What is Texas Linux Fest

Texas Linux fest is…

The first state-wide annual community-run conference for Linux and open source software users and enthusiasts from around the Lone Star State - Texaslinuxfest.org

Meaning It is similar to some of the larger events such as Scale and SELF in their regions.

I attended the following talks..

• Ansible Beginner to Brilliant by Alex Juarez
• Becoming Dangerous with Kubernetes by JJ Ashgar
• Linux Permissions 101 by Alex Juarez
• Confessions of a Sysadmin by Ell Marquez of Linux Academy and Allie Barnes
• Linux Performance Tuning by Thomas Cameron
• Understanding Containers by Ell Marquez
• Identity Management In the homelab by Steve Ovens
• Automate Absolutely Everything by Adam Miller

Also, multiple vendors were on site, some of them being, in no partical order.

• Red Hat
• Linux Academy
• Linode
• Austin Perl Meetup
• The Free Software Foundation
• cPanel
• MySQL

General vibe

Everyone was friendly, and that is a plus.

Majority of attendees seemed to be either individuals that work with linux most of the time in their day jobs, or hobbyists, not entirely surprising. Among those who worked with linux day to day, the word of the day was cloud.

Yeah, I know. THAT cloud.

“When my company was bought, Even though we had fully paid off gear to manage our workload. We were instructed to migrate to AWS and then proceeded to toss out our on-premise gear after months of no use.”

• A Handsome TXLF Attendee

“Sysadmin Jobs are declining, Cloud Engineer jobs are skyrocketing!”

• Thomas Cameron durning the TXLF Keynote.

The Talks

Most of the talks assumed beginner knowledge of Linux, which is great for me, a long time Linux professional and hobbyist. However I brought along two friends…

• One who was a Linux beginner,
  • A fellow coworker on my support team.
    • Lets call him Tux
• One with zero linux experience and is not technical,
  • My dear girlfriend who is a theater and drama nut, but interested in learning. - Lets call her Jane

Day 1

The start of the Linuxing

Ansible Beginner to Brilliant

One of the first talks of the day 1, and the first one Jane and myself attended, and the first one that I realized I didn’t have my laptop

This talk assumed zero knowledge of Ansible, which is great I thought. The first half covered topics I already knew. But unfortunately I had to leave the talk midway though, Otherwise it was a great and knowledge talk that catered to a lot of people.

Becoming Dangerous with Kubernetes

“It can’t be that easy… is it?”

JJ’s introduction to Kubernetes is fantastic.

In more words, JJ is able to keep the audience engaged with his “frank to-the-point” humor.

His talk went into details about each component of K8s, Such as services, pods, and how pods are scheduled and managed between each other.

After the talk, it left Tux and I surprised on how much about K8s we already knew, and that we assumed we knew less than we already knew.

Day 2

sudo dnf install caffeine

Linux Permissions 101

chmod 777

A rather basic introduction course, great for any linux beginner like my friend Tux.

Confessions of a Sysadmin

“Its okay to be new.”

This is not a technical talk, it was a talk that wraps Ell and Allie’s Story into their IT careers, which is full of mishaps, potential fires and common tropes in the Linux Community. I originally wrote this off as a fun meta talk taking a break from the deep technical content of the other talks.

To my surprise, Tux and Jane benefited from the talk perhaps more than any other talks. Jane mentioned that she now understood that it was “okay to be wrong and to ask questions” about technology, I guess sometimes you just need to hear it from someone else to know that you are not going nuts.

Linux Performance Tuning

iostat, ss, netstat and tuneD oh my

I learned the most at this talk, it is a shame that it is only 45 minutes long, easily could of been a 3 hour workshop. Thomas is a excellent speaker and I would recommend any of his talks or presentations.

Understanding Containers

chroot /dankmemes/

Ell goes into the deep history of Linux containers, Along with some tasks you can perform at home to create your own containers without using container tools. Such as how to copy every library you need to create an apache container using default linux tools.

Automate Absolutely Everything

ansible-galaxy init hype

Adam’s lively talk goes into what ansible can automate. a great introduction course to those who have not heard of ansible.

So… how was it?

TXLF is great, I’ll see you in TXLF 2020