LinuxWorld Expo Wraps Up

lisah writes "LinuxWorld Conference & Expo drew to a close yesterday with a handful of final talks and presentations. Newsforge has a rundown on the end of the event. Christina Noren, vice president of product management with Splunk, gave a talk entitled 'Troubleshooting Linux and the Open Source Software Stack.' Among her suggestions were the use of centralized logging systems, allowing users access to logs for researching their own problems, and logging successes and failures to establish a baseline. Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a presentation that focused on doing kernel version control with Quilt, Ketchup, and Git. Though turnout was low as conference attendees got an early start to the airport, the talk was followed up by a lively Q & A about general kernel development. Questions ranged from the Resier 4 situation to who will eventually succeed Linus. The next Linux World Expo will be held February 14-15, 2007, in New York." Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Enough Splunk already

[illumin8]

Christina Noren, vice president of product management with Splunk, gave a talk entitled 'Troubleshooting Linux and the Open Source Software Stack.'

Look, we know that Splunk bought several metric tons worth of banners from Slashdot a while ago, because I've been seeing their banners for days. Looks like a "slashvertisement" to me...

Among her suggestions were the use of centralized logging systems, allowing users access to logs for researching their own problems, and logging successes and failures to establish a baseline.

Well duh, logging software vendor recommends a central logging system! News at 11... In other news, Mcdonalds recommends a healthy hamburger, and Coca-Cola recommends sugary carbonated beverages...

I've tried Splunk... downloaded the free demo and put it on my central syslog server. I was pretty unimpressed. Their AJAX interface, while it does allow Firefox style "real-time" log parsing, was clunky and bloated and makes browsers slow to a crawl, even on a fairly decent 2 ghz Centrino laptop with a gig of memory. No thanks... I've been using a free log parser called php-syslog-ng for a while now and it works great... I dump all of my log files using syslog-ng to a MySQL database and I can query them however I want with php-syslog-ng, or at the mysql client command line interface if I feel like being a real masochist...

Splunk is a problem looking for a solution. Centralized logging has been solved many years ago by many free and commercial products. Just bolting an AJAX interface on the front of your log collecting machine does not make you worthy of thousands of dollars of my money...
[/rant mode]

I went to the show...

[paulmer2003]

...and I would have to agree that the quality of the show went down. I went on Wednesday, the second day, and it seemed the people there were all pissed off. I just went as a linux enthuiast. There seemed to be much more crack headed salesmen and woman than usual. There was this guy from Motorola who was showing off the phone they made that has linux and they had a DDRish game running off of it and he was going up to everyone jumping around like he was on coke begging them to play. There seemed much less of just nice people there, although I have to say the Splunk people wre cool (stayed there and t alked with them for a bit) and the gnome people and a few others. But in general people were less 'nice' and shit. I was quite impressed with the SUSE Enterprise Linux that the suse guy showed me. He was one of the few 'cool' people whom I chatted up for a bit.
 

In all, was still worth it, just wasent as fun as it was in previous years.

will RHEL5 have firewire working out of the box?

[t35t0r]

It's a shame that RHEL4 advanced server doesn't have working firewire out of the box. Even when I tried to compile firewire for the kernel I got an error. Same with a simple make mrproper for the default kernel. Hopefully RHEL5 will.