I'm at OSCON for the next few days and I thought I'd post a quick summary of some sessions I thought might be interesting for open source systems management types. I'll just cover Wednesday for now and post the Thursday and Friday sessions later.

First up is the Manageability: Standards and Open Source session. Intel's AMT has gotten a lot of attention this year. It should be interesting to see how AMT can be leveraged using open source tools.

While it's not directly in the sites of some of you, I suspect the the issues of data management come up often enough that the CouchDB from 10,000 ft and Lock Up Your Data sessions will be worth checking out. CouchDB, for those you not familiar, is one of a new breed of document oriented databases. It also builds on Erlang, the wunderkind that sprang out of the telecom world that's making people rethink how they can scale their applications and services. It will definitely present new challenges in terms of deployment and management.

Ubuntu seems to be one of the hottest names in the linux distro world and Ubuntu Server Technologies and Landscape: Managing Ubuntu Deployments might be good places to stop if you're interested to hear where it fits into the server environment.

In the push to scale, many of you are likely struggling to find a firm footing. Caching and Performance: Lessons from Facebook and Hypertable: An Open Source, High Performance, Scalable Database are focusing on these issues in slightly different ways. Hypertable is a 'clone' of the BigTable technology Google developed to help them scale their data across 1000s of servers.

Since SaaS and systems management seem to go together so often these days, so Think Outside the Box: The End of Standalone SaaS might be of some relevance.

Virtualization is high on my list of technologies to spend more time on, so I'll almost certainly be stopping by Open Source Virtualization for People Who Feel Guilty About Using VMware So Much. I'm trying to get away from my dependence on VMware, so this is aimed squarely at me. I'll also be hoping to get some good tips from Open Source Virtualization Hacks.

And, last, but not least, since shell scripting is still near and dear to some many of our hearts, I bet Shell Scripting Craftsmanship will be a full of good insight.

That's all I have time for now, but I'll try to get at least the Thursday sessions posted before the keynotes start in the morning. Please let me know if you are at OSCON or at least respond in the comments if you actually attend any of these sessions and let me know how it went. I'll do my best to post some reactions as I have time and energy, but OSCON has a tendency to wear me out quickly -- there's just too many ideas floating around to process.