Wednesday opened with Geoff Huston from APNIC presenting on Internet Address Exhaustion, and how it presents a real and present threat to the openness of today’s Internet. Geoff walked the audience through the history of the internet, and covered some of the barriers to IPv6 adoption. Geoff then discussed how without open addressing there’s no open network, and detailed how the current environment provides little incentive for the very big internet players who have benefited from the initial openess of the Internet to maintain that openness when it levels the playing field for their competition. Geoff’s vision of the IP apocolypse was a bleak one, with only one viable solution left - to alter our environment to favour the rapid adoption of IPv6.

We were also treated to a fantastic video by Project Horus of a high-altitude balooning flight piloted by Tux. The video can be viewed at http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/watch-tux-flying-over-adelaide-in-a-balloon/

Wednesday was January 26th which is Australia Day, a national public holiday to celebrate the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. It’s considered somewhat controversial, as for many it is hard to separate the celebration of the arrival of the British in Australia from the extremely poor treatment the indigenous population received at their hands. Among those who celerbate, it’s traditional for Australia Day to be celebrated with beer and BBQ, and Linux.conf.au got into the spirit by putting on a genuine Aussie sausage sizzle for the attendees.

Wednesday marks the first day of the conference proper, with the end of the Miniconfs and the start of the full conference track. Early in the morning I attended Freeing the Cloud, one service at a time by Francois Marier of Catalyst NZ, discussing some of the open alternatives to the incumbent social networking giants, and walking the audience through his creation of Libravatar, an open and libre replacement to Gravatar. Other highlights included Making file systems scale: A case study using ext4 by Theodore Ts'o, Matthew Garrett’s traditional rant about ACPI under Linux, and a brief but fascinating look at Virtual Networking performance: flows, bridging and tunnels byStephen Hemminger. 

After the conference, the Professional delegates retreated to the Brisbane Maritime Museum, to network over drinks and nibbles by the waterfront at the Professional Delegates Networking session. Many Hobbyist delegates attended the informal UnProfessional Delegates Networking session at a local bar, ensuring that many attendees from both camps were filtering into Thursday morning’s keynote looking rather a little the worse for wear.