Indiana LinuxFest

Indiana LinuxFest is a community F/OSS conference, which is showcasing the best the community has to offer in the way of Free and Open Source Software, Open Hardware, and Free Culture. Indiana Linux Fest will be March 25-27, 2011 at Wyndam Indianapolis West Hotel, Indianapolis, IN.

Six Feet Up will present two talks at the conference.

Lars Noldan, a Six Feet Up System Administrator, will present "Speed Daemons -- High performance web clusters for Fortune 500 Companies (And their admirers)", a case study focusing on a Client's request for a website with no single points of failure, an SLA that requires 99.95% uptime, and Disaster Recovery capabilities. Fulfilling these requirements meant configuring ten servers across two datacenters. Facilitating high availability and high performance required extensive use of FreeBSD networking tools.

The project uses the ZFS file system to help solve key data synchronization and shipping problems. During configuration a few weaknesses in FreeBSD were identified. Most notably, problems with iSCSI and ZFS ultimately lead to a moving the storage servers to OpenSolaris.

Lars will discuss the methods used to keep the Disaster Recovery datacenter in sync with the production datacenter, and the methods employed to keep search data as well as web content up to date in near real time. This involved writing a custom ZFS snap shot system referred to in the office as the "Fortville Snapshot Distribution," named after the town our office is in, Fortville, IN.

Jim Glenn, Six Feet Up Director of Technical Services, will present "Who is Karl, and what does he know about Knowledge Management". Jim will introduce KARL as a knowledge management solution as well as show some of the features and uses of KARL. Jim will go over some of the uses of KARL by some clients as well as some of the approaches to rolling out a knowledge management system or intranet solution for organizations. The talk will then begin to delve into some technical aspects of deployments and support for a web hosted solution such as KARL.