Texas Linux Fest 2012 Presentation

As promised, here are the slides from my Texas Linux Fest 2012 presentation:

Data Security and Privacy in the Cloud

Enjoy!
:-Dustin

Data Security and Key Management in the Cloud

Key management in cloud computing presents a brand new, unique, and distinct set of challenges which are in many cases disparate from the traditional set of key management problems system administrators have been dealing with for decades in physical data centers.  In fact, this very topic, in conjunction with data security and privacy, is the subject of two presentations I’m giving in the next 30 days at:

• Texas Linux Fest -- San Antonio, TX -- August 4, 2012
• Linux Foundation’s CloudOpen -- San Diego, CA -- Wednesday August 29, 2012

How are you managing your most sensitive information stored in the Cloud? Are you encrypting that data? Where are you storing your cryptographic keys and certificates? And who has access to them? If you have a stake in your organization's security, these questions may be keeping you up at night.

Cloud storage and Big Data present significant opportunities for enterprises, but those opportunities bring several huge challenges. In this session, we’ll explore:

• What's not secure, not acceptable, not working --- but totally pervasive!
• Where encryption makes the most sense around Cloud and Big Data applications
• Key sprawl in the cloud
• The strengths and weaknesses of various key management options
• Easing the pain - Recent innovations for managing keys and company secrets
• Real-world use cases – from web servers to encrypted file systems to big data to SSH to SSL

I hope you’ll join me for one or both of these talks!

:-Dustin

Let's celebrate the 100th release of eCryptfs utils!

Howdy all!

It's hard to believe that it's been almost 7 years since many of you helped conceive, design, implement, develop extend, test, document eCryptfs back in the IBM Linux Technology Center's Security team, with many more contributions following from Canonical, Red Hat, Intel, etc.

Over those 7 years, we have helped many of the rest of you reading this secure your private data.  Today, there are actually millions of eCryptfs users -- through Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) encrypted home directories, Google's ChromeOS, Synology and Seagate encrypted NAS devices, some Android phones, Gazzang's cloud and big data encryption products, among others.

With the 100th release of the user space eCryptfs utilities (ecryptfs-utils), we'd like to take the opportunity to invite any contributors or users of eCryptfs for a celebration!

Gazzang is providing drinks and snacks on its rooftop (and air-conditioned lobby) in downtown Austin, at 8th and Congress, with great views of the Texas state capitol and all of downtown.  Please join us at 804 Congress Avenue, Suite 400, from 5pm-8pm on Thursday, August 2, 2012.  This is the day before the Texas Linux Fest in San Antonio, so perhaps we might see a few out of town guests join us...  I happen to know at least one guest of honor who will be in from out of town for this event ;-)

Hopefully you'll join some of your colleagues around the Linux, open source, security, encryption, key management and data privacy space for an informal get together here in central Texas!

Cheers,
Dustin Kirkland
eCryptfs co-maintainer

Patchwork of Open Source Memories

One of the biggest differences in my new job is that I have to commute into the office every day.  And with that, comes the second biggest difference -- that I can't wear a t-shirt and pajama pants as I sit and hack the day away in my Eames lounger.

And so I drive 12 (scenic) miles from my house in the hills west of Austin right to the heart of downtown, fighting traffic if I sleep even a few minutes past 7:15am.  I wear a button-up shirt almost every day.  Not that that's formal -- I also wear jeans and cowboy boots.  But I'm dressing for the job I want, not the job I have.  A dude rancher, I reckon  :-)

The net result is that I had a closet full of awesome Linux and open source t-shirts -- shirts I had worn for years -- that just weren't getting their due anymore.  And my Etsy-awesome lovely wife Kim convinced me to part with a number of my favorites to create a t-shirt quilt that captures my last ~7 years in the Open Source world!

Now, mind you, I shed a tear or two as Kim's shears tore through a couple of these shirts that I've carried with me across six continents and most of the two dozen timezones...  :-/  On the other hand, a few of these weren't particularly my favorites, but did fit the color scheme she was going for.  In the end, her work was really quite beautiful!  And warm.

For those interested, I'll document the 6 rows by 4 columns:

• Row 1:
• Ubuntu Jaunty "I Ubuntu My Desktop"
• Puppet Labs, Peace/Love/Mozilla
• Linux Foundation 20th Anniversary of Linux
• Google Summer of Code (Mentor)
• Row 2:
• Texas Linux Fest
• IBM Community
• Ubuntu Precise Pangolin
• Linux Foundation (back of shirt, weird, hard to read, fit color scheme)
• Row 3:
• Linux Plumbers (Santa Rosa)
• Ubuntu Developer Summit (Orlando)
• OpenStack (Boston)
• Open Source Red Hat Summit (New Orleans, 2005)
• Row 4:
• Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, Fedora Project (FudCon 2005, Boston), Ubuntu Developer Summit (2008, Prague), Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
• Slashdot
• Ubuntu (simple, probably my first Ubuntu shirt, circa 2005!)
• Ubuntu (all release version and code names 4.10 - 9.04)
• Row 5:
• Google
• Ubuntu Developer Summit (Barcelona 2009)
• Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy (the most beautiful Ubuntu t-shirt ever, which either shrunk too much, or my belly grew too big; let's say it shrunk too much)
• VMWare Cloud Foundry (Kim wanted a black t-shirt in this spot?)
• Row 6:
• Gazzang, the little start-up that could (lure me away from an awesome gig at Canonical)
• Back of Texas Linux Fest
• Back of Ubuntu 10.10 random 1's and 0's
• Ubuntu Ensemble DevOps t-shirt before the Ensemble project name was deprecated in favor of Juju :-)

Ah memories...  So Kim enjoyed making this for me, but it was a heck of a lot of work, and I don't think she'll be doing it again.  But if you're looking for a quilt made of your own favorite shirt, check out our friend Liz who has her own Etsy site for this sort of thing ;-)

Cheers!
:-Dustin

TLF2010: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Audio

The good people at the Texas Linux Fest have published the audio from my Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud demo and presentation.

You can find the 29MB OGG file here:

• http://www.archive.org/details/Tlf-TheUbuntuEnterpriseCloud

I used an Ubuntu 10.04 (Beta2) Server ISO written to a bootable USB stick, two laptops, and a Linksys switch (running DD-WRT). I deployed a two-system Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), using Eucalyptus, an open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your data center and on your own hardware. I demonstrated the installation and registration processes, and discussed a bit about the various UEC topologies. I also registered an image, ran an instance, and SSH'd into the instance. All within 45 minutes :-)

:-Dustin

Texas Linux Fest 2010

Howdy all-

I attended the first ever Texas Linux Fest right here in Austin this past Saturday, April 10, 2010. My compliments go to the organizers of the event! They were able to pull off this excellent event in the face of many naysayers. Congratulations, guys, it was an outstanding Linux conference, and I'm looking forward to it again next year.



Canonical had ample representation, and the Ubuntu booths (one Canonical, one LoCo) were very heavily visited. Jeremy Foshee was the hero of the Canonical booth over the course of the day. JFo's mouth was running about Ubuntu for a solid 8 hours ;-) We gave away several boxes of 9.10 Desktop and Server CDs, and hundreds of stickers and pins.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier gave the opening keynote, "A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux: Reprise". Joe is an excellent speaker, and I saw this talk in September 2009 in Portland. It's an interesting, engaging talk, comparing various distros to bands. I love his comparison of Fedora to Frank Zappa. But I can't quite abide Ubuntu being likened to Duran Duran, while SuSE is The Who! UPDATE: Ubuntu is now U2 in Joe's talk, so it seems that we have established ourself with a bit more staying power than a bad 80's fad! :-)

Meanwhile, I was working on a dry run of my presentation slated for later in the day. I decided to use the Lucid daily server image, rather than the Beta2 image because there was a bugfix I wanted for the sake of my installation.

I attended a talk by Jeff Gehlbach on OpenNMS, a tool for monitoring Linux systems on a very large scale basis. Looks like a pretty interesting tool. We should perhaps package this for Debian and Ubuntu.

And then I listened to Chip Rosenthal's talk on hosting your own mail server (and "saying goodbye to Gmail"). This was a good talk. Chip started with his age-old mail solution (mutt running inside of a screen session on his server at home). And then showed his Palm Pre -- the first Linux smart phone he's ever owned (same phone I use). The Pre has terminal and ssh application, but the size and format of the interface just doesn't lend itself to mutt. So he built his own mailserver, using Ubuntu and dovecot. I didn't learn anything earthshattering here, but I thought his talk was an excellent showcase for the Ubuntu Server and dovecot.

After lunch, I attended a talk about Ubuntu on ARM, by Canonical's Pete Graner and David Mandala. I learned quite a bit, actually. The ARM space is quite challenging, giving the fragmentation of the architecture, with each vendor making their own strange customizations to the design. The revisions are happening quite fast, which makes it very challenging for Ubuntu, as a distro, to keep up.

Next I learned about Drizzle from Monty Taylor. Drizzle is a fork of MySQL by a number of former MySQL developers (who appear to be fairly frustrated with Sun and now Oracle's handling of MySQL). From Monty's talk, Drizzle is by design quite pluggable and extensible. I noticed that we have several Drizzle libraries in Ubuntu already. I'm going to take a closer look at these at some point.

I think the most interesting talk of the day was by Bradley Kuhn, about the lack of Software Freedom in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. He spoke extensively from the Free Software Foundation's point of view on Cloud Computing, SaaS, and the Affero GPL (AGPL). I really like the AGPL, and have used it for several of my projects, including Musica and Pictor. Bradly has a number of excellent points, and some very poignant concerns. I don't necessary agree with all of his platforms, but fully support his efforts to ensure that software freedom is not simply sliced out of SaaS offerings. Personally, I try to support and prefer free offerings (Identica over Twitter, Launchpad over SourceForge and GitHub) where possible, though not yet universally (I still use both Blogger and Wordpress). Unfortunately, questions from the audience ran about 10 minutes over time which, cut into my presentation a bit...


So my presentation was next, on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. In 40 minutes, I was able to:

• introduce Cloud Computing, Amazon EC2, Canonical, Eucalyptus, and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (components and topologies)
  
• boot a DD-WRT router, setup and install 2 Dell Vostro 1220 laptops with Lucid Beta2, with one machine serving as the Cloud Controller and the other a Node Controller, reboot them both, register an image, run an instance, and SSH'd into it
• show a bit of the UEC administrative web interface, the euca2ools euca-* commands, and how byobu can be used to monitor the UEC services running and estimate the EC2 cost of an instance
  

All in all, I was pleased. It all worked ;-) I think I successfully moved the VGA cable 7 times among 3 laptops during the course of the presentation (thanks Bryce!). And a big thanks to my wife, Kim, who came and sat in the back row. She initially called it Nerdapalooza :-) but she said she had a good time and gained new appreciation for the importance of the work that we do in the Free Software world.

Jon "maddog" Hall followed my presentation, talking about Project Caua -- an interesting idea about bringing the Internet to masses of poor people in densely populated urban settings such as Sao Paulo, Brazil, using Linux servers, thin clients, and desktop virtualization. I think Ubuntu has all the tools that Maddog needs to make this work. I really hope it takes off.

Randal Schwartz delivered the closing keynote. His talk was highly entertaining, and shared many interesting anecdotes about his experiences with Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Richard Stallman. It was a good "motivational" talk, in that he encouraged many of the non-technical attendees to get involved in Open Source through non-traditional means. He also distanced himself from (his words...) "FSF Hard Liners", claiming to be a more practical guy. When talking about making money off of open source, he said something that really hit home for me...he said that even if he were filthy rich, he'd probably wake up and do the same thing everyday -- answer a bunch of emails and questions on mailing lists, maybe hack a little, etc. I was disappointed that he claimed to actually not even run Linux at all (his slides were on a Mac, running OSX). I guess I could have done without that detail about the Texas Linux Fest's closing keynote speaker. Oh well. Other than that, it was a great day.

Again, thanks to the sponsors and organizers of the TLF. Here's to doing it again next year!

:-Dustin

UEC Demo in Austin Tomorrow

I will be giving a preview demo of the 10.04 LTS release of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, tomorrow, Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 4pm in Austin at the Texas Linux Fest.

In my presentation, I will use:

• One free Ubuntu Server ISO (10.04 Beta2 64-bit) burned to a USB stick
  
• Two laptops, and
  
• Twenty Minutes
  

And you will witness the ease of deploying an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), Canonical's open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your own data center and on your own hardware.

In this presentation, you will learn about the UEC, Eucalyptus, Cloud topologies, the installation process, registering nodes, running and terminating instances in the Cloud, and the UEC Image Store.

Bring a blank 1GB+ USB key and I'll even burn you a copy of the same ISO I use in my presentation (time permitting).

Cloud Computing is here, and Ubuntu is a phenomenal platform on which you can construct your private Cloud today. Since 2004, Ubuntu has revolutionized the Linux desktop. Attend this session and learn how Ubuntu is changing the landscape of the Linux server.

:-Dustin

UEC at the Texas Linux Fest

Take a close look at this beautiful image by John Rogers of the Austin skyline ... Do you see some purple? Maybe some orange? How about a few clouds? Reminds me a bit of the new Ubuntu color scheme...

Well the Texas Linux Fest committee has accepted my proposal to demo the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud!

So if you're interested in seeing a demonstration of the 10.04 LTS Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud in action, join me in Austin, Texas on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at the first ever Texas Linux Fest.

In my presentation, I will use:

• One free Ubuntu Server ISO (10.04 Beta2 64-bit) burned to a USB stick
  
• Two laptops, and
  
• Twenty Minutes
  

And you will witness the ease of deploying an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), Canonical's open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your own data center and on your own hardware.

In this presentation, you will learn about the UEC, Eucalyptus, Cloud topologies, the installation process, registering nodes, running and terminating instances in the Cloud, and the UEC Image Store.

Bring a blank 1GB+ USB key and I'll even burn you a copy of the same ISO I use in my presentation.

Cloud Computing is here, and Ubuntu is a phenomenal platform on which you can construct your private Cloud today. Since 2004, Ubuntu has revolutionized the Linux desktop. Attend this session and learn how Ubuntu is changing the landscape of the Linux server.

:-Dustin