Building a Networked Appliance

This talk tells the tale of designing and building a small networked computing appliance into a product, and the decisions, trial(s) and error(s), and false starts that it entailed. It will primarily cover the technical challenges, and the infrastructure and support tools that were required. The device is intended to be deployed unattended and in remote locations, which meant that the device and the supporting infrastructure had to be built such that it could be remotely managed and would be unlikely to fail. What could possibly go wrong?

John Sellens is long time sysadmin and LISA attendee, and has taught tutorials, authored several LISA papers, and is a USENIX Short Topics author. He holds an M.Math in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and is a reformed accountant. He is currently the proprietor of SYONEX, a systems and networks consultancy, and a member of the ops team at FreshBooks.