Japz’ stuff

This is a short update after the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit’s second day. We started off with some keynote sessions, or that’s what we thought we would start off with. Instead of listening to a keynote, we found ourselves drumming for almost an hour! It was really fun, and I’d like to acknowledge the folks from Drum Cafe for their inspiring and entertaining show. After this was over, it was time for some serious stuff: Werner Knoblich’s presentation about Red Hat’s last financial year. These numbers looked pretty impressive, but on the other hand: I don’t know too much about that stuff anyway. Half an hour later the audience was handed to Petra Heinrich. I was very honoured that the cloud computing project that I’ve been working very hard on for a long time (LinuxClouds, sorry, it’s in Dutch) was mentioned during her keynote speech as an example of succesful partner collaboration. Petra: thanks! .

After lunch I sat down in the Sattelite Quickstart Lab, which was interesting for me as I had never actually touched the Red Hat Sattelite Server earlier. So I got a quick overview of how the product works, nothing too difficult, but interesting nonetheless. If you want a patch management solution for RHEL, this is it, no question about it. For deployment and configuration management, my personal opinion is that you’re better off using Cobbler (of course RHNSat 5.3 features Cobbler as a deployment backend, so this versatile and powerful deployment backend will be available to RHNSat users soon-ish) and Puppet.

Two senior Fedora engineers installing systems using Cobbler

After this lab I had a quick sit-down with Marco Bussadori, about virtualization. End-result: We might end up looking at InstallFree (comments / experiences?) as a solution to package MS Windows applications for Linux. I’m new to application virtualization, but this looks like an interesting area to explore.

At seven, we were leaving by bus to the off-site dinner. It was a very luxerious place, situated underground. The food was once again excellent, and I had loads of fun at the party afterwards. Some of the guys went to a pub after that, but it was already two o’clock, and if I went, I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now. I’ll have some pictures for you later.

So what’s up next? Unfortunately, the Summit is almost over. But first: Jan Wildeboer about open source business models!