Friends, syslog-ng, Package Hub, ARM: openSUSE conference 2017

Being a long-time openSUSE user, I visit the openSUSE conference not only to present on one of its components – syslog-ng – but also to meet friends and learn about new technologies and the plans for the upcoming year. Some talks, like those about Package Hub, were very interesting and important also from a syslog-ng perspective. Of course, I also joined a few talks for my personal interest, like the one on the new ARM devices supported by openSUSE.

Friends

I met many of my openSUSE friends at the event. We discussed several interesting topics: ARM, openSUSE, SLES and of course syslog-ng. I received a very special gift from Michal Hrušecký – former openSUSE board member, now working at nic.cz – at the conference: a prototype board of the Turris Omnia router. It uses syslog-ng for logging and can also run openSUSE.

Prototype Turris Omnia board
Prototype Turris Omnia board

My talk

My presentation on how to process security logs with syslog-ng was on Saturday, the second day of the conference. When I started, just four people were in the room and I knew that there are two very interesting talks in parallel sessions. Luckily by the time I got to the third slide, the room was full, some people even had to stand as all seats were taken. My talk was not recorded, but a slightly shorter version is available on the FOSDEM website both with slides and video: https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/syslog_ng_using/

Package Hub

There were many interesting talks about openSUSE Tumbleweed, the upcoming SLES 15, OpenQA and the Build Service. From the syslog-ng point of view the new, Package Hub is definitely the most important one. It is a collection of community packages for Enterprise Linux users. In concept it is similar to Fedora’s EPEL repository: packages from the community Linux distribution made available for Enterprise users.

Software versions in Package Hub are not frozen. In case of syslog-ng this means that new technologies like parsers or destinations coming with new releases will be readily available to users. The repository is also easy to use, it takes a single click in YaST to enable it, where it can be found in a prominent place.

I hope that up-to-date syslog-ng packages will be available in the Package Hub soon.

ARM

Right now working on ARM hardware is mostly a hobby project for me, even if I receive occasional syslog-ng questions related to ARM. The platform is gaining traction among Enterprise users, so the upcoming SLES 15 will support ARMv8 right from the get-go.

ARM developer boards can also be used as a nice learning and demo platform. There was a talk about the Ceph filesystem with 15 Raspberry Pi machines on stage. Of course it is not for production use, but it is a setup even a student can afford to put together and learn about clusters, big data and other technologies on real hardware. It barely took more space than a bunch of books. Imagine the same with x86: even by using 1U machines it would take more than half a rack.

Andreas Färber gave a talk on new ARM hardware supported by openSUSE. It is a long list and many boards have limitations. Still, thanks to the large number of systems, it is easy to find something suiting your needs.

MachiatoBIN
MachiatoBIN was on display as an ARM board running openSUSE

I will finish my blog with the same sentence as last year, just changing the year:

I hope to visit openSUSE conference in 2018 too!

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