UK Linux User Groups

Also (not shown) they dug a trench down the side of the garden for electrics and network cables. We’re going to run some hefty armoured cable, plus two or three cat 7 network cables, covered with bricks and warning tape, at a depth of 18″ (mandated by building regulations).

I just wanted to talk about a busy week of community management and leadership related content I will be involved in in July 2013 in Portland, Oregon.

Community Leadership Summit 2013

The Community Leadership Summit is the primary annual event that brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.

The Community Leadership Summit 2013 takes place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon on 20th – 21st July 2013, which is rather conveniently the weekend before OSCON.

At the heart of Community Leadership Summit 2013 is an open unconference-style event in which everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. These sessions are very much discussion sessions: the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experience, and share ideas and questions. These unconference sessions are also augmented with a series of presentations from leaders in the field, panel debates and networking opportunities.

I can’t quite believe that this is the fifth anniversary of the Community Leadership Summit, and I am determined to make this the very best year yet! We already have an awesome list of pre-registered attendees, and this is shaping up to be yet another fantastic example of the primary place for community managers and leaders to get together to discuss, share, and learn best practice.

The event is completely free to attend, you just need to register first. I hope to see you there!

Community Management Training at OSCON

Speaking of OSCON, which takes place the week after the Community Leadership Summit 2013, I am also delighted to announce that I will be running my very first community management training class.

As some of you will know, I wrote The Art of Community published by O’Reilly (now in its second edition), which has rather fortunately become the best-selling book on community management and leadership.

For some time now I have wanted to deliver a training class that takes many of the concepts of the book, but extends them with detailed problem solving discussions, workshops, Q+A sessions, and more to provide an intense, detail-rich class about how to manage and lead communities, be them small and local or large and global.

On Monday 22nd July 2013, the day after the Community Management Summit 2013, I will be delivering this one day community management training class.

Topics in the class will include:

• Welcome and Introductions
  • Discussing how the class will work, student introductions, and facilities information.
• The Core Mechanics Of Community
  • Read/write communities.
  • Understanding the social dynamics.
  • Building retention and generational growth.
• Planning Your Community
  • Understanding where to focus community management.
  • Gathering stakeholder and community requirements.
• Building a Strategic Plan
  • The importance of a crisply defined strategic plan.
  • Structuring and documenting goals and objectives.
  • Delving down to the work item level.
• Building Collaborative Workflow
  • Understanding the collaborative needs of your community.
  • Building effective communication channels.
  • Determining infrastructure and tooling needs and how to resource them.
• Defining Community Governance
  • The role of governance.
  • Governance styles: dictatorship, delegated leadership, and enlightened dictatorship.
  • Assessing the governance needs for your community.
  • Building, codifying and documenting your governance structure.
  • Growing effective leadership in your community.
• Marketing, Advocacy, Promotion, and Social Media
  • Assessing marketing, advocacy and promotional needs.
  • Building a buzz cycle.
  • Using social media effectively.
  • Tracking publicity work and re-aligning for efficiency.
• Measuring Your Community
  • Knowing what to measure.
  • Defining useful growth and health metrics.
  • Understanding to how to read and react to metrics to provide more focused strategy.
• Tracking and Measuring Community Management
  • The importance of building credibility from good work.
  • Planning for different visibility needs: stakeholders, the community, and your team.
  • Tracking projects, using burndown charts, and reacting to project changes.
  • Tracking growth and decline.
  • Tracking community health and building a network

Find out more about and book your seat in the class by clicking here. Space is limited, so be sure to reserve your seat as soon as possible!

Burnout and Bickering: a Community Manager’s Guide to Conflict

I am also pleased to announce that I will be presenting a brand new presentation at OSCON on Wednesday 24th July 2013 at 2.30pm in D137.

The talk is entitled Burnout and Bickering: a Community Manager’s Guide to Conflict, and here is the description from the talk page

One of the most challenging aspects of growing community is managing conflict and burnout. While we often see the effects of conflict, getting to the heart of the issue is often more challenging.

In this new presentation from Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager and author of The Art of Community, he presents a comprehensive guide to conflict and its many different causes.

The presentation explores how to identify these different causes (such as stress, personality differences, language/age/cultural barriers, and more), how to identify when problems are happening in a scalable manner, and how to resolve conflict in a progressive and repeatable way.

Bacon will also cover preventative measures to reduce the potential for both conflict, stress, and burnout, and wrap the content in a set of practical tools you can use in your own community.

All of this will be delivered in Bacon’s amusing anecdote and story filled style, delivering practical recommendations and techniques in a fun and contextual presentation.

I am excited about this presentation. As some of you will know, I have talked before about burnout and managing stress and conflict in communities, and this presentation provides extensive coverage of the topic. I am looking forward to presenting this at OSCON.

See more about the talk by clicking here.

As you can see, quite a week for community management and leadership! I hope to see you there!

This may be useful, may become useful, or may not:

• https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util

As some readers might know, I work from home, and have worked from home for about 12 years. However I’ve never had a proper dedicated office, just a corner of a second bedroom or a bit of space on a sofa. That’s about to change.

Tomorrow, work starts on constructing a real office in my garden.

Work already started (for me) about a month ago, when I took down a shed and jack-hammered a patio to bits:

Shifting the whole lot into two skips:

Resulting in this empty, mostly flat space (about 20′ wide and 16′ deep, damn you council for chopping that tree down at the back …):

To be continued …

New in libguestfs ≥ 1.21.30 is the ability to use guestfish and some of the virt tools with remote disks.

Currently you can use remote disks over NBD, GlusterFS, Ceph, Sheepdog and (recently upstream) SSH.

For this example I’ll use SSH because it needs no setup, although this requires absolutely the latest qemu and libguestfs (both from git).

Since we don’t have libvirt support for ssh yet, so this only works with the direct backend:

$ export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct

I can use a ssh:// URI to add disks with guestfish, guestmount and most of the virt tools. For example:

$ virt-rescue -a ssh://localhost/tmp/f17x64.img [... lots of boot messages ...] Welcome to virt-rescue, the libguestfs rescue shell. Note: The contents of / are the rescue appliance. You have to mount the guest's partitions under /sysroot before you can examine them. ><rescue> mount /dev/vg_f17x64/lv_root /sysroot ><rescue> cat /sysroot/etc/redhat-release Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle)

Apart from being a tiny bit slower, it just works as if the disk was local:

$ virt-df -a ssh://localhost/tmp/f17x64.img Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% f17x64.img:/dev/sda1 487652 63738 398314 14% f17x64.img:/dev/vg_f17x64/lv_root 28316680 4285576 22586036 16% $ guestmount -a ssh://localhost/tmp/f17x64.img -i /tmp/mnt $ ls /tmp/mnt bin dev home lib64 media opt root sbin sys usr boot etc lib lost+found mnt proc run srv tmp var $ cat /tmp/mnt/etc/redhat-release Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) $ guestunmount /tmp/mnt

Customer: "Hi, we have a printer that's off-line and I cant seem to get it back on. Also I have another printer I need adding to a PC."
Me: "OK but unfortunately you do not have a support contract with us so I'm afraid it's chargeable at £35 per hour."
Customer: "Yes I know we don't have a contract that's why we don't ring you very often."
Me: "Erm? OK?"
Customer: "Is there anyone there that can point us in the right direction?"
Me: "Yes, at £35 per hour."

Hello Mr Garage owner, you know you fitted a new wiper blade three years ago well I need some help with .........

53-55 Lichfield St
Wolverhampton
West Midlands
WV1 1EQ‎

Eat, Drink and talk Linux

Event Date and Time:  Wed, 17/04/2013 - 19:30 - 23:00

I've been getting into snorkelling a bit recently. I've always enjoyed it but recently I bought some good quality gear, replacing the toy shop crap I've been using. It's another world with good equipment! It's not easy to get time, but so far I've snorkelled Jervis Bay, Bushrangers Bay, Clovelly and The Haven in Terrigal.

My son has been asking what it's like, so I bought the Kogan waterproof camera case for $19. Took it out last weekend for a spin at The Haven but the visibility was terrible. The camera case works a treat though, and I'm looking forward to using it some more. Need to work out a strap to attach it to my arm or something though.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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In March I went off to the Photography Farm, an intensive three day residential workshop run by Lisa Devlin and her impressive creative team. Set on a massive farm, we were very well looked after, fed well and kept snug in the 16th century farmhouse. When I was looking at training and development activities I could do this year, the farm was the most popular suggestion and with good reason. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet other photographers, share ideas and talk into the small hours about power ballads.

The photos accompanying this post are from the farm’s styled shoot, an opportunity to photograph a couple in a way that there’s not always time to do on a wedding day. This shoot was inspired by the story of Jemima Puddleduck by Beatrix Potter, and featured a fantastic dress layered with feathers, some amazing eyelashes and a painstakingly detailed leafy bower. The models for the shoot were fellow photographer Hannah Millard and her husband Iwan, who both did a great job and got really into the shoot despite the cluster of photographers gathered around them. It’s interesting watching other photographers at work, the way they shoot and how they interact with their subjects: There’s always something to learn.

There were some very challenging sessions over the three days, but they were also the things I found most valuable. The farm was a great experience and I would thoroughly recommend it. Everyone was warm and friendly, the atmosphere relaxed, and the group size just right. I’m really rather jealous that there’s going to be another one in May!

Credits

Set Styling and Flowers by The Tea Set

Hair and Make Up by Elbie Van Eeden

Fashion Styling by Noir Creative

Dress by Oh My Honey

Pin It

The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 988 developers, 390 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013 page.

The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th and expire on April 17th 2014.

As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present.

There are now packages available, with the source on github.

I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:

run-parts

run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less.

In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently.

Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed.

To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.

silent-run

I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.

I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces.

Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.

Start: 2013-04-13 11:00 End: 2013-04-13 17:00

We have regular sessions on the second Saturday of each month. Our meeting this month is at Sirius Corporation in Addlestone, Surrey. Thanks to Andrew Wilkins for hosting us this month.

New members are very welcome. We're not a cliquey bunch, so you won't feel out of place! Usually between 15 and 30 people come along.

I have finally reach the limit with unsolicited marketing calls (in spite of being registered with the TPS). So today I have implemented a couple of changes to the Asterisk phone system here.

1. All inbound calls with the number withheld will be presented with the number disconnected tones, then told that the call may be recorded (it will be!) before any phones ring.

2. If the call is from a telemarketer, I will transfer the call to sip:lenny@itslenny.com:5060

3. If they are already on my blacklist, they will automatically get transferred to sip:lenny@itslenny.com:5060

read more

Hi,

In the last 45 days, Vault.centos.org's 2 public facing machines delivered just under 66 TiB of data. So while we try and spread this load a bit ( its growing at 25 - 35% month on month ), we've had to make a few changes.

Firstly, isos are no longer directly downloadable from vault.centos.org, you will need to go the torrent route if you want older, deprecated release isos

Secondly, we've turned off multi range requests ( httpd will still accept upto 5 range's, and then block after that )

Over the next few days, we are going to recycle some of the larger disk mirror.centos.org nodes into vault.centos.org; If someone wants to contribute to this effort, please come find us on irc.freenode.net in channel #centos-devel or #centos-mirror or tweet us @centos or email us the address mentioned at http://wiki.centos.org/Donate - but keep in mind that need machines with more than 1 TiB of usable space, and more than 300mbps of network capacity, and since we will consume that bandwidth high density hosting facilities with high contention on the links wont work.

- KB