The Jaipur Linux Users Group (LUG-J) organised it's second event, FOSJAM 2009, on the 16th and 17th of this month at JECRC, Jaipur. Being one of the proud members myself, I knew I just had to be a part of it! The event had a participation of around 280 students from a multitude of colleges in Jaipur. The event also featured talks by familiar names from the Indian FOSS community which included Vivek Khurana (no_mind), Shakthi Kannan (mbuf), Atul Jha (koolhead17) and Varad Gupta. Although it was decided that I'd give only one talk (on Open HA Cluster of course!), I ended up giving two. On the 17th, the event got a little delayed and hence, I decided to take up the task of keeping all the participants busy. So after gathering them all into a hall, I had a long and informal session on FOSS, why it is the best thing in the world for students, how to go about contributing and the whole idea of community driven contributions. The students were quite enthusiastic and I also ended up answering technical questions from all kinds of corners like MINIX versus Linux, using Makefiles, python, the quicksort algorithm and a lot lot more! The event then continued as per plan and I really enjoyed meeting more and more students. I was also surprised at the number of students who recognized me from the previous workshops I'd conducted including Helios and Fotia. :)

The Open HA Cluster talk started at 3:30 PM, and went on perfectly. I also got a good set of doubts from the students including what would happen if the cluster was partitioned such that there N/2 nodes in each partition (this was asked while I was explaining the split brain condition). There was another reasonably good doubt that I just can't manage to recall right now. :|

The event was quite an experience all in all, you can check out the pics over here. By the way, my college (Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur) is now the official host for all LUG-J meetings, the next of which will happen on the 26th of this month itself. Looking forward to meeting ya'll again!