One of the projects that we had focused on getting into Fedora in F16 was HekaFS, or what I always like to refer to as “the filesystem formerly known as CloudFS” (I was really hoping that they’d name it PrinceFS, like the musician, but alas, they did not.) HekaFS is, in short, a set of extensions to GlusterFS that enable it to be more of a cloud-ready filesystem, with security, encryption, multi-tenancy, all that kind of jazz.  And in the end, Red Hat wound up buying Gluster, and we’re all one big happy family now, but it’s been great to see that the Fedora ties we had are continuing to flourish as Red Hat integrates Gluster. John Mark Walker, the “Community Guy” (his words, not mine!) is a good friend of mine that I met in the course of my Cloudy interactions, and it’s been super cool to have him go from being “dude I know in the cloud-i-verse” to a full-fledged co-worker.

The GlusterFS project today announced that they were forming an advisory board, and I’m delighted to see a number of Fedora folks being part of that board.  Jeff Darcy, who worked with the Cloud SIG for months on end in an effort to get HekaFS into Fedora, is on the board, and I’m sure that his vast technical knowledge will be a great asset to them.  Additionally, David Nalley and Greg DeKoenigsberg, both of whom I originally know from Fedora-land, happen to be friends of mine, and have coincidentally moved on to jobs as community leaders/managers/VPs/guys at Cloudstack and Eucalyptus, respectively, have also been named as founding members of the GlusterFS Board.

Without being preachy or *aaS-kissy (ha ha ha! I made a pun!) — I’d just like to say that I think it’s just fabulous to see that Fedora leadership has been tapped to provide guidance and assistance as the GlusterFS project works to define its governance model.  I know that Greg served for some time as a member of the Fedora board, and David is currently in his second stint as a board member. That they have been asked to participate certainly indicates that we’re blessed to have folks in Fedora who are Wise in the Ways of Governance, and I expect that the lessons they have learned from their participation in Fedora will be carried over to Gluster.  And kudos to John Mark for picking great choices, I think you’ve done a great job of picking an excellent spread of folks from a variety of communities who will do a great job as Gluster moves forward.

Christoph’s idea about talking about post-FUDCon Plans for Action seemed like a great one, and it’s always awesome to be able to see at least the high-level, 20k foot view of what people are going to work on in the coming months, and see if there are perhaps intersections with what oneself might be doing. Here are my plans:

• Simple FUDCon wrapup: Getting tickets closed, start thinking about Future FUDcons.
• Writing up some simple FUDCon how-to’s and checklists. The main one I’m thinking of here is the checklist I came up with, with the help of The Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing Stickster, as a bullet-list for reminders one should hear on the day of a BarCamp, or first day of FUDCon.  I think this can just be a simple wiki page, just called BarCamp Leadership Reminders, or something to that effect,  but it’s always helpful to have a good, shareable list written down somewhere so that every year, I don’t go and say to Paul, “Hey, Paul? Remember that plan I made last year? I forgot it….”
• My awesome buddies in the infrastructure team, at my request, created a Trac instance for me for doing schedule stuff, which I’ll edit up a bit in terms of the templates, milestones, etc. so that I can have a place for people to request things from me, and I can actually, ahem, track them, rather than forget. Amazing! This also dovetails nicely (and this idea was a result of the discussions) with the Insight / calendaring stuff going on.
•  Need to figure out a better methodology for FUDCons and ride coordination, both incoming and departing.
• Taking one of my ideas for better communication and getting a few board members on board with it. Which would require me to explain it here, which I’m not going to at the moment, given the OMGOVERSTUFFED state of my Inbox this morning, but it is just a super simple thing to get people in the habit of doing, and reminding people to do it.
• Pursuing a number of finance/budget related tasks that I am personally committed to getting fixed after sitting in Board meetings this weekend, as well as some new possibilities in that area.
• Some thank-you letter duty relating to FUDCon.
• Other things I promised people that I’ve already forgotten, but know they will happily remind me of, since I know y’all understand that I was having some OOM going on this weekend

Aside from that – wow, always so good to see so many of my close friends and contributor pals all at once, and the list of people is just far too long to thank, at least without me feeling guilty for realizing everyone I temporarily forgot. From Cloud SIG folks, to Board members, Ambassadors, Boston folks, people from Red Hat interested and curious about how FUDCon works,  and so many more…  it was just great to not just be able to get things done, in person, but to be able to laugh and enjoy in the evenings, and build those friendship bonds. You guys are all awesome, and I can’t wait for the next one.

Everything went relatively smoothly (HOORAY PLANNING), with me giving a brief and hopefully not idiotic-sounding rundown of the day’s agenda, schedule, and reminders.  I then passed off to Spot to give an explanation of What Is a Barcamp?, so that folks who have not been to an unconference-style conference could know what to expect.  The long line soon formed, and plenty of people pitched their talks as quickly as possible.  After pitching, they exited the door at the back of the auditorium, handing off their pitch to Spot for taping and attaching to the wall, and re-entering in the other rear auditorium exit.

After everyone gave their pitches, the line for barcamp voting began, which is usually (and was again) the longest part of the process. Thomas Cameron was kind enough to act as line motivator, reminding people to not take all week, and we managed to get finished with voting with just enough time for Jared‘s FPL speech. While the speech went on, a few of us taped up the barcamp grid, counted up votes, and started arranging the schedule by vote popularity, avoiding conflicts of interest, etc. With 6 rooms and 5 time slots, 30 sessions seems like a lot, but proved to have a lot of things going on simultaneously, but in the end I think we managed to please everyone but a few people. Which is pretty much the story of life anyway, right?

Anyway, I have no idea how it happened, but magically, a lot of Cloud talks got conveniently aligned all in a row. (And I didn’t bump up the numbers, honest, there’s just interest, though I think Raspberry Pi wound up getting the largest number of votes.)  I popped into Mo Morsi‘s Aeolus talk for a bit this morning, and this afternoon John Mark Walker and Jeff Darcy  presented on Gluster, David Nalley gave a talk and demo on CloudStack, followed by Russell Bryant and an awesome local (to Blacksburg) Rackspace employee giving a presentation on OpenStack. Mike McGrath is now presenting on OpenShift, which I’m sure will be great.

FUDPub starts at 7pm, a bit of a break after the last session is over, and at 11pm we’ll be meeting in the lobby to play some POKER. Looking forward to the rest of the day and evening, whooping some butt in a variety of games of skill or luck, and helping Spot get through the evening of FUDPub

Hopefully by now most of you have managed to figure out at least what time we’re starting today by looking at the schedule on the FUDCon:Blacksburg wiki page, but for those who haven’t (and there’s no time like the present!) — we’re starting at 9am on the second floor of McBryde Hall. (Obligatory link to map information is right here.) I’m sure we’ll have a good contigent of people walking over there this morning, though if you’re lucky, you can probably catch a ride with someone and not freeze your patootie off.

For those not here at FUDCon, you can still follow the fun on IRC on irc.freenode.net in #fedora-fudcon, as well as probably other channels specific to individual teams.  I’m sure lots of other people will be blogging about their ongoings on planet.fedoraproject.org as well.

So what have I been up to? FUN THINGS, of course. Ian Weller, Dennis Gilmore, and I arrived on Wednesday afternoon.  I got my car and hauled us out to Blacksburg, which is about an hour drive from the Roanoke Regional Airport. Had some dinner, and then gathered in the lobby waiting for the few people arriving on Wednesday, including Jared and Tatica (who wound up not getting in until very late Wednesday/early Thursday), and I also got to meet Jon Masters, who I hadn’t yet ever had the pleasure of meeting.  Peter Robinson also got in that evening, so there was plenty of ARM talk to be had, though the extent of my contribution there was something along the lines of, “Hey, I have ARMs… I wave them around a lot and try to get people’s attention…”

Thursday morning saw me doing some work on the other projects I work on outside of Fedora in my hotel room, and then around noon we started seeing more people come in. Spot arrived with a vanful of Boston RHT folks he flew in with, and then I went back with him to the airport to retrieve many more folks, including cwickert, kanarip, jforbes, tflink, gholms, inode0, nirik, and about … 4 more people I’m forgetting because it’s super early right now and I’m still working on drinking my tea (but I can assure you that I love you guys nonetheless). Although it does not have the same ring to it as The Spevan, the SpotBus was still awesome, and there’s nothing that makes me more smiley than getting to see lots of Fedora people travelling together that I haven’t seen for a while and getting to have some great laughs and productive conversation in.

By the end of last night, a ton of people were here, and we have even more arriving this morning and this afternoon. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you here, we’re going to have a great time and get lots of Things Done

I’m hoping to attend some Cloudy Stuff today, as well as go to the Fedora Board meeting numero uno, and the Implementing the Spins Process in Trac session, which is an area that I think could use some srs luv. What is everyone else planning on doing today?

Chances are, you probably don’t.  Right now, the schedule for Friday and Sunday, the primary days for Workshops and Hackfests, is lookin’ pretty darned empty. But I do see a giant list of planned hackfests and workshops (and by the way, if you’re planning on one and haven’t listed it yet in the hackfests/workshops area of the wiki, you should probably do that!), which means we need to all come together and start planning WHEN all of these things are going to be.

Let me be very clear here:

IF YOU ARE PLANNING A WORKSHOP OR HACKFEST, YOU NEED TO WRITE IT INTO THE SCHEDULE YOURSELF.

And the sooner, the better; the trusty Ian Weller and I get into Blacksburg tomorrow (Wednesday), and I’d like to be able to get the schedule finalized as much as possible before evening on Thursday, so that people know where to go and what to do on Friday. The last thing we want to do is waste Ian’s last pre-21-years-old FUDCon screwing around for 8 hours trying to do it for everyone waste time when we get started on Friday morning running around not knowing where we should be — FUDCons are a huge investment of time (and money!) for everyone involved, so let’s make the most of the time we have together.

Please note: Don’t write your proposed BarCamp session into the calendar, as we’ll schedule those during BarCamp.

If you’re not sure when, or worried you’ll conflict with others, ping the people you think will be likely attendees at your session and just make sure it’s a kosher time. The schedule will never be conflict free, but we can do our best.

There are a few things I think this might be helpful for:

• If you’re attending a session on BoxGrinder and you want to learn how to roll your own Fedora on EC2.
• If you’re inspired to work on the Cloud Guide on a docs session, or maybe want to learn how to test EC2 for each release during Test Days.
• In case you’re attending a hackfest on getting Fedora into the EC2/S3 .. repo.. area… or something… so that when you are yum-installing/updating/etc. you can get it insanely fast from what would essentially be a local mirror in EC2-land. And you want to help test to see if it works! (Note: Did you see that? That was my technical knowledge dropping off of a cliff.  I hope you can come to that hackfest and help out!) Maybe I’ll be more explicit about this plot in a future blog post in the next few days.

I’ll be setting up access using the awesome instructions written by Garrett Holmstrom to create accounts. IAM is actually pretty darned cool, and more importantly, EVEN I have utilized it and haven’t actually broken anything. The nice part is that you can limit how long the instances are alive, which is precisely what I’ll be doing — enabling them for this Thursday – next Tuesday (Jan. 12-16).

Anyway, if you want a temporary account for the FUDCon time period, drop me a line (rbergero@fedoraproject, plz).  I’ll set up accounts Wednesday night, and it would be super awesome helpful to me if you email me BEFORE IT IS AN EMERGENCY, preferably before FUDCon actually starts, so that I can hook you up without having to vanish in the middle of FUDCon fun.

<insert my sweet, smiling face here, topped by a Cloudy Hat that I really, really do have>

Speaking of Cloudy Things and access, if you’re planning on learning at all about OpenShift during FUDCon, and I have received confirmation that there will be Shifty Things a’Happenin’, you might think about signing up for that before you arrive, so you’re SUPER READY to get going on it.

THIS IS ABOUT POKER.

I know there are a few of you out there who really like playing poker and also just happen to be coming to FUDCon. And this works out fantastically, because I really enjoy beating some of you at poker, particularly if your name is Greg, but also if you happen to be named Paul, or Jesse, or Adam, or Bill, or Max. (Greg just gets extra points because he always beats me. Sniff.)

Anyway, I’m sure there are others of you who might like to do a little mini-tournament or something. I’m thinking Friday night, post-dinnerish-time, or Saturday night, post FUDPub. And so I am gauging interest. WITH YET ANOTHER WIKI PAGE. YOU ARE INVITED! Once I have a reasonable list I’ll note on the main FUDCon page the when, and eventually, the where.

Sign up here to give me major ego points, I mean, to play poker, since we’ll be playing not-for-money because of silly laws and stuff. (Though if we have a private room to play in, you know, things could change, and you could buy me a new pair of shoes, too.)

If you’re interested in coming to Cloudy Things, or want to Do Something Cloudy, I’ve conveniently set up a wiki page where you can indicate some interest as well, mostly for my ease of use so that I can figure out when things should be and who will be around that is interested here.  Or, you can pipe up on the Cloud SIG mailing list, or even join our always-interesting-and-fun Cloud SIG meeting TODAY, Friday, Jan. 6 at 1900 UTC (11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern) in #fedora-meeting on IRC.

So who will we have representin’, you ask? Let’s see:

• Aeolus
• OpenStack
• OpenShift (I assume mmcgrath will be showing off here, right?)
• CloudStack
• Eucalyptus
• Gluster & HekaFS
• oVirt
• BoxGrinder
• Snap!
• Your Cloudy Thing Here

If you’re not sure what this Silly Cloud hubbub is all about, or what the difference between an IaaS, PaaS, and a SaaS is… I am hoping that perhaps my planned barcamp pitch might be accepted. My not-so famous Cloud Smörgåsbord talk will give a super-high-level overview of all these things, talk a little bit about what all these various projects do, and so forth.

And hopefully I won’t make too much of an *aaS of myself. Tee-hee.

Now, I realize that we have, or are about to have (since FESCo currently has more than 10 in the queue for their next meeting), a BOATLOAD of features in this release.  I don’t mean, like, a tugboat, or a yacht, but I’m talking, the FULL-ON CRUISESHIP O’FEATURES (please note that any cruise ship references are not related to any desires to have FUDCon on a cruise ship. No sirree.)  And like any awesome, delicious recipe with lots of ingredients, you generally don’t want to dump all the crap in a bowl at once and hope to god it works out; instead you want it to turn out as a hearty $foodyoulove, and not $somethingthatyouateonceandohboyneveragain.

Or, to get more to the point, the sooner you people get your features in, and done in a timely manner, the more likely it is that we’ll have a less frantic, more on-time release.

Here are some dates to pay VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO:

• Feature Submission Deadline: 2012-01-24. That’s not long after FUDCon. Which means that you should probably think about this stuff *before* FUDCon, and get it done, and not get swept up in the excitement and business of FUDCon. Also: YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH THINGS RELATED TO YOUR FEATURE AT FUDCon. Fancy that!
• Feature Freeze: 2012-02-07. For feature freeze, the feature should be substantially complete and in a testable state, and enabled by default, if so specified by the feature. Branch freeze is also on 2012-02-07.
• Software string freeze is on 2012-02-14.
• The Alpha Change Deadline is also 2012-02-14. Love is in the air!
• F17 Alpha is scheduled for 2012-02-28.

In the meantime: IF YOU ARE A FEATURE OWNER, please, please, pretty please, with mustard on top, keep your percentage complete number updated on your feature page. Your percentage complete should be updated at *least* once a month, if not more often.  Knowing where you are *really* at helps a number of different teams coordinate and prioritize things, and I’m really not a fan of waving the white flag of OHGODNOOOOO if things are just hunky dory.  But if the white flag needs to be waved, I’d really prefer to wave it in advance, when things can be fixed, and not at the last second. So do your part and update your percentages!

And thus, I am here to give you, as always, gentle, friendly, loving tips, with only a slight hint of sarcasm. Because I’m nice like that. Really.

• Tip #1: Planning on getting together with people to MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, or hoping people might be interested in doing the same stuff you are? The best time to start arranging that is before FUDCon. The best way to do this is either to reach out to your prospective co-thing-doers in mailing lists or IRC meetings, or better yet, WRITE A BLOG POST and make sure it hits planet.fedoraproject.org. And remember that if your trip was fully or partially sponsored, blog posts are a requirement! The more noise everyone can make about what they’re doing, the better.
• Tip #2: I am willing to bet ONE AMERICAN DOLLAR that there are still folks who haven’t booked their hotel room. The date has passed for booking rooms, but if you’re in a bind, I’m of course willing to help you out. No guarantees, and I don’t exactly have a plan at the moment, but I’m guessing we can work things out. So email me or beep me on IRC if you’ve failed to heed my endless previous reminders and I promise to be nice, and I won’t even make it contingent on you purchasing me a hot dog. (Though I do love hot dogs.)
• Tip #3: Not sure how you’re getting from the airport to the hotel? Try adding your name to the Travel Planning wiki page, and check back as we get a little closer for other people who are arriving around the same time as you. Get in contact. PROFIT. (Same goes for people driving from Raleigh – hit that wiki page up, but do it soon before The Amazing Ruth finalizes plans.)
• Tip #4: VERY IMPORTANT TIP ABOUT YOUR WIRELESS ACCESS. You need to register for your guest account to get wireless while at FUDCon. You *will* want wireless. So go to the wiki page and learn about how to register for access so that you can be on teh intarwebz whilst at FUDCon.
• Tip #5: If you’re planning on giving a presentation, make it now! We have a lovely template if you’re not sure how to make it look, but the content is what counts.  Adding your plans for your barcamp session/pitch, workshop, or hackfest to the FUDCon wiki page helps others plan ahead for what they want to do/see/participate in. Incidentally, if this is your first FUDCon, you should read about what the heck goes on at a FUDCon.
• Tip #6: I really do like hot dogs. Oh, wait.