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.
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