From jeff at osuosl.org  Mon Aug 16 17:46:13 2010
From: jeff at osuosl.org (Jeff Sheltren)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:46:13 -0700
Subject: [OSL] August 2010 Newsletter
Message-ID: <E8ABFC8D-3BAC-4908-9E0C-CE1939D1B836@osuosl.org>

This is the email version of the August 2010 OSU Open Source Lab newsletter.  The online version is available at http://osuosl.org/about/news/aug2010newsletter which contains links with more information about the stories below.

You can subscribe/unsubscribe from receiving future email newsletters by visiting this URL http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/osl-newsletter

Thanks,
Jeff Sheltren
Operations Manager
Oregon State University Open Source Lab

==== OSCON ====
We were very excited to have OSCON back in Portland this year!  Not only did this mean we got to share our wonderful city with many of our open source friends (Three OSLers live around Portland!), but Portland is also close enough to campus that we could bring up a number of OSL student employees and OSU CS students.  It was great seeing our students meet people in the expo hall and share some of their experiences.

The OSL was represented in a few different sessions at OSCON.  Lance Albertson joined Justin Erenkrantz (Apache Software Foundation) and John Hawley (Linux Foundation / kernel.org) for a talk on scaling open source project infrastructure on a shoestring budget.  Deb Bryant opened up the Health IT Track and led a panel on open source voting solutions as well.

Deb didn't stop at simply participating in sessions.  She also received one of five O'Reilly Open Source Awards in recognition of her work in getting open source software into state and local government agencies.  Please join us in congratulating Deb on this exciting award!  

We ended the week at OSCON with a small bus tour which took a group down to Corvallis to see our data center, and then stopped on the way back at Willamette Valley Vineyards for lunch and wine tasting.  The wine was great, and the company on the bus was even better.  We even did a network boot of Linux over the bus's Wi-Fi using boot.kernel.org.  We've got pictures up on Flickr!  Our thanks go out to Aruba Networks for sponsoring the tour.


==== New Projects ====
We've brought in a number of new projects during 2010, includingCONNECT, OpenEFS,  Meego and OSGeo, just to name a few.  For further information on projects hosted at OSUOSL, please see our Communities page at http://osuosl.org/services/hosting/communities


==== Donations Update ====
Give 6 program ends successfully -- We raised over $350,000 during the 6 for 6 program.  Thank you all for your support! For more information on the Give 6 program and our future funding plans, please see our recent news story at http://osuosl.org/about/news/give6_2010


==== Virtualization Migration Complete ====
We have migrated all of our hosted virtual machines onto new hardware and management software.  We are now using <a href="http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/">ganeti</a> for VM management on top of KVM virtualization.  We are currently running 65 virtual machines on four physical servers using DRBD to replicate disks between them for failover.  The hardware is much faster than the previous virtualization hardware we had in place, and many hosted projects have noted a nice performance increase after the migration.


==== GOSCON 2010 ====
This year, GOSCON returns to Portland, Oregon on October 27 & 28. The conference venue is the Nines Hotel, located at Pioneer Square in downtown Portland.  Early registration and the call for speakers are now open, and program tracks have been announced!  More info on GOSCON, including a sign-up for the conference newsletter, can be found at http://goscon.org