OSU Open Source Lab

OSUOSL Speakers at Open Source Bridge

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.

Want to hear about how we are handling virtualization at the OSUOSL? Lance Albertson will be giving a talk titled "Creating a low-cost clustered virtualization environment using Ganeti" which describes our recent migration to a redundant and easily scalable virtualization setup using the open source project, Ganeti. Come and hear about the ups-and-downs and other juicy details of our migration from the old Xen-based setup with central disk storage to the new Ganeti setup which uses local storage on servers combined with DRBD for redundancy.

Maybe virtualization isn't your thing, but you'd be more interested to hear about interactive "touchscreen" displays such as the one we use in our data center to show network graphs, FTP downloads, and other general information. Peter Krenesky and Rob McGuire-Dale will talk about our Touchscreen application during their talk, "Building Interactive Displays with Touchscreen 2.0". This talk will show off some of the cool features of Touchscreen 2.0 which has been built using Django and jQuery.

At the OSUOSL we host a lot of high-traffic websites. From an open source project's point of view, the more traffic to your site the better! However, from a system administration point of view, more traffic tends to mean more headaches as you try to keep sites fast and responsive during a flood of traffic. This can be especially challenging when dealing with dynamic web applications such as Drupal. Rudy Grigar and Greg Lund-Chaix have a talk titled "Making Drupal Go Fast with Varnish and Pressflow" which describes how the combination of Varnish and Pressflow can be used to cache much more content than a standard Drupal install -- leading to faster websites and happier servers. They will get into details about Varnish and Pressflow and give some real-world examples of similar setups at the OSUOSL.

We're also very happy to see Alex Polvi, a former student employee at OSUOSL, come to give his talk: "libcloud: a unified interface into the cloud". Alex is the CEO at Cloudkick where they use libcloud to build their cloud management and monitoring services. libcloud is an Apache Incubator project which provides a unified interface into many cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Slicehost, and Rackspace.

Hopefully you're as excited as we are to head to Open Source Bridge and check out these and many other great talks. See you there!