The ATIX crew @ Config Management Camp 2019

Following on from the great experience from the previous year, we didn’t miss the opportunity to travel to this year’s Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) in the East Flemish city of Ghent. But this year everything turned out completely differently than planned. Everything? No, not for a small delegation that had decided to travel by train: the heavy snowfall did not dissuade them from their plans and they were able to start the event with the legendary speakers’ dinner. Meanwhile, our “air travelers” were still stranded due to the weather along with large parts of the stand equipment.

For this reason, at the official start on Monday morning, our stand was not only occupied in terms of staff, but also equipment. But fortunately that changed with the arrival of our flying group. So we were able to really get started after half a day late, because in addition to looking after the stand, there were also four lectures we were scheduled to give. Matthias Dellweg starts with the newly created pulp track. He spoke about the latest developments surrounding the pulp3 plugin API and the connection between these and the special requirements of the plugins for Debian packages and Ruby Gems. For his talk, Matthias incorporated an additional “special effect” and completely dispensed with any technical aids. Instead he chose blackboard and chalk. Next, Quirin Pamp joined our list of speakers at the Config Management Camp: With a certain amount of humor, he reported on considerable performance improvements in the pulp2 implementation of the Debian plugin.

Managing large Debian repositories with Pulp

The members of the ATIX crew present, together with many other participants, ended the first evening with good food and Belgian beer.

Managing Debian/Ubuntu hosts with Katello (incl. Errata)

We then start the second day of the Config Management Camp with a full stand. Thanks to the many stand visits and interesting conversations, the morning flew by before our two “Bernhards” made their big appearances in the afternoon. In the new Katello talk, Bernhard Suttner spoke about two large pull requests that allow both the handling of installed packages on controlled Debian/Ubuntu systems and the timely monitoring of known security-relevant errata on these same systems.

These two features have been available in our orcharhino for a long time and have been working on being able to place them in the upstream version of Katello for some time. Last but not least, it was Bernhard Hopfenmüller’s turn on Tuesday evening. His talk took place in the Ansible Track. He focused on methods that significantly speed up the execution of Ansible scripts. By mentioning the Mitogen project, he stimulated a lively discussion.

Ansible – ´Faster-than-light´

On the final third day it was time: hands-on! At the first official Pulp Plugin Day there was an intensive exchange between the RedHat and ATIX developers present. At the same time, another part of the crew worked on Molecule, a library for testing Ansible roles, as part of the Ansible Hackday.

Despite all the adversities, we can look back on another great event. That’s why we’ll of course be there again at the Config Management Camp 2020!

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ATIX-Crew

Der ATIX-Crew besteht aus Leuten, die in unterschiedlichen Bereichen tätig sind: Consulting, Development/Engineering, Support, Vertrieb und Marketing.

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