TXLF2019

There's a lot of wild stuff going on these days. Linux isn't just the OS we install on hardware any more. It's powering cloud infrastructure at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and many others. Microsoft is even including a Linux kernel in Windows 10 now! More changes are under way, as IBM expects to close on their acquisition of Red Hat this year. In case you forgot, this will be the largest software acquisition ever at $34 billion!
Join us for our keynote session with Thomas Cameron, a Red Hat Certified Architect, a 26 year IT veteran, and a 24 year Linux user, as we discuss the state of the Linux ecosystem. Thomas Cameron Slides

Ansible has proven itself to be an essential tool for configuration management. Join me for an “I’m completely new” hands-on guided session on how to create Ansible playbooks.
We will take it in baby steps and build our way to writing playbooks with best practices in mind.
This session will assume a working knowledge of the command line and common systems administrator tasks, but no knowledge about Ansible at all.
Course Outline / Discussion Topics:

• What is Configuration Management?
• What is Ansible?
• What is a Playbook?
• How do we run a Playbook?
• Playbook Best Practices

Course materials and example playbooks will be available online. Alex Juarez

Enterprise grade two factor authentication is no rocket science and does not need to take much time or money. Neither do you need to rely on 3rd parties. You can do it on your own, on premise using privacyIDEA which is open source under your control.
In this workshop we will install the privacyIDEA Authentication System on a fresh Linux system and add 2FA to applications like SSH, NginX as a reverse proxy, ownCloud, simpleSAMLphp or even the Windows desktop (if you want to) - or any other application of your choice.
We will enroll different kind of second factors to the users like smartphone apps, OTP cards or Yubikeys.
We will take a deeper look at the vast possibilities of the policies to define rights of users and administrators and tweek the behaviour of the authentication system. We will discuss aspects of the event handler framework to automate processes and ease the enrollment for many users or ease other tedious administrative tasks. Cornelius Kölbel

Blender 2.80 a new way to Open Source...3D like Brian Beck

The first README for strace called it ‘a useful utility to sort of debug programs for which no source is available’. A ‘sort of debug’ utility is still not far from the truth, but it can be your best friend when dealing with processes mysterious and unknown (...and really the known ones, too). It’s verbose, and at times superfluous, output can quickly intimidate and overwhelm people who don’t know what they’re looking at, or how to effectively parse it. This workshop will begin by breaking down some very basic examples, and end by using strace to analyze and troubleshoot an advanced, but practical Linux server scenario. This talk only assumes basic understanding of Linux command-line and file system traversal. Ryan Robson

Microservices revolutionized the way we look at app development and is now one of the most popular programming architectures. Now, Docker alongside Kubernetes is changing the way teams look at deployments of these microservices. Kubernetes provides powerful production-grade orchestration for your "Dockerized" microservices.
In this workshop, you'll get an overview of Kubernetes, and what it provides for application development. You'll then go through the process of building and deploying a microservice application on Kubernetes.
This is a hands-on-keyboard lab, everyone should come with a laptop and a desire to learn. Attendees can use minikube locally, or cloud accounts will be provided. We'll cover:

• Kubernetes basics
• Building Container Images
• Deploying the application with Kubernetes
• Upgrading and scaling the application with Kubernetes
• Debugging your application in Kubernetes

JJ Ashgar

MySQL is the most popular database on the internet and ubiquitous in data centers around the world. This workshop is an introduction to the MySQL Relational Database for those with no experience with databases, relational theory, or Structured Query Language (SQL). Relational databases are the core technology for most businesses and projects. This will workshop will show you how to download the free MySQL 8.0 Community Edition (and use other free tools like MySQL Workbench and the MySQL Shell) and it stall it to create and use databases. We will cover the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL) to run ad hoc queries as well as how to use popular programming languages like PHP and Python to connect to your data from a browser. This workshop assumes no prior knowledge or experience with databases. MySQL is consistently listed as a 'must have' skill by hiring managers and is easy to learn. David Stokes

This talk centres around my experience and observations (as a consultant) entering different corporations. I have seen many common themes from people who feel trapped working in one company because they don't know what companies are looking for and how to match this up with the skills they currently have.
Everyone struggles with self worth as we hear of all the cool things other companies and people are doing. I am here to tell you, you are worth more than you know! I'll give some examples of tasks you actually perform and how you can pair them up with your dream job.
In this talk I source several well known authors and subjects from psychology to negotiation and human interaction. This is a very dense talk but I guarantee there will be something here for everyone. Steve Ovens

Let’s say you need to find hosting for multiple web applications with cPanel backend access so clients cannot access each other’s backends. What can you do to create a secure hosting environment without paying for several different hosting accounts? Why not host it yourself?! This workshop will show you how to unpack a straightforward hosting-in-a-box scenario to get your idea off the ground in a scalable, practical way. This talk assumes a cursory understanding of Linux environments, Amazon’s AWS platform, and basic networking, but is open to all skill levels. Ryan Robson

MySQL 8 Features for Developers - This session covers the new features in MySQL 8 including the new, transnational data dictionary so you can now have millions of tables in a schema (the bad news is that you can now have millions of tables in a schema), Windowing Functions for data analytics, Common Table Expressions to replace messy sub-queries, full UTF8MB4 support, invisible indexes, better locking, an improved temporary table engine, improved JSON support (including a JSON_TABLE function to turn your unstructured JSON data into structured relational data temporarily), histograms, resource groups to dedicate CPUs to certain classes of queries, and more. And there are two new major additions to the MySQL database ecosystem with the MySQL Document Store (Lets you use MySQL as a NoSQL JSON Document Store as well as a relational database) and the InnoDB Cluster that provides highly available active-active master-master replication. If you use MySQL then you need to looking into the new features of MySQL before you upgrade. David Stokes

This is an introduction to Linux permissions, and whether you are brand new or have been doing Linux for a while or even professionally there will be something for you.
Controlling access to files is a mandatory skill as a Linux administrator. A misunderstanding of how users are able to read, write and execute files can lead to unintended access to your data.
This sessions will start with the basics of Linux permissions but will quickly move into topics not typically covered in first level Linux permissions talks.
We will dive into:

• Special permissions, e.g. SUID, SGID and the Sticky Bit
• The chown and chmod commands
• Ways to Verify and Restore Permissions
• Linux FACLs for Creating, Reading and Deleting FACLs
• Backing Up and Restoring FACLs

Alex Juarez

Have you been looking for tools to help get your children interested in technology? When you search for information on the topic most of the suggestions involve getting children to use social media or some online portal. To me, this is not very helpful.
My wife and I home school our two boys and so we have had to do a lot of digging to find some appropriate learning matterials. This talk will concentrate on Linux, Android and touch on some things to do with the raspberry pi. We have paid to try some of these programs so you dont have to! This is our honest opinion about some of the more prominent apps and software out there for kids. Come have a look! Steve Ovens

26 million lines of code. 750,000 commits. 61,000 files. Continuous integration and deployment of the Linux kernel should be impossible, right?
The Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) project wants to make it possible to test each commit proposed for merging into the Linux kernel. In this talk, the audience will embark on a journey of triumph and tragedy through the experiences of a small team at Red Hat.
Major Hayden, principal software engineer at Red Hat, will explain how kernels are built and tested within the CKI infrastructure and what testing is already in place today. He will take a deep dive into the infrastructure components (including Gitlab, Jenkins, and containers) and the optimizations that allow for rapid testing of the Linux kernel. Members of the audience will also learn how they can get involved in the project. Major Hayden

The two-factor market is changing rapidly. Mergers of the classic, proprietary vendors result in cluttered product portfolios. Products go end-of-life or are moved as a service to the cloud, promising faster rollout but also faster revenue. As a result, users are often faced with their 2FA installation that is no longer supported or even no longer works.
The privacyIDEA Authentication System allows a quick and easy migration. It runs on Premise under your control without any end-of-life restrictions. And privacyIDEA is open source under the AGPLv3. It bundles 15 years of experience in the field of 2FA and the 2FA market developments. Therefore it supports all common authentication methods. Above all with sophisticated policies and the flexible event handler framework it is probably one of the most enterprise ready open sourse systems on the market.
In this lecture I will present how you can use privacyIDEA for your network and your requirements. Cornelius Kölbel

The trouble with any 'smart' device such as a Nest thermostat or many other smart devices is that they require an internet connection and a company to be in business running a server that they connect to. As we have seen with Logitech a company can change its focus at anytime.
If the product you just bought requires a cloud service to be available to function, you don't own it.
2019 is the year I am taking back control of my smart devices by bringing as much 'smarts' back inside my LAN as possible. To do this I've recently been experimenting with Home Assistant which I have running in a docker container on my media server.
Alex Kretzschmar

Many of us in the technical community have heard the saying RTFM (Read The [Friendly] Manual) as advice given to someone learning Linux. In Confessions of a Sysadmin, Ell Marquez will share a practical approach to learning to navigate the command line along with some of the secrets she has learned along the way. Ell Marquez Allie Barnes

Using Fedora Silverblue as my Primary Laptop. Fedora Silverblue is a new way of packaging the Linux desktop. The idea is that using rpm-ostree you get an immutable base system that is atomically updated and applications (other than a bare minimum) are added via flatpaks. This talk will cover my non-developer experience with using Silverblue as my primary laptop. Alex Thomas

Most Linux distributions are built with a sane set of default tunables which work fine for most use cases. But there are a lot of virtual knobs which can be turned to change the performance of your disk, your network stack, your memory use, and other capabilities. In this session, Thomas Cameron, a Red Hat Certified Architect, a 26 year IT veteran, and a 24 year Linux user, will talk about the fundamentals of performance tuning. Thomas Cameron

Kubernetes. It's so hot right now. But what is it?
This session is designed to show the fundamentals of Kubernetes. It assumes you know what a container is, that Kubernetes does something called "orchestration" with it, but that's it.
We'll cover the following: Container Registry, Pods, Services, Ingress, Scaling, Networking, mounting volumes, package management (Helm) and what's next. Tommy Falgout & Kendall Roden Slides

What's the future of Linux distributions? Containers, npm, linuxbrew, snaps join their friends container-optimized Linux and minimal distro images and make the future of APT and RPM a little bit... cloudy. How is open source software delivery and package management changing, and where are distributions going and what it means for Linux system administrators? Jose Miguel Parrella

I just want the open source world to be more friendly to each other, and I think that there are some tips that I have gathered over time that would be beneficial to other people.
The goal of this talk would cover:

1. How to find an opensource project to contribute too
2. The best ways to interact with an opensource community
3. As a community leader, how to effectively encourage people to contribute and help with your project

Daniel Wallace

Brown Bags, Lunch and Learns, Study Sessions, whatever you call it, sharing knowledge is essential when it comes to helping your team become efficient.
Effectively passing on that knowledge can and should be done in several ways, but one of the most accessible and straightforward methods are brown bags.
Brown bag training is beneficial for a host of reasons, but most importantly, brown bags provide a way to tailor training to address examples, problems, and challenges that your team will encounter on a day to day basis.
In this session we'll cover a step-by-step process for creating and delivering brown bag training specifically for technical subject matter using action-based curriculum. Topics Include:

• Deciding Your Subject
• Creating Your Agenda
• Providing Specific Examples
• Content Delivery
• Creating Practice and Reference Material

At the end of this session you'll walk away with a brown bag article template and the motivation to go forth and brown bag. Sarah Ofsdahl

In a world that is moving towards rapid development and delivery of software, security should play a vital role in the process from start to finish. In this session, we will analyze some typical build pipelines and identify each step that security plays a role, some of the tools available to fill those roles, and why it's important. We will also discuss how to engage in constructive conversation between development teams and security teams to encourage these practices. David Sirrine

Containers are all the rage right now, but if you want to start learning container technology where do you even begin? Starting out it can be difficult to know what questions to ask or even what you should be studying. It may be even more difficult to understand the answers you are getting. Join me while we take our first steps into understanding the concepts and products behind current container offerings. Ell Marquez

In this session we will discuss how to prepare an image from your physical server for upload into either AWS or Azure. We will go over some tools and resources that you can use to prepare your image. We will also go over some CLI tools that you can use to help maintain your infrastructure in AWS or Azure. Dan Kinkead

External documentation is easy to neglect. Keep your docs inside your source repo and learn how to use MkDocs and Travis CI to automatically build and publish beautiful documentation on every commit. Attendees will walk away with a new mindset on how to handle documentation, a list of tools that can aid in this process, and an easy-to-implement method that works well for real engineers in a production setting. Mason Egger

Identity management is becoming an increasingly important element of computer infrastructure. Whether you are a business or simply have a home lab, identity management should be implemented, if for no other reason than it makes life easier.
There are lots of projects out there that can help with this. You could use Samba 4 and its suite of tools. There is also 389-server for straight ldap implementations. There are also more comprehensive projects like FreeIPA.
This talk is aimed at the enthusiast and not at businesses. It is not a sale pitch or corporate speak. It is meant to highlight the developer edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's Identity Management offering called IdM. I will show how you can integrate various versions of linux with IdM and how you can get up and running in your home lab with only a few resources. IdM can manage SUDO rules, host based access controls, centralized ssh, kerborose and more! Steve Ovens

Learn how to successfully start your very own free-and-open-source software community!
Go from zero to hero!!
Save the world!!! William Braswell

You may not know it yet, but IT is not easy. Breakdowns in people, processes, and technology leads to frustrating times for all of us. As it spirals out of control, we often meet the final boss: burnout.
Burnout affects us all in different ways. Some people find different job roles, others look for new employers, and many dig themselves into a deep emotional rut.
In this talk, Major Hayden will bring the audience along for a few bumps in the road along his 19 year IT career. Some of the bumps were unavoidable, but plenty were self-inflicted (and hilarious in hindsight). The audience will learn that each of these bumps may feel different, but they can ask themselves a few simple questions to ground themselves and look for better path. Major Hayden

Clay D. Montgomery will present an overview of the best open-source software and open-hardware components available today to quickly prototype new projects requiring audio, video, 3D graphics, touch and/or computer vision on low-cost open hardware for bootstrapping a new start-up, or just for fun!
Clay will introduce Yocto Open Embedded Linux, and other major components including OpenGL, OpenCV, FreeType, Blender, OpenSSH, ffmpeg and BSPs to build seriously disrupting new technology quickly. Linux and open-source now enable individual developers to go way beyond creating apps for just Apple and Android.
The Yocto Project enables developers to build complete Linux images, custom made for your application and your choice of hardware, sensors and controllers. This opens the realm of possibilities beyond what phone and tablet hardware can do.
Clay will also demonstrate Lightwing as an example application he created that utilizes many of these components to build custom digital signs, video walls and multimedia touch-kiosks leveraging open hardware. Clay Montgomery

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. It allows you to avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications. With Ansible, you automate in a language that approaches plain English using native communications protocols, such as SSH or WinRM, with no agents to install on remote systems. In this session, we'll discuss many ways to utilize Ansible as an agentless and idempotent part of your DevOps practitioner workflows and/or Systems Administration automation needs; including examples from the traditional to the unorthodox. In this session we will cover a wide array of topics such as traditional configuration management, various forms of provisioning, application deployment, lifecycle management, orchestration, utilizing Ansible to simplify command line tooling creation and scaling, performing application builds, creating self managing infrastructure with event-based playbook execution, workflow automation, continuous integration, containers, and more. Adam Miller

It pays to learn the ins and outs of your favorite shell and editor to automate all kinds of daily and routine tasks. You can browse the news in minutes via text feeds instead of getting caught in the "web" (no pun intended) of cleverly designed news websites whose "suggestions" algorithms have gotten too good for their (and your) good! You can organize your life in text, chat, mail, browse, etc. all without leaving your trusty shell (or console-based editor). Even Redmond after decades of naysaying now acknowledges the power--no pun intended--of the Shell! The sky is the limit when it comes to streamlining your daily workflow around the half-century old (and counting) wisdom of the UNIX Philosophy: "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. Sameer Khan

Musicians learning how to improvise develop an intuition built around the materials of the genre, and can be directly compared to the “mental map” engineers develop when understanding complexities. As a system grows dimensions, any one person cannot comprehend the whole thing, so we rely on shared knowledge. “Fundamental common-ground breakdown” (FCGB) happens when accumulated learnings are assumed knowledge among individuals, good or bad. Part of the game is learning how to harmonize these separate threads of experience. This talk seeks to unravel the methodology around how we humans operate complex systems by taking a closer look at intuition and pattern recognition. It will introduce the concept of FCGB and how it contributes to our efforts to collaborate and respond to incidents, with real-world examples. A Chaos Game Day example will tear down the “gut feeling” myth to show that intuition is not an act of instinct, but a developed ability based on careful analysis and practice. Matt Davis

Giving Back to the Open Source Community is something you can do easily. If you feel like you have benefited from Open Source Software there are things you can easily do to give back to the folks who helped you. If you are not a coder (or just starting to code) then there are opportunities proof reading, documenting, testing, or teaching about a project you use. If you do code, and want to improve the breed, then you can add (or tighten up) features. There are websites like Quora.com and Stackoverflow.com looking for folks to help others and you can always set up a user group or a study group. This talk is a quick introduction on ways for you to help others the way you were helped by open source software, or wish you had been helped David Stokes