This is just a quick heads up that we’ll exhibit at FroSCon 2010 this weekend.

We’re looking forward to two days of nice chatting with friends, customers and new people. The FroSCon schedule has lots of interesting talks again and lots of nice open source projects and companies which are running a booth.

Our main product this year will be bytemine cryptorage. We will show how it works and what you can do with it. Oh, we will also give away voucher codes to interested people for testing cryptorage.

So drop by at our booth! :)

After a very successful week in Hannover at CeBIT 2010, we’re getting ready to depart for the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010.

At the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010 we will show the new version (and community edition) of the bytemine manager, a preview of the upcoming version 1.5 of our software for the bytemine openbsd appliance and last, but certainly not least: there will be a preview of our new product cryptorage.

On Saturday I will give a talk on OpenVPN. The complete schedule is to be found here.

Looking forward to see you in Chemnitz!

Last saturday bytemine started into the conference season 2010. Well, not quite. We’ve started into the conference season as an exhibitor. The visiting conference schedule was begun by Bernd attending Fosdem 2010.

At the 4. Linux-Informationstag Oldenburg (“4th Linux-Informationday”) we’ve been one of the main sponsors, while this is a local and regional event for us it is like a homecoming game, as it is the only linux event in Oldenburg.

The day itself was quite nice. It is always good to hear how much visitors like the way we represent the company and our products.

Felix gave a presentation on OpenVPN and also represented the german OpenVPN Association. The slides from his (my) talk can be found on our website.

By the way, we do sell the ‘bytewear’ visible on the photo. We have hoodies, polos, various shirts and even bathrobes. This as a small note until we finally get around to add them to our online shop.

Next stop on our conference schedule: CeBIT 2010.

Am 13. Februar 2010 findet in Oldenburg wieder der Linux-Informationstag statt. Die Veranstaltung findet wie die letzten Male in den Räumen des KDO (Zweckverband Kommunale Datenverarbeitung Oldenburg) statt. Eine Anfahrtsbeschreibung findet sich hier.

Als Unternehmen aus Oldenburg begrüßen wir das Engagement der Organisatoren und unterstützen die Veranstaltung so weit wie möglich.

bytemine wird auf dem 4. Linux-Informationstag mit einem Stand sowie einem Vortrag präsent sein. An unserem Stand werden wir unter anderem die kommende Version des bytemine manager präsentieren, sowie auch unsere bytemine openbsd appliance ausstellen. Einen Prototyp der kommenden Erweiterung der Hardware-Plattform der bytemine openbsd appliance werden wir ebenfalls vorstellen.

Seit heute ist auch das Vortragsprogramm veröffentlicht. Ich werde einen Vortrag zum Thema OpenVPN halten. Inhaltlich liegt der Schwerpunkt hierbei auf Einsatzszenarien abseits von “08/15” Setups. So behandelt der Vortrag unter anderem auch die Authentifizierung gegen LDAP.

Wie die letzten Jahre sind wir auch wieder finanzieller Unterstützer der Veranstaltung, zusätzlich freuen wir uns darüber, dass wir den Linux-Informationstag dieses Jahr auch mit dem Hosting der Webseite unterstützen können.

Well, clock is ticking and in a few hours OpenRheinRuhr in Bottrop opens the gates. bytemine will be present as sponsor and exhibitor, so you can visit us at our booth and have a glance at our products or simply get in touch with us. See you there.

Last Friday and Saturday we spent exhibiting at the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage 2009. For the ones who remember, a year ago this was the first event, we attended with bytemine as an exhibitor. For years Bernd and I have been doing events and staffed a lot of OpenBSD booths, but in the context of this company last year’s Kiel Event was the first. This made this year’s edition even much more interesting for us, since we could see how much the booth-showcases improved (and changed) and how much better the booth looks overall now. It also showed very clearly our shift towards our new product line. Last year we presented the bytemine openbsd thinclient, a product that we pretty much shifted focus away from in favor of the bytemine openbsd appliance and the bytemine manager. Products that (in my personal opinion) fit way better into our portfolio and experience than a thinclient.

Aside that, Kiel was once again lots of fun. Even though the overall amount of visitors for the event was much less than the year before. The organizers did a lot of publicity for the event, so it is not clear why so little visitors showed up. Maybe because saturday was a german national holiday?

There were quite a few interesting talks, because I had to guard the bytemine booth, I was sadly not able to attend Bernd his talk about OpenBSD and the Web 2.x. The slides of his talk are available as a pdf.

I’ve attended an overview of SSL-based VPN Solutions, which featured software like OpenVPN, CloudVPN, n2n and such. From my personal view, OpenVPN is the only one from the list that should be used in a professional environment, the rest is more meant as an aid to quickly share contents among a group of people and crypt it on the way. The talk was missing some informations regarding OpenVPN, among others a proper reference to the OpenVPN Association (of which bytemine and myself are members).

Once again, we were located right next to Zarafa, which gave us the chance to have lots of chats with Andreas from Zarafa Germany.

Last but not least, we had the chance to meet one of our long-term webhosting customers from Kiel, always a nice experience to directly meet and exchange ideas and be able to answer questions quickly.

Am looking forward to next year’s Kiel event!

Like last year, bytemine sponsors the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage and we will again exhibit some of our products. The Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage will happen at the KITZ on the 2nd and 3rd of october. On the 2nd Bernd will give a talk about OpenBSD and the Web 2.x, since Bernd is very active in the Ruby and Rails on OpenBSD scene, he surely will deliver a very exciting talk!

As usual, we will show the current development versions of our products at our booth as well as welcome you to stop by and have a chat about our upcoming products with us.

Directions on how to get to the KITZ can be found here.

See ‘ya at the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage 2009!

We’re back from FrOSCon 2009 and had a fabulous time. Previously we have heard, that FrOSCon is a very well organized conference and we can definitely confirm that. Already prior to the event, the communication with the FrOSCon team went well.

We arrived Friday evening around half past eight and the whole FrOSCon team was in action to build up the event. This gave us the chance to have our booth set up by friday evening already. With each iteration of ‘bytemine on tour’ we worked on improving the presentation concept for our booth and yes, we came pretty far. The outcome of this can be seen in the picture. Wow!

We’ve presented the newest of our products, with software versions we’re releasing this and the next week. The visitors had a chance to take a peak at the upcoming bytemine openbsd appliance software version 1.2 as well as the beta version fo the bytemine manager 1.1. These will be covered here, once we released the software this and next week. Stay tuned for that!

Holger had the idea to use a table-top rack, usually used for music equipment. The rack is tilted by 15 degree, which gives the visitor the chance to take a look at the display and the appliance without having to bend down.

Both days were filled with lots of interesting conversations. The social event on saturday evening was nicely done and gave the chance to relax a bit.

One of side-effects of FrOSCon is that we will be exhibiting at OpenRheinRuhr this november. I will be talking with their organizers this week.

See you at FrOSCon 2010!

For the first time we are going to be at the FrOSCon and will have a bytemine booth there.

To quote their website:

“FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.”

We’ve heard many good things about this conference and are really looking forward to be there. As the conference closely follows on the 1.2 release of the bytemine openbsd appliance, as well as the 1.1 release of the bytemine manager (both will be released in the week preceeding FrOSCon), this is a good chance to check out our new stuff.

See ‘ya at FrOSCon!

Following Felix’s summary for day 1 of Rails Underground, here are my highlights of day 2.

The day started pretty early with Yehuda Katz’s keynote about Rails3 and interfaces in Ruby general. Really nice talk! Yehuda is working full-time on Rails and did some great refactoring for version 3. I’m looking forward to the new major release. video

For the next talk I decided to attend Ben Scofield’s presentation about Rack integration in Rails. Rack acts as the glue between webservers for Ruby and Ruby web frameworks. Ben showed how Rack works and lots of nice ways to work with it. (like some middleware projects) I will definately dig a bit deeper into Rack. Really nice! slide video

Pat Allan gave a nice talk about sharing your knowledge with other people or using your knowledge to help people. He gave some examples like giving guest lectures at universities (_Teach the stuff you’d like to have learned at the university._), organizing meetings in your local area or doing charity work in other countries. Pat himself did charity work in Cambodia for three months and helped local organizations with their websites. Awesome! slide video

There also was a Q&A panel with Obie Fernandez, Jim Weirich, Jonathan Siegel and David Heinemeier Hansson. Unfortunately David didn’t attend the conference personally but was only connected via video link. That was a bit weird and I didn’t really liked that. Not that many questions from the audience but some interesting discussions between the panel members.

Lindsay Holmwood talked about Behaviour driven monitoring with cucumber-nagios. This was really inspiring and is a cool way of doing regression tests for your websites. Thinking a bit further, this can not only be used for websites, but also to test other types of services, like asterisk (checking your dialplan, for example) or smtp sessions testing your mail addresses or mail routing. He also mentioned his own monitoring tool flapjack which he’s currently writing. I’ll give it a try soon!

It’s a bit sad that I missed Jim Weirich’s talk about object oriented programming stuff but I hope there will be slides and a video.

All in all, Rails Underground was a really nice conference. Thanks to the organizers, speakers and all people who made it happen.

We’ll come back next year!

Oh, I almost forgot that I won a Ruby In Practice book at the book-lottery. YAY! :)