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2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 27-July 2, 2004, Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, MA
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  TECHNICAL SESSIONS

Complete Technical Sessions
By Day: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday
By Session: General Sessions | FREENIX | SIGs | Guru Is In | WiPs

Monday, June 28
8:45 a.m.–9:00 a.m. Monday

Opening Remarks & Awards
Salon E/F

Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison

9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. Monday
Plenary Session
Salon E/F

Open Source and Proprietary Software: A Blending of Cultures
Alan Nugent, VP & CTO, Novell
MP3 IconListen in MP3 format
Linux/Open Source

As a 20-year provider of proprietary software for the enterprise market, Novell has built products and a culture around proprietary (or closed) software. Within the last 18 months, we have embraced open source development and Linux and have injected them into our corporate DNA. While different, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue embracing open source as a proprietary company is more straightforward than an open source company trying to move "up the stack." In this talk I will examine the myths, challenges, and opportunities for companies attempting to understand the best of both worlds.

Alan F. Nugent serves as chief technology officer of Novell. Prior to Novell, Alan was the Managing Partner, Technology, at Palladian Partners. Mr. Nugent has successfully led many different technology organizations. He serves on the Board of Directors and on the Technical Committee for the Object Management Group and is a widely respected writer and speaker on OT, BPR, and Information Management. He sits on the board of directors of several technology startup companies.

10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break  
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Monday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
Instrumentation and Debugging
Session Chair: Val Henson, Sun Microsystems
Coding
Making the "Box" Transparent: System Call Performance as a First-Class Result
Yaoping Ruan and Vivek Pai, Princeton University

Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems
Bryan M. Cantrill, Michael W. Shapiro, and Adam H. Leventhal, Sun Microsystems

Flashback: A Lightweight Extension for Rollback and Deterministic Replay for Software Debugging
Sudarshan M. Srinivasan, Srikanth Kandula, Christopher R. Andrews, and Yuanyuan Zhou, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F

Advanced System Administration SIG
Session: Automating System and Storage Configuration Sysadmin
CHAMPS: A Schedule-Optimized Change Management System
Alex Keller, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

IBM's CHAnge Management with Planning and Scheduling (CHAMPS) system gleans and exploits detailed structural knowledge about software dependencies in a distributed system. CHAMPS' ability to gather and optimize such information according to administrator-defined objectives, available resources in server pools, and financial constraints enables high-quality optimized solutions for quick and reliable software provisioning tasks, such as installations and updates.

Autonomics in System Configuration
Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

A computing installation is created from a collection of bare hardware and a repository of software. These same components may be used to build "fabrics" with very different objectives, from a GRID computing cluster to a network of desktop workstations. We use the term "system configuration" for the task of turning these raw components into an integrated system that satisfies the given objectives. However, we also want to maintain these objectives in the face of changing requirements and external influences. To do this, a system needs to be able to adapt autonomically. This talk discusses some of the problems of specifying and implementing configurations in an autonomic environment.

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Embedded Linux
Bart Massey, Portland State University
Linux/Open Source Networking
Bart is the faculty advisor to the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS). PSAS has been using Linux as the embedded OS for launch control, flight sequencing, and in-flight telemetry in the extremely unforgiving environment of their 12-foot-high supersonic rocket. Bart has also been involved with the efforts of Keith Packard and Carl Worth in developing the Linux/X infrastructure for embedded devices in conjunction with the handhelds.org project.

The session will be fun-filled and informative for embedded Linux novices and experts alike. Session focus will be on cost-effective, practical Linux solutions for a variety of embedded environments.

12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Monday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
Swimming in a Sea of Data
Session Chair: Yuanyuan Zhou, UIUC
Sysadmin
Email Prioritization: Reducing Delays on Legitimate Mail Caused by Junk Mail
Dan Twining, Matthew M. Williamson, Miranda J. F. Mowbray, and Maher Rahmouni, Hewlett-Packard Labs

Redundancy Elimination Within Large Collections of Files
Purushottam Kulkarni, University of Massachusetts; Fred Douglis, Jason LaVoie, and John M. Tracey, IBM T.J. Watson

Alternatives for Detecting Redundancy in Storage Systems Data
Calicrates Policroniades and Ian Pratt, Cambridge University

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F

Advanced System Administration SIG
Session: System Administration: The Big Picture Sysadmin
The Technical Big Picture
Alva Couch, Tufts University

Network and system administration are still considered bottom-up processes: integrating disparate hardware and software into a usable computing infrastructure, building a pyramid of capabilities and services upon a foundation of reliable core systems. By contrast, the true goal of network and system administration is to support a particular top-down mission or pattern of use, by expressing organizational goals as subgoals in an upside-down pyramid of needs. Looking at the profession from a top-down perspective leads to new metrics for the profession, some surprising and controversial conclusions, and several interesting questions for the future.

The Human Big Picture
Tom Limoncelli, Independent Consultant

Imagine rolling out a security patch, a new application, or a new operating system to 40,000 PCs—it's 65% communication, 25% technical work, and 10% ego management. System administration on a large scale becomes a study of human relationships: managing large teams of people on a project, managing expectations and resources with upper management, and coordinating with a user base. Psychology and public relations become just as important as technical prowess. Why aren't those skills taught to CS majors?

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Session TBA
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break  
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Monday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
Network Performance
Session Chair: Carl Staelin, HP Labs
Networking Sysadmin
Monkey See, Monkey Do: A Tool for TCP Tracing and Replaying
Yu-Chung Cheng, University of California, San Diego; Urs Hölzle and Neal Cardwell, Google; Stefan Savage and Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego

A Transport Layer Approach for Improving End-to-End Performance and Robustness Using Redundant Paths
Ming Zhang and Junwen Lai, Princeton University; Arvind Krishnamurthy, Yale University; Larry Peterson and Randolph Wang, Princeton University

Multihoming Performance Benefits: An Experimental Evaluation of Practical Enterprise Strategies
Aditya Akella and Srinivasan Seshan, Carnegie Mellon University; Anees Shaikh, IBM T.J. Watson

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F

Advanced System Administration SIG
Session: Large Storage Sysadmin
Autonomic Policy-based Storage Management
Kaladhar Voruganti, IBM Almaden Research

The cost of managing ever-growing storage is now a dominant IT expense. Storage administration complexity is growing, and the amount of storage a single administrator can manage is not growing as quickly as a site's storage capacity. We present a new approach: autonomic policy-based storage management. This approach dramatically increases administrative leverage by moving storage admin to software that understands high-level policy goals with respect to performance, availability, security, and backup/restore. The talk discusses the architecture, algorithms, and implementation details of a policy-enabled storage-network planner—a key component of the overall policy-based storage management solution.

Experiences with Large Storage Environments
Andrew Hume, AT&T Research

I have worked with various aspects of the recording and billing systems for a large telecommunications company for the last several years. We process feeds from various UNIX, MVS (Cobol and PL/1), and AS/400 systems, to the tune of 4000 files comprising 300–700GB of new data per day. This data streams into several PC clusters, where it is chewed on, compressed, added to databases, and copied onto tape. This is not trivial to do. Sure, we have about 50TB of disk, but that doesn't go as far as it used to. Managing the space is harder than it ought to be; annually managing 2–3 million files and their life cycles is awkward, as is controlling the processing of these files. This talk will discuss these and other challenges in both hardware and operating system choices and will discuss solutions we've found.

Tuesday, June 29
9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. Tuesday
Plenary Session
Salon E/F

Network Complexity: How Do I Manage All of This? (PDF)
Eliot Lear, Corporate Irritant, Cisco Systems
MP3 IconListen in MP3 format
Networking Security Sysadmin

In the evolution of computers and networks, we have developed complex mechanisms to manage one, the other, or both. We organize teams based on technology or task, only to find that the tools they use converge at times and then diverge again. I'll discuss the latest convergences in the context of distributed systems management, network management, security, and voice in a world of ISPs, ASPs, Web services. It all boils down to this: why can't we manage the network just like one large UNIX box?

Eliot Lear started his career developing distributed management tools for UNIX in 1987 at Rutgers University. From 1991 through 1998 he was part of a team that ran a large computer manufacturer network. Since 1998, Eliot has been the Corporate Irritant of Cisco Systems, focusing on the area of network management, network applications, and cross-functional integration.

10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break  
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Tuesday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
Overlays in Practice
Session Chair: Fred Douglis, IBM Research
Networking Sysadmin
Awarded Best Paper!
Handling Churn in a DHT
Sean Rhea and Dennis Geels, University of California, Berkeley; Timothy Roscoe, Intel Research, Berkeley; John Kubiatowicz, University of California, Berkeley

A Network Positioning System for the Internet
T.S. Eugene Ng, Rice University; Hui Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University

Early Experience with an Internet Broadcast System Based on Overlay Multicast
Yang-hua Chu and Aditya Ganjam, Carnegie Mellon University; T.S. Eugene Ng, Rice University; Sanjay G. Rao, Kunwadee Sripanidkulchai, Jibin Zhan, and Hui Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
UseBSD SIG BSD Networking
Using Globus with FreeBSD
Brooks Davis and Craig Lee, The Aerospace Corporation

Building a NIDS with OpenBSD
Kamal Hilmi Othman, NISER; Mohammad Rizal Othman, JARING

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Deploying Commercial DB on Linux
Steve Rees, DB2 Development, IBM Toronto Lab
Linux/Open Source
Steve Rees is a Senior Performance Manager in DB2 development at the IBM Toronto Lab, focusing on transaction processing performance on Linux. He's been part of DB2 development for twelve years and has been working on performance for the last six. He still likes getting bits under his fingernails.

This session will deal with various aspects of performance as related to commercial database systems for Linux. This includes the technical challenges of producing high-performance, high-quality code on Linux, as well as performance questions customers may face when deploying a large database system on Linux.

12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Tuesday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
Secure Services
Session Chair: Atul Adya, Microsoft Research
Security
Reliability and Security in the CoDeeN Content Distribution Network
Limin Wang, KyoungSoo Park, Ruoming Pang, Vivek Pai, and Larry Peterson, Princeton University

Building Secure High-Performance Web Services with OKWS
Maxwell Krohn, MIT

REX: Secure, Extensible Remote Execution
Michael Kaminsky and Eric Peterson, MIT; Daniel B. Giffin, NYU; Kevin Fu, MIT; David Mazières, NYU; M. Frans Kaashoek, MIT

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
UseBSD SIG BSD
The NetBSD Update System
Alistair Crooks, The NetBSD Project

A Software Approach to Distributing Requests for DNS Service Using GNU Zebra, ISC BIND 9, and FreeBSD
Joe Abley, Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
NFS Deployment for High Performance
Tom Talpey, Network Appliance, Inc.
BSD Linux/Open Source Networking Sysadmin
NFS is increasingly deployed in performance-sensitive environments, where numerous new issues are confronted relative to "traditional" workgroup-style deployments. Tom will discuss goals, issues, and tunings that may be relevant to NFS. Also, he and his audience will explore new transport-level developments that NFS will be taking advantage of in the near future.
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break  
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Tuesday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
The Network-Application Interface
Session Chair: Vivek Pai, Princeton University
Coding Networking
Network Subsystems Reloaded: A High-Performance, Defensible Network Subsystem
Anshumal Sinha, Sandeep Sarat, and Jonathan S. Shapiro, Johns Hopkins University

accept()able Strategies for Improving Web Server Performance
Tim Brecht, David Pariag, and Louay Gammo, University of Waterloo

Lazy Asynchronous I/O for Event-Driven Servers
Khaled Elmeleegy, Anupam Chanda, and Alan L. Cox, Rice University; Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL, Lausanne

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
UseBSD SIG BSD
Building a Secure Digital Cinema Server Using FreeBSD
Nate Lawson, Cryptography Research

Panel: The State of the BSD Projects
Chair: Marshall Kirk McKusick, Author and Consultant

The FreeBSD Project
Robert Watson, Core Team Member, The FreeBSD Project

Since 1992, the FreeBSD Project has been one of the the open source community's organizational and technical success stories. In addition to serving the needs of some of the most well-known players on the Internet, it has managed to forge some of the most significant and long-running ties between the commercial world and BSD's open source contingent. Robert Watson will discuss what lessons have been learned over the course of the last decade and some of the more recent developments in the BSD world.

The NetBSD Project
Christos Zoulas, President, NetBSD Foundation

Celebrating its 11th year of development, NetBSD is the most portable operating system in the world. It runs on everything from the oldest VAXes to the latest AMD64 systems, from big-iron servers to embedded and handheld devices.

The DragonFly BSD Project
Matt Dillon, Project Leader, The DragonFly BSD Project

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Lessons from the Trenches: Enterprise Wireless LANs
Philippe Joubert, ReefEdge Networks
BSD Linux/Open Source Networking Sysadmin
Philippe Joubert is the Director of Engineering at ReefEdge Networks.

In this session Philippe will discuss the common pitfalls of WLAN deployments and how they can be avoided. Topics of discussion include security, mobility, management, deployment, support, and network design.

5:15 p.m.–6:00 p.m. Tuesday
Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs)
Salon E

Session Chair: Vivek Pai, Princeton University

Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting new or ongoing work. If you have work you would like to share or a cool idea that's not quite ready for publication, send a one- to two-page summary (in PDF format) to usenix04wips@usenix.org. We are particularly interested in presenting students' work. A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference, and the speakers will be notified in advance. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations; the time limit will be strictly enforced.

Submissions are due by 11:59 p.m. EST, May 27.

Wednesday, June 30
9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. Wednesday
Plenary Session
Salon E/F

Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World
Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.
MP3 IconListen in MP3 format
Security

All security decisions involve trade-offs: how much security you get, and what you give up to get it. When we decide whether to walk down a dimly lit street, purchase a home burglar alarm system, or implement an airline passenger profiling system, we're making a security trade-off. Everyone makes these trade-offs all the time. It's intuitive and natural, and fundamental to being alive. But paradoxically, people are astonishingly bad at making rational decisions about these trade-offs.

Security expert Bruce Schneier discusses this notion of security trade-offs and how we are all "security consumers." He makes use of a five-step process to explicate these intuitive trade-offs and shows how the process can be applied to decisions both small and large. Learn how security works in the real world, and what you can do to get the security you want . . . not the security that is forced upon you.

Internationally renowned security expert Bruce Schneier has written eight books, including Beyond Fear and Secrets and Lies, as well as the Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms. Schneier has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, has testified before Congress, and is a frequent writer and lecturer on issues surrounding security and privacy.

10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break  
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Wednesday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS
Salon E
Unplugged
Session Chair: Scott F. Kaplan, Amherst
Coding
Awarded Best Paper!
Energy Efficient Prefetching and Caching
Athanasios E. Papathanasiou and Michael L. Scott, University of Rochester

Time-based Fairness Improves Performance in Multi-Rate WLANs
Godfrey Tan and John Guttag, MIT

EmStar: A Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks
Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Alberto Cerpa, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, and Deborah Estrin, University of California, Los Angeles

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
Security SIG Security
Panel: The Politicization of Security
Moderator: Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University
Panelists: Ed Felten, Princeton University; Jeff Grove, ACM; Gary McGraw, Cigital

Like it or not, security has become political. Technologists once interested only in how security apparatus works and how it fails need to be cognizant of the ramifications of their activities. These days, announcing a security flaw can lead to personal and professional attack by corporate spin control. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes can wind you up in jail. Demanding secure voting induces smear campaigns—even in a democracy.

This panel is about what happens when security and politics collide. Using particular real world examples, we will discuss the politicization of security. Examples we will discuss include:

  • The RIAA and the DMCA
  • Electronic voting apparatus
  • Compiler flaws and Microsoft security response
We will debate the finer points of:
  • Disclosure of security problems
  • Civil liberty and security
  • Fighting stupid security
Come join us!
GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
High-Performance Linux Clusters
Greg Bruno, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Linux/Open Source Networking
Greg is a core developer for Rocks, a high-performance Linux cluster distribution developed at SDSC. "As we give this talk, we will build a new cluster on the fly and in front of the crowd." Participants in Greg's Guru session will walk away with an appreciation of how easy it can be to build and deploy high-performance parallel machines.
12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Wednesday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
Opening Remarks & Awards
Bart Massey, Portland State University, and Keith Packard, Hewlett-Packard Cambridge Research Lab
Invited Talk: The Technical Changes in Qt Version 4
Matthias Ettrich, Trolltech
Linux/Open Source
SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
Security SIG Networking Security
Panel: Wireless Devices and Consumer Privacy
Organizers: Ari Juels, RSA Laboratories; Richard Smith, Consultant
Panelists: Markus Jakobsson, RSA Laboratories; Frank Schroth, Ulocate; Matthew Gray, Newbury Networks

Location-based services, RFID, Bluetooth, and 802.11 promise a more seamless interface between the physical and virtual worlds. Like many information technologies, they have also ignited fears among privacy advocates, ranging from the legitimate and pressing to the fantastical. The goal of this panel is to adumbrate and compare the threats to individual privacy and civil liberties posed by several popular wireless technologies. Is RFID a greater threat to privacy than a GPS-enabled mobile phone? Is Bluetooth an emerging threat? How much do 802.11 devices reveal about you when used in public venues? More generally, the panelists will consider how technology itself can effectively combat the very privacy problems it is creating.

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Deploying Samba
Gerald Carter, Samba Team
BSD Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Team since 1998. He is employed by Hewlett-Packard as a Software Engineer, where he works on Samba-based print appliances and acts as the release coordinator for the Samba project.

He is currently working on a guide to LDAP for system administrators with O'Reilly Publishing and is the author of Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours from Sams Publishing.

Gerald holds a master's degree in computer science from Auburn University, where he was also previously employed as a network and systems administrator.

3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break  
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Wednesday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
Server Coding Linux/Open Source
Migrating an MVS Mainframe Application to a PC
Glenn S. Fowler, Andrew G. Hume, David G. Korn, Kiem-Phong Vo, AT&T Laboratories

C-JDBC: Flexible Database Clustering Middleware
Emmanuel Cecchet, INRIA; Julie Marguerite, ObjectWeb; Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL

Awarded Best Paper!
Wayback: A User-level Versioning File System for Linux
Brian Cornell, Peter A. Dinda, and Fabián E. Bustamante, Northwestern University

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
Security SIG Security
Debate: Is an Operating System Monoculture a Threat to Security?
Dan Geer, Chief Scientist, Verdasys, Inc.; Scott Charney, Chief Trustworthy Computing Strategist, Microsoft Corporation
Moderated by Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

Dan Geer's Opening and Closing Remarks

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
How to Talk with a VC
Dan Slavin, Founder, Photolighting
BSD Coding Linux/Open Source Networking Security
Dan is a serial entrepreneur who has built a number of successful startup companies. Many technologists think they have come up with the "next great new thing," but have no idea about the venture funding process. This discussion will focus on how to organize and present your ideas and what VCs look for when they invest.
Thursday, July 1
9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. Thursday
Plenary Session
Salon E/F

Cheap Hardware + Fault Tolerance = Web Site
Rob Pike, Google, Inc.
MP3 IconListen in MP3 format
Coding

The Web is too large to fit on a single machine, so it's no surprise that searching the Web requires the coordination of many machines, too. A single Google query may touch over a thousand machines before the results are returned to the user, all in a fraction of a second.

With all those machines, the opportunities for parallelism and distributed computation are offset by the likelihood of hardware failure. If one machine breaks on average every few years, a pool of a thousand machines will have machines break on a daily basis. A key part of the Google story is that by designing a system to cope with breakage, we can provide not only robustness, but also parallelizability, efficiency, and economies of scale.

Rob Pike is a member of the Systems Lab at Google, Inc. In 1981, while at Bell Labs, he wrote the first bitmap window system for UNIX. He has since written a dozen more. He is a principal designer and implementer of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and co-author with Brian Kernighan of The UNIX Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming.

10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break  
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Thursday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
Free Desktop Linux/Open Source
Glitz: Hardware Accelerated Image Compositing Using OpenGL
Peter Nilsson and David Reveman, Umeå University

High Performance X Servers in the Kdrive Architecture
Eric Anholt, LinuxFund

How Xlib Is Implemented (and What We're Doing About It)
Jamey Sharp, Portland State University

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
UseLinux SIG Coding Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
The FlightGear Flight Simulator
Alexander R Perry, PAMurray

Making RCU Safe for Deep Sub-Millisecond Response Realtime Applications
Dipankar Sarma and Paul E. McKenney, IBM

Making Hardware Just Work
Robert Love, Ximian

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Deploying the Lustre Cluster File Systems
Phil Schwan, Cluster File Systems, Inc.
Linux/Open Source Networking Security Sysadmin
Lustre is the only Linux cluster fileystem to be POSIX compliant and to be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Lustre powers four of the top five Linux-based supercomputers in the world. Phil, as a major implementer of Lustre, will be here to discuss using issues regarding cluster filesystems.
12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Thursday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
Security Linux/Open Source Security
Awarded Best Student Paper!
Design and Implementation of Netdude, a Framework for Packet Trace Manipulation
Christian Kreibich, University of Cambridge, UK

Trusted Path Execution for the Linux 2.6 Kernel as a Linux Security Module
Niki A. Rahimi, IBM

Modular Construction of DTE Policies
Serge E. Hallyn, IBM Linux Technology Center, and Phil Kearns, College of William and Mary

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
UseLinux SIG Coding Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
Custom Debian Distributions
Benjamin Mako Hill, Debian Project

Building and Maintaining an International Volunteer Linux Community
Jenn Vesperman, Author and Consultant, and Val Henson, Sun Microsystems

Indexing Arbitrary Data with SWISH-E
Josh Rabinowitz, SkateboardDirectory.com

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Sysadmin Management/General
David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison
BSD Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
David has been a system administrator at the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Department since 1991, serving as Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab since 1995, guiding a staff of 8 full-time sysdamins and supervising up to 12 student sysadmins at a time. His experiences in this capacity include working with other groups on campus; providing technical leadership to the group; managing the budget; dealing with vendors; dealing with faculty; and training students. As a consultant, he has dealt with a variety of technical and management challenges.
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break  
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Thursday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E

Demonstration: Croquet, a Networked Collaborative 3D Immersive Environment
Dave Reed, Hewlett-Packard Labs
Coding Linux/Open Source
SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
UseLinux SIG Coding Linux/Open Source
Linux and Genomics: The Two Revolutions
Martin Krzywinski and Yaron Butterfield, Genome Sciences Centre

Thin Client Linux, a Case Presentation of Implementation
Martin Echt, Capital Cardiology Associates, and Jordan Rosen, Lille Corp.

Towards Carrier Grade Linux Platforms
Presentation Slides (PDF)
Ibrahim Haddad, Ericsson Research

Friday, July 2
9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. Friday
Plenary Session
Salon E/F


The State of the Spam
Eric Allman, CTO, Sendmail, Inc.
MP3 IconListen in MP3 format
Sysadmin

No one needs to be told that email spam is a serious problem, but some people don't truly understand how serious it is. The speaker now gets about 900 spams every day, a great many of them in character sets he can't even render, and is seeing a doubling rate of about four months. Many solutions have been proposed, falling primarily into two areas, legislative and technological.

The current state of spam will be reviewed, including some thoughts about the current legislative climate (and whether legislation has any chance of doing any good) and quite a bit about the various technologies that are being discussed and deployed. Although opinions will be offered, no conclusions will (or can) be drawn in an environment changing as quickly as we are seeing with email today.

Eric Allman is the original author of Sendmail, co-founder and CTO of Sendmail, Inc., and co-author of Sendmail, published by O'Reilly. At UC Berkeley, he was the chief programmer on the INGRES database management project, leader of the Mammoth project, and an early contributer to BSD, authoring syslog, tset, the -me troff macros, and trek. Eric designed database user and application interfaces at Britton Lee (later Sharebase) and contributed to the Ring Array Processor project for neural-network-based speech recognition at the International Computer Science Institute. Eric is on the Editorial Review Board of ACM Queue magazine and a former member of the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association.

10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break  
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Friday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
Software Engineering Coding Linux/Open Source
Managing Volunteer Activity in Free Software Projects
Martin Michlmayr, University of Melbourne

Creating a Portable Programming Language Using Open Source Software
Andreas Bauer, Technische Universität München

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
Extreme Linux SIG Linux/Open Source Networking
Cluster Interconnect Overview
Brett M. Bode, Jason J. Hill, and Troy R. Benjegerdes, Ames Laboratory

Infiniband Performance Review
Troy R. Benjegerdes and Brett M. Bode, Ames Laboratory

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Practical IPv6 Deployment
Jamey Hicks, Hewlett-Packard Cambridge Labs
BSD Linux/Open Source Networking Security Sysadmin
Jamey has been part of the IPv6 world since its inception. His session is a buffet of choice material, from "practical IP network issues" to talking about "cool network stuff to make satcom work better in BSD too."
12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Friday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
Invited Talk: Current Gtk+ Development
Mattias Clasen
Linux/Open Source
SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
Extreme Linux SIG Linux/Open Source Networking Security
A New Distributed Security Model for Linux Clusters
Presentation Slides (PDF)
Makan Pourzandi, Open Systems Lab, Ericsson Research

Implementing Clusters for High Availability
James E.J. Bottomley, SteelEye Technology, Inc.

GURU SESSIONS
Harvard
Experiences with Voice over IP (PDF)
Mike Cambria, Ammasso
BSD Coding Linux/Open Source Networking Sysadmin
Mike is an old-time IP developer, SW technic, and VoIP fanatic. He will describe his experiences in trying to bring this technology up and run it. Multiple open-source VoIP solutions that are available will be discussed, as will using UNIX as a VoIP-to-PSTN gateway.
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break  
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Friday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Salon E
System Building Coding Linux/Open Source
KDE Kontact: An Application Integration Framework
David Faure, Ingo Klöcker, Tobias König, Daniel Molkentin, Zack Rusin, Don Sanders, and Cornelius Schumacher, KDE Project

mGTK: An SML Binding of Gtk+
Ken Friis Larsen and Henning Niss, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Xen and the Art of Repeated Research
Bryan Clark, Todd Deshane, Eli Dow, Stephen Evanchik, Matthew Finlayson, Jason Herne, and Jeanna Neefe Matthews, Clarkson University

SIG SESSIONS
Salon F
Extreme Linux SIG Linux/Open Source
Scaling Linux to Extremes: Experience with a 512-CPU Shared Memory Linux System
Ray Bryant, John Baron, John Hawkes, Arthur Raefsky, and Jack Steiner, Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Quantian: A Single-System Image Scientific Cluster Computing Environment
Dirk Eddelbuettel, Debian Project

Cluster Computing in a Computer Major in a College of Criminal Justice (PDF)
Boris Bondarenko and Douglas E. Salane, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

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Last changed: 19 Oct. 2007 ac