Trying to wrap one's head around the paradigm changes happening in the industry can be difficult.  Everything is just moving way too fast.  Daniel Riek has been giving a talk for a while now entitled, "A Greybeard's Worst Nightmare."  Here is a fairly recent iteration of his talk where he does an excellent job of providing both a historical context and a bridge to understanding the revolution and evolution that is happening.  Unfortunately a lot of the progress has been coming from black box services provided by proprietary companies who don't see lock-in as a problem.  Daniel explains how the benefits that have been gained by adopting free and open source software don't have to be abandoned in an effort to keep up with industry methodology shifts providing the most innovation and value.  We can and are keeping up... but there is a LOT to learn.

Looking over the fine list of presentations  and events for LinuxFest Northwest 2019, here are my preliminary picks for which ones I want to attend.  Since there are several at any given time slot, there are quite a few more I'd like to see but... conflicts.  I hope they record the presentations and post them in a timely fashion.

Saturday:
    9:30  - CC-208 - UEFI Boot for Mere Mortals
    10:45 - CC-115 - Linux Container Primitives
    1:00  - CC-200 - The Current State of Free and Open Source Software in Public Education
    2:15  - CC-115 - A DevOps State of Mind: Continous Security with Kubernetes
    3:30  - CC-115 - A DevOps State of Mind: Managing Microserves and Databases with Kubernetes

Sunday:
    9:30  - CC-236 - The Fight for a Secure Linux BIOS... Past, Present and Future
   10:45  - G-103  - Sex, Secret and God: A Brief History of Bad Passwords
   12:30  - CC-200 - Deep Dive into firecracker-containerd
    1:45  - G-103  - "Just don't buy it"
    3:00  - G-103  - Q&A: Past, Present & Future

Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is that at the last minute things get shuffled around some and then you have to adjust.  We'll see how it works out this year.

Folks going this year include: Gary Bummer, Rob Potter, Warren Sanders and myself.  Anyone else interested in attending?  We probably have room for one more.

The physical server hosting the virtual machine that MontanaLinux.org was running on had a complete hardware failure.  It appears the motherboard failed.  While we believe the original hard disks are intact (even if they aren't, we have a fairly recent complete backup) getting everything back up will be a bit time consuming.  This site is mostly back up but the files directory will take a while to sync so some of the videos may not be available for a while.

I'm temporarily running the site on a Digital Ocean droplet until we get another physical host in place.  I have a spare in Belgrade but I have to get it to Warren in Billings.  If we can just transplant the RAM and drives, that'll be great.  If we have to setup a new system from scratch and then restore from backup, that's going to be a bit more work.  old.montanalinux.org and mail.montanalinux.org (Zimbra) will probably remain down until we get the physical system fully migrated.  Yeah, that sucks.  Sorry.

Update:  The site is fully syned now.
Update 2:  old.montanalinux.org and mail.montanalinux.org were up as of late last night (Wednesday, 3/13/19).
Update 3: Got everything moved to BudgetVM.  It's a KVM VM running OpenVZ Legacy with a handful containers each with their own IP address.  I had it all setup and they accidentally reinstalled the OS on top of it... so I got three months free.  Yeah.

Richard Stallman paid a visit to Montana State University, Bozeman on Monday, Feb. 11th, 2019 and gave a talk entitled, "Free Software and Your Freedom".   I recorded the following video of his presentation with his permission.

RMS-Free_Software_and_Your_Freedom-20190211.webm (~1hr 47min, 590MB)

I haven't watched it yet but I bet it's yet another good one from Jon.

Brian May.  You should recognize that name.  He's the guitarist from Queen and an astrophysicist.  While I'm not exactly sure what role he has played in the overall New Horizons mission, I at least enjoy the official Music Video / Song he made for it.  Enjoy.

Cockpit has been in development for a few years now and it appears it is going to be default in the upcoming RHEL8 release.  I've recently started using it for managing and accessing KVM virtual machines via the cockpit-machines package.  I made a short screencast showing the basics.  Enjoy.

Red Hat's Dan (Mr. SELinux) Walsh gave a talk about Container Security at the USENIX LISA 2018 conference.

Another LISA 2018 presentation... but this one about one of our favorite topics... Sysadmins!