Call for Papers

LinuxTag seeks proposals for talks and presentations in its conference program. Proposals, preferrably in English language, are accepted by the LinuxTag virtual Conference Center (vCC) until Friday, February 7, 2014. To provide an interesting and coherent program, LinuxTag focusses in its main conference tracks to a number of main topics:

Find out: Tracing, troubleshooting, and logging

Not all servers and services do "operate within normal parameters" all the time. If they don't, system engineers need reliable procedures to track and fix problems. In this track, LinuxTag speakers explore tools and techniques to trace programs, to profile applications, to monitor and enhance database connections, and web scripting language frameworks. They learn how to manage and aggregate aquired data, skim it for values and events that make information from data.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to Strace, Ltrace, Sviz, Breeze, New Relic, Dtrace, features of JBoss, Log4j, Logstash, Splunk, Graphite, Syslog-NG, and monitoring frameworks.

Protect yourself: Security after Snowden

Action is due after a couple of months lamenting about security and privacy breaches inflicted by intelligence agencies and major Internet corporations. Who, if not users and administrators of open source systems, has the option to protect oneself from eavesdropping and surveillance?

Adding to that, protecting infrastructure from competition and miscreants is essentials. Conference delegates learn what to do to effectively protect their privacy, take measures against surveillance and how to judge the effectiveness of security tools and ciphers. Last but not least they discover strategies to spread the word in order to curb the silly "I have nothing to hide" error in reasoning.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to OpenSSL, OpenSSH, Tor, GPG, and other security related tools.

Fancy a game? Linux' new steps into entertainment

Linux reached a next level in the gaming industry with the advent of commercial grade gaming platforms based on open source software. LinuxTag visitors are interested in design decisions, technology choices, and ways to participate in the ever growing field of entertainment development. Libraries and frameworks support developers to code for high framerate, animated and networked pastime experiences.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to all kinds of game platforms and development environments.

Make it so: Configuration management and software deployment

Virtualization manifolded the number of servers administrators take care of. The need to orchestrate your services, automate configuration and deployment processes gave birth to many frameworks that act as a helping hand. Provisioning of a stage environment is just a matter of seconds.

Most share a common set of functions but some tools are better suited in situations compared to others. Conference vistors learn in this track how these platforms work. They want to identify specific advantages and discover best practises for configuration management, software deployment, and virtualization provided by experienced experts.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, Fabric, Ansible, Vagrant, Rex, Jenkins, Docker, and Cfengine. IaaS management may cover Open Stack, Eucalyptus, Ganeti, Cloudstack, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, VMware, and EC2.

Roll your own: Bring back your servers home

Home gardening and power knitting appear to be popular retro trends: Folks recollect traditional virtues. This applies also to computers: In the aftermath of Prism and Tempora like the idea to have more control over servers and services. In this track, delegates learn how to set up a fileserver, receive own mail, launch a blog, maintain a web server, and host a personal web shop to sell the knitted socks. They train their skills in hardening, to configure a firewall and email encryption, and finally set up a Tor server.

In a more advanced approach, developers build their own devices, appliances, and even networks: SDN build complex network segments, and compose experimental protocols. By means of SDR programmable network chipsets even allow to create own broadcast applications.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to Owncloud, postfix, exim, sendmail, wordpress, dyn-DNS, webshops, apache, nginx, hardening, mod_security, firewalls, netfilter, nftables, Tor, GPG, Enigmail, OpenWRT, Freifunk, OpenVSwitch, and Open Flow.

Extensible Attic: Deal with vast amounts of data

Extracting information from collected data in a fast way is a key goal to keep your business running. When once data retrieval was accomplished in the uniform way of speaking SQL, today there are several approaches like full text search, object stores and key value tables. Attendees of this track learn about the advantages and pitfalls of storage engines, NoSQL databases and search indices. Big data requires even new programming paradigms and blur the boundaries between databases and file systems.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to MongoDB, Elastic Search, Redis, Hadoop, Cassandra, Swift, Ceph, Solr, Lucene, Map Reduce, HDFS, and Hadoop.

Pimp the Web: Speed up your apps and improve user experience

Running a successful website is fun, but not all webmasters are prepared to get slashdotted or ddosed. This track tells to benchmark the performance of a site, to measure its thoughput, to evaluate it concerning accessibility, and scan for security vulnerabilities. Frameworks help webmasters to optimize their UI, do A/B testing, replay user requests, and run complex test suites before you deploy. New generation browsers facilitate clientside applications by means of websockets and stream with Web RTC.

A list of tools, techniques, and projects might include but is not limited to Apache Bench, Jmeter, Apache, Nginx, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Node.js, angular.js, amber.js, backbone.js, GWT, OWASP, Mod_security, skipfish, pagespeed, Firebug, Ghost, Selenium, and robot framework.

Go agile: Small steps for your code, but a giant leap for Users

Building complex software products for customers is an difficult task, where the traditional approach to software development often is too risky, more costly and less efficient. An essential shift in the way how software is developed, tested, deployed, and improved is widely discussed by software developers, system engineers, and product managers. Developing software with lean and agile methods focuses on implementing features, which are small, fully-tested, independent and valualable.

In theory agile methods like the Scrum framework are easy to understand and simple to use. But experience shows that turning an organisation from a waterfall approach to agile practices is more than sorely a technical task, where developers learn about pair-programming, TDD or continuous integration. It is also about self-responsible and crossfunctional teams, leaving behind traditional roles and cultural change in organisations. Agile methods strive to narrow the classical gap between operations and development. This track investigates the impact of such approaches to software development in general and Open Source in specific.

A list of tools, techniques, and projects might include but is not limited to continous integration, lean development, Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps.

OpenStack: One IaaS platform for all needs

OpenStack is a complete cloud solution that was built to simplify IT vendors' business, as far as it didn't take off into cloud computing yet. Unlike other cloud solutions, OpenStack has deep roots in the FOSS community and is supported by many companies and developers. The track will guide through the OpenStack universe, show use cases and feature other projets, that come in handy in cooperating with OpenStack.

A list of tools and projects might include but is not limited to OpenStack components like Nova, Swift, Glance, and Cinder, as well as augmenting technologies like Ceph, cluster file systems, or software defined networks.

Deadlines and conditions

Apart from the listed main topics, LinuxTag gladly also accepts any other proposals for talks and presentations until Friday, February 7, 2014 in its virtual Conference Center (vCC).