LCE-EU 2015

Installing and maintaining a secure server on Linux can be a challenge. It requires in-depth knowledge of Linux. Securing a server should begin with hardening the Linux operating system. This presentation will discuss: - a brief introduction to web server - securing Apache web server - limit server functionality - limit access to operating system and its files - disable unnecessary services - monitor log files - Presentation will be oriented to Ubuntu Linux distribution, but talk will discuss how to make the same on other distributions too.

Many people want to make a difference but believe that they need to be a coder or a developer to make a difference in open source projects and communities. However, there are many roles in open source that need someone who supports and believes in collaborative development to create change. I will cover some of these areas and show how you can get involved and make a difference and create an impact. My own personal story is one where I have worked in commercial company creating an open source based product, I have done open source marketing and advocacy for the Yocto project and now am the open source strategy person for my company. These roles have allowed me to move open source understanding and engagement forward in a positive way without coding.

The pets vs cattle meme is the essence of one of the lessons learned by Google from operating container at scale. One implication of it is that service discovery plays a central part in distributed application design. In this talk we will discuss service discovery in the context of Docker container and the audience will learn about components that help realizing it, from HAProxy to Mesos-DNS to Consul. The audience is anyone interested in building distributed systems with container technologies.

Most Linux systems have the powerful D-Bus (a message bus) on board that allows the kernel and applications to communicate with each other. Knowing about its existence and what D-Bus can be used for will allow anyone to take advantage of it. This presentation will introduce the D-Bus concepts and using the "dubsoorexx" package will take advantage of them. A number of small nutshell examples will demonstrate the communication over the D-Bus and remote-controlling, scripting applications. Using ooRexx (an easy programming language that looks almost like pseudo-code) and the "dbusoorexx" package it becomes plain easy to understand and exploit the D-Bus message bus, including nutshell examples that show how easy it becomes to create D-Bus services, create private D-Bus client-/server applications that can be even exploited easily in a cross-platform manner (Linux, MacOSX and Windows)!

With STEM and the maker movement becoming an increasingly important focus for the technology industry, it is important that we are encouraging the right skill sets in the next generation of software developers.
We propose a Portable Linux Lab, based on Intel Galileo or Edison boards, as a cheap and easy way of bringing Linux and programming knowledge into the classroom and Coder Dojo. The lab is designed to be a springboard for students to experiment in a Linux environment, which they may otherwise not have access to. This will ensure that educators have adequate resources to operate their classes, unfettered by location or existing infrastructure.

We will present a practical, portable and alternative solution to teaching Linux programming in a Windows-dominated classroom.

Idle is the most important workload of a client system. Modern client platforms are heavily optimized for low power. In this talk, Alexandra will explore how the platform can support idle workloads, and how Linux supports these platform features.

Additionally, Alexandra will demonstrate a practical example on how to tune the power management features of a laptop to minimize overall power consumption while idle. She will use various tools and analysis techniques including PowerTOP & Turbostat. Upon completion of the talk, the audience should have a general understand of Linux idle power management, as well as the steps needed to properly configure an out of the box Linux distribution to take advantage of the power features available on the latest Intel platforms.

Performance tuning is always an important aspect of setting up a workload and it is equally important when testing code for example filesystem feature updates. Paul Evans has been working on interfacing Performance Co-pilot with R as a way to collect live metric data which can then be looked at statistically along with visually to gain a better understanding of how workloads are performing both when running tasks and under testing.

Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a system performance and analysis framework which has had an uptake in popularity recently as the base of Vector, Netflix's on-host performance monitoring tool.

Paul will look at a selection of performance recorded demo runs using PCP along with R to statistically interpret the results of the data to help the audience members visualise the performance the workloads.

ACPI support on ARM64 is merged for v4.1 release and it's just the beginning of the journey. ACPI is a very complex specification and supporting it on ARM requires discipline in many areas. One such area is the ACPI development itself which so far is mostly x86 driven and more aligned to it. There are few areas in the current ACPI support in Linux that can be improved to make it more architecture agnostic. Another area is the firmware development supporting ACPI especially by ARM vendors for whom this is completely new area. Getting those firmware well tested is the main challenge. Given the growing interest in ACPI in ARM ecosystem, steps need to be taken to enforce standardization. This talk highlights these topics by providing a detailed overview of ACPI support on ARM64 with code examples used as a starting point to present the current solution and possible extensions.

gnuplot is indispensable in my UNIX Toolbox for way more than a decade.

gnuplot can do much more than just (nicely) display mathematical functions. Whenever one encounters some numbers that belong together in some way (whether statistics or timing data (e.g from strace;), gas prices, weather data, perhaps even lottery numbers) - a graph shows relationships and developments. And creating these diagrams is super easy with just a few intuitive commands.

The presentation will show various examples, of how to convert numbers in informative and scalable graphics, and how to evaluate data with gnuplot and generate curve fits to equalising functions in seconds.