FOSSology

On the 10th of July I had the last exam on the RHCDS track, it was the EX401; I passed this exam with 100 out of 100 in both sections. The exam was great.

I was trying to get the EX401 as soon as possible; because this would entitle me to be the first Egyptian who get the RHCDS. Yes I did it and I am the first one.

Since Redhat doesn't have RHCA exams/courses available in the middle east; I had to travel overseas for those three courses and exams.

I have travelled from Egypt for the training courses to Redhat UK Fanbrough, Redhat office in Westford, Boston and Denver.

For the exams I have travelled to Santa Clara, California, Denver and New York. It was amazing and costly experience but it really worth all these efforts.

On 22 December 2008, we had other successful fedora event at Misr University for Science and Technology, It was one of the last fedora events in 2008, it was just after the reporting Fedora Day at Menoufiya University, which was mentioned here.

We first (Omar and I) visited the information technology faculty dean, he welcomed us. It was nice meeting him, the schedule went as we had on Helwan event.

From L to R (Me, Collage staff, Collage Dean, Dr.Mona the event host,Omar ,Hazem the organizer.)

Then we headed to the assigned lecture room, the number of attendees was great if compared with the information technology students. Attendees were around 100 and the faculty have only 300 students.

Me giving the FOSS and fedora introduction session.

When Hamada posted on the ambassadors mailing that he is going to organize local event; I have contacted him with Omar.

We have agreed that I will give the Fedora introduction presentation;the modified one plus FOSS brief.

So it would align attendees have no general knowledge of FOSS; if the FOSS term was familiar, it would fit and mapped to what fedora is all about.

Also we have organized desktop demonstration.

It was really cool event; all event organization was conducted online, MUFIX Community done great job in organizing this event, Mufix community lead by Hamada.

The event held 16-Dec-2008, we have started first with checking the registration booth.

On registration process attendees answered several questions such as (do you know what is FOSS? did you used fedora linux before? do you have any GNU/Linux installed?), almost everyone checked on hearing about foss and fedora.

booth was crowded

I am going tomorrow to El- Menoufiya to represent Fedora 10 as fedora release party.

We will be moving (Omar, Mostafa and I) from Cairo at 8:10 to reach there before 10:30 AM. The trip is about 90 Km from Cairo.

Since I know personally all ambassadors in Egypt; it will be cool to meet Hamada tomorrow and watch the fedora community growing in Egypt.

We'll present Fedora introduction and desktop features demonstration. there will be Live usb creation station.

I have returned back home after successful trip to USA, I went there to take Red Hat Enterprise Directory Services and Authentication Exam and the training of Red Hat Enterprise Storage Management.

I had the directory service exam on Santa Clara California, the trip was extremely long it took like 20 hour; Cairo -> France -> Atlanta -> San Jose, I took the exam 1 day after arrival.

Then I went to Denver to have the cluster and storage course and the exam, it was remarkable experience for me. I have had really great chance to meet George Hacker; the instructor(this is his real name, he showed me the ID); he's awesome guy. I have got the exam right after finishing the course.

I have got the result of the Cluster and storage after really short period. the directory service exam was after the Cluster and storage exam result. anyway it was really nice to get the result with PASS for both exams.

it's time to return back home, the route to return was cool Denver -> Atlanta -> New York -> Cairo; just 18 hour.

Hopefully the RHCA training tracks will be delivered in Egypt soon, so I can get the rest of the RHCA stuff.

We'll migrate our directory service from openldap to fedora/redhat directory service, the ldap server is considered almost the back-end for everything on our hosted IT services.

we are running openldap-2.0.27 which have many deprecated service. it's six year old . we have almost 500,000 entry.

We have benchmarked our staging setup with ixia, it gave very positive results, we were able to authenticate (bind) 1800,000 and having 22000 write/modify operation in just 2 minutes with no impact on the service. Actually the setup isn't just one server they are five servers; with two hardware load balancers, still it's awesome software to rely on.

The migration will be tomorrow, I feel confident about the software that we are going to use. it's very exciting.