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Day 1 has been pretty interesting. The surprise highlight for me was the keynote speech from Dr John Halamka (CIO, Harvard Medical School) about the challenges he faces with computerising patient records for the state of Massachusetts, and how he is using Red Hat and open source technologies to do this. He also described the process of genetically sequencing people, and how some of these records are being stored in an open source Google-powered vault (aptly named Google Health) for access by medical professionals (this process now only costs a mere $10,000 per individual!). The IT Infrastructure he is responsible for is huge. The main data centre in Boston has 250 Red Hat VM's and 500Tb of information that can fail over to a DR site with only 1 second of lost information.

The workshop seminars started off slowly. Kernel optimisation is a fairly dry subject already, so being lectured by Red Hat experts (geeks) in the subject made for a sleepy beginning to the morning. But there were 3 other seminars that stood out for me.

A few months ago I started reading about RH Satellite server and put in a request for the Red Hat AS licence so we could get one running on our network at work. Today I sat in on a case study on Satellite server by PMC-Sierra which made me want one even more. The highlight was discovering you can add your Red Hat boxes to "configuration channels" on the Satellite so that they can automatically receive settings (such as DNS, NTP, etc) and also files and directory structures automatically. Given that the Red Hat infrastructure at my place will probably consist of 10 front end application servers with the same configuration in the future (with a clustered Oracle back end), this means a Satellite will save me a lot of work. For example, each time I wanted to add a new front end, I could just add it to the relevant configuration channel and it would get all of the files it needs automatically. In addition, any hotfixes and updates to the system would just need to be made once to the config on the satellite server, and then the changes could be pushed out to all 10 servers in one hit (or a new config could be created with the hotfix included, which would allow easy rollback to the old configuration in a few mouse clicks). RH Satellite also comes with 24/7 support and the option of professional services to get it set up, which all sounds very appealing.

The other 2 seminars of interest were an introduction to SELinux, including all the things I should have read about already but never got round to, and how to harden a Red Hat server against attacks, which was very handy for those that managed to make it through the dreary presentation. I will cover the highlights of that lecture in this blog (or maybe my Linux blog) in more detail at a later date.

Some pictures of the event are below. If you can't see them, please follow this link.