[volunteers] volunteers Digest, Vol 49, Issue 4

[Luke S Crawford]

Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> writes:

> Yes, indeed.  The TBA page _also_ has a pointer to Luke S. Crawford's 
> June 2008 offer to give a talk about Xen virtualisation, which at that
> time he was using to operate a small virtual hosting company.

yeah, I've been doing that since '05 or so, and still am.  I'm still 
small, but I'm growing.  (I'm still small because I screwed myself in 
'07 -  I decided to shutdown.   I came back early '08, after realizing that 
I was not willing to tolerate the corporate grind, without at least 
hope of escape.) 

I'm currently also a contractor, doing xen stuff for a large corporation.
I don't really like working for large corps, but right now is a time
of great opportunity if you are willing to hire people, and while I could
turn down the money, I'm unwilling to turn down the talent I can buy with
that money.   (so many really good people are out of work now.  It's 
shocking.)  

At some point I'd like to talk about fighting abuse from the point of
view of a hosting provider.   Automating your abuse discovery is essential
to keeping costs down.  (If you wait for someone to complain to move on
an abuse report, the value of the day and a half or whatever of spam they
can get out before someone complains sets a lower bound on what you can
charge without becoming a spam haven.)  

Now, my snort foo is really too weak at this point to give a good talk
about it, but the idea I'm using is that I'm setting a snort server on 
my outgoing traffic, watching for signs of outgoing abuse, and taking
action before I get a complaint.  


But yeah,  in the near term, a presentation on Xen would likely be the best.
I can do a good 'real world'   presentation on using Xen (sometimes in
suboptimal situations, sometimes using bad hacks, but making it work,
both in a hosting provider environment, and in a large corporate 
environment.) 

I was probably talking about my book 9 months ago, too.  It's still not done.
http://nostarch.com/xen.htm
but we will see.   Chris is coming up this weekend and we are going to 
try to finish, but that's what I say almost every weekend these days.