Simon's Musings

March 27, 2009

AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 1:01 pm
Tags: , , , ,

Once again, I’m presenting at the AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop. This years event is at Stanford University from June 1st-5th

I’m giving two talks, the first on prometheus, our new Identity Management System. The second is about how to contribute to OpenAFS. The abstracts are

Prometheus is an LDAP based provisioning system, which is designed to manage a wide variety of user databases, including AFS’s PTS and a Kerberos KDC. It is highly flexible in the databases it supports, and permits very fine grained delegation of control. It has a role-based access control model, and allows the creation and management of roles by any authorized user. It is instance aware, allowing users to create many instances of a primary account, request keytabs of those instances, and delegate particular permission sets to individual instances. Prometheus is designed to be a distributed as possible, permitting provisioning of system maintained by disparate groups without requiring those groups be trusted by the system itself. This talk will discuss the design goals behind Prometheus, provide an update on implementation progress, and demonstrate a running system.

and …

OpenAFS has a huge, daunting codebase, with a relatively opaque system of patch submission, review and application. It takes mountains of skill, and years of persistence to get your first patch into a state where it can be submitted, let alone accepted into the hallowed halls of the code tree…

Nonsense!

This talk will attempt to blow away some of the misconceptions with regards to contributing to OpenAFS. It will provide a first-timers view of the steps, both technical and political, to crafting a patch for submission into OpenAFS. We’ll take a whistle stop tour of the tools now involved in the process, from the code repository, to the patch review system and the bug tracker. We’ll talk about code review, bug triage and testing, with a view to inspiring participation in these areas.

Finally, we’ll talk about some low hanging fruit that anyone could get started on, and write their first bit of OpenAFS code …

In addition to keynotes from Morgan Stanley and Carnegie Mellon, the conference features a number of talks about research computing storage (including one from the nanoCmos project), and looks like it will have a great mixture of academic and commercial topics.

The hotel block (at the very reasonable Stanford Guest House) expires April 1st, with the early bird deadline being April 21st.

January 31, 2009

UKUUG Kerberos tutorial

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 11:56 pm
Tags: , , ,

I’m presenting a Kerberos tutorial on the 24 March as a precursor to this year’s UKUUG Spring Conference in London. This will be a revised and extended version of the tutorial I presented 2 years ago. This year there will be an additional afternoon session which will give an opportunity to go into some more advanced topics in greater detail, and to allow a wider opportunity for discussion.

The abstract is:

This year’s Kerberos training tutorial will be presented in two parts. The morning’s session will be aimed at users without any particular Kerberos knowledge, but with an interest in deploying a site-wide authentication solution. We’ll cover the basics of the Kerberos protocol, examine common deployment considerations and discuss realm administration strategies. Suggestions will be made for methods of Kerberising many popular applications, and we’ll touch upon the issues involved in controlling delegation and key type management.

The afternoon’s session will look at a series of more advanced topics. It will be targetted at those who have either attended the morning session, or who already have a good working knowledge and deployment of Kerberos. We’ll look at the issues involved in running Kerberos across many different platforms, the challenges presented by mobile devices, and at extending Kerberos single sign on to the web. We’ll discuss the issues involved in rekeying existing Kerberos realms, and look at mechanisms for adding Kerberos support to existing local code and protocols. A number of methods of making interactions with Kerberos appear seamless from the user’s perspective will be presented, and ways of leveraging Kerberos into the world of public key certificates will be discussed. Finally, there will be an opportunity for attendees to get advice and feedback both from the tutor and other attendees on particular issues facing their site.

Further details are available from the UKUUG site.

April 3, 2008

UKUUG spring conference

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 11:04 am
Tags: , , , ,

I’ve just got back from the UKUUG Spring Conference, where a group of us from Informatics (myself, Stephen, Paul and Gihan from Flexiscale) were giving talks. I talked on two subjects – the LCFG based monitoring system framework I developed last year, and the new account management system I’m currently writing. Slides from both of these talks are available on the DICE publications page, which also has Stephen’s slides from his “An end to hacky scripts” talk about the LCFG system.

Despite gaining a scripting language track, and the addition of a parallel one-day PostgreSQL conference, the event seemed smaller this year, with many of the familiar faces missing. Some unfortunate scheduling meant that switching between tracks wasn’t as easy as it could have been, with 45 minute sessions in one room scheduled against 30 minute sessions in another one. However, the event was still productive, useful and stimulating, with a number of interesting talks – slides and audio from which should hopefully be up on the conference website shortly.

Some highlights were the talk from Mark Gledhill from the BBC on “Feeding the BBC Homepage“, which provided a fascinating insight into perl and Catalyst usage at a large organisation, as well as giving a useful background on their project management techniques, and test and deployment issues. Gavin Henry’s talk on OpenLDAP 2.4 provided a valuable summary of the changes in the latest version of OpenLDAP, as well as giving some examples of practical uses for these new features. Randy Appleton’s “Today’s Software … Is It Really Bloated?” talk took a very humorous tour through a number of code size and performance statistics he and his students have been collecting over the years – a perfect start to the day after the conference dinner!

The Transitive (which I ended up seeing because it was swapped with the talk I wanted to hear – one peril of last minute schedule changes!), and ZFS talks pretty much repeated material I’d heard at other conferences, but the ZFS one, in particular, was a helpful reminder of a system I’d really like to have time to look at in more detail. Whilst I wasn’t specifically interested in the scripting language talks, I did manage to catch “USENET Gems” which provided details of a number of interesting perl quirks, which are now firmly filed as things to watch out for.

Paul and Stephen arranged a well attended LCFG BOF on the Tuesday afternoon, and Paul, Stephen and I took some time to chat on Wednesday about possible designs for the new LCFG compiler. As with all UKUUG conferences, it tends to be these unscheduled events, and impromptu corridor conversations where the real value lies. There was a large amount of interest in prometheus, both from people in the commercial sector who have deployed similar systems, and had insights to share, and those who are interested in similar systems for their own sites. Hopefully we’ll be able to build some kind of a community around this technology.

There was continued interest in OpenAFS and Kerberos, with a number of people asking questions both about the technology, and our deployment experiences. Access to the source code for the monitoring system was also in demand – I really should arrange to publish this somewhere less adhoc.

February 26, 2008

FOSDEM 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 2:45 pm
Tags: , , ,

Over the last weekend, I attended FOSDEM, an absolutely mind blowing conference bringing together Free and Open Source developers from all over Europe. The scale of the conference, attracting as it does thousands of developers, and accommodating hundreds of different talks over 2 manic days, really can’t be described. You have to be there to experience it.

I made the journey to Brussels by train, a most civilised way to travel – especially given that Eurostar are quite happy to replace lost return tickets for a small fee! The weekend started with the infamous beer event on the Friday night (hence the lost ticket), before getting down to business on the Saturday. It’s hard to pick particular highlights from such a packed program, but the perl6 talk managed to be both fascinating and scary at the same time and the cmake talk was very useful given the way Stephen is going with build tools. In the dev rooms, Dan Mosedale unfortunately didn’t make it for the Thunderbird talk, but an productive discussion was had none-the-less, and Jens Kuehnel’s introduction to SELinux in the Fedora devroom helped overcome a lot of my fears (and, in fact, has succeeded in its goal, as I no longer just switch it off). The sight of 100+ folk all participating in a PGP keysigning had to be seen to be believed (eventually, we just had to go outside, as the lecture theatre just wasn’t big enough)

I signed up a few months ago to present a Lightning Talk on OpenAFS, in an attempt to grow awareness, and attract new developers. That talk certainly helped me with talking to other people at the conference, as well as being pretty well received. Both slides, and video, of the talk are available from the FOSDEM site.

February 21, 2008

UKUUG Files and Backups Seminar

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 12:00 am
Tags: , ,

As previously trailed, I presented as part of this year’s UKUUG Files and Backups Seminar on the 19 Feb. My talk, on  OpenAFS, was a revised and extended version of the paper Craig and I wrote, and I presented at UKUUG’s Spring Conference the year before. Whilst that paper concentrated on Informatics’ experience in deploying OpenAFS, the seminar talk was far more outwards facing, discussings the pitfalls and benefits of any OpenAFS deployment across many different types of organisation. A copy of the slides is available from the UKUUG web site.

Both days of the seminar were a very interesting opportunity to take part in a number of focussed discussions about storage issues, as they affect a wide variety of different businesses. Charles Curran’s discussion of CERN’s data management issues (with LHC producing around 15PB of data every day) was a hilarious tour through the issues involved in managing vast amounts of experimental data, and Kern Sibbald’s talk on Bacula was a fascinating discussion of what must be the industry’s leading Open Source backup technology. Kern and I had a chat afterwards about the issues involved in making Bacula AFS aware, such that it could easily handle both backup, and restoration of files from AFS volume dumps.

February 15, 2008

Talking

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 6:14 pm
Tags: , , , , , ,

I’m giving a few talks over the next couple of months

  • UKUUG Files and Backup Seminar I’m giving a general overview of AFS from a users and administrators perspective, particularly focusing on features that will be of interest to new deployments
  • FOSDEM I’m giving a developers overview of OpenAFS as a lightning talk
  • UKUUG Spring Conference I’m currently scheduled to give two talks. The first is an overview of our monitoring system, talking in particular about the benefits (and challenges) of integrating it with LCFG. The second is about our in-development account management system, prometheus, and some of its unique features.
  • AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop

I’m going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting

Theme: Rubric.