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

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!

The topic I submitted, Fedora Remix.

It turns out that it’s a remix of another presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference by Paul Frields.  But things have changed since that presentation was given. Here’s a couple I’ll mention:

• First, Fedora has now approved a secondary trademark called ‘Fedora Remix’.    I’ll talk a little about how this can be used and what the benefit is to downstream groups and Fedora.
• The spin-kickstarts rpm created by Jeroen van Meeuwen provides over 30 kickstarts you can start with to make things better.

In preparation for this presentation at SCaLE 7x, and if you are in Utah, I’ll be presenting it (hopefully) a couple times at the Local User Groups (LUGs).

Cheers,

Herlo

The next presentation was ‘ifdown -a Now! Becoming productive offline’, by Don Marti. It was awesome! He spent a bit of time talking about git, ikiwiki, blosxom, OfflineIMAP, Mairix and some ssh config rules to help productivity. There is some definite things that will help me become more productive with these tools.

The next presentation I attended was the video codecs presentation, but what was being discussed was stuff I’d already learned. So I headed over to ’10 Years of GNOME’, with Ken VanDine (also the creator of Foresight Linux). GNOME features are definitely getting cooler, and discussions about Gimmie and the OpenSuse SLAB menu were held. Ken wants to see more involvement in the GNOME project, called GNOME Love. If you love GNOME, they’re making it easy to share the GNOME Love.

I was able to catch the last half of the Second Life presentation as its always been a curiosity to me.  I’m thinking of actually running it and seeing what its all about.  Thanks Liana!

At the end of the day, I skipped the reception in favor of a spirited talk with the folks from BakBone, then spent time talking with the organizers of SCaLE and was able to chat with the developer for the conference management system here.  Looks like they’re open sourcing there django app too, so we might be able to work with them too.

Tom Callaway was in the Fedora BoF, so I was required to go by that at 8pm and annoy him.  Turned out, I spent the next 3+ hours discussing everything from PulseAudio, RPMS, RHCE and PackageKit to Obama, Iraq and Ron Paul and the value system of patents in our nation.  It was a great evening.

Its time to sleep and another day of SCaLE will be upon us.  See you all then…

Cheers,

Herlo