Fedora @ LISA 2016 Wrap-Up

LISA is a conference that stands for "Large Installation System Administration." Corey Sheldon told me how awesome it was last year, and that is one reason why I went this year. I was one of one of the Fedora ambassadors along with:

• Matthew Miller (it's the only event he serves as an ambassador at each year)
• Corey Sheldon
• Nick Bebout
• Beth Eicher
• Some Red Hatters involved in Fedora (like Steve Gallagher.)
• Note: There was a Red Hat booth right next to us.

Mike DePaulo showing off X2Go to Matthew Miller

Overall, the event went very well. Perhaps it felt that way due to the technical nature of the crowed. The reasons why it went well are:

• Many people had heard of Fedora
• Of those that had not heard of Fedora, almost everyone had heard of RHEL or CentOS, and were pleased to hear about Fedora's relationship to them.
• In addition to the usual explanations about the relationship, I like to say "Red Hat sells its past, and gives away its future."
• A Microsoft employee expressed his opinion that that Fedora should be on the Azure cloud.
• Disclaimer: This was his personal opinion.
• A few people reported that they were using Fedora in production environments consisting of dozens or hundreds of machines.
• For example, one person reported that having the latest development frameworks & tools (at their educational setting) is a reason why.
• This sounded a lot like the deployment of Fedora at University of Novi Sad in Serbia.
• At least 1 person expressed interest in using the Fedora 24 Workstation DVDs that we had, specifically to try out Fedora via the live mode.
• At least 1 person was delighted to hear that he could use either GNOME boxes or virt-manager on his CentOS system to run Fedora easily.
• After all, Fedora includes the drivers and guest agents to run on these KVM-based virtualization solutions.
• Steve Gallagher gave a presentation on Fedora Modularity. Of particular note was his Voltron analogy!

Some downsides though:

• We only had Fedora 24 DVD's rather than Fedora 25 DVD's. Of course, Fedora 25 was only released 2 weeks prior, so it was unreasonable to have hundreds of DVD's printed & delivered by then.
• We had Cockpit on a big display. Although it generally worked, the SELinux feature did not at all. Even when we went out of our way to generate an SELinux error that was logged, it did not show up in the Cockpit GUI.

I personally had a great time. I look forward to next year!