Sessions at FOSDEM 2012 on Sunday 5th February

Rudder is a new open source tool in the configuration management domain. Its aim is not to reinvent the technical wheel, but to provide a new way to drive our infrastructure.

Specifically aimed at drift assessment, it addresses automation, ongoing verification and repairs, centralizing information and knowledge about your infrastructure, compliance reporting... thus helping to keep drift from nominal behavior low. Built upon a standard CFEngine architecture (and other open source components).

This talk will show how Rudder's approach enables everyone in the IT department to benefit from the advantages of configuration management, without necessarily needing to learn a complex tool, or even get their hands dirty. We'll describe and demonstrate how this is possible, and dive into the technical architecture that makes it work.

In a nutshell, clearly separated tasks permit technical experts to create configuration templates for the tools they know best, thus letting non-experts leverage this power via a modern web interface, such as: architects or security officers who implement policy, junior sysadmins who use and reuse such policies to setup services, and pretty much anyone who digs into real-time compliance reports and error logs.

Neil and Robert will discuss their own experience of writing a Wayland compositor, where they have been adaping the Gnome Mutter compositor into a hybrid X and Wayland compositor. The talk aims to provide general guidance on writing a hybrid X and Wayland compositor without going into many Mutter specifics.

This presentation looks into the technical details of CoApp, a new fully-open source package management system providing all the tools to easily create, publish, discover, and install software packages, including automatically handling dependencies, managing updates and providing a frictionless end-user experience, all in a method that is well supported by the platform.

The Adhearsion project is an open source voice application development framework, the first of its kind in the open source world. By utilizing modern a modern, powerful and descriptive programming language, Ruby, and development practices like test-driven-development, Adhearsion allows developers to apply tools and skills they already have to this rich domain. During this talk, we will build and demonstrate several working voice applications.

Caching has been a 'hot' topic for a few years. But caching takes more than merely taking data and putting it in a cache : the right caching techniques can improve performance and reduce load significantly. But we'll also look at some major pitfalls, showing that caching the wrong way can bring down your site. If you're looking for a clear explanation about various caching techniques and tools like Memcached, Nginx and Varnish, as well as ways to deploy them in an efficient way, this talk is for you. In this talk, we'll start from a Zend Framework (PHP) based site. We'll add caching, begin to add servers and replace the standard LAMP stack, all while performing live benchmarks.

"Internet of Threads" gives a new perspective on the Internet. Each process, group of processes or even a single thread can be an Internet node, having its own ip address, QoS, routing etc. Virtual Distributed Ethernet, User mode IP stacks, partial virtual machines can make this change possible.

The is a technical talk about how Xspice integrates the spice-server library into Xorg via a small rewrite of the xf86-vide-qxl driver, resulting in a standalone X and Spice server. Alon will briefly describe his future plan to use hotplug export a running Xorg via Spice.

This talk is aimed at developers porting toolkits to run on Wayland. It will include an overview of some of the lessons learnt from porting various toolkits over to Wayland and provide an opportunity for developers to raise questions.

LemonLDAP::NG is a free WebSSO software written in Perl and using Apache engine. It supports CAS, OpenID and SAML 2.0 protocols.

coreboot is a free firmware for x86 computers. It is designed as an extremely fast and lightweight alternative to BIOS and EFI (poweron to OS in <500 ms) while retaining the flexibility to boot any operating system. A few hundred desktop/server/embedded mainboards are supported, but supported laptops were unavailable in shops until now.

The coreboot developers are proud to present the first working mainstream laptop here at FOSDEM. We'll tell you how we did it, and how you can enjoy coreboot on your hardware as well.

This talk will firstly discuss the impossibility of using current APIs efficiently (via benchmarks on a diverse set of hardware (from many-core AMDs to the experimental Intel SCC). Finally, I will describe our work on introducing a hierarchical name system and extended socket API that adds support for automatic transport selection and reconfigurable sockets. This permits many NUMA-related optimisations on single hosts, for VMs to switch to shared memory communication if on the same physical host, and for seamless network-wide protocol upgrades to multi path TCP or TCPcrypt.

SEMS, the SIP Express Media Server, is the media and application server counterpart to SIP Express Router aka Kamailio/OpenSER, the leading open source SIP Signalling server from iptel.org. Since 2004 SEMS has been used to implement classical value added services in VoIP networks like announcements, conferencing, voicemail and RBT, and converged services as web conferencing and voice message broadcasting.

More recently, its integrated Back-to-Back User Agent has been extended and improved for flexibility and high performance, making it one of the few open source solutions for high volume session border control. But there's more to it: Thanks to its flexibility, it can also be used as core call routing element, and be a useful tool in various situations for the VoIP platform engineer.

The talk will present the SEMS SBC functionality and typical performance numbers, and then show how developers can use the internal call control API to create custom call routing in the SBC with two examples: Using a RESTful interface, a web app server implemented with the Play! framework is used for user controlled call routing, and by accessing a blacklist database in REDIS, SEMS' SBC can be used to block SPIT.

The “White-Rabbit” timing project is open and addresses the future timing and synchronization needs for CERN and other laboratories. White-rabbit makes use of synchronous Ethernet and uses ideas from IEEE 1588 PTP protocol to synchronize remote equipment up to 10Km apart to better than one nanosecond.

We stumbled upon ancient (circa 1960) scrolls of wisdom in the field of statistics and applied it to modern day monitoring systems. The result is a monitoring system that detects anomalies instead of relying on statically defined thresholds as well as predicts failures long before they become problems.

An overview of what the Firefox Mobile team has been working on and the future plans for Fennec.

Clarissa would like to convince "geeks" that they need "normal people". She wants to convince geeks about what an Average Jane or Joe can bring to FLOSS, because she wants geeks to make some efforts to welcome them.

Indeed, it has been quite difficult for her to enter the community. Difficult, but not impossible! And now, she simply loves FLOSS. So she'd like to explain how Mozillians managed to catch her attention. And which kind of contributions geeks can propose to "normal people" to attract them, and to keep them in the community... You'll see that Average Jane or Joe can be useful ;-)

She thinks geeks need Average Jane or Joe to understand what the public really wants or needs. It's the only way to really open up the Web!

So throughout this talk, she will explain what you can do to attract "normal people".

Based on his experiences with aggressively growing and maintaining the Exherbo community Bryan dives into the secrets and experience leading to this success.

pkgin is aimed at being an /apt / yum/ like tool for managing pkgsrc binary packages.

You've got the program, you've got the users but how do you make sure your community thrives? An introduction to the research on open source communities when they get more complicated then 2 developers on Github.

If you are a developer interested on the DevOps movement, you can implement end-to-end development-to-production process taking advantage of Apache Maven and Puppet, to automate continuous delivery, from source code to any number of application servers managed with Puppet.

The DevOps movement aims to improve communication between developers and operations teams to solve critical issues such as fear of change and risky deployments. But the same way that Agile development would likely fail without continuous integration tools, the DevOps principles need tools to make them real, and provide the automation required to actually be implemented. Most of the so called DevOps tools focus on the operations side, and there should be more than that, the automation must cover the full process, Dev to QA to Ops and be as automated and agile as possible. Tools in each part of the workflow have evolved in their own silos, and with the support of their own target teams. But a true DevOps mentality requires a seamless process from the start of development to the end in production deployments and maintenance, and for a process to be successful there must be tools that take the burden out of humans.

Apache Maven has arguably been the most successful tool for development, project standardization and automation introduced in the last years. On the operations side we have open source tools like Puppet or Chef that are becoming increasingly popular to automate infrastructure maintenance and server provisioning.

In this presentation we will introduce an end-to-end development-to-production process that will take advantage of Maven and Puppet, each of them at their strong points, and open source tools to automate the handover between them, automating continuous build and deployment, continuous delivery, from source code to any number of application servers managed with Puppet, running either in physical hardware or the cloud, handling new continuous integration builds and releases automatically through several stages and environments such as development, QA, and production.

Geeklog is a web content management system. The project has been around for more than 10 years now and is probably best known for powering the Groklaw website.

Yet another CMS? Actually, Geeklog has been around for longer than many of the other systems, yet has kept a low profile. Originally written for a security portal, security has always been our focus - to the extent of refusing certain features as long as they can not be implemented in a way that we consider secure.

The lightning talk will provide a quick overview of Geeklog, its features, focus, and community.

In this talk Rob will highlight the key technologies and events that are going to affect open Web game development in the near future. He will also demo some of these new technologies and show how easy it is to share your game and make money from it using the open and distributed Mozilla Labs Apps project.