Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG)

SLUG's monthly meeting, featuring talks and SLUGlets.

As our final meeting of the year, we are also including a short Bonus Talk. Read on for details.

Meetings are open to the general public, and are free of charge.

Our meetings take place next to Darling Harbour, near public transport and other amenities.

Our location: Atlassian, 173-185 Sussex Street, Sydney (corner of Sussex and Market Street). Entry is via the rear on Slip Street. There are stairs going down along the outside of building from Sussex St to near the entrance. A map of the area and directions can be found here.

We start at 18:30 but we ask that people arrive 15 minutes early so we can all get into the building and start on time. Please do not arrive before 18:00, as it may hinder business activities for our host!

Appropriate signage and directions will be posted on the building.

This month's sessions are:

General Talk
Mary Gardiner: Precious precious data, keeping it safe the sane way

Your data is vulnerable to loss in all kinds of ways, from earthquakes and invasions on down. Home users are most vulnerable to data loss through user error, software failure and media failure. This talk will outline good backup practices for Linux home users who are concerned with keeping their email, homework, code, novel drafts and photos safe for the long term. I will review various tools and approaches for keeping your data safe from all three of user error, software failure and media failure.

Bonus Talk
Robert Thorsby: Christmas Cards from the Geek

It's almost time to snail mail Christmas cards to those we love and those who we think will forget to send us one. Your average nerd would trawl stationers and newsagents to purchase exactly the right card for each recipient, but what would a geek do?

This is a short, sardonic, look at how one aspiring geek bashed together a script to print out Christmas cards on the office printer.

In-Depth Talk
John Ferlito: Bootstrapping your application for just $3 a day and beyond - Amazon EC2, S3, SQS

In the past deploying a scalable web application could be a daunting task. Not only requiring the provisioning or leasing of servers in a data centre but worrying about hardware failures and the ongoing issue of constantly provisioning more physical servers to scale your application as it grew.

With the advent of Cloud or Utility Computing many of these issues have disappeared, while some have been replaced with others. An application can now be deployed to the cloud within a day and new instances turned on within seconds or dynamically to meet demand.

This presentation will aim to cover off the providers in the Cloud Computing ecosystem. The advantages and disadvantages of various providers and the concept as a whole will be discussed.

Focus will then move more specifically on Amazon AWS and its components. A quick demonstration will be given on the ease of deploying new applications into an EC2 environment and hosting data out of S3. Topics covered will include:

• Amazon AWS Services
• Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Simple Queuing System (SQL)
• Simple DB (SDB)
• Deploying an Application
• Creating AMI's
• Deploying Instances
• Amazon APIs
• PHP
• Ruby
• SOAP
• etc
• Limitations of the model
• Scaling the service dynamically

This talk has been prepared for OSDC 2008, which is being held in Sydney in December.

Sluglets
General discussion about Linux, free software and open source

Meeting Schedule

See here for an explanation of the segments.

• 18:15: Open Doors
• 18.30: Announcements, News, Introductions
• 18:45: General Talk
• 19:30: Bonus Talk
• 19:45: Intermission
• 20:00: Split into two groups for:
• In-Depth Talk
• SLUGlets
• 20:45: Dinner

Dinner is at Golden Harbour Restaurant, in Chinatown. We will be having the $24 Banquet, but we will be collecting $25 per head for ease of accounting and to cover a tip. We will be taking numbers during the break to confirm the reservation size. If you have any particular dietary requirements (e.g. vegetarian), or if you would prefer to order separately, let us know beforehand. Dinner is a great way to socialise and learn in a relaxed atmosphere :)

We hope to see you there!