Hello folks,

Over the past few months, there was been a lot of activity behind the scenes in the tech channel to figure out the state of things and how to move forward after the attrition of some of the key members. Before we go further, I want to highlight some of the progress we have made in the last few months :

1) We have moved the servers from ACTUSA to Rackspace. 2) We have moved the DNS to route53 (Amazon). 3) We have moved all the configuration of the servers to Chef, and everything has been published in our public github channel ( https://github.com/socallinuxexpo). 4) Some work still remains on finalizing a network infrastructure model for SCALE 15X. We had a tentative plan with Ubiquity gear, but that fell through, so we are a little behind on this task.

These tasks look trivial when itemized in this manner, but for the several of us that worked on these tasks, they were pretty daunting at first.

To that end, many of us have come to realize that while they are related, the management of the server infrastructure and the network infrastructure require vastly different skill sets. The former is a year long activity, and the latter primarily activates a few weeks before the show and major activity ends the day the show is done. Therefore, we have decided to split the team into two - one for server infrastructure, and the other for network infrastructure.

Phil D will take over the server infrastructure team, and I will let him announce his key team members. I will continue to handle the network team until we find a more permanent replacement.

As always, I welcome your comments. If you are interested in working with Phil on the new team, please reach out to him at phil@socallinuxexpo.org

Thanks,

Bala