Coming up this Saturday at UTOSC 2012, we will be setting up a room dedicated to boardgames. We’ll be LA 122 starting at 10am and going until someone kicks us out of the building. It could be a fairly late night of boardgame fun!!

If you plan on attending any or all of the boardgames session at UTOSC, please bring your boardgames. Mark them in some fashion with your name, and bring them down! We need tons of games as many people will come to play!

Myself, I’ll be bringing at least the following games, possibly more:

• Mag Blast
• Ticket to Ride (USA and Europe)
• Small World
• Killer Bunnies
• Dominion
• Apples to Apples
• Bang!

Bring your games or come and play what is there. Either way it should be a blast!

Cheers,

herlo

The first will be on my latest project, GoOSe Linux – Rebuilding Enterprise Linux the ‘Community’ Way at 11:15am on Thursday, May 3.. If you ever wondered why CentOS took so long to rebuild Enterprise Linux, wondered what other options are out there, or even were just curious how Linux is built, come by and listen. It will be entertaining and enlightening.

The second talk will be Koji – A Reliable, Repeatable Build Environment, 4pm on Thursday, May 3. If you aren’t aware of what Koji does, it builds and manages RPMs. While we use it for the GoOSe project, many folks need a simple and clean way to build packages in a repeatable and reliable way.  Koji can also build LiveCD/LiveDVD images, manages repositories, tags builds and much, much more.

The last presentation I will be giving is ‘The State of Open Source‘, it’s a keynote presentation at 1:30pm on Friday, May 4. Expect this talk to be light and fun! I hope everyone comes out and enjoys this talk as well.

Additionally, it looks like Victor and the gang have created badges for you to put on your blog, Facebook, Google+, etc. so get them out there and come hang out at UTOSC 2012!

Cheers,

herlo

If you attend the event, you will receive two study guides and an ec2 instance for about 24-hours. The idea is that you will spend the day today studying with others to improve your system administration skills. There are no instructors, but I will be there to get the ec2 instances setup and help with any non-study related issues.

If you are interested in the sysadminSG,  come visit us at SCaLE10x today:

Cheers,

Herlo

Now we’re announcing the Sysadmin Study Group will be the Fedora Activity Day at SCaLE 10x!

So Exciting!

Well, it’s been a week since the first run of my ec2 instances for the SysadminSG (or System Administrators Study Group).Things look promising. The folks over in #fedora-cloud and #boxgrinder have been especially helpful! Thanks a ton msavy and gholms and rbergeron too!

The plan here is to grant every user in a room access to an ec2 instance for 24-hours. It may be shorter or longer, depending on a few unknowns at this time. After some additional testing tonight, I think just a bit more work and the workshop will ready. We still need to update the Study Guide to match the RHEL6 RHCSA exam and RHCE exam requirements, so if anyone wants to take that on, just let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.

If you are looking to do some RHCE prep with others, come on down to the Sysadmin SG workshop at either FUDCon Blacksburg or SCaLE 10x! We look forward to seeing you there!

Cheers,

Herlo

WE NEED YOU

Come by the UTOS Project day from 9am to 11am to hear what we have planned for the future and how you can help.

Date: May 28
Time: 9am to 11am
Where: Open Source Technology Center @ Novell (map)

We’re growing again and UTOS has some excellent opportunities available. I highly suggest you consider supporting this organization as we cannot put on an awesome conference and community events without volunteers. I’ll be there, cheering you all on and helping UTOS grow open source.

You can find more details on the UTOS Project Day website and the Utah Open Source Blog.

I look forward to seeing who shows up and is ready to make UTOS the best open source community around!

Cheers,

Herlo

I’m very happy to read this article. I’ve never really thought about the lyrics to the song, but it makes perfect sense. If I may, I’d take this concept a bit further, focusing on what is important to you in ‘life’. In fact, replacing almost every instance of ‘Fedora’ with life also works.

What I mean by this, is find that passion, find that joy, find that night light that makes you happy in ‘life’. I’ve never been good at metaphors like this, but I am going to be using this one, now.

I hope that every Fedora contributor thinks about what you have written and takes to their hearts the value of Red Hat and the Fedora Project. I truly believe in this community and am truly blessed to have so many amazing and awesome friends here.

For me, what makes me happy in life, beyond my family time and my kids, is the Fedora Project.  I am not kidding, I really mean that from the bottom of my heart.  The Fedora Project has given me more than I have contributed, been my mentor in many places and given me a career I wouldn’t have otherwise.  I will always be grateful to my friends who got me involved with this amazing people.

I’ve been doing a bit of navel gazing lately.  As I depart SCaLE later today, I have been thinking about what reasons I work in the Fedora Project. I think a lot of us didn’t get into Fedora for altruistic reasons, but after a while, they are the reasons to stay.  Why do you stay?

I would like to invite everyone else to think in this way.  Come up with some sort of project or activity that takes a few hours or a few weeks and make a plan.  Share your plan, invite your friends to help make a better birdhouse!

Cheers,

Clint

The question is, how do you gain the skills to become a better sysadmin?

In my opinion, one of the best ways to gain experience quickly, is to participate in training classes, such as the amazing classes run by Red Hat.  But sometimes, those cost a ton of money, and the current company doesn’t want to foot the bill.  Of course, you are trying to save your pennies to get to there, but that can take time.

However, there are cheaper alternatives.  I believe the community is the best way overall to gain this knowledge. While it takes a bit more time to get there, over time, you can learn a major portion of what it takes to become a skilled sysadmin.

Local User Groups

I suggest attending a Local User Group that specializes in Linux administration.  These groups take one topic per month and can educate you (usually) for free.  I really enjoy my LUGs and have gained tons of knowledge over the years.

Conference Events

Many conferences, like SCaLE, offer space to communities to run day long activities.  The Fedora Activity Day at SCaLE is a good example of where you can quickly gain skills as a system administrator for a very low cost.  If you are looking to improve your system administration skillset, I highly recommend attending the FAD at SCaLE this year.

Sysadmin Study Group at SCaLE 9x

The study group is about helping you become a better system administrator and there will be experts on hand to help you study.  We will also be providing an installation server with Fedora 14, which will be used to build your virtual or physical machine and give you real hands on experience with the sysadmin tasks.

Machine Requirements

Register Today

I look forward to seeing you all come and improve your skills on Friday, and the entire cost is just what it takes to get into SCaLE, $70.  Register now!

However, my pitch was a bit different than the rest.  Throughout the rest of the sessions from now until Sunday noon, I’ll be in room BYAC 190 to record your talent.  What I mean by this, is that I want you to come by and do a 5-15 minute presentation on your Fedora system that we can share with the community.

As an goal, I’m working to make videos that can help other Fedora contributors work toward gaining a larger skillset.  For example, a presentation on configuring a DNS caching server, configuring a simple smtp server, using Scribus, how to configure NetworkManager or SELinux basics could be good simple presentations.  As you can see, these topics could become very complex, but I’m mostly interested in the basics in these areas.

Once I get these recorded this weekend, I’ll process them on Sunday and Monday.  My goal is to get them up on the Fedora website somewhere (more details to come) by early next week.  Watch for another blog post when I get them online.

I’d like to thank you in advance for coming by and spending 10-15 minutes sharing your knowledge with Fedora and the free software community.

Cheers,

Herlo

But I kind of have a few problems…

1. The icecast streaming server we previously setup on talk.fedoraproject.org appears to be off.  I’m hoping to get a hold of someone who knows what happened to it and see if we can get that turned back on in time.  Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with a million other things this weekend, so it’s not been top priority.
2. I used to have access to my own icecast server at stream.utos.org, but that server recently crashed, and I don’t have it back up as of yet.
3. Arizona State University technical staff, as amazing as they are, didn’t know of my request for a wired connection until today.  Again, my fault for springing it on them last minute.  It’s still possible they’ll get it done, here’s hoping!

Essentially, if these three things work out tomorrow, I still have to reconfigure my little PC to make streaming work.  That should be less painful and much more simple.

BUT

Just in case streaming doesn’t happen, do not despair! As an alternate, I do plan to have the audio of Jared’s talk recorded.  Once I have it cleaned up as best I can tomorrow, it will get pasted on the FUDCon Tempe page and I will blog a direct link for your consumption.  It should be up by noon MST.

AND

In lieu of streaming the sessions, don’t forget to logon to #fedora-fudcon on irc.freenode.net tomorrow and follow the transcripts of each session.  This started at FUDCon Toronto last time, and should be a good resource for watching the event from afar.

Now, to get some sleep!

Cheers,

Herlo

Every 10 minutes, starting at 7:45am, meet in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott.  You will be directed on a walking tour as we head toward the Center for Design North (CDN), also known as the Architecture and Environmental Design Building (AED).

On the tour, you will see the following items:

• A short tour of Mill Avenue, with restaurants and pubs
• The Brickyard Artisan Court (where the Barcamp sessions will be held)
• The Center for Design North (where the Barcamp pitches will be held)

In addition to all this, you’ll be on time to the barcamp pitches!  But don’t miss out, the last tour will begin at 8:45 so we can all get there before 9am.

If you don’t get the tour, you can still make it on your own.  Here’s a map with information to make it simple and straightforward.  It’s a google map and works well by searching for the url right in your maps program on a smart phone.

See you all tomorrow!

Cheers,

Herlo