LINUX Unplugged - 301: Peak Red Hat

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

We scale the Red Hat Summit and come back with a few stories to share. Plus some big community news, finding threats on the command line, and our reaction to Microsoft shipping the Linux kernel in Windows. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Ell Marquez, and Neal Gompa.

Open source knows no bounds, Mr. Westpain. A team of astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have successfully developed software that can simulate the complex vibrations that stars produce. Listen to that. It's not remarkable. In a way, it is, though. Kind of lovely.

It's really impressive. I don't really think I'd ever would have seen the day In a way, it is, though. Kind of lovely. It's really impressive. I don't really think, I don't think I ever would have seen the day when open source software was simulating the sounds of stars. How the heck did they pull this off? Actually, it's pretty neat. So as the star is undergoing fusion and outputting a bunch of energy, there's just fluctuations that happen. And those can tell scientists a lot about the structure and undergoing dynamic processes within the star. You can measure that stuff with telescopes.

And then, so really this is two different pieces of software combined together. Because on one set you have the simulation software, which is used to build models that can be checked against measurements from, like, our sun, for instance. Right, right. And then the other side is the software that takes those oscillations in the star, and that can be in brightness or temperature or in, in like the radius of the star itself, and then converts those to the sound waves we hear. Now, as you might have guessed, it does have to pitch shift it up by like a thousand or a million times or so. Yeah, because these starquakes, as they're

called, happen a little infrequently. So you have to kind of speed it up a bit to really enjoy it. And if Starquake isn't good enough, this whole field is astro-seismology. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 301 for May 14th, 2019. Oh, hi there, and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. We've made it over the 300 hump.

Ooh, I'm proud of us. Lucky 301. I feel like it's a lucky episode. This is one of those special episodes where we can actually claim thousands of miles and dollars went into its making. We did our research. Yeah, we went to Red Hat Summit last week in Boston. And I don't know what I went in expecting, but I walked away with some stories, some impressions,

and a completely different perspective on Red Hat and the upcoming IBM merger. I feel like you maybe have had the same impressions, the same kind of takeaway. Oh, yeah, but we're not going to spoil it now. We've got a lot more to talk about in this episode. That's right. We've got community news. Plus, we've got a chat with someone very special later on in the show who's going to help us identify if our Linux box has been compromised. It's really awesome. It's part of the study group we're doing later. But before we get to any of that, we got to bring in that virtual lug. Time appropriate. Greetings, virtual lug, time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, everybody.

Hello. Wow, hello to Cheese. Hello to Neil. Hello to Elle. Hello to Brent. Hello to Alex. Hello to Bruce Cassidy from Elementary OS. And we have, what is that, Dem in there? We also have, I'm going to say Mario. It's not Mario,

but like the first part of it's Mario. So I'm saying Mario. Neil Burner and Turth are all like the first part of it's Mario. So I'm saying Mario. Neo Burner and Turth are all in the virtual lug today. Close enough. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for being generous on that one. You can participate too.

More information at irc.geekshed.net. Once you get in there, pound mumble. irc.geekshed.net. And it's hashtag Jupiter Broadcasting for the chat room. All right. Well, let's get through some community news because we do have so, so, so much to talk about today. Very excited to share some exclusive clips from Red Hat Summit. And, you know, I was really trying to wrap my head around how we were going to even put a trip like that into the show.

I went to Boston. Wes went to Boston and Cheese. And we went and got in as press, we were able to attend the press track. And you know, we could have come on the show today with a bunch of canned interviews from spokespersons and just really railed you with spokesperson interviews. But not only would that sort of be high level information, but it would kind of come across as a sales pitch. And that's not really what we wanted to do. And I thought, you know, Wes, not a lot of people get an opportunity to

do something like this. And as somebody who's done trade events in the past for years and years and years, I went to Red Hat Summit and I really, I just came away with a completely different mindset about a lot of things. And I thought maybe we can encapsulate some of that into the show. Like, what's the experience like? And what kind of insights do you get into Red Hat when you attend an event, when you get really close like this? It was definitely a new view for me, and I had a few assumptions going in

that probably didn't bear out. I was right on a few things, too. But it was just a lot bigger and more complicated than I could have ever dreamed. Yeah, so I'm really excited with our take on it, and so stay tuned for that. Neil was at Red Hat Summit as well, and he's in the Mumble room with us. Hi.

Hey. But a big story out of GitHub today, and I thought maybe Wes could help us break it down. Apparently, GitHub now is offering a package registry that you can publish and consume packages within, like, your own org, or you could publish to the whole world and make it public what is this okay really it's um more efforts in their goal to create create and enable you to create end-to-end devops workflows that include your code ci and deployment solutions especially if you're integrating and leveraging github's apis actions

webhooks and all the permissions-based infrastructure that already exists. So that's a lot of what you just said there. It's pretty thick, but to cut through it, if I'm already pretty deep in the GitHub infrastructure, maybe I use it for some authentication stuff, like this just makes it easier? Yeah, right.

I mean, you already have your packages up there. So if you're going to go build a Ruby package today, maybe you keep your code, it's open source, it's on GitHub, well, you've got to go work with other providers, maybe like RubyGems or you're managing your own private repository that, if you're lucky, integrates with GitHub, but you probably have to have separate authentication

and manage actions, which, as you recall, perhaps GitHub just recently has their own, you know, they call them actions, but sort of CICD-type platform that can perform automated deployments or updates or distribute software. You had to have separate things. Maybe you ran Nexus or one of the other big competing artifact repositories.

GitHub's saying it's just easier. We'll do it for you. We have, you know, first-class CDN support. And during the beta, it's free. We have first-class CDN support, and during the beta, it's free. What is the consumption side like? As a user, how do I add these repositories to my system? Is it

dependent on the language I'm using? What does the consumption side of it look like? Yeah, exactly. So they're not reinventing the wheel. Right now, they have support for Docker, Maven, NPM, Nuget, which is for the.NET platform, and RubyGems. And you notice.NET in there. For me, what was missing was Python support.

So that kind of shows that, you know, there's maybe a little Microsoft influence going on there. Maybe not. Basically, all those clients have different ways that you can say, add this additional repository, or I would like to interact with this repository. And now GitHub is implementing all that stuff in their own backend, which it sounds like they hope, they did use the word hope, I don't know what that means, but they hope to open source this summer. What?

That does sort of trigger me a little bit when you get that. Oh yeah, I totally hope to make, like FaceTime, Apple hopes to make FaceTime open source one day. We're getting there. So, they have some examples set up. In a limited beta, you can go request access if you'd like to give it a try. Yeah. And really, you know, there's a release tab right there

when you go look to find stuff. Now there's just an additional sub tab there that says packages, and it'll show you all the different packages. It uses all the, you know, like the metadata you might have in your readme to populate all the package information for you and if you've already set up like team access to controls who you know who can update and push to your repo those will work with the packaging system as well the team's aspects nice i can see i could definitely see that's maybe the big push here that's probably the main focus right there

yeah well that's very much that is a Microsoft move. Okay. Well, thank you for explaining that to me. I saw that story go by, and I knew you'd be able to break it down for me. Now, I have a question for the class today. Maybe we can solve it, or maybe the audience can send me in some feedback

at linuxunplugged.com slash contact, but my 10-year-old son, Dylan, he's had a Dell XPS Sputnik laptop for three years now, I think. One of the older generations? Yeah. I remember the version of elementary OS he first had was based on Ubuntu 14.04. And he's running whatever the most current version you can run on 32-bit hardware is. But that's where the problem lies.

It's an old XPS that's 32-bit only. And Linux really is moving on. And this is where it's hitting me. Dylan is getting limited on some of the things he wants to do with his computer, and he feels like it's time for an upgrade. And of course, this is incredible. It's like going back in time.

All of his friends are telling him to get Windows 10. Wait, really? Yeah, yeah, because they want to, you know, play it. That Windows peer pressure, man. It's just the games. It's all games. For them, it's all games. It's all about the man. It's just the games. It's all games. For them, it's all games. It's all about the games.

100% about the games. Nothing but the games. And you didn't just tell them about Proton? That wasn't your solution? I was going to go into the whole pitch, but I wasn't sure, like, what to even do because this isn't something I want to spend an incredible amount of money on,

but he's taken really good care of it. It's still, like, three years later, like, nothing wrong with it. And it's clearly learning and using the system. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. And he's maintained it, and he's added to it, and modified it, like three years later, like nothing wrong with it. And it's clearly learning and using the system. And he's maintained it and he's added to it and modified it and he's gotten like accessories hooked up and external monitors and all that kind of stuff. So I like to encourage it.

So I thought, you know, I should get him another long lasting laptop that would run Linux really well. And I really, really like my T480 with the one major exception is it doesn't have dedicated graphics and a big part of what he wants to do is play video games. So Intel integrated isn't going to cut it. And I can't

do like any GPU for him because it's like that's going to be fidgety, complicated. And he wants to take it to his friend's house to play games and you know, it's like it's number one job so it'd be nice to have it internal. Well, there may be a solution starting at the end of May. Lenovo is adding the AMD Ryzen Pro powered line to its ThinkPad lineup.

The new T495 and T495S and also the X395 laptops are all powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 Pro processors with integrated Vega graphics. So that's, I have questions about that with the audience, but that seems like a promising hardware setup. Yeah, both of the T models are 14-inch laptops and the X395 is 13 inches. And really, they look almost identical to the Intel-based laptops because they are. Lenovo just took the same frames and stuck AMD APUs inside. Yeah, really, that's just the biggest differences. According to Lenovo, the second-gen AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processors, combined with the integrated Vega graphics, should provide an 18% improvement in performance over previous T4 models. If you go with the base T495, you're looking at something like $939.

Anything else starts at around $1,089. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that puts it in the running. I'm also going to look at the System76 lineup. I really don't want to spend probably more than $1,100. That's sort of like my max, I think, for this kind of thing. For the kid laptop. It's a high risk, you know.

I think that does seem like a pretty decent idea. They are rugged. Yeah, yeah. And I would imagine those would run Linux great. I was going to recommend the Pinebook Pro, but it might not be so well for games. Yeah, that has crossed my mind a lot, or something equivalent, but it really does come down to he wants to run games

that run on x86. And if it doesn't solve that problem then he's going to continue to think about windows every night because every now and then he brings it up so could my computer run windows dad oh you poor man i'm like well dylan not really no oh no so i gotta make sure that uh i measured twice and cut once on this next move here. It's important. It's important. And maybe for ultimate gaming performance, we'll load them up with Clear Linux this time. Now, I'm very excited to report that I think another one of my predictions is chiming right along. Along with dark mode for the web and a few others,

we now have some Clear Linux hype as well as a clear push for Clear Linux on the desktop. And not only is it well-known now for its performance on Intel systems, but they've made some big user desktop-friendly changes recently. Yeah, this week actually just saw some further improvements to their relatively new graphical installer. They actually only added this last year. Before then, it was just a text installer,

which Michael Larable definitely prefers. I think I might as well, because honestly, their text installer is pretty solid. But now they also have a graphical installer that, I mean, it's really, it looks pretty much up to par with, you know, Anaconda or Ubiquiti. Yeah. And I think that was the straw that broke Jason's back over at, you know, Jason Evangelo from Forbes and also from Choose Linux. He gave it a go now that they have the new graphical installer and he wrote up his impressions over at Forbes. And I bet we'll be hearing more from him about it in some podcasts soon too. But I'll link to that in the show notes if you want to read his impressions. And he talks about how it

ships with Flatpak support out of the box and they have 4,000 applications in bundles. So there is quite a bit of software, more than you might expect. It doesn't run so good in a VM, I've discovered. I've discovered that. Another interesting Clear Linux news item is if you're in the Portland, Oregon area at the Intel Hawthorne campus, I think it's called, the Hawthorne Farm, in the HF3 auditorium, they will have their very first Clear Linux meetup. I'm always hanging around there. I am actually really, really tempted to go.

I'm kind of looking into it. It's next week. It's May 22, 2019 at 3 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. There's going to be refreshments. Looks like there'll actually be a dinner break, too. But there'll be some demos, some architecture overviews, and some hands-on workshops. Does it say who might be there from the project? No, but they talk about a panel being there. So that seems like it's a pretty good chance

for some people to know what they're talking about. And since it's an Intel project at an Intel campus, I'm really kind of, I mean, Portland's like a four-hour drive from here. I'm kind of thinking about it. It just would take up, you know, a huge chunk of the day. It's a whole day there, yeah. But that seems really neat.

So I'll link to that in the show notes, too, if you're in the area and you might be able to go. It's interesting how they kind of started with technical foundations. I mean, you can see how Intel would have their own Linux just to, you know, they work with computers. Okay, sure. And now they're kind of bootstrapping a desktop community around it. Mm-hmm.

Interesting to watch. Yeah. Yeah, and totally called it. Sorry, I just got to get my, you know. Fair enough. Interesting to watch. Yeah. Yeah, and totally called it. Sorry. I just got to get my, you know. Fair enough. And then I just, now I'm sort of following the uLauncher project because God bless it if it doesn't make XFCE just perfect. You add uLauncher on top of XFCE.

You mean it fixes the flaws in your inferior desktop, Chris? Wow. Wow. No, I'm just kidding. Wow, dude. You're coming at me over here. You're coming at me with this. That's totally unfair, man.

Shots fired, guys. It does sort of lack in the launcher department, though. I mean, the toolbar icons are all good and stuff, but I don't want to take my hands off the keyboard. It's 2019. That's right. I want to party like it's 1980. So I install uLauncher, and then I just have a control space, and I type in the first three letters of any application, enter, and they launch. And they're making a move. Obviously, they have to move from Python 2 to Python 3, but they're also extending their API. They're temporarily dropping support for OpenSUSE and CentOS, and they're seeking for contributors. If you need a great application launcher for your desktop,

give YouGo a go. Give YouLauncher a go. Try YouGo. It's YouLauncher for humans. YouGo. All right, so I just thought we could ask the room, take the temperature of a phrase that's gotten kicked around a lot over the years. In fact, I don't think any of us have ever declared it

in the 13-plus years of broadcasting on this network. But is 2019 the year of the Linux desktop? Isn't every year? No, no. Let's just do a little math here for a second. Can there only be one year? What are the rules? Here's the math of it.

Number one, all Chromebooks in 2019 shipping will support running Linux applications and launch Linux environments. But bigger than that, obviously that's a huge deal. Let's not just dismiss it, but bigger than that, the Windows subsystem for Linux version 2 will be shipping a Linux kernel, a 4.19 LTS Linux kernel. Windows 10 will have an embedded Linux system in it. If just, let's say, a small percentage of the nearly billion users they plan to have with Windows 10 fires up the Windows subsystem for Linux, we may, over the course of the rest of 2019, may, over the course of the rest of 2019, end up with more users than we've ever had on the desktop.

It'll just be a Windows desktop, but they'll be using a Linux kernel in a Linux user land. I'm very, very conflicted about this because the Chrome OS one is easier to stay. It's like, okay, because of Wayland, they're able to pull this off reasonably well. But for Windows, it's like, well, yeah, they're running a Linux kernel, but they're gimping it so that running desktop applications is not going to be easy or usable. No, you just get better desktop applications. Right. And so like it's my feeling about this is it actually incentivize people to pull away from Linux. Sure. Because you can run your you can run your Linux games. You can run Adobe Photoshop, you can have Adobe Premiere, and you can run your Linux command line stuff. Right, and virtually all Linux games compiled to natively

on Windows. So if you're already on Windows, why would you run the Linux version? And it's a pain in the butt to actually make the Linux version of a game actually run in WSL as someone who has actually tried. It is annoying and difficult. So I'm very conflicted because on one hand, it shows that Microsoft recognizes there's no substitutes or imitations for a Linux kernel. But on the other hand, it feels like a defeat wrapped in a victory because it will make it easier for people to just completely ignore Linux and run Windows full time for everything. On the other hand, there are environments where you

literally don't get a choice. Yes. And this opens that door. I mean, I used to work in an environment where I was forced to run Windows for work. And if I had had this as an option, I would have totally used it then. Yeah. So I think that's just it. So I want to make it clear, I'm playing devil's advocate. I don't necessarily think the applications are better and I think the fundamental issue is it's still Windows.

It's still Windows, but if you are forced to use it, if you are in a constrained environment, this is a great opportunity and it absolutely is an admission from Microsoft that developers want true blue Linux. It's good today. It gets more people using Linux.

It gets more people in the Linux user land. It actually, in a funny way, also makes it easier to transition from Windows to full desktop Linux, if you think about it. I think we should acknowledge, too, that many of the people who stay on desktop Linux are there because they want to for philosophical reasons or because they enjoy it, but acknowledge that there are tradeoffs they make. So we, by and large, I think, collect people that know that and like the Linux desktop. So if they can discover it through Windows, that might mean, you know, a new influx of Linux users that would have never been brought over to our platform. I'm wondering, Alex, if you think this is going to be a good thing and, like, see where I'm going, where people will try it out, they can get familiar with the Linux user land and then move over,

or if you think it's more like devil's advocate Chris that says people are going to stick with Windows now and just use the utility command line. Do you think there's a clear winner or loser here? Is it that simple? I still flirt with Windows. I have a VM that runs with PCI pass-through for a graphics card. It took me the longest time to actually switch and make it stick on the Linux desktop. I think I agree with the previous caller that it's going to make it harder for some people to actually ditch Windows. It's going to be too comfy for a lot of people. And then, you know, putty is fine as it was. And then, yeah, I think

it largely the year of the desktop Linux desktop is coming. Is it this year? It's every year, isn't it? It is. I know. I just, it's so funny. It's just such a cliche thing to throw out there that this whole conversation feels like it's getting cliche, to be honest with you. And I think it's hard to really gauge long-term where this is going. To the point I was trying to like poke you with there. It's like, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? To clear it up, it's a good thing today. It may be a bad thing tomorrow. It depends on how long Microsoft can continue to convert their brick and mortar on-premises clients to Azure clients. As long as that low-hanging fruit exists, then this is great. This is great because it makes Microsoft more money.

Getting people into their software as a service, aka Azure, is fantastic. So everybody wins. Once all of that low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and now they need to sort of tighten down the ratchets a little bit, they need to leverage the ecosystem a little bit, they need to maybe create a little more lock-in to get a little more revenue, then things could change. But that could be five, 10 years down the road. So you just have to just accept it for what it is today. It does mean more people using open source.

And there's so many areas of improvement. Cassie, I'd love to get your take on areas of improvement or just this overall story. And then I think we'll move on. Yeah, I think it's kind of twofold. It's one, it's Microsoft trying to just stop bleeding users to Linux, but also Mac OS with that, you know, Unix kernel developer tools tend to be aimed to Mac OS more than Windows. So I don't know that it's really going to shift, you know, people who would be using Linux anyway. It's really just people who, who might be leaving my, uh, leaving windows to Mac OS or Linux. Yeah. But then also it, I mean, it just drives home why Linux based desktops should focus on user experience and their own ecosystems instead of just happening to run a Linux kernel. Um, you know, that Linux

kernel is awesome and amazing and has enabled so many incredible things, but it's not the end-all be-all experience of every desktop. It's a good point. It's a good point, Cassidy. It's like you have thought about that before. That's the impression I'm getting there. Yeah. I agree with Joe from LAN, where it's like, where is Apple's developer story? Microsoft's is very, very clear for us all to see now. Well, I think you have to keep in mind that Microsoft's quote-unquote story

is about getting you to use Azure. All roads lead to Azure, that's right. Right, yeah, as I always say. And so that's where this plays a big role in that. There's Windows Subsystem for Linux. Apple, you know, they couldn't give two shits. They're not trying to sell a hosted service for you to develop on. It's not a platform.

They want you to write apps for their phones. And so they don't need a big, strong Linux play. They don't need that. Whereas Microsoft does need that to be part of their quote-unquote developer story, as we like to say now. Alright, hold it there. Hold it there, because we have to continue on. And I have to cover a couple of things

that we just need to clear out before we get to the Red Hat Summit stuff. Because once we get to the Red Hat Summit stuff, we're going full force. So a little housekeeping first before we continue. First and foremost, we've sort of sneaky launched a new show just like out of nowhere. Like it was just something we started doing and then we're like, okay, we should probably publish this. Whoops. It's the Friday stream, we should probably publish this. It's the Friday stream, fridaystream.com. We just released Fluffle of Fools.

You can meet Drew and... Learn just what a fluffle might be. Yeah. And also, the best 39 seconds from the Red Hat Summit. Not in this show, no. Yeah, we decided to save it for the Friday stream. It's worth it.

Plus, we were also caught up in the middle of an Uber Lyft protest. So we busted out the microphone and got a little audio of that for the Friday stream. But the Friday stream is really just a chance for you to come meet the crew. It's sort of just a chat show. We have a larger crew now that works full time on these shows. So we have a little more time to dedicate to stuff like this. And we wanted to have a moment to connect with our community. So we are doing it live. You know, we don't do as many live shows anymore. So we'll have a chat room going and we'll bring on different members of the crew each week and tell stories and give each other a hard time and chat with the community and talk about things that are going on in the community as well. So it's really a show about nothing. So FridayStream.com. Way to sell it, Chris.

A show about nothing. Yay, that's a classic, isn't it? We all like Seinfeld, right? So check it out, FridayStream.com and Slash3 is the latest one. Now, there's an event coming up that we haven't talked a lot about because so much is going on,

but we're very excited about Texas Linux Fest. 2019's Texas Linux Fest is just around the corner, May 31st and June 1st. And rumor has it, Elle is involved to some degree. Remind the audience, Elle. Of course, not me. Of course, I remember Elle. But you're, like, somewhat involved at Texas Linux Fest this year. Yeah, this is my third year to be involved,

and I'm going to be helping coordinate all the volunteers this year, making sure that things run smoothly. Look at you. You are humble about it, but she's like, you know, the glue holding the whole thing together. And so it's important to us and Elle that everybody goes. Maybe you weren't considering going to Texas this year. Well, here's an opportunity. Texas Linux Fest. We'll have a link in the show note. Registration is now open. What can we say about it, Ali? Where are things at right now? What stage in the event planning is it at? Give us a little behind-the-scenes information. Behind the scenes, I think things are kind of closing up on getting all of our speakers

organized. I'm so excited because there's so many talks that I want to attend. So I can only imagine that other people are going to be really excited to see the lineup. And it's available on the website now. The actual conference center has been organized and we know we're going to put everything. But we are short on volunteers. If anyone can donate a little bit of time, I'd be really thankful. Oh, OK. I'm going to be down there.

Cheese is going to be there. Elle's going to be there. And, of course, Alex is going to be there. So come say hi to your friends from Linux Unplugged at Texas Linux Fest this year in just a little bit. Links to that stuff in the show notes, of course. I should also mention, come watch us live. Hang out with us. Join the Mumble Room, all that stuff.

You can get it converted in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. JBLive.tv for that S. Okay, so Red Hat Summit came and went. We've wanted to go for years. And to Red Hat's credit, they've invited and accepted, and it's just never freaking worked out. It's a really, really expensive thing to pull off. So it's in Boston, and Boston's not a cheap place to live. The hotel

rooms per night, per person, were like $3.80 a night. So we immediately decided that's way too much. Let's get an Airbnb. So we got a crew Airbnb, which was a ton of fun. We got it in South Boston, just 2.6 miles from the convention center. So it was just a cheap Uber ride away or Lyft ride, assuming they were working that day. And it was a pretty remarkable week. We got in really late. We got in around 11 p.m. All of us arrived at the airport, which I'm just going to be frank here. The Boston airport is the worst airport I've ever been to.

Yeah, I mean, we got in at like 11 and then spent an hour trying to find cheese. Cheese was just lost. Turns out, too, like you can't go through certain areas of the airport without re-going through security. So when we were leaving, we got trapped in the airport straight up for four hours because Hedia, the problem child that she is, just got her name changed. Well, not just, but we were married not too long ago. You know, she changed her name to your name. You should come on, acknowledge that. Honestly, you know what's great too is her ID showed up the day we got back with her new name on it.

No. But TSA doesn't like it when you have one name on your boarding pass and a different name on your ID. They make you do like the extensive, extensive, we're going to touch all your parts security check. Oh, she got a pat down. Yeah, she sure did so once we got through all of that we woke up really early Tuesday morning as you can tell and we got right inside the Red Hat Expo and started getting a feel for things and I tuned in on something we're inside the Red Hat Summit Expo Hall there is a lot of people and there's also a lot of Red Hats I already have Red

Hat Envy god I'm the worst. I feel like the people walking around with the red hats are like the more dedicated. Oh, they're the cool kids of the event, obviously. Yeah. Definitely. I have that same feeling. I feel like we're underdressed without a red hat. Turns out we were actually dead on.

Later on, I tried to get myself a red hat. I went to their swag store, which was reasonably priced, and I asked get myself a red hat. You know, I went to like their swag store, which was reasonably priced. And I asked them about the red hats. I'm like, oh, no, no, no. We don't sell those hats. In fact, the hats are so coveted that Monday night, a gang of thugs came in and stole a bunch of fedora hats. You have to earn these hats, apparently. Or you have to be a vendor that spends so much money with red hat they give you a

hat like a third option which we may have researched um they're about 23 online yeah yeah could i clarify something you get a woolen red hat fedora as part of new hire orientation um i was lucky enough to go through two of those last year. So I had one in Europe and one in the US. So I actually have two hats. So ha ha. Oh, you bastard. Oh, oh, that's great. Yeah. No, it was funny because it wasn't just the hats. There's other things like there's badges with flair. There's red shoes, there's red jackets. There's other things that sort of signal different status in the Red Hat community. Like I started picking up on that stuff pretty quickly. And it was fascinating.

But it didn't feel like aggressive or bad. No, you can just tell there's a lot of pride about people being there. Yeah, people that are prideful, like seasoned pros that have been there since the late 90s. And, you know, they just kind of went all out. It was kind of fun to see. It was pretty great. And, of course, we always had Mr. Wes Pay. It was kind of fun to see. It was pretty great. And, of course, we always had Mr. Wes Payne, as I called him, the badge watcher. Wes Payne, badge watcher.

So he's our dedicated badge observer, checking out the company names, the styles. What are you seeing, Wes? So far, a lot of big industry. We've got Lockheed Martin and a lot of academics. I've seen probably six or seven university badges represented already. So clearly big deployments of REL out there. Oh, yeah. All right. Bacon's got his new lens. Time to go inside the expo hall. Bacon's got his new lens.

Now, let's fast forward to the keynote. This was great. So instead of being in the morning, God bless him, they did it in the afternoon after everybody was kind of done doing their thing so you didn't have to get up super early they transformed the second half of the expo hall into a magic show they turned off the lights they pumped it full of steam of fog like like from a you know fog machines from like like a Hollywood set. They bought tons of them because this is a ginormous expo hall. Huge space. You could fit probably a 747 in this expo hall. And then they set up

is it fair to call them lasers? Or light beams? Very strong lights in any case. Creating a triangular entrance tunnel into this glowing red room that had a multi-million dollar stage huge screen huge screens uh with their own light effects and steam effects where jim whitehurst was up on stage giving like the jim talk show where he had a disappearing set of chairs and

tables that would be absorbed in the background of this multi-million dollar set and then would slide back out right as he needed them. It was very cool. The impression was like, wow, they spent some money on this. Polished, polished, polished. Yeah. But you mentioned Lockheed Martin there in that last clip, and that was one of the more interesting guests. Red Hat really had a message here. We are big. We've got ExxonMobil. We've got BP. And we've got Lockheed Martin. And because we're working with secure U.S. government systems, timelines are even longer.

Our ability to continue to stay ahead of the threat is increasingly becoming an exercise in insanity. So over six years ago, we attempted to implement agile methods into this environment. This guy is really intense. I mean, he's military grade, Chris. He really is. Wow. They had a bunch of different speakers up there, like large financial institutions as well, like DBS Bank. Please welcome DBS Bank Group Chief Information Officer and Head of Group Technology and Operations, David Gledhill. DBS Bank.

And then after each major presenter would come out on stage, Jim Whitehurst would come back out and make sure to really touch on a couple of key points. They wouldn't necessarily talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In fact, I don't think it was ever mentioned, really. But they would talk about culture and open source. I think that is such an important lesson for everyone here. Technology is hard, but culture is really the critical aspect. David, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story and the success that you've had. It's great to have you. Thank you so much.

These massive corporations would come up on stage and talk about how Red Hat worked with them to change their culture, change their culture. Literally every presenter from Volkswagen to ExxonMobil to Deutsche Bank to Delta said that. And you picked up on, there's like a, there's a undertone there. There's a bigger message that Red Hat's trying to convey. Yeah, I mean, really, by culture, a lot of what they mean is, you know, how do you do your

business? Some of these companies are large, and they are not IT organizations, right? They're making planes, or they're running a bank, and IT is critical to their business, but they're not a tech company. Red Hat is, and is basically saying, we can drag you into the future. We've got hybrid cloud offerings. We can support you in the cloud. We can support you on-prem. We can help you make that journey wherever you need to get. And we'll be your partner,

all powered by open source. We can help you speak open source. We can help you speak community. We can teach you how to do continuous integration and deployment. We can teach you how to do much faster-paced development. We can teach you how to do much faster paced development. We can bring you into the agile future. That's what some of the people

said up on stage. There's a big message there. The entire night though, there was like moments that were hilarious, which we saved for the Friday stream. There were moments that were awkward, like when, I mean, legitimately when Jenny from IBM was up on stage. Yeah, just a bit. The moment that got the absolute most applause when she was up on stage was when she said Red Hat would remain independent. That got the absolute most applause. In fact, what really I think most people were excited to see, strangely enough, but was clearly measurable by the crowd's reaction, was Satya Nadella from Microsoft. Absolutely. I mean, you and I too, right? That's who we were there to see. really measurable by the crowd's reaction, was Satya Nadella from Microsoft.

I mean, you and I too, right? That's who we were there to see. Well, it was a weird thing. It was a weird thing. So the moment we had all waited for all night. It's impossible without open source. And so I'd like to welcome on stage a partner who's been embracing open source in a big way recently. It's somebody you probably wouldn't expect to see on stage at a Red Hat Summit. Huge reaction. out from behind a hidden door, giving themselves a nice handshake. And Satche is sitting down now at the talk show seats.

I would not have expected to see that. They're pointing up to the Microsoft and Red Hat logo that's huge and glowing just behind them. And within a couple of moments, it becomes clear Satche is not just there to represent, like, Red Hat and how far they've come in the collaboration between the companies, but they're also there to announce a new product on Azure. We do have a more significant announcement we're making tonight. I work together with Microsoft Azure and Red Hat OpenShift. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

No, first of all, it's fantastic to be here with all of you at the Red Hat Summit. And as you said, we've been working for multiple years now. And today, in fact, is the general availability of the Azure OpenShift service. So it's fantastic to see that out. All right. Yeah. OpenShift 4 was a big deal at Red Hat Summit as well, which, Alex, that's your area, isn't it? Yep, it is. The Azure story with OpenShift is a really interesting one. I don't know if you

want to get into it or not, but... Can you give me like the elevator version of it? I'd be curious. Well, if you look at Amazon and ECS, Google with Google Kubernetes engine, Red Hat is in a really unique position of being able to offer a managed Kubernetes platform, if you like, on premise, but also with Azure now in a structured way. So it's a very enterprise-y proposition and not really interesting for people interested in Linux desktops, perhaps. But in terms terms of the enterprise story it's a really powerful one because now people can run red hat in their data centers but also in azure to get the power of microsoft's cloud etc so there's a lot of synergies corporate synergies there yeah yeah and they love those there's a lot was interesting, too, to see the amount of partnership, too, right?

Like, Microsoft gave them a lot of access so that they could actually set up and co-support this new partnership. That was a big thing, right? They wanted to push this phrase that, you know, we're not working with Red Hat, we are partnering with Red Hat. And I don't know what the difference is, but that's what they were telling us. That sounds good. So that was day one in a nutshell. There's a lot going on. This is a very, very well run event from the visual assets on the displays,

on the ground, to the logos. The new logo was everywhere. You never saw the old logo. They must have spent millions on new swag. I keep dropping the term millions, but I mean it. I have been to some events and these things cost money. I have an idea of what these swag items cost and all of that. Millions is not an exaggeration. And they have the new logo everywhere rolled out, top level execution on the event. But an area that people attending might not normally get some insight into that I'd like to share with the audience is how they work with the press. And I had an opportunity to have a conversation with a few individuals to get insights on their opinions on this too. And it's an interesting model because it's very information dense. They keep the press very, very busy. They

dedicate rooms for the press to go into to work. They get connectivity, they give you some snacks and some beverages, and then they dedicate like Q&A session rooms where they distill like the big, fancy, flashy announcements down into more information-dense, shorter sessions with the press. And there's maybe 80 press there in the room. They have several presenters. They'll usually have a high-level business person, like the project manager, and then somebody on the team who's intimately familiar with how the software actually functions. And each one of them gets about 10 minutes to speak, and then the press can ask questions. And it's very systematic. They all have slides. It's very well done.

They provide power and chairs and all of that for the press, so that way you can actually take notes. And they really work to kind of efficiently convey information. They follow up very quickly with emails afterwards, including slides and information like that, and make people very available. So it's extremely well run. And it's, of course, in their best interest because that gets the information out. I want to give you a little taste of that. They kept us really busy on day two. Well, the first press conference of the day just wrapped up. The one note that they kept hitting a couple of times besides the announcement of OpenShift 4, which a big thing about that was Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, oh, by the way, serverless. But the thing that

they kept touching on aside from that is at the core of all of this is Linux. We didn't hear that yesterday. Today it was all of this innovation is made possible because it's riding on top of Linux. And as the industry is changing like crazy, Linux is the foundation that remains the same. So if you build for Linux, you're going to build for the future. That was a good message to hear from them because they really, otherwise it's all been about open source and not really talking about Linux. What jumped out at you, Mr. Payne? There really has been an emphasis on platforms and building platforms. And I think that's where Linux comes in, because yesterday was focused on business outcomes.

But underlying all of that, you have to have stable technology. And there is obviously frustration in the industry of, well, I built it for this release, and does it still work? So we also saw a lot of emphasis on the RHEL model as a relationship, a subscription that is a relationship. You're not pressured to upgrade. You get support, so you have a stable base that you can rely on. And I think that's the theme with the hybrid cloud offerings, too,

because there's sort of this tacit acknowledgement at the summit that everyone's using open source. Your developers are using it. It's just going to find your way into your products no matter what. But it can be difficult to use because it doesn't always come with a manual. It doesn't always come with an operator's guide. That's what Red Hat's selling. Yeah, great point.

And they talked about some of their features like insights, which are essentially metrics collections to help you do some predictive analysis. And they're backporting that to, I think they said as far as RHEL 6.7, which is still supported. So current supportive versions of RHEL will get one of these new analytics features that they're talking about.

Mr. Bacon, I know a couple of things jumped out at you, like the numbers they were tossing around around the world economy that passes through Red Hat servers. Yeah, they said 5% of the world's GDP passes through RHEL servers, which to me, when Stephanie uttered that statement, literally made the hairs on my arms stand up. That's a huge number. And I think that it shows that Red Hat really is a big player in the world economy and the enterprise of the world. Yeah, there's no escaping that conclusion

from this press conference. And I had a lot of good stuff, and I love seeing the love for Linux up there on the slide a few times. Saw that up there a few times. I love seeing that. Good press conference. Lots of good information.

You know what else we saw up on the slide that surprised me was VS Code mentioned up there a couple of times. It's everywhere. Yeah, VS Code up on a Red Hat slide. Okay, so I see Carl has joined the mumble room just at the perfect time. Hey, Carl, welcome to the show. How's it going, guys?

Hey, good. So stand by one second here because I'm just about to get to the expo hall. Holy crap, what an expo hall. Holy crap. I mean, I don't really know what else to do other than just play this clip of my raw impressions. The press briefings are done. Lunch has been had. And now the moment I have been waiting for since we got here and saw them unboxing everything.

We are entering the expo hall of all expo halls. One of the most impressive floors I have ever seen in my 10 plus years of covering events. I can't wait to go around and see the floor from the high tech lights to the Azure cloud booth, the IBM million dollar booth. Intel's here, Dell's here. And there's a puppy area. I don't know about that. I'm going to figure out what that is, too. There's a lot to catch.

Now, there was one just indescribable booth, but I'll give it my best. And Wes, feel free to chime in or cheese if there's anything you can add to help describe this. But as you're coming down a very high escalator that's like a story or two up, really, it's a very tall escalator. Off to the right are these pods of what look like fan-made Star Trek warp cores with pulsing lights. They're long, tall structures with things that look like plasma conduits running into them and cages around them to make them look like chambers. And then if you look closely, and we have some pictures up on our website, which we'll have linked in the show notes. If you look closely, you'll see phone handles. And these phone handles, when you pick them up, have something very special in them. It was a very, very interesting and intimate experience.

And it was the first thing we had to make a beeline to. Innovators on the line, technology saving lives. So this has been something that's been capturing our attention the entire time. Oh, I see. So Wes, you go in here and you learn about different innovators. You go inside the booth, and then I think you put it up. So here's Chief Data Scientist, Vice President of Digital Transformation at BP. If you don't think the climate is changing, you just have to go to somebody else. It's hard to hear, but it's because it's such a loud floor,

but you get essentially a phone call with a CEO at one of these companies or somebody who's designed something who's famous that they worked in conjunction with Red Hat to go out and collect the audio. And I was sitting there just sort of marveled by it, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a lady walking up to me that she had a look of pride because I was saying things like, oh, this is great. This is really an intimate experience. We were clearly super interested in her project. She walks up and I just went right into interview mode.

So I have a sense that you may know a little bit about this. What's your name? Emily. Hi, Emily. I'm Chris. So what is this called and what's the idea behind it? Yeah, so this is Innovators on the Line. We are from an agency in Portland called Second Story. We partnered with the Red Hat content team and tried to come up with an interesting way to highlight the Innovation Award winners by having this intimate experience like you suggested. The idea is that it does feel a little bit exhibit-like. It's really special and kind of elevating all of the speakers and what they're saying.

And then the content was selected based on different themes. So the central theme being innovation and then each of the satellite pods, like this one is the future that we're standing in. It was really impressive. And Emily was great to chat with. They even took apart one of the future that we're standing in. It was really impressive. And Emily was great to chat with. They even took apart one of the booths for us. If you go to linuxunplugged.com and click on the blog, Cheesy wrote up a great article. Yeah, the guy there, Matt, from Second Story, super nice guy, really talented guy. And I got to talking, well, actually it was with Emily,

and I was like, so is that, what kind of microcontrollers inside of there is that a esp32 and 8266 what's and then at that point she signaled from his eyes what's that what's that what are you asking about and i started asking him he's like well do you just want to see inside one and i was like you're gonna take this thing apart on the floor he's like sure man so he just pulled pulled it apart And it was like, at that moment, I realized that we were all just a bunch of nerds in a room, like wherever we aligned in the Linux community, it was like, you know, tech toy and he was showing it off. I was glad to check it out. It was really a great experience. And I appreciate both Matt and Emily from Second Story. And they did a lot of work.

They actually collaborated with red hat to build that. So it got red hats blessing, but yeah, it definitely looked like the, the warp core or something from the enterprise. I think it was 16 foot tall, something like that. So,

and Carl, you worked on the, the floor of the expo hall. What was your impressions of it? Massive scale. Oh yeah. Redhead. They don't half-ass it, man. No kidding. No, the numbers I was originally kicking around in some of our clips are 8,000,

but then the number I've actually heard after the fact is more like 9,000. Yeah, I heard the same. Yeah, yeah. So what area of the Expo Hall were you working? So I wasn't working the Expo Hall. I was doing one of the labs. A lab. that's right. That's right. In fact, before we go there, I think the story we really should tell, although I do want to hear about the, and now I remember,

because you actually had great attendance. Now I think about it. The story I want to tell, though, is those wings. The most incredible wings, I think maybe the top two in my life. I don't know. I'm leaving room for the possibility I've had better wings, but I don't know for sure. Immediately impressive. Best pro tip ever.

Yeah. So, Carl, can you describe the killer feature about these wings? Because you know what it is. There's something a little different about these wings. So, these are the 10 Spice Wings at City Tap House, a short walk away from the conference. I don't really know how to describe them. They're dry rub wings. They're real juicy, though,

but they're not like dripping in sauce. They're just different. The dry rub's the key. The dry rub is the key. So they're so good. They're so good. And they got a little cinnamon as you bring them up to your face. You get a good smell of it.

That was a great tip. So the experience of running a lab, Carl, as a community member, I'm kind of just curious of your impressions of that. Just kind of like a short summary of it. I was blessed. One of my friends, Adam Miller, that works at Red Hat, reached out to me. He was doing a lab about building RPM packages, which is my entire day job. And he got permission to have a few extra co-presenters, got me a ticket to Summit.

And then we, it worked really well. He got to do all the presentation stuff and me and two other people ran around and answered everyone's questions and kept the lab on track. Well done. Well done. I know that can be a lot of work and a lot of energy, but it looks like it was well received. So good job. You know, it should be said too, that there was a Red Hat, the old logo there, and that was on Rob's arm from Linux Academy. Oh, yeah. Whenever we had weeks. Yeah, we bumped into Rob and Gabby from Linux Academy and hung out with them for a bit. And, yeah, Rob's got an old school.

Also, he's got a Pinehead tattoo. So Rob's decked out. I think he's the first and only to have the Pinehead tattoo, actually. Well, you better step up, Cheese. I'm on it. He did mention that y'all's CEO was talking about getting a red pine head tattoo, and then Rob beat him to it. Yeah, that's great, isn't it? Okay. Well, I got more to say about Red Hat Summit.

Just two more clips, because the second day towards the end, as we're walking around this massive scale, high production expo hall, it just kind of starts hitting us. There's several things about this event that are, I mean, not to put it like over the top, but honestly, a once in a lifetime opportunity. There's something that keeps crossing our mind as we're walking around the expo, as we're walking around the whole summit, as we attend the keynote. What we are witnessing right now is Peak Red Hat, Peak Independent Red Hat. They brought all these companies here themselves, not as an arm of IBM, but as a scrappy 1995 Linux company. They started up, they brought Lockheed Martin and VW and BP

and all of the other companies that have been up on stage, right? And they have created an 8,000-attendee event that is one of the best orchestrated, best executed events I've ever been to. And they brought all this here on their own. This is peak Red Hat. So in a real way, it's kind of an historic summit. There will never be another Red Hat summit like this one.

Next year, they'll be IBM- owned. The deal's been approved. So it's sort of kind of amazing that we made it here. Yeah, I think for them to, you know, like you mentioned earlier, to be a scrappy company from 1995, I don't think they could ever picture themselves here in a convention hall this size with nearly 8,000 attendees and industry from all over the world, huge first-class industry. They pulled this all together. Maybe, I don't want to say it's a good send-off to Red Hat because I don't think it's a send-off. This is not the last of Red Hat, but I think this is definitely one of those events that is going to be the last of its kind for Red Hat as we know it.

It's not just that it's the last summit as an independent company where they brought all of these massive organizations and they built this massive ecosystem from the ground up. But it's also a bit historic in the sense that not every summit has a massive RHEL release. We're continuing our walk around the Expo Hall. We're somewhere right now between the customer success zone and the feedback zone. And it really hits us, going back to that point about it being historic, this is also going to be one of the few Red Hat summits

where a new version of RHEL is released. RHEL 8 came out yesterday, and then today, we saw OpenShift 4. They're really pitching both of these as platforms to build on, right? This is the first major RHEL

after everyone has adopted container technology, and you see it in the things they're excited about. Not only the universal base image, but all the container-based tool chains that come just as part of standard RHEL. Yeah, that's another kind of noteworthy thing there you just tossed in there. The universal base image is their base container platform now. It's like a base container. I mean, everything's got the word platform.

But it's a standard container file system that will work on any kind of container host that is RHEL. And if you run that is RHEL. And if you run it on RHEL, on OpenStack or whatever, whatever their combo is, it's fully supported. But you could technically run it on Ubuntu too.

That's key. It's freely redistributable. So you can take this image, you don't have to get a license, you don't have to worry about that, you can ship it and run it wherever you want. If you run it on, you know, whatever operating system you like, that's up to get a license. You don't have to worry about that. You can ship it and run it wherever you want. If you run it on whatever operating system you like, that's up to you to support.

But if you run it on a licensed version of OpenShift or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because they've tested this universal base image against all the Red Hat software, they'll provide you regular support just like RHEL. Yeah, and I confirmed it's not CentOS. It is genuine RHEL that'll be tracking RHEL. Yeah, and I confirmed it's not CentOS. It is genuine RHEL that'll be tracking RHEL packages like Python and whatnot. And

going back to OpenShift just really quick, the other big thing they're doing with OpenShift, besides Kubernetes, all the things, is serverless. Oh, and a little bit of serverless. It does feel like Red Hat Enterprise 8, sort of their big catch-up, making Linux the base platform and then you can build your infrastructure or your cloud

however you want, and you don't get a lot of those. Like, you can go to Red Hat Summit for a few years, and there's no big release. There's no big release of OpenShift and RHEL. Plus, you've got the new rebranding rolling out. Plus, it's the last one before they join IBM. Just the more we talk about it, the more we think about it, historic really feels like an accurate description.

Well, I mean, about the time of the last Red Hat Enterprise Linux released, I don't think Red Hat would have called themselves a hybrid cloud company, but that's what they call themselves now. So it's a new era in many ways for Red Hat, and this is the culmination of a lot of that work. Also, don't forget they're a culture leader, too. Oh, yeah, that's right. You've got to get that in there.

Cloud and culture. That's right. Wow. I mean, those clips right. You got to get that in there. Cloud and culture. That's right. Wow. Uh, wait, I mean, those clips really just kind of, just kind of sum it up. Uh, and it, it really was, it was a remarkable summit to go to. And I don't know if I could say necessarily go if, uh, you weren't in the industry. Cheese, you're probably the most removed from the industry. Um, uh, would you recommend it necessarily for a casual listener of the show? You know, I don't know that I would. If you're just, say, a casual listener, if you're just a hobbyist,

it might not be the conference for you. But if you are an IT professional that uses RHEL, works with RHEL, I think it's important that you go. Yeah. You get a lot more context around stuff, for one thing. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the workshops like what, like what Carl and Rob and, and everyone was doing there. Um, I think those are of great benefit to the attendees. So I think that's a great way to get them up to speed really quickly with the, with the new technology. So,

um, it's a great place if you're going there for that. If not, I would say go somewhere like LinuxFest Northwest or come down to Texas LinuxFest, a little smaller, tighter community, a smaller group of people. You get more opportunity to hang out and chit-chat. And the hallway conversation is always great at those little conferences. So that's where I would say go.

I, for one, am glad you went because you got some great, great photos and it was a ton of fun to have you there. So you got to check that out now. Now I know Neil, it must've been worth your time in every sense of the word to go. Well, yeah, I mean, so I've been going to Red Hat summits for the past five years now. So for me, this feels like this event was a celebration of, of the over 25 years that Red Hat has been going from just a distro integrator to a developer to a leader in free and open source software. And I think this event this year, I think it was a big celebration of that with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat OpenShift Contain four, um, with the community

booths, with all the, all the stuff that they were doing. Um, so like my day job, uh, really doesn't involve too much Red Hat stuff. Um, I go to Red Hat summit for two main reasons. One is I get to geek out with all the people. And like, as, as, as, uh, as you mentioned earlier, like we're all nerds here at the end of it. And like, it's, it's a lot of fun to, to meet all these people. And the other thing is if you really look at it and if you like, if you really take stock of what Red Hat Summit is about, and if you really know about how the event works, if you're a community member of any of Red Hat's over 500 communities that they officially sponsor, you can get a ton of value out of it, even if you are not a Red Hat customer.

Well, I hope you feel better soon. That's the thing, Neil, is I can tell you've got a little bit of the con crud right now. You can hear it in your voice. So I hope you feel better soon. Stick around because we're going to keep going. We could talk more Red Hat Summit. So don't go anywhere, Neil. We'll keep talking about it.

But I want to get a chance to play this interview with Tony Lambert. So after the show today, we're doing a study group with Tony Lambert. It's called Command Line Threat Hunting. If you're a part of our meetup, you already know about this. And it's a great walkthrough on how to just use tools built into Linux to determine if your system has been owned or if it has something on there that might be malicious. And Tony is an interesting guy. And I had a chance to chat with him before the study group, which is coming up later today, which we should, I would imagine by the time this episode, and I had a chance to chat with him before the study group, which is coming up later today, which we should, I would imagine by the time this episode comes out, have a link to go watch it after the fact, because we are going to post this one after the fact.

We have to now. Yeah. So here's an interview with Tony Lambert. He is the host of this study group, him and El Marquez. And check the show notes for a link to the entire talk where he gives way more information than what we touch on in just this chat. So Tony Lambert is joining us right now. He's a detection engineer at Red Canary.

Tony, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Thanks. It's awesome to be here. So we were thinking, since we're going to be talking security in our study group, maybe we could give people like a quick top three things to check on their Linux box if they think their machine has been compromised, maybe has something even persistent. Absolutely.

So the thing to keep in mind when adversaries are trying to compromise Linux machines is that they don't always know what your Linux setup is going to look like. Everybody's setup is a little bit different. Everybody has a different distribution. Maybe your folders are set up differently than somebody else's. They tend to focus on certain things that are consistent across distributions.

You always have certain temporary folders that are consistent across distributions. You have cron jobs, you have scheduled scripts that are consistent across distributions. And it's also possible across distributions nowadays that you're going to have system D services, system D timers that are existing on systems. So the things that I tend to tell people to check most are files that may have been left in temporary locations, cron jobs or scripts that are existing on your system, and systemd services, systemd timers may have been left by malicious packages. All of these things are going to be left in various types of attacks. Sometimes they're drive-by attacks

by adversaries, sometimes they may be orphaned software packages. Do you have any tips for, you know, even just looking at like a system CTL status? There are a lot of services, many of them that I did not install, but are provided by the distro. Do you have any tips for sort of sorting through that mess to identify something that might be malicious?

That is really hard. And the only big advice I can offer is to do it like a lot of enterprises do it. Create a baseline. After you first install your Linux system, take a look at the cron jobs that you have. Take a look at the system D services that you have. What are your init scripts that may exist

if you're using an older distribution or something that doesn't honor system D at the least. And keep a little text file that says, here's what known good was. And then kind of, you know, as you go on, if you think something's weird, go back, look at what known good was and see if anything's changed. Yeah. Coming from the server side and the sysadmin side, I know that there are a lot of baselines that we get used to. You know, a web server acts this way. You know, my SQL server acts this way.

If you're a desktop user, what are some of the red flags that you should be looking for to think, hey, maybe I have been compromised? So for a desktop user, some of the red flags I would tend to look for are more of, you have certain services turned on that shouldn't be. You know, if you're a desktop user, you're probably not using SSH to get back into your machine as much as you know you're getting into a server. If it's something that you interactively log on with, you may not need that. If you have VNC remote desktop type services or SSH, something like a lot of SSH failed logons in a log. Those are the things I would typically look for on the desktop side. in a log. Those are the things I would typically look for on the desktop side.

The cool thing about doing security with Linux is that you do have some proprietary products, and some of these proprietary products are expensive. But the grand fundamentals of doing security in Linux, you can base those around shell utilities and things that are automatically built into your packages that you have installed when you first set up your distribution. built into your packages that you have installed when you first set up your distribution. So if you want to determine if you have malicious cron jobs or malicious scripts executing on your system, you can do that using CAD, LS, grep, all the tools that are built into your Linux distribution. If you want to determine whether or not you're participating in a malicious botnet that is bringing down other sites. You can do this using tools that are actually built into your system already.

Companies know about this now. There are several companies that actually base their threat hunting services around using built-in shell utilities and Linux and combining those with SSH to do hunting at scale across an enterprise. Tony, you're being humble now, but I understand that Red Canary actually contributes a bit in this area in open source. So where we contribute a lot in open source is security control and validation, security control, validation and testing, because we run into customers in the community that don't really know how to test their own services.

They don't know how to test whether or not their controls are working. They decide to go to VirusTotal and download a virus and see whether or not it actually serves up a detection from something that's a behavioral control. Not all antiviruses are equal. Not all behavioral controls are equal. not all antiviruses are equal, not all behavioral controls are equal. So we put together a project called Atomic Red Team, which lets you kind of browse around and see what commands, what scripts that adversaries use in the real world. And you can see how does it work? What does an adversary need to actually execute this in my environment? And you can replicate that before an adversary does so that you can find out whether or not you have coverage for it. If you don't have coverage to detect it, if you don't know how to look for it, you can learn how to look for it before a bad guy comes to you.

Thank you to Tony. And if you're on the live stream today, stick around because he will be joining us in just a little bit via the magic of the Internet and going through all of that live with much, much more detail and examples and all of that. And then we should have it posted pretty soon. Mr. Payne, I think that's everything we had for the main show. You know what we should do is take those picks we had for this week and let's save them for next week. We'll just do extra picks next week. Good idea. I think.

Yeah. Get it out of here. Double picks. Yeah, hype for the picks. So make sure to tune in to the next Linux Unplugged. Get them brats to the front of the line. Brats to the front of the line. That's right.

That's right. I love that one. I just love that one. All right. Well, links for everything at linuxunplugged.com or probably in your podcast player, I would imagine. Go check out the new Friday stream. It'll be live 2 p.m. Pacific in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.

And then we post it Monday for download. Fridaystream.com. Friday on a Monday if you want to get the download where we've cleaned it up a little bit. Not much, though. Let's be honest, it's a sloppy show. Just the way we like it. Boy, I'm getting really good at these teases, aren't I?

All right, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. I would love to see you here live next week. I'd love any of your feedback at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I am at Chris Elias, the network is at Jupyter Signal. See you next Tuesday. Thank you. Elle, are you still on the line? Because I know you just got back from DockerCon. Apparently, DockerCon cut crud free, though. So congratulations to you.

How did it go? It was a lot of fun. It was good to see a lot of my friends, who I only get to see every six months, I guess. Now every year, that's going to be a little sad. But I love how hands-on the conference was this time, as opposed to just kind of sitting and watching presentations. They actually had just kind of like little robots that were running Docker, running around the conference, bringing swag to you. Did you say like swag delivery? Yeah, and could you explain that a little bit?

So they have these little bots that are used in San Francisco to make food deliveries or groceries deliveries within a small area. But they would fill them up with swag. With swag. And it would just kind of run around, and if it noticed you in front of you, it would stop, make little eyes that look like a heart, open up. And there was swag inside that you could take. I want one.

What's really funny, though, is I couldn't figure out how to make it stop. So I kind of just walked in front of it and it did veer around me. But then my friend walked in front of it and it just ran right into him. And it gives two X eyes and was like it looked like it was looking meanly at him. Target identified. Must destroy. Swag theft. Swag theft.

So that was a lot of fun. I did tell you that I got to play rock, paper, scissors with Rosie the robot. Who won? I don't know. Yeah, from the Jetsons. So Rosie won and she trash talked the I don't know. Yeah, from the Jetsons. So Rosie won, and she trash-talked the entire time. No. She did. She was telling me

that her ratio was so much higher, and then I thought that I had won, but she cheated, because she was like, you have scissors. And I was like, I have paper. What are you talking about? So it's like a series of cameras they've stuck in this thing to watch you, so you can't trick it.

There's one main camera in its belly that it's watching. And then it's analyzing all of your movement. It's running over 40 Docker containers to run its brain, basically. Whoa. So they've done 40 containers on Rosie the Robot? I did think that it was very interesting that we could have our own Rosie the Robot if we wanted because all of the blueprints for how to print this robot are available open-sourced online and can be done with an at-home 3D printer.

All right, audience. There you go. The challenge has been thrown down.