[Lcabid] LCA Bid IT Team

[James Iseppi]

Hi Guys,

I wanted to go over several of the ideas I had for us as the tech  
team, and what we'd deliver as part of the bid.

Network

For the networking, I would like to go down the same path as all AU  
based LCA's before us and get aarnet to sponsor the Internet  
(Something I've already mentioned to our Sponsorship Czar Shaun). My  
understanding is that they will usually deliver this as an interface  
on one of their routers located at the venue. Since QUT is an aarnet  
POP, I really don't see this as being too much of an issue, assuming  
we can get aarnet onboard. From there we will need to get it over to  
the venue. I'm hoping that QUT will help out by providing us with 4 or  
more vlan's on their network that we can trunk between V block (where  
the aarnet POP is located) and Z Block (and any other venue we use) to  
carry our various networks around. I think we need 2-4 vlan's on our  
network (whether these are vlan's on our infrastructure or QUT's  
infrastructure depends on how we end up piecing this together). These  
will include:
Network Management
LCA Servers
Organiser's
Delegates
Special purpose (used for connecting cars to the network when Jon Oxer  
gives us 5 minutes notice before his presentation).

Aarnet also usually provide a /22 network to the conference that we  
can break up into various networks. We'll need to work out a plan for  
this, keeping in mind that the largest chunk of this needs to be on  
the delegates vlan. Linux Australia also owns a fairly significant  
stock of Linksys WRT54GL AP's which have been used for the previous  
years networks. They also have some HP Layer 2 managed switches which  
we can probably use as access switches for the organisers, and  
possibly as the core of our network if we need to build our network  
from the ground up. I'm also hopeful that we can get QUT to either  
allow us use of their Cisco AP's that are deployed around Z Block, or  
if they won't/can't do that, then we can hopefully get them to turned  
off to avoid interference with our equipment. Shaun will organise some  
discussions between us and QUT regarding the network so that we can  
iron out some of these details, but I'm not sure when in the Bid  
process this will be able to happen.

We will also need to setup some servers for various uses during the  
conference. We'll need one to manage the access points using a system  
that has been used successfully at lca2007, lca2008, osdc2008 and  
lca2009. We will also need to store the video data locally before it  
is released and sent off to the Linux Australia mirror. I'd also like  
to stream all the talks locally at the conference so that people can  
watch without being in the lecture theatre, possibly while enjoying  
the hallway track. These are the things I can think of now, but I'm  
sure there will be more as we progress with the bid.

For the network side of the bid, I'd like to deliver a plan that is as  
detailed as possible regarding how the network will be put together.  
Obviously the level of detail will depend on how much we can confirm  
with our potential sponsor aarnet, and QUT.

Website

For the website, I'd highly recommend using zookeepr, which is the  
conference management system that has been used for all LCA's since  
2007 in Sydney. We will need to get to work on it as soon as possible  
after we win the bid, as it will need to have our website theme  
applied to it, and we'll also need to identify any functionality that  
is not complete enough for use by our conference. Linux Australia can  
provide a VM to host this on, or we can organise to host it ourselves,  
both options are acceptable. For the past 2 years there has been a  
zookeepr hackfest which is funded by the wining lca bid, so we need to  
make sure that we budget for that. Usually we fly everyone involved to  
a common location (usually the city with the most attendees living in  
it, to minimise costs), and sit down for 3-4 days (long weekend ideal)  
working on all the issues that need to be resolved for the next  
conference. My proposed list of attendees for our hackfest would be  
John Ferlito (2007, Sydney), Jiri Baum (2008, Melbourne), Joshua  
Hesketh (2009, Hobart), Francois Marier (2010, Wellington), Myself,  
Stephen Thomas, Daniel Devine and anyone else from the bid team that  
felt they could contribute. Based on that list Brisbane would probably  
be the best city, but we'd need to investigate flight costs,  
accommodation costs etc. The Hackfest has been extremely useful in the  
past, and hopefully it will be equally useful to us.

In addition to the conference organisations components of zookeepr, we  
will need to have several static pages (which zookeepr supports  
through its db_content module), and a delegates wiki. My feeling is  
that we should simply aim to make the whole website (other than the  
cfp, registration, and other zookeepr functionality) for the  
conference a wiki, and therefore use the wiki as our CMS for any  
static pages we require. We can then apply permissions to the  
important pages to protect them from editing by anyone other than the  
organisers, while still allowing the delegates to modify any other  
page on the wiki. Since HUMBUG already has experience with MoinMoin  
and Stephen and myself were mostly responsible for setting it up, it  
would be good to use it again for this. Zookeepr was also integrated  
with MoinMoin for LCA2007, but its pretty much been torn out since  
then, so we'd need to re-add that functionality.

The bid document for the website should include a plan for our  
development work on zookeepr with a list of features that we require  
for our bid, their current implementation status in zookeepr, and our  
plan for adding/improving the features that we need at various stages  
of the conference (e.g. CFP, Proposal review, Registration and first  
day of the conference).


These are my initial thoughts, I'd upload them to the wiki if my dodgy  
3G Internet would work long enough for me to do so, but its not being  
so kind at the moment. If anyone has any thoughts to add to this,  
please reply and let us know.

Thanks
James
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