[chiglug] Follow-up from our December 9th meeting

[Jim Campbell]

Hi All,

I wanted to provide a summary of yesterday's meeting, as someone did for
at a recent meet-up that I attened, and I found it to be very useful.

## Ansible's use by the DebConf video team

Carl talked about using Ansible to perform configurations of
video-related hardware for conferences. He uses a PXE boot process to
create a base image, and then uses scripts to install and kick-off
Ansible.

Because Carl has gotten help from Debian developer wizards, they
actually insert and kick-off Ansible from *within the Debian installer*!
Magic! But also, sometimes headache causing! If something goes wrong in
Ansible, it may cause the installer to fail. They often have to do some
trickery to prevent Ansible from restarting services inside the
installer, as well.

Carl uses host variables to assign different Ansible playbooks to each
of his machine types (e.g., tftp servers, dhcp servers, video mixing
workstations, etc).

And speaking of machine types, Carl's setups can be tricky at times
because he is often working with different, conference-supplied hardware
at each of his different venues. For example, he can't depend on primary
hard disks always being available at /dev/sda. His install scripts and
Ansible configurations would be simpler if his hardware were more
homogeneous, but he often has to use whatever is available.

It was an in-depth look at how Carl uses Ansible to provision commodity
hardware, converting it to a complete video-production service. Good
stuff.

## GNOME Cake
We had cake as a belated celebration of GNOME's 20th birthday. We
totally had limited-edition GNOME 20th birthday stickers, too. They are
cool, and I have two of them. It's like two bitcoins except they're
stickers. I'm rich! Thanks to Meg for getting us set up.

## The Linux Vendor Firmware Service

I also gave a talk on the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, a new set of
services that aim to simplify the firmware update process for
Linux-based devices. It includes both vendor-facing services and
support, and server+workstation-based utilities to apply the firmware
updates. Given that firmware is also important in securing devices, this
is a useful service.

The slides give a good run-down on each of the components involved, and
are available for download here:
https://chicagolug.org/files/2017-12-09/linux-vendor-firmware-talk.pdf

Thanks for making it out yesterday, and we look forward to seeing you at
future meetings!

Jim