Blog on OSU Open Source Lab

Data Center Migration Complete: A New Chapter for the OSL

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In February, I shared that we had crossed the halfway point of our historic move from Kerr B210 to Oregon’s State Data Center in Salem. I’m overdue in sharing the good news: we completed the migration in mid-March, ahead of our end-of-March target. Every server and every co-located project system, along with our entire network, now runs from our new home, and the months since have been some of the most productive in the lab’s history.

Retiring POWER8 from OpenPOWER Cluster

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

We have deprecated the POWER8 systems in our OpenPOWER OpenStack cluster and are decommissioning the hardware over the next few weeks. All instances that were running on POWER8 have been migrated to POWER9, and POWER9 and POWER10 remain available for new hosting requests.

Why now

POWER8 has been heading toward retirement for some time. IBM reached end of service for the POWER8 line in 2024, and while hardware support remained in place, IBM no longer provides firmware or security updates for these systems. The wider Linux ecosystem has moved on as well: RHEL 9 and its rebuilds such as AlmaLinux require POWER9, Ubuntu did the same starting with 22.04, and Debian is discussing raising its ppc64el baseline to POWER9 for its next release. We have standardized on AlmaLinux for our OpenStack platform, and since AlmaLinux 9 requires POWER9, the POWER8 nodes had stayed on AlmaLinux 8 and out of step with the rest of the platform.

Data Center Migration Update and Fundraising Campaign

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0800

In December, I announced that the OSL would be relocating from our longtime home in Kerr B210 to Oregon’s State Data Center in Salem. I’m excited to share that we’ve made tremendous progress on this historic migration, and I’m pleased to announce a critical fundraising campaign to support this endeavor.

Migration Progress: Halfway There

Cart loaded with servers, ready to be installed in new racks

Since we began the physical migration in early December, we’ve successfully relocated 128 servers out of approximately 260 total systems, putting us just past the halfway mark. We’re currently making three trips per week to Salem, moving approximately 10 servers per trip. Our timeline remains on track for completion by the end of March, though we’re optimistic about finishing sooner.

OSL Infrastructure Migration: A Move to Oregon's State Data Center

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:15:50 -0800

Earlier this year, I shared our “OSL Future” update, outlining the roadmap to build a more sustainable and resilient OSU Open Source Lab. A key part of that plan was finding a professional-grade physical home for our core infrastructure to replace the facility we’ve called home for the last two decades.

Today, I am thrilled to announce a major milestone: The OSL is officially moving to Oregon’s State Data Center (SDC) in Salem, Oregon.

Featured: Strong support stabilizes funding for the Open Source Lab

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0800

The OSU College of Engineering featured an article highlighting the Open Source Lab’s plans on moving forward after reaching stability following the funding crisis.

Read the story here: https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/all-stories/strong-support-stabilizes-funding-open-source-lab.

We're Hiring: Join the OSU Open Source Lab as a Student Systems Engineer!

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Are you passionate about Linux and the open source community? Looking to gain hands-on experience in a real-world production environment?

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) is hiring! We’re looking for an enthusiastic undergraduate student enrolled at a university in Oregon with at least one year remaining in their program. This is a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology, contribute to open source projects, and be part of a team that supports the global open source ecosystem.

Forging Our Future: OSL's Path to Sustainability – A Call for Smart Solutions and Enduring Support

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Following our OSL Future post, the community response has been incredible! Thanks to your amazing support, our team is funded for the next year. This is a huge relief and lets us focus on building a truly self-sustaining OSL.

To get there, we’re tackling two big interconnected goals:

Finding a new, cost-effective physical home for our core infrastructure, ideally with more modern hardware.
Securing multi-year funding commitments to cover all our operations, including potential new infrastructure costs and hardware refreshes.

Pillar 1: The Data Center & Hardware Challenge

Our current data center is over 20 years old and needs to be replaced soon. With Oregon State University evaluating the future of this facility, it’s very likely we’ll need to relocate in the near future. While migrating to the State of Oregon’s data center is one option, it comes with significant new costs. This makes finding free or very low-cost hosting (ideally between Eugene and Portland for ~13-20 racks) a huge opportunity for our long-term sustainability. More power-efficient hardware would also help us shrink our footprint.

Future of OSL in Jeopardy

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700

I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab (OSL). Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable.

Now Providing Access to POWER10 for Open Source Projects

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700

We are excited to announce a major upgrade to our OpenPOWER cluster, which will greatly benefit our open source projects. In collaboration with IBM, we have successfully integrated POWER10 capabilities into our current OpenPOWER cluster, powered by OpenStack using KVM on PowerVM. This enhancement represents a significant step forward in our commitment to providing cutting-edge resources to the open-source community supporting the POWER ecosystem.

FTP Server Rebuild - March 2024

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Service(s) affected

FTP mirroring service which includes (but not limited to) the following hostnames:

ftp.osuosl.org
ftp2.osuosl.org
ftp-chi.osuosl.org
ftp-nyc.osuosl.org
ftp-osl.osuosl.org
rsync.osuosl.org
rsync2.osuosl.org

Reason for outage

We will upgrade all three servers’ operating system from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8. Unfortunately, due to an issue with how the disks were partitioned, we are unable to do in-place upgrades. This will require to do a full reinstall including re-syncing all of the FTP content on each system after reinstallation. The re-sync will likely take multiple days due to the size of the content.

On Leaving the Open Source Lab, Jonathan Frederick

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0700

My first Linux operating system was Ubuntu 10.04, when I was still young. It was my first experience with open-source software, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. I just wanted an operating system to work on my Dell hand-me-down computer and didn’t want to pay for windows. So, Linux was the first thing I found. Over the next few years I started to really appreciate open-source software. I realized its importance for the internet and myself since it was one of the only things that allowed me to have full control over my devices.

Reflections on My Time at the Open Source Lab, Travis Whitehead

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0700

Reflections on My Time at the Open Source Lab by Travis Whitehead

Working at the Open Source Lab has been the highlight of my computer science experience at Oregon State University. It was just by chance that I came across a job listing for the OSL. I had never heard of the organization, and it certainly was not a factor in my decision to pursue computer science at Oregon State University.

OSL Alumnus Matthew Johnson on working at Tesla

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0800

Matthew Johnson is an OSU alumnus who now works at Tesla as a senior software engineer. He is a veteran of the U.S Marine Corps Infantry and served as a law enforcement officer. At Oregon State University, he worked for the Open Source Lab and received a scholarship from CBT Nuggets. He recently sat down with College of Engineering to talk about his experience working at Tesla.

Hiring two DevOps student positions

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800

Are you a student at Oregon State University who likes working with open source software? If so, then we have a job for you! We currently have two student systems engineer positions open which includes working with open source projects, gaining mentorship from professional staff, and interacting directly with clients.

Check out our employment page to see what you gain when you work with us!

TDS Telecom Support of OSU Open Source Lab Tops $5 Million

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0700

TDS Telecommunications, a telephone and Internet services provider has been supporting the OSL since 2005 by providing bandwidth and colocation hosting for the OSL’s mirrors. TDS recently made a large bandwidth donation valued at more than $1 million, making their cumulative support to the OSL top $5 million. Read more in the OSU newsroom story.

Goodbye Letter from Graduating Senior, Cody Holliday

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab has treated me well. I came here bright eyed and full of wonder, fascinated by the racks and racks of servers we had in the data center. Fascinated at the treasure trove of artifacts held in the back room from conventions passed, old CDs labeled “Fedora 10” or “Ubuntu 8”. That scrap of paper on the wall of an IRC log with Linus Torvalds.

Mohamed Eldebri on OSL's participation in the Corvallis Maker Fair

Mon, 07 May 2018 00:00:00 -0700

On April 28th, 2018, the OSL participated in the Corvallis Maker Fair for the second year in a row. We hosted 2 booths, the first had demos of programs in Python and Scratch, and the second had a HAProxy cluster with diskless nodes, which was built and deployed by OSL student JJ Frederick.

Attendees learned about the basics of programming by modifying the source code of the demoed programs to see how it changed the programs, learned about DevOps basics and saw how easy it was to add their laptops to the cluster as a diskless node, and also gained an appreciation of open source software.

Cody Holliday on the Department of Energy Cyber Defense Competition 2018

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0700

I took part in a Cyber Defense Competition hosted by the Department of Energy, and it was a fantastic experience! Our team worked hard to ensure that we had a fighting chance at the competition, and we had much needed help from our mentor.

The competition took place in a control center. One wall covered in flat screen TVs to create a huge monitor and the other was lined with windows into the room where the Red Team worked. There was a table for each of the 6 teams, and on each table was a small model of a natural gas extractor with two little houses around it. This little model simulated a power plant – the thing we would be defending against cyber attacks.

OSL's Cody Holliday Wins Regional DOE Cyber Defense Competition

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab’s Cody Holliday recently competed on a team with five other students at the Department of Energy Cyber Defense Competition. Despite that this was their first time competing, they ranked first place in the regional competition, and fourth place nationally! Read more about the competition. You can also read about his experience working at the OSL.

OSL Alumnus Alex Polvi sells CoreOS to Red Hat

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800

CoreOS is a San Francisco based company that focuses on developing software for container management. Alex Polvi, the CEO of CoreOS and OSL alumnus, recently sold CoreOS to RedHat for $250 million. Congratulations, Alex! img src

Changing the World, One Line of Code at a Time

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800

The OSU Experience Site has published an online article about our students! In it they talk about the services we provide, our positive impact on the lives of our student workers, and the industries we work with.

Jack Twilley on Leaving the OSL

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800

About a decade ago, I was becoming disenchanted with my time in the computer industry. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t me anymore. After some serious soul searching, I decided to turn my hobby into my next career – but I knew that I needed formal education and training. After some careful research, I narrowed down my choices to two: UC Davis and Oregon State University. Both schools have top-tier records in my new field but it was the Open Source Lab that tipped the balance. After moving to Oregon I haven’t once looked back. | After establishing residency and completing my associate degrees (all three) at PCC, I finally moved to Corvallis. I sent Lance my resume in February of 2013 and was hired the following month as a student software developer. The staff was welcoming and the students were amazing and inspirational. I felt like I was right where I needed to be. I was surprised at how much pleasure I took from mentoring so I got involved with Google’s Summer of Code program which was a great experience. I even grew so attached to one of my projects that I still support it long after it transitioned to another lab. Yay PGD! | But all good things must come to an end. After finishing my undergrad work, I went on an internship and came back to start graduate school. I suspected then that I wouldn’t be able to have my cake and eat it too and that I would have to cut back on my commitments once my research got started, and my time at the OSL would probably be the first to go. This suspicion was reinforced after my daughter was born last January and again by the financial situation about which we all know. I decided to wait to resign until after the summer in case I was needed to help with the transition and now the summer is over. I want to thank all the students with whom I have worked at the OSL. You’re what makes the lab what it is: a finishing school for the finest students at Oregon State. I am proud to have worked with you as you launch your careers and I firmly believe that you will continue making the world a better place.

Jonathan Frederick on Packer Templates project at the OSL

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0800

At the OSL we use Packer to build our images, because of the reproducible and easy work-flow it allows. We can create an entire operating system image based off a Linux distribution without any interaction! With this we are looking to add much more complete and automated testing.

To help with this we have decided to create a GitHub repository called Packer Templates. This is what the OSL will be using to generate OpenStack operating system images that many of our hosted projects use. We have been hard at work making this a reality for around 2 months and counting, and we still have a lot of work to do!

Ganeti Production Rebuild - Dec 11-15 & 18-19, 2017

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0800

Service(s) affected

All VMs running on our production Ganeti cluster will need to be non-live migrated to their secondary nodes (i.e. shutdown and start is required). We expect the outages for each VM to be short (under 5 minutes each). To see a list of VMs that are affected and when please see this page. We will ensure the VMs are pingable after the reboot, but you may want to check that services started properly for any services we don’t already monitor.

Thank You for Supporting our Crowdfunding Campaign!

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0700

As of September 1, the OSL has concluded its first ever crowdfunding campaign. With the support of our donors and the larger open source community, we managed to raise $7,140 to support our students here at the lab in compensating them for their work and enriching their experience through events such as Beaver Barcamp and other conferences.

We are so very thankful for the support of our partners and friends. If you would like to donate to the OSL, visit our donation page or our OSU Foundation page to make a direct donation. And follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to hear about more fundraising opportunities we hold in the future.

A Message from the Director

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Since its creation in 2002, the Open Source Lab (OSL) has been a beacon of innovation, experiential learning, and hosting at Oregon State University and beyond. As Director, I’ve had the pleasure of watching the lab and its employees grow over the years and I’m so grateful to have been given such an opportunity. I want to express why the OSL is important not only to the open source community, but to our larger academic institution and its students.

New Project: polr

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0700

In July 2017, the OSL began providing virtual machine and database for hosting the demo service of polr. The project itself simplifies long and complicated urls. It was started by a high school student back in 2014 who has since volunteered on the Fedora Infrastructure team. For more information, visit the project website.

Donate to Our Crowdfunding Campaign!

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0700

We’re very excited to announce our very first crowdfunding campaign through the OSU foundation! The OSL relies on donations and revenue generating projects to fund its work and its students–the number of students we can hire and train is dependent on the donations we receive.

Help us fund five additional students for the coming year, including wages, professional mentoring, and the opportunity to attend a major open source conference, such as SCALE or OSCON.

Cody Holliday on Why we should stop using C

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Programming languages are a touchy topic in Computer Science. In certain crowds even mentioning a language will elicit groans and eye-rolling. Conversely, there are crowds that will only use certain languages for all projects.

These people have lost sight of the fact that programming languages are tools. Languages have certain problem sets that they’re really good at and some not so much. If you were to ask me to do some complex math or signal processing, I would point you to MATLAB. Would I use MATLAB for developing a GUI? Not in a million years. So why do we choose C? Well, C is efficient since it’s practically one step above assembly and with a modern compiler it compiles down to a small executable. Plus modern compilers have extremely good optimization algorithms that can optimize your program better than if you wrote it by hand in Assembly. This makes C a great tool for embedded programming and systems level programming, which is why we have been using it for so long in these fields! However, a downside (and upside!) of C is that it’s like assembly. It will let you do whatever you want, even if that means shooting yourself in the foot. There is no type safety, there is no memory protection, and no thread safety built into the language. You have to do all of that yourself with mutexes, semaphores, and checks. It’s good to know about these concepts and be able to design a system that puts these protections in place, but every project should not be an exercise in memory management and complex concurrency. We should move on to tools that help you rather than give you enough rope to hang yourself with. With computers being as important as they are, security should be our number one priority when writing software. If you’re writing an application that does an unbounded copy from input (ex. heartbleed) in your final release, you just added another vector of attack to someone’s computer.

Amanda Kelner on Graduating

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0700

As of September 8th, my time here at OSU will officially come to an end. As sad as I’ll be to leave my life here in Corvallis and as nerve-racking it is to enter the real world, I realized recently I’ve spent the last seventeen years of my life in school and I’m ready to break free!

I’ll be leaving with both a degree in English and in music performance, both of which have taught me so much not just about their respective fields, but about growing up and how to work with what you’ve got.

Beaver BarCamp 17: New Horizons

Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 -0700

April 8 started out like any other Saturday in Spring in Corvallis: rainy, then sunny, then windy, windy-rainy sleet, hail, and then of course, sunny again. Despite the crazy weather, people from all walks of life still convened at the Kelley Engineering Center on the Oregon State Campus for the Open Source Lab’s annual Beaver BarCamp.

For several years now, the OSL has hosted one of Oregon State’s only unconferences to great success. Just as a refresher, or for any newbies out there, an unconference is an event in which the attendees decide the topics of presentation and discussion the day of, rather than determining these topics ahead of time. This year, we tried a few new things.

New Project: libpng Now Mirrored on ftp.osuosl.org

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0700

The OSL took on a new project and delivers a new mirroring site libpng source for libpng tarball distributions that is 20+ times as fast as the old site. It also now responds to http and https requests as well as ftp requests. For more information and links, see the original announcement.

Network Outage 2016-12-17 Post-mortem

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Issue Summary

At approximately 8:28 AM PST (1628 UTC) we lost all our network connectivity in our Corvallis data center affecting all of our customers hosted in the data center. Network connectivity was restored at approximately 11:15 AM PST (1915 UTC). The root cause was due to our ISP losing power to their switches which provide our Internet connectivity due to a problem with the generator.

Timeline

Time	Description
8:20AM PST (approx)	OSU electricians start a planned power outage affecting the building our systems are housed in.
8:28AM PST	OSL received a page regarding several networks being off-line.
9:12AM PST	“OSL arrives on-site and confirms our primary data center is powered on and that none of the systems

had been rebooted.” 9:30AM PST| “OSL confirms the root cause is a UPS problem in the basement data center which houses our ISP network equipment.” 11:07AM PST| Power restored in basement data center. 11:15AM PST| OSL Network was restored.

OSL Summer 2016 Internship

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0700

In a new program, the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL) partnered with Intel to give community college students an opportunity to get hands-on experience with open-source projects. This summer, four students interned for 10 weeks at the OSL, working on a variety of projects, including web development and systems engineering, to advance their skills and knowledge with open-source work and communities.

The OSL at PyCon

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

The month of June opened with the annual PyCon event at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, the largest annual gathering for the Python community. This year, the OSL had the opportunity to send one of its own. Matthew Johnson presented a poster on Pymesync, a tool of Python.

But first, what exactly do all these Py- words mean?

Congratulations 2016 Graduates!

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700

As exciting as the end of the school year is for everyone, and with it the promise of sun, no classes, shorts, extended vacations, and no classes, it also brings an inevitable goodbye to those leaving to enter the real world.

I’m talking about our graduating seniors. Those who have earned their stripes and are ready to move on. The superstars stepping up to take the stage. The brave few willing to begin paying off their student loans. Many of our graduates have spent multiple years working for the OSL, some starting not long after high school. And we’re losing too many good ones this year, including:

RTEMS

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Within the last several years, the OSL has provided a home for the Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor System, or RTEMS. RTEMS is an open Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) that supports both open application programming interfaces (API) and interfacing standards such as Berkeley sockets. Basically, RTEMS supports the embedded systems in programs, or the combinations of software and hardware designed to do very specific tasks. RTEMS works in spaceflight, medical devices, and more. For a while, RTEMS was developed and hosted by a corporation named OAR where it was continuously developed by its programmers, however the project was lacking a certain amount of IT expertise. Enter the fateful meeting between RTEMS developers and our very own Lance Albertson at a Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit.

CASS and the AllSeen Alliance

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Oregon State University has joined the world’s technology leaders — including LG, Microsoft, and Qualcomm — to advance the collaborative development of the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT is a network of devices that exchange information — anything from smaller devices like watches to full-scale “smart cities.” IoT devices are almost too numerous to count, including light bulbs, air vents, watches, speakers, parking monitors and mirrors. The number of connected devices is predicted to increase by another 30 percent in 2016, according to Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company.

DevOps DayCamp 2015

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0700

In early October, we hosted our second annual DevOps DayCamp to over eighty students, faculty, and community members, acting as a feeder workshop into the year long DevOps BootCamp series. Beyond its promotional function, our DayCamp provided an interactive workshop for those in attendance.

We offered seminars and interactive programs for both beginners and more advanced participants.

For the beginners, the sessions focused on fundamentals and introductions. We began with an explanation of DevOps and its functions and moved into the basics of operating the system, including working with Unix, executing programs and flagging potential problems. Participants also learned collaborative techniques featuring IRC and git.

OSL GSOC 2015 - Oregon's Catch

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

This summer the Open Source Lab had three students from around the world working on open source software through Google Summer of Code. The OSL has participated in GSoC for nine years, and each year has had its own unique challenges and successes.

I had an opportunity to work with a student, Chaitanya, on What’s Fresh, a project I originally developed last summer at the OSL for Oregon Sea Grant. With What’s Fresh (which Sea Grant is planning to brand as Oregon’s Catch), Sea Grant wanted to allow visitors to the Oregon coast to be able to find fresh fish available from fishermen, and had CASS, the new organization the OSL is a part of, develop the app and backend. Chaitanya worked on the backend, making data entry easier. It now has several important features, like easier location entry, search, and inline forms so users don’t need to leave the page to add related items. It is also now themeable, so other organizations can use easily set up a customized version for their area.

OSL GSOC 2015 - Protein Geometry Database

Sat, 12 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

What is the Protein Geometry Database?

The Protein Geometry Database project (PGD) is many things to many people.

The synopses on code.osuosl.org says:

“Protein Geometry Database is a specialized search engine for protein geometry. It allows you to explore either protein conformation or protein covalent geometry or the correlations between protein conformation and bond angles and lengths.”

There’s a lot of science in that paragraph; I speak code much better than I speak science, so let’s look at the GitHub Repository. That page says things like…

Mysql1-vip Outage Post-Mortem

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Background

On July 15th we ran into a number of issues with replication on mysql2 on a couple of session tables. This caused replication to be paused, and a large number of statements had to be skipped. Replication was restarted successfully. On July 16th some more issues with the same tables were encountered, but in far greater number. A ticket was created to track the issue. Replication was restarted several times, but on the week of the 20th a decision was made to entirely reload mysql2 and examine some alternative replication methods (primarily row-based replication).

Write the Docs '15

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0700

The day is May 18. The location is the Portland’s Crystal Ballroom. The conference is Write the Docs (WtD). Excitement and anticipation fill the air as we collectively munch on breakfast foods and find a seat. The keynote begins and immediately sets the mood: docs are fun, docs are interesting, and here’s how you can make your docs awesome.

WtD was quite the experience and it got me excited about documentation, something I admit I never expected to be all that excited about. At times it felt like a support group for non-technical individuals that work with engineers, other times it felt like a storyteller sharing with us their adventure in documenting some massive project, and most importantly it was always engaging and interesting. Some of my most memorable talks were of Twillio’s efforts to make their documentation better, GitHub’s workflow of writing docs for GitHub with GitHub, and Google’s new documentation tool and how it was developed and adopted in a grass roots effort as opposed to a top-down corporate approach. I even gave a Lightning Talk on “How to Write the Best Email You’ve Never Written… Until Now” which went over very well and seemed to speak to a lot of people.

Coming Soon: Beaver BarCamp 15

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Spring is almost here, and that means Beaver BarCamp 15 is quickly approaching. The OSL’s annual unconference is scheduled for Saturday, April 18th. Participants are beginning to gather ideas and information for their sessions, and the Open Source Lab is offering up some helpful suggestions on how to present a successful unconference session:

Plan ahead. While the spirit of BarCamp is spontaneous and unstructured, it is a good idea to gather enough information ahead of time to present a well-informed BarCamp presentation. Planning for your session can help you budget your time and make you less nervous.

SCALE x13

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0700

A few months ago, Emily Dunham and I were chatting about the talks we had recently presented at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference, and the topic of other conferences and events we were interested in speaking at came up. She pointed me to the Southern California Annual Linux Expo (SCALE) and encouraged me to submit one of my talks. Two hours later, I had successfully submitted a proposal to give a talk about the media suite Blender 3D and promptly forgot about the whole thing. A few weeks later I got an email congratulating me on being accepted as a speaker to Scale x13; a few weeks after that I was on a plane to LA getting ready for an eventful (and exhausting) weekend.

A Successful DevOps DayCamp

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Over 100 students and community members attended the Open Source Lab’s DevOps DayCamp in the Kelley Engineering Center at Oregon State University on Saturday, Oct. 11.

DevOps DayCamp, a new event this year, was the kick-off for DevOps BootCamp, an extracurricular training program in its second year that takes place throughout the school year for OSU students and community members interested in DevOps. DayCamp is a dual-track event designed to accommodate varying levels of DevOps experience. Tracks consisted of a beginner track and an advanced track, with one joint session for all experience levels.

Using Variables in a Custom Drupal Theme

Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0700

At the Open Source Lab we host many of our sites as a Drupal multisite. This means that we have several instances of Drupal using the same theme, and then we can populate each site with different content as needed (for instance, cass.oregonstate.edu and osuosl.org would be different websites with different messages, but with Drupal they can look and act the same. Pretty neat!). Since not all of our sites are used by the OSL (i.e. the Center for Applied Systems and Software), I recently needed to make our logo and organization name into variables so that the user could just upload an image and fill in a text box to customize the site theme to their organization. Luckily, Drupal makes my job pretty easy.

DevOps DayCamp

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab will host the new DevOps DayCamp on Saturday, October 11, in the Kelley Engineering Center from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

DevOps DayCamp will kick off DevOps BootCamp, allowing students to start their DevOps education early in the school year. In order to accommodate different experience levels, DayCamp is comprised of two tracks: a beginner track and an advanced track. The beginner track will help inexperienced attendees get started with DevOps through introductory sessions and workshops on the basics of DevOps. Additionally, the advanced track will be comprised of a hands-on hackathon with educational sessions throughout the day for the more experienced DevOps crowd. Advanced track sessions will be given by industry professionals and will include Ansible, Travis CI and Docker.

My Experiences with Openstack

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0700

In the simplest of terms, OpenStack is a massive undertaking. The goal of OpenStack is to fit just about every use case imaginable. This goal brings with it a daunting list of configuration options and requires a larger understanding of networking and virtualization systems. Couple that with cryptic error messages, and this makes for a system that can easily crush a newbie’s confidence and cause them to scrap the system altogether. Luckily, there are some projects out there trying to lower the entry bar and get more people introduced to OpenStack. Two of the projects most referred to are DevStack (which the OpenStack developers actually use for development and testing) and RDO Packstack from RedHat. Last summer, I began teaching myself OpenStack using Packstack. This creates a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) deployment suitable to get comfortable with the architecture, the concepts and even some architectural design choices. Fast forward a few months and, having gathered a much larger (and yet still very small) understanding of how OpenStack works, the OSL deployed the POC Packstack setup and had our Systems Admins deploying VMs to develop and test our Chef cookbooks. Next comes the most daunting challenge: configuration management. Configuration management requires a much greater understanding of the underlying system because you have to know which options should be changed and which options should not. The problem with OpenStack in configuration management is that there are so many options to set/change in each OpenStack service. The other challenge is knowing how to choose the best option for your use case. You can create your own management scripts or you can look into the various other methods being developed (such as RedHat’s RDO Foreman using Puppet or Chef’s Stackforge). I first started with RDO Foreman mostly due to the RDO support community. This community is filled with helpful and knowledgeable people who are working on the configuration management scripts. Ultimately, however, we went with Stackforge over RDO Foreman, mainly because the latter lacked some flexibility we required. It also turned out that the Stackforge project would allow for us to run multiple environments as well as allowing us to run OpenStack on IBM Power CPUs. After a lot of testing, tweaking, frustration (head-desking, face palming, cursing), moments of inspiration, sudden realizations, and wonderful moments of clarity, we had a working test environment. Next, we had to reconcile the differences between the testing environment and the production environment (as well as throwing in things like changing from OpenStack’s Havana release to Icehouse for good measure). Currently, we are finishing up some testing of our x86 production OpenStack cluster and we even have a production OpenPower OpenStack cluster. Overall, this project has been an incredible opportunity that enabled me to experience different roles in project management, build connections in the various OpenStack community, learn more about the underlying systems that OpenStack uses (kvm, networking in too much detail, web servers, etc.), and, most of all, drastically increase my abilities to debug problems with little information while being persistent in learning how to properly fix those bugs. Ultimately the skills and concepts developed while working with OpenStack can be transferred to almost any setting, making it a valuable teaching tool.

Make Bash, Not War

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

At the OSL we have shared workstations, most of which are named after colors. In the NOC, I usually work at emerald.workstation.osuosl.bak (Figure 1). I use tmux (Figure *) to multiplex so I can have multiple terminals open in a single ssh connection and connect to my session from anywhere. When splitting the terminal ertically, the prompt can get so long that it’s hard to see the command that I’m entering (Figure 2). I’d like my prompt to automatically shorten itself in narrow windows. Fortunately, my terminal already knows how much space it has available: $COLUMNS is an environment variable which stores how wide your current terminal is, and the default unixism is 80. So in order to save space, I’d like to shorten my prompt to only a directory listing and a colored character replacing the normal $ or >. Behold! (Figure 3, 4) Using a case statement and filtering out the name of the workstation from the domain name, I can color code my prompt based on hostname. This very easily lets me know $HOSTNAME (again, this is an environment variable which contains /etc/hostname), and indirectly /usr/bin/whoami since almost every other user will preface their prompt with a $USER. This was a 10 minute exercise in learning how to write case statements in bash and provide some cute utility to an otherwise stale prompt. The other thing you might notice is that I directly add the unicode heart into the prompt. This causes difficulty on TTYs and some terminal emulators where it is replaced with a ♦ (which is an ASCII character). There should be a check to make sure it can be loaded and replaced with something else if it fails. All in all, this is just quick hack to make life prettier! Source!

A Recap of OSCON 2014

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

The OSL made a strong showing at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) this year with the majority of the student employees attending along with all of the full time staff. The conference was held in Portland, OR, and fell on July 20-24.

The Lab always places a special emphasis on education, and the conference was certainly an educational experience. The expo hall held dozens of booths filled with information and demonstrations about open source projects and the companies that support them.

Google Migration Post-mortem

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

OSU administration recently approached the OSL asking us to help migrate their email archives to Google. Through contacts with other local universities that had made the switch recently, we discovered that Portland State University had written and published an open source Python app to manage the process. In the name of expedience, we decided to fork that project and use that as our base from which to extend.

Vim Trick FTW!

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Recently, I learned a useful Vim trick. One of our hosted clients has a Dokuwiki instance that we help manage, and they were having problems with a lot of spam user accounts being created. We added a CAPCHA to the wiki to make it less convenient for new spammers to join, but there were a lot of bad accounts already existing. By “a lot,” I mean there were 112,808 accounts listed in users.auth.php, and only about a dozen real project personnel using the wiki on a regular basis.

OpenStack on OpenPOWER

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Openstack has been growing in popularity over the past few years and recently we’ve started to look into it further here at the OSL. We plan to continue to use Ganeti for our high-available IaaS needs, however we’re researching ways to integrate Openstack at the lab as well. While Ganeti provides a solid, stable and simple platform for general IaaS needs, Openstack provides better support for elastic and dynamic needs. We feel that using both platforms gives the best of both worlds, because they each fill a specific niche in a cloud environment.

Protein Geometry - What the Heck is That?

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0700

When I bumped into my biochemistry professor, Dr. Kevin Ahern, on campus a few months ago, I had the pleasure of explaining how I actually get to use what I learned in his class. And at the Open Source Lab of all places. At the lab, I’ve had the opportunity to work on an open source project called the Protein Geometry Database (PGD), and my coursework as a food science major with fermentation science option – specifically, that course in biochemistry – has proven unexpectedly helpful when working on the PGD.

Openstack's Horizon

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0800

The first tech post is by Chance Zibolski, a community system administrator and project lead of Ganeti Web Manager, a Web administration panel that allows administrators and clients access to administer and use Google’s open source cloud infrastructure.

Recently the OSU Open Source Lab has been experimenting with different technologies, in particular Openstack. We already use Ganeti as our production virtual machine and cluster management system and have written a web front end called Ganeti Web Manager. The whole purpose of the web manager is to allow us to easily create new virtual machines for internal purposes and to provide our customers with cheap, redundant VMs. Recently, the OSL released Ganeti Web Manager 0.10.2 and we’re getting close to finishing version 0.11. With this release, we’ve begun to discuss the future of Ganeti Web Manager and where we should be taking it. We’ve decided to eventually rewrite it. As the project lead of Ganeti Web Manager, it’s been my job to explore what tools and libraries we may want to use for new versions of the project.

DevOps Bootcamp Extends OSL Reach

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Sometimes, it’s hard to be popular. The increasing popularity of open source means that there are always more students interested in the Open Source Lab than we have the ability to hire and mentor. In order to increase the lab’s reach and educate more people about FOSS, the lab created a new program, DevOps Bootcamp. Spearheaded by Emily Dunham, a student system administrator, and modeled after Portland State University’s Braindump, this program will allow more people from outside of the OSL to learn valuable FOSS skills.

10 Projects Making a Difference

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Submitted by Melissa Morse on November 25, 2013

In addition to supporting projects that are making significant impacts on technology, the Open Source Lab hosts projects that are striving to make the world a better place. The following 10 open source projects (in no particular order) promote open source technology in education, health care and government in ways that build a better future.

Connecting at Beaver BarCamp 12

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0700

More than 160 students, community members and educators gathered in the Kelley Engineering Center at Oregon State to share ideas, make connections and learn together at the Open Source Lab’s Beaver BarCamp 12 on Saturday, October 12. An informal conference hosted twice each year by the Open Source Lab, Beaver BarCamp encourages attendees to participate by both presenting sessions and participating in discussions. Throughout the day, 50 sessions were presented, with topics ranging from Python programming to starting a business to creating a universe.

Top 10 Projects Impacting the Open Source Community

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab serves as a trusted third-party home to some of the largest open source projects. By promoting collaboration, accessibility and transparency, these projects are advancing the open source mission. The following (in no particular order) are 10 projects that make a significant impact on the open source community.

Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation manages the development of many open source software packages, most notably the Apache Web server. The ASF was one of the OSL’s first hosted projects, coming aboard in 2003. The OSL provides hosting for the ASF’s operational infrastructure.

Top 10 Milestones

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab is celebrating 10 years of open source hosting, development and education. Here is a look back at some of our most important accomplishments.

2003 Domain name

The domain name osuosl.org was created on October 11 at 17:25:06 UTC.
2003/04 Mozilla Firefox

The OSL began hosting the Mozilla Foundation in 2003. In 2004, the lab began facilitating downloads of the Mozilla web browser Firefox 1.0, using Bouncer. The OSL specifically created Bouncer to help facilitate the high number of Firefox downloads: over 1 million on the first day of its release. Learn more

A Look Back at Beaver BarCamp 1

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

After attending BarCamp Portland, Alex Polvi was inspired to create a similar opportunity for Corvallis. At the time, Polvi was a computer science student at Oregon State University, and he approached Associate Professor Timothy Budd about creating a BarCamp on campus. After driving up to Portland with some students in order to see a how a BarCamp is organized, Budd began creating the first Beaver BarCamp, with the help of his students and Corvallis community members from the Software Association of Oregon. The first Beaver BarCamp was held on March 1, 2008.

OSL Announces 10 year Celebration; Attends OSCON

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab (OSL) recently kicked off its 10 year celebration at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland July 23 - 26.

Over the last decade, the OSL has contributed much to the recent growth of the open source community and is using this milestone to reflect on its past accomplishments and to create goals for the future. By focusing to ‘Build The Future’ in three key areas: education, outreach, and research and infrastructure, the lab will strengthen its position as an open source leader.

Open Source Bridge Promotes Community

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

With the open source conference season well underway, OSL students and staff were excited to attend Open Source Bridge at the Eliot Center in downtown Portland from June 18-21. Now in its fifth year, the conference provided a unique opportunity for the open source community to connect and share with each other.

Besides great vegetarian food, one of the ways conference organizers promoted a feeling of community was with the hacker lounge, sponsored by Intel. Comfortable seating, plenty of power strips and wifi, a 3-D printer and a Lego table added to the atmosphere of creativity. For OSL Director Lance Albertson, the hacker lounge was the most important part of Open Source Bridge.

OSL to Mentor Four in Google Summer of Code

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Students from India, Poland and the United Kingdom will work on projects for the OSL this summer. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab has accepted four college students from around the world as Google Summer of Code 2013 participants. The four students will work on projects for the OSL over the summer with Google’s sponsorship and OSL staff members’ mentoring and supervision.

The OSL has not had four GSOC students since 2010. OSL Director Lance Albertson attributes this year’s increased number of students, compared to only one in 2012, to a greater variety of available projects.

OSL Staff Participate at DrupalCon 2013

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Open Source Lab staff members attended DrupalCon May 20-24 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. OSL attendees welcomed the opportunity to contribute and learn during the many sessions and social events.

“It was so good to see everyone in the open source community, meet new people and reconnect with people I only see once a year,” says Rudy Grigar, senior systems architect.

OSL's April 2013 Newsletter

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Below is a summary of the Open Source Lab’s tri-annual newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, visit our sign up form.

Letter from the Director

Dear Friends,

After working for nearly six years as the Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s lead systems engineer and the associate director, I became the lab’s new director in January. My involvement in the open source community began in 2003 with the Gentoo Linux distribution, and I am excited for the opportunity I will have to continue promoting and supporting FOSS in my new role. The OSL is unique for its heavy reliance on a student workforce to power the lab, and I plan to find new ways to further develop and expand our students’ abilities.

Students & Community Members Learn Together at Beaver BarCamp 11

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

More than 150 Oregon State students, community members and students from other Oregon universities gathered in the Kelley Engineering building April 20 to attend the Open Source Lab’s Beaver BarCamp 11. Attendees presented nearly 50 sessions on a wide range of topics ranging from the technical to the recreational, including successful system administration, mead brewing and how to turn a T-shirt into a tie.

OSL to Participate in Google Summer of Code 2013

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

This year will be the lab’s seventh straight as a GSOC mentor.

Open Source Lab staff are excited to announce that the lab has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the seventh year running. GSoC is a valuable opportunity for collaboration between the lab and young programmers around the world. In the past, the lab has worked with students from China, Portugal, Venezuela and Poland, offering them mentorship and guidance as they complete tasks to advance projects at the OSL.

OSL Staff Mentors International Students Through Google Summer of Code

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Real-world work experience is one of the most valuable things an employer can provide to students preparing to enter the job market.

At the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, that experience is readily available to 19 part-time student employees who balance their coursework at Oregon State with a job that offers them professional training. But the lab’s influence on ambitious students reaches beyond Oregon State, and even the United States, through Google’s Summer of Code program.

Students, Community and Professionals Collaborate at Beaver BarCamp 10

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0700

On Oct. 13, more than 150 people gathered in Kelley Engineering Center to attend the Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s Beaver BarCamp 10. Beaver BarCamp is a semiannual unconference that brings together students as well as community members to discuss technology, recreation and ideas in an interactive setting.

Beaver BarCamp 10 featured attendee-led sessions on a variety of topics and was sponsored by Mozilla, RackSpace and the Oregon State University School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In addition to sessions held by students on topics ranging from whistling to virtualization to playing poker, Mozilla employees presented three sponsored sessions on Web security, writing for the Web and building open Web apps.

From Support to Success

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

When staff members at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab were working with creators of the Drupal content management system to provide free hosting services to the overloaded project in 2005, crisis hit. A server meltdown left all Drupal websites down for two days, emphasizing the project’s need for further support and motivating the community behind the open source project to donate double the amount needed to purchase a new server to be hosted at the OSL.

OSL in the Spotlight at Summer Conferences

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The open source community is driven by the people who use, change and support open source software. This summer, members of the Open Source Lab staff enjoyed opportunities to connect with those people face-to-face at annual open source events. Lab staff and students attended the Portland conferences Open Source Bridge and O’Reilly Open Source Convention, where they presented talks, hosted a booth to represent the OSL and talked shop with everyone from recreational users to industry developers.

OSL Advances With New Staff Members; Renewed Focus

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab recently hired three new full-time staff members as part of a movement toward expansion as a self-supported campus entity. The additional staff members will provide comprehensive support in lab operations, allowing the OSL to increase student opportunities within the lab and improve the resources it can offer open source projects.

The OSL is home to some of the most well-known open source projects in the world and facilitates more than 600,000 unique downloads each day. In addition to hosting external projects, the OSL also contributes to and develops open source software in-house and provides hosting for projects and Web infrastructure within the university. To support its efforts, the lab employs several qualified OSU students who gain professional experience managing open source projects, maintaining servers and providing customer and user support.

Building a Bright Future With DevOps

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Sometimes finding the best solution means starting over. That was Mike Cooper’s dilemma as he tackled his first solo project at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. An OSU sophomore studying computer science who had just been hired in March 2010 to work as a system administrator for the lab, he was tasked with securing a network connection that could be extended to laptops, allowing lab staff and hosted projects to connect to the lab’s private network from anywhere. Cooper decided to scrap the previous method that others had planned to use to link the network servers and instead opted for a virtual private network, a transient link between servers that he felt was a better fit for the lab’s needs.

Connect With the OSL at OSCON 2012

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Staff members and students from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab will represent the lab at Portland’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) July 16-20. An annual open source conference, OSCON engages all aspects of the open source community with sessions, tutorials, keynote presentations and an expo.

The OSL will be present throughout the conference at the OSCON Expo, where the lab will have a booth alongside open source leaders like Drupal, Facebook and Intel. In addition, OSL Associate Director of Operations Lance Albertson will lead a session on open source private cloud platforms. Albertson plans to discuss the various features offered by different cloud computing platforms and offer insight on how to choose a platform that best meets a project’s needs.

Open Source, Open Future

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Students reap the benefits of professional programming experience at the OSU Open Source Lab

As a freshman at Oregon State University in early 2010, Jordan Evans didn’t have a lot of computer science experience. Though he had always had an interest in computers, Evans had come to OSU as a mathematics major and, like many first-year students, didn’t yet have a clear idea of what he hoped to do with his education.

Setting the Bar High

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s Beaver BarCamp 9 brought around 70 people to the Kelley Engineering Center on April 21 to discuss projects, explore new interests and share ideas. The sessions held throughout the day varied greatly in topic – from robotics to hydroponic gardening to gaming – but all shared an open forum and flexibility that promoted discussion and collaborative learning.

OSL 'Unconference' Approaches

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab will host Beaver BarCamp 9 Saturday, April 21, in the Kelley Engineering Center. The event is free and open to anyone, including OSU students of all majors and interests, faculty and community members.

Beaver BarCamp is an opportunity to learn about an assortment of projects, skills and interests through discussion in an open, participant-led format. Attendees are invited to devise and lead interactive sessions that others at the conference can join. In the past, BarCamp sessions have focused both on computer and software development and on completely non-technical subjects. Topics have included writing software applications, learning Spanish, screenplay writing, the computer science gender gap, improving Web security and biking, among others.

Highlights From Beaver Barcamp 8

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Beaver BarCamp 8 Quick Facts:

Number of T-Shirts Ordered: 100
Number of Raffle Tickets Distributed: 136
OSL Mugs Raffled Off: 6
Happy Recipients of Kindle Fire Door Prize: 1
Hero Sandwiches Consumed: 42’ of Tasty
Awesome Sponsors: Mozilla, SAO Corvallis and Thumb Arcade
Cool Factor: 11

The Oregon State University community shared its talents, knowledge and ideas this past Saturday, October 29th, in the Kelley Engineering Center during Beaver BarCamp 8 (BBC 8), an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

Lots of Love from LinuxCon

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

You may recall our earlier article on the OSU Open Source Lab’s plans for LinuxCon North America 2011. If you’re following us on Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen some of this great news stream by already. But we do have some great new photos to share, so read on in any case.

The first ever Linux Learners Day was a resounding success. We welcomed more than 35 student participants to this day long track on all things Linux and open source. The best part of the day? Letting our attendees know that we could forgo the concluding panel session on careers if they were tired from 5+ hours of lecture and having them not only decline to leave early, but then keep the panel discussion going a full twenty minutes over schedule because of all the great questions.

All Aboard for Vancouver!

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The OSUOSL Heads to LinuxCon North America 2011 Next Week

The entire OSU Open Source Lab team will be catching a ride on the Tux Bus next Monday, headed to Vancouver, B.C. and LinuxCon North America 2011. We’re very excited to be leading all the sessions for the brand new Linux Learners Day, a full day of talks geared to students. The schedule includes:

Fundamentals of Open Source Development
Linux Basics
Introduction to Python
Embedded Systems
Careers in Open Source

Linux Learners Day is one of the many ways the Linux Foundation supports students in pursuit of future careers in the Linux arena. Other efforts include Linux Training Scholarships, with the first round of scholarship recipients announced just yesterday.

New Study to Investigate Use of Open Source Software for Securing the Energy Industry

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Energy Sector Security Consortium and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab Partner to Establish Effective and Inclusive Collaboration and Governance Models

8-8-2011

CORVALLIS, Oregon - The Energy Sector Security Consortium (EnergySec) and Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) announced today that they will partner to perform strategic research on the current use of open source software in the energy sector, especially as it relates to computer security. OSUOSL will perform case studies looking at leading and influential organizations or projects, the tools they use and the challenges these groups have faced in adopting open source software.

A Little Love for the LUG

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Oregon State University Linux Users Group (LUG) exists to promote free and open source software on campus. Its members and moderators turn to events like OSCON to find support from premier open source affiliates to help boost the group’s reputability at Oregon State University, and last week some OSU Open Source Lab (OSL) students also LUG members were treated to mass donations.

An incredible 23 organizations and companies listed below opened their booths and handed the students boxes of t-shirts, books and other great gifts to help the LUG’s development this coming year.

Highlights from OSCON 2011

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Summer Camp for Geeks

Students at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL) get into a project development groove, especially during the summer months. They’re happy to exit the groove, though, when major open source events roll into the region.

A group of them took a break from their daily routines and traveled to the Oregon Convention Center in Portland last week for OSCON, now in its 13th year. Amidst dozens of booths, each with its own ornamentation – simple and extravagant – they wandered, hunting for stickers, branded flashlights and other free promotional garb, when they weren’t tending to the OSL’s own booth.

Come See the OSUOSL at OSCON 2011

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

It’s that time of year again in Portland, Oregon. It’s sunny and warm - well, it is today - and the annual OSCON conference is just around the corner. The OSU Open Source Lab team will be participating in several activities at the conference, and we hope to meet some new folks, introduce them to the lab and our offerings to the open source community, and catch up with old friends. Here’s what we’re up to at OSCON 2011:

OSL Talks OSWALD and Ganeti at Open Source Bridge

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Three representatives of the Open Source Lab gave presentations at last week’s Open Source Bridge conference in Portland.

The annual four-day conference is a public platform for open source developers to discuss various technologies and projects. Hundreds of people filed in each day to listen to the individual talks and share information with the open source community.

Programmer Tim Harder gave the first of the two OSL project presentations on Tuesday afternoon, while lead systems administrator/architect Lance Albertson with lead software engineer Peter Krenesky presented on Wednesday morning.

OSUOSL Alum Eric Searcy Joins the Linux Foundation as IT Infrastructure Manager

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Eric Searcy, a former three-year student employee at the Open Source Lab, has picked up a new role at the Linux Foundation as the organization’s IT Infrastructure Manager. He will be in charge of maintaining and deploying systems, systems security, and keeping the Foundation’s IT infrastructure up and running.

In Spring 2008, Searcy graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Computer Science. He immediately began working for Corvallis-based InsightsNow, a market research company, as its Infrastructure Architect. He was hired by Jason McKerr, then InsightsNow’s Director of Technology and one of two people who founded the OSUOSL. If you’ve been following the news from Oregon’s tech scene, you may recall that McKerr recently joined Portland based startup Puppet Labs as VP of Development.

Out and About with the OSL in June

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Summer conference season is upon us, and employees of the OSL will be giving several talks. Kicking off June’s festivities, Leslie Hawthorn will be discussing “Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software: Saving the World One Bit at a Time” at Southeast LinuxFest. The conference runs from June 10-12 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Leslie will be speaking this Friday, June 10th.

If you find yourself in Portland, Oregon for Open Source Bridge, you’ll hear from all our technical staff at the conference. Tim Harder will be covering OSWALD: Lessons from and for the Open Hardware Movement. Lance Albertson and Peter Krenesky will be giving a tutorial talk on Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti. Open Source Bridge runs June 21-24th.

Emily on Essentials: Robotics, Open Source and Life as New Student at the OSL

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Ed. Note: As part of our ongoing series of interviews with the OSL’s student employees, this week we’re bringing you the story of Emily Dunham, one the newest additions to the OSL. Emily joined us just over a month ago as a student developer. Emily was kind enough to share her thoughts with the Lab’s student writer, Anthony Casson.

Emily hard at work on her latest creation, which fetched the Artistic Design award at this year’s Oregon State University Engineering Expo

Special Student Attendee Packages for LinuxCon North America 2011

Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

You may recall from our recent newsletter that the OSL team is organizing a student focused track at the Linux Foundation’s upcoming conference, LinuxCon North America 2011. Dubbed Linux Learners Day, these sessions for students will be taught by OSL staff and will focus on fundamentals of Linux, embedded systems and open source community involvement. LinuxCon NA 2011 will take place the week of August 15th in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

OSL Newsletter - April 2011

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The OSL Team and Our Host, David Recordon, at Facebook’s Prineville Data Center

We’ve been spending the past few weeks making our plans for the summer: specing out longer term projects for our student employees, sharing our knowledge at conferences and continuing our mission to grow and support the world of open source. While we’re busy looking forward and reviewing our progress thus far for 2011, we thought it would be the perfect time to bring the community an update on what we’ve been up to for the past few months since our last newsletter. If you’d like to receive more frequent news updates from the OSL, follow us on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

Visiting Prineville: OSL Tours Facebook's Open Compute Data Center

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve likely heard of the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s project to build the most efficient data center at the lowest possible cost and to share their knowledge with other companies. Last Friday, Facebook opened the doors of their Prineville, Oregon data center, inviting a host of dignitaries and members of the press to tour this newly opened facility and learn more about the Open Compute Project. The Open Source Lab crew was fortunate enough to be invited to join this august group for a tour thanks to David Recordon, Facebook’s Senior Open Programs Manager.

OSL Newsletter: A Look Back at 2010

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

We’ve had plenty of good things happening at the OSL since we brought your our last newsletter, and as we’re busy gearing up for 2011 we wanted to take a few moments to share our good news with the community.

First, the best news: We’re Hiring

The OSL is hiring for a full-time software developer who will analyze, design, and test software code for Ganeti Web Manager, the Protein Geometry Database and several other homegrown Open Source Lab projects. For more details on the position and instructions on how to apply, check out the Analyst Programmer role on the Oregon State University Jobs page.

CrisisCommons is pleased to announce partnership with OSU's Open Source Lab

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who use creative problem solving and open technologies to help people and communities in times and places of crisis. CrisisCommons is pleased to join several other humanitarian free and open source software projects hosted by Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL).

The CrisisCommons community creates “CrisisCamp” events where volunteers of all skill levels can work across borders, languages and timezones to collaborate on projects, translate languages, build open source technology tools, and aggregate data to provide support for crisis response efforts. During the worldwide response to the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, this community organized 63 events across 8 countries with over 2,300 people participating to support such projects as Person Finder, a searchable database of missing persons, and Tradui, the first Creole translation application. The OSL has been part of the CrisisCommons community from the beginning, through the CrisisCamp Portland (CrisisCampPDX) event on January 23, 2010.

OSU Open Source Lab to assist young students in “Google Code-in” contest

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

CORVALLIS, Ore. - High school students can soon participate in the Google Code-in Contest with the assistance of the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University.

In this contest, which begins Nov. 22, students aged 13-18 will be provided with a list of tasks that could improve various open source software projects. The OSU Open Source Lab, one of 20 organizations participating in this initiative, will ask students to create logo artwork, write code, produce documentation, fix software glitches and do other tasks.

TeachEngineering Project Receives Award from NSF's National Science Digital Library

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

At the annual meeting of the National Science Digital Library in Washington, D.C. earlier this week, the TeachEngineering digital library received a “recognition of excellence” award from NSDL. The NSDL is the National Science Foundation’s online library of resources and collections for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and research.

At the opening of this year’s annual meeting, chair Susan Jesuroga recognized the TeachEngineering collection as the most learning application-ready collection in NSDL. The recognition was based on an audit of quality criteria defined by NSDL as part of an assessment of the learning application readiness of NSDL’s 121 collections.

Selected for Google Code-in 2010

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

We are thrilled to have been selected as mentoring organization for the Google Code-in contest.

Right now, we’re busy getting our task list up to date on the contest website, http://google-melange.com.

News

Greg Lund-Chaix has written a blog post aimed at educators about why he’s excited to participate as a mentor for Google Code-in. Greg is one of the key figures behind the Oregon Virtual School District program.

Student Information

Students can begin participating in the contest on November 22, 2010. In the interim, now is a great time to peruse the Official Rules and the contest Frequently Asked Questions pages. If you want to talk your would-be mentors at the OSL, you can find us in our online chat room, #osuosl on Freenode.

Leslie Hawthorn Joins OSU Open Source Lab

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is pleased to announce that Leslie Hawthorn has just joined the team as an Open Source Outreach Manager. An internationally known speaker and advocate for open source software development methodologies and community practices, Leslie Hawthorn brings more than 10 years experience in project management, marketing and public relations to her new role. She previously worked as a Program Manager at Google Inc, where she was responsible for the company’s open source outreach efforts, most notably the Google Summer of Code program and Google Highly Open Participation contest.

OSL Newsletter - August 2010

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

This newsletter contains updates of recent events at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. We will continue to publish newsletters every 3-6 months in the future. Newsletters will be posted to our website as well as sent out to an email list. If you’d like to receive newsletters via email, please sign up at http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/osl-newsletter

OSCON

We were very excited to have OSCON back in Portland this year! Not only did this mean we got to share our wonderful city with many of our open source friends (Three OSLers live around Portland!), but Portland is also close enough to campus that we could bring up a number of OSL student employees and OSU CS students. It was great seeing our students meet people in the expo hall and share some of their experiences.

Give 6 Program Ends Successfully

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Give 6 fund raising program which was launched last year has completed with great success. Friends of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab were invited to make a gift in honor of our sixth anniversary. Responses came from 88 unique donors representing 27 U.S. states and 17 different countries. Many donors added words of appreciation: “The support we’ve received, in hardware, bandwidth, and from the volunteers and employees of the Open Source Lab, have been outstanding.” “By supporting efforts like the Open Source Lab, the university is helping teach, innovate, and support our future.”

OpenConferenceWare-Android Launched for OSCON

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

We are happy to announce that we’ve completed work on our OpenConferenceware-Android application to make it available for OSCON 2010. You can download the app to your Android phone to get access to OSCON schedule, maps, and more.

Peter Krenesky, the lead developer of the Android application, has written a blog post with more details about the application including links to the code. You can also learn more from the OSCON blog post.

OSUOSL Speakers at Open Source Bridge

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

We’re always excited to see open source events happening, especially when they are in our home state of Oregon! Open Source Bridge will have its second annual conference June 1-4, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab will be well represented at the event where five of our staff (plus one OSUOSL alumnus) will be speaking. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on at the OSUOSL and are excited to have a chance to share some of the things we’ve been up to.

MeeGo Comes to OSUOSL

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

As part a major effort and plan by the worldwide Nokia (Mameo project) and Intel (Moblin project) to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community, MeeGo has selected OSU’s Open Source Lab as its infrastructure home. Today MeeGo is an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation that encourages community contributions in accordance with the best practices of the open source development model.

MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity. MeeGo integrates the experience and skills of two significant development ecosystems, versed in communications and computing technologies. According to the project’s web site, they believe “these two pillars form the technical foundations for next generation platforms and usages in the mobile and device platforms space.”

Drupal Association supports OSUOSL with $15,000

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Drupal Association is supporting the Oregon State University Open Source Lab to the tune of $15,000. Specifically, $10,000 is being directed specifically towards paying OSL student employees to work on drupal.org infrastructure tasks. Our students have been instrumental in setting up and maintaining the infrastructure for drupal.org and related sites, and we are very excited to be able to dedicate more time to this important project.

Additionally, the Drupal Association has committed to make a $5,000 donation to the Open Source Lab general fund. This money is used to support all of our activities at the OSL, for specifics, please see our FAQ. It is great to see a project hosted at the OSL become large enough that they are able to support the Lab with a monetary donation, especially as we celebrate our sixth anniversary with the Give 6 program.

GOSCON DC

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

This year, join us for a special one-day Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) DC on Thursday, November 5 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. The program will focus on how federal agencies are using open technology in support of their agency mission objectives while reducing costs and creating a secure information technology environment. “Management”, “Mission”, and “Technology” tracks in the program feature outstanding agency and industry presentations. Government agency leaders and their key technology personnel as well as legal, procurement, planning, public information and social media staff should attend . Highlights from the program include:

Google Surpasses $1M in Donations to OSUOSL

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Google has generously donated $300,000 to support the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. With this donation, the companies cumulative support of the Lab has now topped $1 million.

Google is a Platinum Sponsor of the OSL Alliance program which enables commercial vendors to financially support the expansion of computing infrastructure, hosting services, and software development provided to open source projects at the OSUOSL.

The full press release is available here: Google gift of $300,000 to OSU Open Source Lab raises Internet giant’s support to more than $1M

OSCON 2009

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Being located so close to Portland, of course we at the OSU Open Source Lab were sad to see OSCON move down to the Bay Area this year. However, it remains a great convention not only for the abundance of wonderful sessions, but for bringing together so many open source contributors from all around the world. So, even though it means a bit of traveling for us this year, we’ll be at OSCON next week – not with are usual booth in the expo hall, but we will be participating in a number of sessions.

Catch us at Open Source Bridge

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Open Source Bridge starts today and runs through Friday at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Most of our full-time staff will be participating in the conference, so please stop us in the hallway and say hi!

Deborah Bryant will be speaking on Open Source in Government.

Lance Albertson will be speaking with ex-OSL’er, Narayan Newton (now at Tag1 Consulting) on using “layers of caching” to scale websites.

Hackathon at Open Source Bridge

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Open Source Lab is organizing a Hackathon (code sprint) at the Open Source Bridge conference, June 17-19th at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. We’re bringing people together to help out Sunlight Lab’s Fifty States Project. If you’re interested in helping promote government openness and transparency, this is your chance.

What

Part of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation, Sunlight Labs is an open source development team that builds technology to make government more transparent and accountable. They have been building the Fifty States Project with the help of volunteers around the country. The project aims to provide parsers and an API for legislative data from each of the fifty state governments in the U.S. This is a local version of their already successful OpenCongress.org which provides the same data from the federal government.

Hardware Donation Expands OSUOSL Infrastructure

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab recently received a large gift in-kind donation from a local Portland company which included approximately 20 servers, two NetApp filers with approximately 14TB of disk space, load balancers, and more. This is a very generous donation which will help the OSL replace aging hardware and expand our current infrastructure to support even more services and open source projects.

One of the donated servers (pictured here), an HP dl580 with 20GB of RAM and dual dual-core Xeon processors has already been put to use as a community database server. The OSL is currently running five such servers which run MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for our hosted partners. Our database servers power such community sites as phpBB, Mozillazine, Linux Plumbers Conference, OpenOffice Extensions, BusyBox, Gentoo Forums, Kerneltrap, OLPC Support Forums, and many more!

Flourish! Open Source Conference

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Last month, Oregon State University Open Source Lab Operations Manager, Jeff Sheltren, headed to Chicago for Flourish! Open Source Conference, put on by the University of Illinois, Chicago. There was a great crowd at Flourish with a number of excellent speakers and demonstration/learning sessions going on throughout the two day conference.

Jeff spoke about the OSUOSL including the history, current projects, and some of the cool open source projects hosted at the lab. There was a lot of interest in the audience about forming open source groups at other universities and potential collaboration with the OSUOSL.

OSUOSL Visit to Japan

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Deb Bryant, the OSU Open Source Lab’s Public Sector Communities Manager, was recently invited to participate in a number of events in and around Matsue City, located in the Shimane Prefecture of Japan. The region has drawn national recognition for the Matsue “Ruby City” project, a highly innovative initiative to promote open source software through a collaborative partnership created by local industry, academia, and government.

Linux.com finds new home at OSUOSL

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Linux.com is now being run by the Linux Foundation and, along with most of the other Linux Foundation infrastructure, is hosted at the OSU Open Source Lab.

The site has historically been a source for articles, information, and online forums about the Linux operating system. Under the Linux Foundation, the site will undergo a face lift in the coming months. An IdeaForge site has been launched at http://ideaforge.linux.com/ where you can view and make suggestions about what you would like to see on the future Linux.com site.

OSU Open Source Lab announces OSL Alliance Corporate Sponsorship Program

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

IBM, Google and Real Networks among lab’s industry donors

Source: Jeff Sheltren, 541-713-3206

Media contact: Todd Simmons, 541-737-4611

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The Oregon State University Open Source Lab, home to growing open source communities, today announced the OSL Alliance™ corporate sponsorship program. The OSL Alliance enables commercial vendors to financially support the expansion of computing infrastructure and services that OSL provides to open source projects worldwide. Among its donors, Google and Real Networks have contributed $1.25 million to date.

Helping Drupal Grow

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Submitted by OSUOSL Admin on February 5, 2009

When Drupal began to outgrow its infrastructure in the summer of 2005, its developers appealed to the open source community for help. OSL offered to host the equipment, and students Eric Searcy and Narayan Newton were put on the case.

“We attacked the problem from two different angles,” says Newton, who now works with Tag1 Consulting and is a member of the association that runs Drupal. Searcy, now a systems administrator at InsightsNow in Corvallis, dealt with the scaling of the Web side of Drupal while Newton worked with the database.

Reciprocity and Gentoo

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

It’s not an overstatement to say that Gentoo was integral to the Open Source Lab’s foundation. The Linux-based operating system was one of the OSL’s first projects - it even preceded the existence of the lab - and was instrumental in building the buzz that put open source at OSU on the map.

It started when Gentoo reached out to the open source community for help - it needed more infrastructure, and OSU provided it. “Web services donated an old Dell server, and from there Gentoo just grew and grew,” says Lance Albertson, lead Unix systems administrator at the OSL.

OSUOSL Hosts OpenMRS Development

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

OpenMRS is an open source electronic medical record system framework. Led by the Regenstrief Institute and Partners In Health, OpenMRS has been implemented in several countries including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is providing hosting for the OpenMRS Development Website including a Trac instance at http://dev.openmrs.org and the OpenMRS subversion repository. We are happy to provide services to OpenMRS and support their efforts in bringing usable medical information systems to developing countries where HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are a major problem.

OSUOSL One of Nation's "Really Cool" Networking Labs

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab was recently featured in a Network World online story about really cool university computer network labs. This is a great honor for us, and we are glad to be in such good company. Some of the highlights of the OSUOSL included in the list were our hosting of projects such as the Linux Kernel, Drupal, the Linux Foundation, our development work on the Oregon Virtual School District, and our annual Government Open Source Conference.

rpm.org and yum move to OSUOSL

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is proud to be the new home for two very important OSS projects. We are now hosting the main web sites, ticket trackers, code repositories, and mailing lists for RPM and yum.

RPM is the package management system used by many Linux distributions including RedHat Enterprise, Fedora, SUSE, CentOS, Mandriva, and many others. The RPM format is also part of the Linux Standards Base.

A Look Back at the OSL's Partnerships with Google and TDS

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0800

As the Open Source Lab celebrates a decade of open source hosting, development and education, the lab is reflecting on its past accomplishments. Below is a favorite from our archives.

OSL Teams with TDS for Bandwidth Increase

Originally published on March 06, 2006

The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University has received a large donation of Internet bandwidth from TDS Telecom that will allow it to more than double the number of visitors it can serve, in the future helping up to 50 million people a day review or download free software.

A Look Back at Mozila Firefox 1.0

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0800

As the Open Source Lab celebrates a decade of open source hosting, development and education, the lab is reflecting on its past accomplishments. Below is a favorite from our archives.

OSL Hosting Popular New Firefox Web Browser

Originally posted on November 16, 2004

Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0, the newly released Web browser available at www.mozilla.org, is living quietly in the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. The Open Source Lab is a world-class facility and data center for Open Source Software (OSS) knowledge, hosting, infrastructure, development and collaboration.