One of the reasons I wanted to come to LWE was the geek factor. I have been a bit disappointed. For example, there were two presentations on LDAP – one an overview of directories and one, supposedly, about implementation. However, the second one repeated the consulting mantra: requirements analysis, gap analysis, technology choice, yadda, yadda.

I don’t agree with that method anymore. I believe in results. So I wanted to see something like “hey, I want to manage the passwords on my multiple servers in LDAP. After ‘apt-get install openldap’ what now?”

The afternoon keynote featured Tim Killalea, Infrastructure Director of Amazon.com. While this talk was somewhat of another advertisement for the speaker’s company, it was interesting to note this one slide:

Note the huge drop in the operations cost at Amazon when they moved to Linux. With no upfront operating system cost and the ability to use powerful, yet inexpensive, hardware, Amazon saved a ton of money. They did this, however, by porting their (still) closed and proprietary code to the new platform.

I did spend some time on the show floor, although I hope to have more time today and tomorrow. Apple did have a tiny booth, and I stopped by to chat and pick up a shirt for Ben.

The last keynote event of the day was The Golden Penguin Bowl hosted by Chris DiBona. This was a Jeopardy-like quiz show based around Linux and open-source related questions. Dirk Elemendorf, a Rackspace co-founder, was on the winning team.