Gluster Summit 2017

Right after Open Source Europe, we had Gluster Summit. It was a 2-day
event with talks and BoFs. I had two key things to do at the Gluster Summit.
One was build out the minnowboard setup to demo Tendrl. This didn’t work out.
I had volunteered to help with the video work as well. According to my plans.
The setup for minnowboards would take about 1h and then I’d be free to help
with camera work. I had a talk scheduled for the second day of the event. I’d
have expected one of these to two wrong. I didn’t expect all to go wrong 🙂

On the first day, Amar and I arrived early and did the camera setup. The venue
staff were helpful. They gave us a line out from their audio setup for the
camera. Our original plan was that speakers would have a lapel mic for the
camera. That was prone to errors from speakers and also would need us to check
batteries every few hours. When we first tried to work with the line in, we had
interference. The camera power supply wasn’t grounded (there wasn’t even
a ground out. The venue staff switched out the boxes they used for line out and
it worked like a charm after that.

We did not have a good start for the demo. Jim had pre-setup the networking on
the boards from home and brought them to Prague. But whatever we did, we
couldn’t connect to it’s network the night before the event. That was the day
we kept free to do this. That night we gave up, because we needed a monitor, an
HDMI cable, and a keyboard to debug it. At the venue, we borrowed a keyboard
and hooked up the board to the monitor. There was no user for dnsmasq, so it
wasn’t assigning out IPs and that’s why the networking didn’t work. Once we got
past that point, it was about getting the network to work with my laptop. That
took a while. We decided to go with a server in the cloud as the Tendrl server.
By evening, we got the playbook run and get everything installed and
configured. But I’d made a mistake. I used IPs instead of FQDNs, so the
dashboard wouldn’t work. This meant re-installing the whole setup. That’s the
point where I gave up on it.

My original content for my talk was to look at our releases. Especially to list
out what we committed to at the start of the release and what we finished with.
There is definitely a gap. This is common for software projects and how people
estimate work. This topic was more or less covered on the first day. I instead
focused on how we fail. How we fail our users, developers, and community.
I followed the theme of my original talk a bit, pointing out that we can small
large problems in smaller chunks.

We’re running a marathon, not a sprint.

Source: nigelb (Gluster Summit 2017)