '$value'": }
}

include other

The purpose of this was to test that the include method was no longer doing lazy evaluation.

I've also just joined Dopplr, which helps people who travel track their friends' travel, hopefully helping them to meet up in the various destinations. I use TripIt to organize my travel, but Dopplr is really a different kind of service and is relatively complementary -- TripIt is useful for keeping track of all of the details I need when traveling (confirmation codes, times, etc.), while Dopplr can hopefully allow me to meet up with friends who are in town while I'm traveling.

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, lisa, lisa2007, usenix, dallas, conference, puppet, lisa07