The Day 1 of FUDCon KL started with Christoph Wickert giving keynote on leadership. As with every FUDCon keynote, it was awesome. One thing that Christoph said in the end really strike me “It may not always be pretty, and it may not always be easy, but persistence wins”. Amazing thought.

The Day 1 was dedicated to bar camp style talks. Immediately after the keynote, the pitching started. I guess a little over than 20 talks were pitched for about 15 slots which, in my opinion, is a good number. I pitched two talks, one on Git and another one on Metrics Collection. The git one got through, sadly(well, not that sad) the Metrics Collection was shot down. Most of the selected talks revolved around students contributing which was a good thing given that most of the audience consisted of students. I got a handful of people interested in Git who were happy to talk to me about it after the session.

We had a big face-to-face APAC meeting back at hotel. We did missed David Ramsey and Harish. Several important points were discussed during the meeting including budget, swags, mentorship and general promotion of Fedora across the Asia Pacific region.

The day ended along with several discussions on a bunch of topics. I guess several emails on the lists will appear soon about the action plans.

As I reached the venue, I was put up in a nice guest house close to the venue itself. I met the regular crowd Suchakra, Shreyank, Neependra, Ramki, Saleem and other regular folks. Shreyank was just out after giving his talk. We chatted for a while and I went to the guest house for a break. There was a speaker’s dinner in the evening where I met Deependra Shekhawat (openbysource) and Atul Jha (koolhead17). Deependra is working on Eucalyptus which is a cloud computing software platform. We discussed a bit about building rpms for Fedora and EPEL. I think very soon Eucalyptus will be packaged for EPEL. Atul told me about some of the api issues he has seen with openstack. I had a chance to talk to Alolita also. She mentioned that they are using openstack to serve out the thumbnails. Use case looks interesting, I hope to use openstack myself sometime soon. Arky told us about the story behind GlusterFS and its founder Anand Babu. What an inspiring story! One thing I would never forget about this evening was Ramki telling me about career path. It was one of the best advice I got in a long time.

Next day, I started off by my own talk. It was good to find an interactive audience and everything went well except a part in demo where I did not realize that college authorities have blacklisted port 8140 which was required for puppet to run. Following it was a talk by Arun Tomar about chef. I realized how similar both the tools are. With each day passing by, puppet and chef are providing nearly same features. Post lunch I went for Deependra’s workshop on Eucalyptus. He showed how to set up a cloud platform using Xen hypervisor in a couple of hours. It was very cool.

Gnunify 2012 ended here for me. Hope to visit again next year and a lot of thanks to Directi for sponsoring my visit.

We reached there on Sat, 4 Feb after 6-7 hours of bus journey on bumpy roads. I hardly slept for 2-3 hours, same for Arun. We had two classrooms full of students. Arun picked one and started with Introduction of FOSS and Linux while I took the other one and started with Python Introduction. Srishti talked about Qt after that. The day went by and we had talks on Vim, Emacs, Python, Qt, RPM packaging by Arun, Srishti and me. As my initial expectation, the level of Linux awareness was not much. I guess that is the problem with most of the colleges in India.

Day two started with me talking about the basics of DNS and Load balancing and Arun talking about Django. We dialed down things to the beginner level and tried to explain things in as simple form as we could. I was kinda skeptical about both of my talks, Load Balancing as well as Puppet, because these are fairly advanced topics but students kept their patience which I should appreciate. I asked them to configure a puppet master on the spot and all of them were able to do the same after an hour of debugging session. We closed on a good note (I hope) and some fun moments.

We visited a temple afterwards, a huge temple. I still fail to understand why would they spend so much time, resources and money to build a temple but i guess faith is something which is beyond my understanding. A few non-linux points about this workshop:

• We saw a doll which Arun loved. The doll, made up of wood, i think, swings its head.
• Srishti likes to click photographs even when food is at stake.
• Arun has replaced pink slippers with yellow ones.
• Food at SASTRA canteen is far better than what we had in my college canteen (Birla Institute of Technology).

GNUnify, Pune this weekend

As a closing thought, the number of contributors in Bangalore are increasing. With Arun SAG moving here and Srishti Sethi starting to contribute, we might be able to have a FAD sometime.

Talks ended for the day. We had a group shot and headed for FUDPub. Sadly, Harish had to go back and Jared had some minor health issues owing to the food he had previous night so they was unable to attend but nonetheless we had lots of fun. Open Bar helped, of course . We chatted, danced and cheered for Fedora.

I would like to say that volunteers did an awesome work. Everything went on smoothly. Good food, good internet and helpful people. FUDPub is a memory I will always cherish.

PS: We also had a small session on “Accidents of Kushal Das” at FUDPub, the funniest thing ever.

Day 0

I arrived in Pune yesterday. The moment I reached Hotel Cocoon, I met Kushal, Jared Smith (Fedora Project Leader), Joerg Simon and Robert who were getting ready to check out the Red Hat office here in Magarpatta City, Pune. I rushed into my room, dumped my bag and went with them to check out the office myself. It is a nice place to work, calm and quiet though sense of security among the CyberCity security guards is a bit weird. I got to meet Shankarshan, Shakthi Kannan, Shreyank, Amit Shah and the the man who has been with Fedora since dinosaurs, Rahul Sundaram. Afterwards, I went out to meet some of my local friends. As last foss.in, I am sharing my room with Arun SAG. I had a lot of fun meeting everyone.

Day 1

I woke up early in the morning, well 6:45 am, to get ready for FUDCon. Reached venue after Kushal’s several head counts and the event kick started with a welcome note by the Director of College of Engineering, Pune. It was followed by Jared’s “State of Union” address. I simply loved how he managed to give his address without a single word on his slides. That was awesome!

I had a printed schedule with me which I had already marked for “must-attend” talks. So, I headed for SSSD talk by Kaushik which was very informative. I guess I can use it on my machine. I also attended Amit’s talk about git and Joerg’s talk on Fedora Security lab and OSSTMM.

I had an amazing time with everyone. One thought by Jared which is still revolving in my mind would be “fail early, fail often”.

The work is awesome. People are even better. I get to tinker around with Linux servers and work on some of the awesome technologies (and I am paid for it! Dream come true!). I have setup the first ever Koji server for Directi to build rpms which is in production. I have used the Koji server before when I was packaging stuff for Fedora Project. Pulp Server for repository management is also up, though not in production. We decided to wait up in Pulp’s case since it is updated often and is relatively new. I’ll test it in and out before putting it into production.

I have also written a couple of posts to troubleshoot Koji and Pulp errors.

I have also coded a good number of features in RackMonkey. Initially I was a little skeptical about RackMonkey since it is a perl code and I don’t know much about perl (to be fair, I didn’t knew anything when I started working on it). Thanks to Biju (My manager) and Dushy (GM – System Admin) who encouraged me to use perl rather than to build a new app in python, I was able to do it in perl only (though I still prefer python). Although seeing the massive amount of modifications, we are considering building a new app now and open source it

Also now I am a campus recruiter. I went to BIT Mesra for the recruitment and might go to Allahabad or Warangal around this weekend. It is tiring but exciting at the same time.

I am writing after a long time, around two months. A lot of stuff happened during this time and I learned a lot in last two months. Most notably I compiled Linux Kernel 2.6.37 successfully and wrote a tutorial which turned out to be a Twitter top tweet. I actually started using Linux like a system admin (at least I think so) and currently  I am looking forward to dig Puppet.

Another major task accomplished during this time was that BIT Linux Users Group finally got enough bandwidth and disk space and now we host repository for Fedora 14, Fedora 13, Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 10.04. I am really happy to say that all the repos are up and running. If you are interesting in building a repo for yourself, check out this tutorial.

On the negative side, I won’t be able to attend the KDE Conf in Bangalore due to my college exams. I really wanted to show off my “Season of KDE” t-shirt there  . And last of all, I am still looking for a good job, want to work as a system admin with some cool people. If you know about a vacancy, contact me.

• Short Talk (45 minute Short talk / Project pitch)
• Long Talk (2 hours tutorial sessions)
• Dexter’s (4 hour lab sessions)
• Aktivities (Impromptu Hack sessions)

I request all the Fedora contributors to take part in this conference. Check out this wiki page for more details.

Also FOSSMeet 2011 is being organized by NIT Calicut from 4 February to 6 February. The CfP for the same is open. You can check out the details here. If you are attending this event, please create a wiki page and help us to spread the word.