Gratien D'haese

The Open Technology Assembly (OTA), formerly known as Belgian Unix Users Group, is a non-profit organisation which main goal was to promote and organise meetings around Unix and Open Source in general (mainly more than a decade ago). Over the years the Internet took over so that the interest in our meetings declined and finally we stopped organise meetings altogether. However, as a non-profit organisation we would like to do something useful such as supporting and funding new open source related projects.

The Open Technology Assembly (OTA) will open an Open Source Support program to apply for funding. It would be nice that the chosen Open Source projects owners submit a (lightning) talk for next year's FOSDEM, however, it is not obliged. We will also organise an independent jury to go over the submitted projects and make a list of the projects which will get funding. Before FOSDEM starts we will have web pages explaining most of the details.

Installing and configuring ReaR on thousands of Linux systems might become a nightmare to keep track what/where was done with success. Luckily using configuration management software we can do this quite easily. In this talk we will guide you through a recipe on how we have done this for a multi-national company.

Introducing Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) for the novice users. What is it and what can it mean for you? Is Disaster Recovery useful to consider it or not? How can ReaR assist you with DR? ReaR can store the details about your systems on disks (NAS, USB, SAN,...) or network (PXE, NFS, CIFS,...) including the complete backup. It also creates a bootable image which you need to recreate your system from scratch. Furthermore, thanks to the modular concept, ReaR integrates perfectly with external backup solutions (be commercial and/or open source ones) to do the backup and restore part which makes ReaR very scalable in big enterprises. ReaR scales even with Cloud solutions and is the heart of another great project (DRLM or Disaster Recovery Linux Manager).

Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) is the de facto standard generic (bare metal) disaster recovery framework for all kind of Linux systems. ReaR is in common use by admins for disaster recovery on thousands and thousands of Linux server systems. The first part of the "ReaR Basics" talk will be presented by Gratien D'haese (one of the co-founders of ReaR).

In the second part of the talk Johannes Meixner (one of the main developers of ReaR) will use his own laptop to demonstrate the ReaR disaster recovery framework. Therefore, Johannes will show a real live demo without safety net how ReaR is used to recover his own laptop from soft errors like deleted essential files (rm -r /lib...) and/or destroyed partitioning/bootloader (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX). Come and see for yourself how ReaR can save your day!

An informal talk with ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos users about what they would like to get implemented in future ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos versions.

This talk happens at the end of the "Backup and Disaster Recovery" devroom time schedule. This way also new ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos users could first get informed about ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos so that afterwards they could better tell about what enhancements or features they would like to have implemented in future versions.

Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) is a bare metal Disaster Recovery tool that can save you hours (and sometimes days) to recover a system from scratch in case of failure. However, for us developers before making a new release it is a real nightmare to test all the different Linux distributions in combination with all the known workflows that ReaR provides. It used to be a manual process of testing the recovery, but we are in progress to automate the whole process for some workflows. We will explain the internals of how we do automated testing and we will give a live demo as well.

Upgrade-UX is an open source framework developed to assist in patching and/or updating Unix Operating Systems in a consistent and repeatable way. Especially in the industry it is forbidden just to run yum update (on Linux) to update your Linux system, therefore, upgrade-ux may proof to be a handy tool to guide you through the patching and/or update process as it follows a track you control (evidence gathering, pre/post executing of scripts, logging, and so on).

Upgrade-UX is a software framework to update or patch lots of Unix systems (Linux, HP-UX, AIX and Solaris).

In professional environments it is not allowed to just blindly update an UNIX system without testing this first out on a development system, pre-production and so on. The upgrade-ux product allows you to repeat this process in a consistent way and as many times as you like on any system. Upgrade-ux understands two states:

• preview mode: will go through the whole process without actually doing the update
• upgrade mode: will do it for real (the update)

The upgrade-ux uses configuration files which describes what a particular Unix Operating System requires to be upgraded in the way you want it (or designed it). Doing it this way allows you to exactly define how a system should look like after the upgrade or patching. Nothing else can be installed, removed or configured.

Furthermore, many checks can be build-in via adding simple scripts. We also keep of each run an unique log file, and furthermore, we keep evidence before and after patching in a special directory. Months later we can still inspect these logs and evidence directories to verify what happened or what has changed in the meantime.

Cfg2html is a little utility to collect the necessary system configuration files and system set-up to an ASCII file and HTML file. Simple to use and very helpful in disaster recovery situations.

Collects Linux system configuration into a HTML and text file. Config to HTML is the "swiss army knife" for the sysadmins. It was written to get the necessary informations to plan an update, to perform basic trouble shooting or performance analysis. As a bonus cfg2html creates a nice HTML and plain ASCII documentation from Linux System, Cron and At, installed Hardware, installed Software, Filesystems, Dump- and Swap-configuration, LVM, Network Settings, Kernel, System enhancements and Applications, Subsystems.