LISA 2016 (Large Install System Admin “Sysadmin” Conference) 2016 Dec 4-9th,2016, Expo Dec 7-8th,2016. Hosted Sheraton Downtown Boston.
Attending Ambassadors, Fedora Contributors included: Corey Sheldon (linuxmodder), Nick Bebout (nb), Mike DePaulo (mikedep333), Beth Lynn (bethlynn), Matthew Miller (mattdm), Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh). Having a rather nice spread of the Fedora Community among us made for a very productive display and sidebar chats amongst ourselves and the Redhat / Centos Table folks we were with. Among us were several conference talk attendees and even a GPG Signing Party (as a BoF).
Day 1 — Wednesday — (Expo):
Things started off a bit sluggish til just after lunch when there was the first break from all talks on Wednesday. We had folks from all sectors of the industry coming to the booth, and they had mostly upgraded to 25 already. A few common questions revolved around what was in the pipeline for modularity and issues/gripes with systemd. Being a ‘ Large Install` centric conference we saw plenty of folks also asking about using Dockerfiles and cockpit, which mattdm so happily had displayed on one of the two monitors we had been provided at the booth. Thanks to some pesky hardware or a bad burn, we even had the pleasure of helping one of our own clean install F25 at the booth (bethlynn). Among several of the talks that some of us attended there were: Beginner Wireshark, SRE: At a Startup: Lessons from LinkedIn, SRE: It’s people all the Way Down, The Road to Mordor: Information Security Issues and Your Open Source Project. Also of interest to both booth staff and many attendees was LISA Build, think of that as a Cisco NET+ hands-on event, where all skill levels learned/taught things on building networks, configuring routers/load balancers and setting up native IPv6. Day one ended with a small number of DVDs (F24, as F25 media was not just available) about 75% of our unixstickers supply and about 50% of the combined USBs from the RedHat / Centos booths.
Day 2 — Thursday — (Expo):
Day 2 started at 10a as far as the expo was concerned but several of the team took advantage of the late start to visit local restaurants for breakfast, braving the wind and cold all the while. Day 2 saw a lot of the same questions and some more complex questions regarding more complex deployments including ones with advanced SELinux and docker images which given the selection of talks that day was quite understandable. There were several BoFs (Birds Of a Feather) talks on day 2 as is customary at LISA conferences, the note-worthy one from the Redhat / Fedora / CentOS team was the GPG key signing party which saw less than expected numbers with only 13 attendees but several were either new to key signing or the practice itself. As an uncommon occurrence would have it 3 of the attendees (including Nick Bebout the organizer) that were CACert validators, which would have allowed any interested folks to get over the required 100 points to become a certifier in their own right, sadly this is an aspect of the Web Of Trust (WoT) that is too under publicized.
Several of the booth staff stayed for the Thursday night Google Ice Cream Social, which is always a great networking event that is very low key and laid back. Nick Bebout (nb) even won (via raffle) a signed copy of the SRE book on website optimization.
All in all, while we still had media on the table at the conclusion, we shared plenty of the other swag and had PLENTY of awesome user interactions with seasoned users and new users alike. We also had a blast talking and working out ideas amongst ourselves at the booth.
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