• USENIX Home
• Conferences
• Publications
• Membership

BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic. Enhanced BoFs Resources will be available to help facilitate a great BoF (even if you've never led a BoF before). Instant discussion lists will be provided to all BoFs so that attendees can easily continue their interactions after the session ends and keep the networking going throughout the year. Click here to create a mailman list now. Vendor BoFs Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your company's latest technologies with LISA attendees? Host a Vendor BoF! These sponsored one-hour sessions give companies a chance to talk about products and proprietary technology—and they include promotional benefits. Email sales@usenix.org if you're interested in sponsoring a Vendor BoF. Click here for more information about sponsorship opportunities. Scheduling a BoF To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on one of the BoF Boards located in the registration area. BoF Schedule (Current as of December 9, 2005) Monday, December 5, 2005 ROOM # of Seats 7:00 p.m.– 8:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m. 9:00 p.m.– 10:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m.– 11:00 p.m. San Diego 300 ROOM NOT AVAILABLE An Evening with MAKE Magazine Joe Grand and Bunnie Huang ROOM NOT AVAILABLE Sheffield 100         Hampton 100         Windsor 100   IBRIX Vendor BoF Increasing Application Performance Using Scale-out Clustering Sudhir Srinivasan, Chief Technical Officer, IBRIX, Inc.     Garden Salon 1 30   Beating Open Source into Management Marc A. Pelletier, Above Security Settlers of Catan BoF Jessica Cohen, Settlers Addict Garden Salon 2 30 6:30 p.m.–9:00 p.m. ACM San Diego Chapter Meeting Luke Kanies     Crescent 30   EDA on Linux Jim Dennis and Rick Moen, IT Escalation Support for Cadence Design Systems, Inc.     Ascot 50   Chicagoland Sys Admins (chi-sage) Sabrina Downard, University of Chicago Scripts and Tips Jennifer Davis, Decru   Britany 50 So You Want to Plan a Tech Conference? Beth Lynn Eicher, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and Ohio LinuxFest Team-Member (ohiolinux.org)       Clarendon 50         Tuesday, December 6, 2005 ROOM # of Seats 7:00 p.m.– 8:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m. 9:00 p.m.– 10:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m.– 11:00 p.m. San Diego 300 ROOM NOT AVAILABLE Meet the USENIX Board and Staff and Hear about USENIX and SAGE Programs Dessert and refreshments will be provided. ROOM NOT AVAILABLE Sheffield 100 BoF for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Users Joshua Jensen Sun Vendor BoF Grid Computing Eric Nielsen, Chief Architect N1 Systems Integration Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Katherin Davidson, Information Architect & Lead OpenN1 Writer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Vendor BoF Solaris 10 Innovations: Where We are Today Hampton 100 Naming Infrastructure: What Are You Using and How Well Does It Work? Shaun Drutar, Texas Instruments Server Automation and Configuration Management Luke Kanies, Founder, Reductive Labs Puppet: The Next Generation of Configuration Management Luke Kanies, Founder, Reductive Labs Windsor 100 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m. Cambridge Computer Services, Inc. Vendor BoF Cutting Edge of Data Protection & Storage Networking 8:30 p.m.–10:00 p.m. Cambridge Computer Services, Inc. Vendor BoF Cambridge Computer's USENIX Community Appreciation Night (Beer & Ice Cream Social)   Garden Salon 1 30 Mac OS X BoF Leon Towns-von Stauber, Occam's Razor Log Collection and Analysis John Rouillard, Renesys Corporation/U-Mass Boston     Garden Salon 2 30 SGI Altix System Robyn Landers, University of Waterloo       Crescent 30   EDA on Linux Jim Dennis and Rick Moen, IT Escalation Support for Cadence Design Systems, Inc.     Ascot 50 Snort Users Group BoF Jennifer Steffens, Snort Product Manager       Britany 50   Nagios 2.0: It's (Almost) Finally Here John Mark Walker, GroundWork Open Source Solutions     Clarendon 50   Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Intersexed, and Friends Michael R. Crusoe   Wednesday, December 7, 2005 ROOM # of Seats 7:00 p.m.– 8:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m. 9:00 p.m.– 10:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m.– 11:00 p.m. San Diego 300 6:30 p.m.–8:00 p.m. LOPSA Community Meeting ROOM NOT AVAILABLE Sheffield 100 NetBackup BoF W. Curtis Preston EMC Vendor BoF Improving Information Protection: Blending New Technologies with Traditional Backup, Recovery and Archiving to Safeguard Your Business Colin Bailey, Director, EMC Software Group Sun Vendor BoF ZFS and Other Innovations: What's Next for Solaris Hampton 100 GroundWork Vendor BoF Introducing GroundWork Monitor 4: Redefining IT Monitoring and Management from the Ground Up Thomas Stocking, CTO, GroundWork Open Source Solutions Wide Area Storage Networking: Data Protection and Server Consolidation over the WAN Jacob Farmer and Mike Cucchi, Cambridge Computer Large Filesystems: Breaking 2TB Limitation Sergey Sviridov, AC&NC   Windsor 100 Virtualization in Production Mark Ballew, U of California, OP Cfengine 3 BoF Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting Oslo University College, European Centre of Excellence: Higher Degree Programme in System Administration BoF Staff and Students of Oslo University College   Garden Salon 1 30 Component-based Signature Writing Chris Jordan, Endeavor Security Raritan Vendor BoF Out of Band Management of Data Center and Remote Sites: Beyond VNC and Proprietary Solutions—Why and How Is It Really Emulation If You Need the ROMs? Emulation & Virtaulization BoF Heather Stern, XenSource, Inc. Fluxx, Werewolf, Wizard, and BrettspielWelt Card and Board Game Players Christopher Davis, Broad Institute Garden Salon 2 30 Matching the Right Software and Hardware Features to Eliminate Brute Force Backups Dave Hiechel, EAGLE Software Multi-platform/Windows SysAdmin Matthew Barr, Datalyte Consulting Disaster Response Technology Teams Matthew Barr, Datalyte Consulting   Crescent 30 BSD BoF Ben Lovett, San Diego BSD Users Group Digital Photography Workflow & Color Management David C. Snyder, Turner/CNN - Internet Operations Network Traffic Monitoring: Tools, Techniques, & Goals Evan Hughes, Carleton University Content Management System (CMS) Options Joe Morris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ascot 50 Lantronix Vendor BoF Got Too Much Stuff on Your Network? Learn the Best Solutions to Consolidate Your Data Center Assets with Secure Remote Management Paul Wacker, Product Line Manager, Lantronix Sendmail Vendor BoF Email Authentication and Manageability Eric Allman and David Eerikainen, Sendmail, Inc. Workstation Backup: How Do You Assure Your Users Can Recover Their Data? BackupPC, VSS, rsync? Ski Kacorski, Northshore School District   Britany 50 Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall Professional BoF How to Be a Technical Author Catherine B. Nolan, Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall Professional Effective Volunteering Sam Albrecht, Association Headquarters Improv for Sysadmins Bob Apthorpe, St. Edward's University   Clarendon 50 The Future of ILM: Best Practices for 2006 Joshua Konkle, SNIA Usenet—New Management for the Big-8 Hierarchies Tim Skirvin     Thursday, December 8, 2005 ROOM # of Seats 8:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m. 9:00 p.m.– 10:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m.– 11:00 p.m. Pacific Salon 3 100 Google Vendor BoF Google Is Hiring!! Come Learn More Splunk Vendor BoF Take the sh Out of IT with the Wikipedia for Troubleshooting Splunk, Developers of the First Search Engine for IT Data Veritas Users BoF Mike Ekholm Pacific Salon 1 100 Setting Up a Grid and Sharing Resources (Computer Power/Storage) Richard Wonka, ALTANA Pharma AG BayLISA & Technical User Groups Locally Jennifer Davis, BayLISA WoW Addicts: World of Warcraft Brian Smith, Dalaran Pacific Salon 2 100 PGP Keysigning and CAcert/Thawte Assurances Teus Hagen, Stichting NLnet Enterprise Directories & Authentication (LDAP, Kerberos, etc.) Digant Kasundra and Jason Hurdy, UT Arlington Managing DNS, DHCP, IP Spaces, and Related Topics David Nolan, Carnegie Mellon University; Shaun Drutar, Texas Instruments Garden Salon 1 30 Automating Network Configuration & Management Brent Chapman, Great Circle Associates, Inc. Small Business SysAdmin Matthew Barr, Datalyte Consulting Asterisk Garden Salon 2 30 Salary Survey David Parter, LOPSA What Flavor of Linux Have You Chosen and Why? Derek J. Balling, Systems Administrator, Vassar College "Is There No Help for the Widow's Son?" Consiracy Theory, Loonie Fringe, Libertarian Meetup Bernd Haug Crescent 30 Robust Malware Defense through Mandatory Access Control as Eric Freudenthal, Univ. of Texas, El Paso An Update on Standards Nick Stoughton, USENIX Standards Liaison Advanced Server Load Balancing and SSL Acceleration Joe Morris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ascot 50 System Administration Code of Ethics Stephen Potter, Director, LOPSA Executive Board LOPSA Resume Standards Program Trey Harris, LOPSA   Britany 50 Backups Are Dead! W. Curtis Preston ConfigFest Luke Kanies, Reductive Consulting; Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory Clarendon 50 How Do You Use AMD64? Travis Campbell, AMD Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy BoF Brian Sebby   BoF Descriptions So You Want to Plan a Tech Conference? Organizer: Beth Lynn Eicher, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and Ohio LinuxFest Team-Member (ohiolinux.org) Monday, December 5, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Britany Volunteer-run conferences are a growing trend in the Open Source world. Since they tend to be low-in-cost for attendees, these are ideal for system administrators who want to check out new technology on their own dime. Sometimes these conferences are organized to advance the project and reach an under-served geographic region. For those who run these conferences it is a joy to help out the community and an excellent opportunity to network with the movers-and-shakers. We will discuss what it takes to get started and how to handle a crisis so that it doesn't stop your show. Increasing Application Performance Using Scale-out Clustering Organizer: Sudhir Srinivasan, Chief Technical Officer, IBRIX, Inc. Monday, December 5, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Windsor Open discussion on the challenges of scaling throughput via parallel file systems to break the I/O bottleneck and achieve application performance goals. Performance results will be presented through a variety of case studies centered on animation rendering, seismic processing, computational fluid dynamics, life sciences, and web services. Beating Open Source into Management Organizer: Marc A. Pelletier, Above Security Monday, December 5, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 It's now easier to sell using Open Source to management, but they still have a great deal of trouble allowing contributing back their "precious IP" to the community. Discussion of strategies that worked (and failed) to make them See The Light™. EDA on Linux Organizers: Jim Dennis and Rick Moen, IT Escalation Support for Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Monday, December 5, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Crescent Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Crescent The Electronic Design Automation software industry is undergoing a major transition from Solaris and other forms of UNIX on high end workstations to Linux running on PCs. In this BoF we'll discuss the challenges posed by this combination and any tips and suggestions for admins of these systems. We'll discuss whether OpenSolaris on x86 and x86_64 PCs might offer advantages over Linux for these applications. Users of tools from Cadence, Magma, Mentor, and Synopsis and staff from these firms are all particularly encouraged to participate. (Hosted by Jim Dennis and Rick Moen, IT Escalation Support for Cadence Design Systems, Inc.: We'd hope to be contacted by any of our counterparts from Synopsis, Magma or Mentor to co-host this BoF as we will be observing LISA's vendor nuetral tradition). Scripts and Tips Organizer: Jennifer Davis, Decru Monday, December 5, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Ascot What's in your bin? Share your perls of wisdom (or any other scripts in the language of choice) Give your tips to working in a heterogenous environment or how you set up the perfect NOC or automate the mundane. BoF for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Users Organizer: Joshua Jensen Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Sheffield Join the informal meeting for those of us interested in, or currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Come with questions, experiences, and needed solutions to share with fellow attendees. Topics we may cover: Corporate acceptance as a desktop platform Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and Fedora strategies Migrating toward or away from RHEL 3/4 Package Management - Red Hat Network, Zenworks Linux, or Yum? Experiences and best practices Third party Vendor support Red Hat's Clustering Solutions etc Cambridge Computer Services, Inc. Vendor BoF Cutting Edge of Data Protection & Storage Networking Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Windsor Fast track presentations from Cambridge Computer Storage Pavilion partners. Mac OS X BoF Organizer: Leon Towns-von Stauber, Occam's Razor Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 An opportunity for current Mac OS X administrators to get together and swap stories or get questions answered, and for those curious about OS X to see what's going on. Sun Vendor BoF Grid Computing Presenters: Eric Nielsen, Chief Architect N1 Systems Integration Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Katherin Davidson, Information Architect & Lead OpenN1 Writer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Sheffield Are you administering grid environments with mulitiple OS types, storage and network fabrics? Sun takes a look at creating system management network fabrics to control dynamic resource pools of compute systems. Learn and discuss how Sun is running their 1000-node grid environments: what works, what doesn't, successes and failures. Also see a preview of the new OpenN1 community site, allowing administrators and system designers to share their grid design experiences. Server Automation and Configuration Management Organizer: Luke Kanies, Founder, Reductive Labs Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Hampton A follow-on and complement to the Configuration Management workshop, this BoF will focus on the practical aspects of using server automation tools to make your life easier as a sysadmin. Previous years have had lively discussion on the state and adoption of existing tools, how to introduce them to organizations, and what you really get out of automation. Cambridge Computer Services, Inc. Vendor BoF Cambridge Computer's USENIX Community Appreciation Night (Beer & Ice Cream Social) Tuesday, December 6, 8:30 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Windsor Want free beer? Want free ice cream? Want a sneak peek at the hottest topics in storage and data protection? If you answered "yes" to at least one of these questions, then plan to join Cambridge Computer and its selected storage technology showcase partners at this BoF. To show our thanks and appreciation to the USENIX community, we invite all USENIX attendees to join us for an informal evening of beer, ice cream and a little bit of storage sprinkled on top. Log Collection and Analysis Organizer: John Rouillard, Renesys Corporation/U-Mass Boston Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 A free flowing discussion on collecting logging information, its forms and how to extract information from the reams of data to keep systems running at peak efficiency and the users happy. Nagios 2.0: It's (Almost) Finally Here Organizer: John Mark Walker, GroundWork Open Source Solutions Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Britany Introducing Nagios 2.0, the next generation of the rock-solid, open source monitoring tool that you've come to know and love. So what's new in 2.0? How does it make your monitoring experience better? How much preparation do you need to do in order to upgrade? We encourage active participation and dialogue among attendees. Sun Vendor BoF Solaris 10 Innovations: Where We are Today Tuesday, December 6, 9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Sheffield Solaris 10 is changing the way administrators think about Solaris deployments. Join Solaris engineers for an evening of presentation and discussion about the nuts and bolts of the most important OS release Sun has ever made. We'll talk about the Service Management Facility, the Fault Management Architecture, DTrace, Zones, the FireEngine TCP/IP stack, system tuning, and more. We'll also cover some installation technologies which can simplify your life: Live Upgrade and Flash archives. Puppet: The Next Generation of Configuration Management Organizer: Luke Kanies, Founder, Reductive Labs Tuesday, December 6, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Hampton Puppet has been developed by Luke Kanies out of frustration with the existing configuration management tools. Released under the GPL but supported by Reductive Labs, Puppet could be considered a descendent of tools like cfengine and LCFG. Luke will discuss the current state of Puppet, why you would use it, and how it compares (both positively and negatively) to other configuration management tools. GroundWork Vendor BoF Introducing GroundWork Monitor 4: Redefining IT Monitoring and Management from the Ground Up Organizer: Thomas Stocking, CTO, GroundWork Open Source Solutions Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Hampton GroundWork Monitor changes the economics of IT operations management. Built around Nagios and 70+ other open source tools, GroundWork Monitor delivers enterprise-class IT monitoring more quickly and cost effectively than expensive, inflexible, traditional solutions. GroundWork provides centralized visibility and control over your entire IT infrastructure. It monitors systems, applications, databases, and network equipment. Employing a wide array of agent-based and agent-less monitoring techniques, GroundWork Monitor meets customer requirements for efficiency, speed, overhead and maintenance. It features a flexible architecture that supports custom configurations, custom reporting, and the integration of multiple IT data sources. Matching the Right Software and Hardware Features to Eliminate Brute Force Backups Organizer: Dave Hiechel, EAGLE Software Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Garden Salon 2 We will discuss D2D, transportable images, CDP, synthetic full backups, and data classification. Lantronix Vendor BoF Got Too Much Stuff on Your Network? Learn the Best Solutions to Consolidate Your Data Center Assets with Secure Remote Management Presenter: Paul Wacker, Product Line Manager, Lantronix Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Ascot System administrators continue to deal with the increase of switches, routers, and other data center equipment they must manage. Because of this increase, maintaining and managing these devices has become an important tool. However, the concept of secure, out-of-band management may not be understood by all. This presentation will educate attendees on the value of remote, out-of-band management and the necessary utilities to ensure the management process is secure from end-to-end of the communication cycle. In addition, Mr. Wacker will discuss the hardware and software solution available and what solutions are best for your data center needs. Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall Professional BoF How to Be a Technical Author Speaker: Catherine B. Nolan, Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall Professional Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Britany Come to this BoF hosted by Catherine Nolan of Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall Professional Publishers. AWP & PHP is the industry's leading publisher of open source, UNIX, Linux, networking, and security books. It publishes these books within many popular series, including the Bruce Perens Open Source Series, the Professional Computing Series, IBM Press, Hewlett-Packard Press, and many others. Nolan will be speaking about the state of technical book publishing, what the risks and rewards are, and about what you can do to get involved. The Future of ILM: Best Practices for 2006 Speaker: Joshua Konkle, SNIA Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Clarendon This session, presented by SNIA's Data Management Forum, features the latest approaches for successfully implementing Information Lifecycle Management. Join Joshua Konkle of SNIA's DMF in an interactive discussion of ILM challenges and best practices for overcoming them. EMC Vendor BoF Improving Information Protection: Blending New Technologies with Traditional Backup, Recovery and Archiving to Safeguard Your Business Presenter: Colin Bailey, Director, EMC Software Group Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Sheffield This session features a discussion of ways to strengthen and simplify the management of information protection environments and achieve optimal recovery point and recovery time objectives. Traditional approaches to information protection are necessary - providing help but not entirely eliminating complexity, rigidity, performance degradation and cost, leading to challenges in recovery, management and compliance. A blend of backup, recovery and archiving technologies driven by advanced software and disk-based technologies is helping customers achieve faster recovery and retrieval of data and applications. As a result, customers can get back up and run faster in the event recovery is needed from a variety of events, with more flexibility, in a more simple and affordable way. Attend this session to learn more about continuous data protection, advanced backup reporting and analysis and the latest technology for safeguarding the life-blood of your business - information. Wide Area Storage Networking: Data Protection and Server Consolidation over the WAN Presenters: Jacob Farmer and Mike Cucchi, Cambridge Computer Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Hampton This BOF explores the emerging trend of deploying storage solutions across a wide area network. Three general areas are covered: 1) Backups - vaulting backups to a remote location and/or centralizing branch office backup on a central location; 2) Data replication - a comparison of host-based and SAN-based replication as well as volume, file system, and application-level replication; and 3) Server consolidation over the WAN, including wide area file systems (WAFS) and WAN acceleration. The BOF includes a presentation to start things off. Please bring questions and your own real-world experiences. Cfengine 3 BoF Organizers: Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Windsor Mark and Æleen will be presenting plans for cfengine 3: in particular the new language design and data model. Plans for development will be discussed and the theoretical model for cfengine will be explained so that potential developers can orient themselves in the basic ideas. Raritan Vendor BoF Out of Band Management of Data Center and Remote Sites: Beyond VNC and Proprietary Solutions—Why and How Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 This educational session will focus on best practices in large enterprise customers around the world. Learn why having an alternate management path (or two) can save you time and money - while maximizing uptime. Learn what KVM, Serial Console, and power management can do to simplify your IT operations. A brief introduction to KVM, serial console servers, and power management will be provided. Digital Photography Workflow & Color Management Organizer: David C. Snyder, Turner/CNN - Internet Operations Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Crescent I usually meet several folks at LISA who are avid (and sometimes, part-time professional) photographers. I'd like facilitate a discussion around digital SLR photography workflow and color management, and to network with other interested techie/photographers. Sendmail Vendor BoF Email Authentication and Manageability Presenters: Eric Allman and David Eerikainen, Sendmail, Inc. Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Ascot Two emerging developments in email are sender authentication and directory-based manageability. Eric Allman, the original author of sendmail, will discuss the latest developments in sender authentication. We'll also take a look at directories, and how you can integrate them with your email infrastructure for better performance, security and manageability. We'll leave plenty of time for Q&A and group discussion. Effective Volunteering Organizer: Sam Albrecht, Association Headquarters Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Britany Ever feel the need to help out and/or are you looking to network with the leaders in your profession? Serving as a volunteer will fulfill that need. There will be valuable information for both newbies and experienced leaders. We'll discuss how to better communicate, how to organize, how to recognize opportunities, and how to not stress over it! Usenet—New Management for the Big-8 Hierarchies Organizer: Tim Skirvin Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Clarendon For those still interested in Usenet politics: the current managers of the Big-8 Usenet hierarchies (comp.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, sci.*, news.*, misc.*, humanities.*) have resigned, effective October 2006. In the mean time, there is a movement to reorgaize the Big-8 management structure, to better reflect the current realities of Usenet. This BoF will discuss some of the proposed changes, and hopefully help offer some new ones. Sun Vendor BoF ZFS and Other Innovations: What's Next for Solaris Wednesday, December 7, 9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Sheffield Join Solaris engineers for a followup to our Tuesday Night Solaris 10 BoF. We'll discuss ZFS, Sun's next generation filesystem, and other technologies coming hot out of the oven. We'll also give an overview of the OpenSolaris project and we're planning some eye-popping demos-- don't miss this one! Large Filesystems: Breaking 2TB Limitation Organizer: Sergey Sviridov, AC&NC Wednesday, December 7, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Hampton How to address more than 2TB Storage Volume as a single LUN. Windows and Linux experience. Doug Hughes will talk about Solaris and Veritas Volume Manager. Oslo University College, European Centre of Excellence: Higher Degree Programme in System Administration BoF Organizers: Staff and Students of Oslo University College Wednesday, December 7, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Windsor An informal meeting and discussion of Oslo University College's masters and doctoral degree students. What is a higher degree in system administration about? Who should be interested? Is it computer science? What research can one do in system administration? Come and have your say and ask questions. Improv for Sysadmins Organizer: Bob Apthorpe, St. Edward's University Wednesday, December 7, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Britany Use the power of improvisation to improve your quality of life! More than just a form of comedy, improv techniques can help you listen better, communicate more effectively, and avoid being a doormat. We'll cover observation, status, relationship, and making things happen. You improvise every day; you might as well get good at it. Content Management System (CMS) Options Organizer: Joe Morris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Wednesday, December 7, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Crescent Campus is screaming for an enterprise CMS solution. We're experimenting with Zope/Plone and Mambo and not entirely happy with either one. We're still in evaluation mode. LDAP and Kerberos support is needed as well. What are other people doing? What worked and what didn't? Google Vendor BoF Google Is Hiring!! Come Learn More Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Pacific Salon 3 Ever wondered what its like to work at Google? Ever wondered if that strange rumor you heard about Google was true? Come to the BoF this Thursday evening, and hear folks who work for Google talk about Google, their experiences, and what we're looking for. You'll also have the opportunity to ask questions. PGP Keysigning and CAcert/Thawte Assurances Organizer: Teus Hagen, Stichting NLnet Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Pacific Salon 2 A chance to exchange signatures for your PGP pubkey (bring along your PGP fingerprint and your ID). A chance to collect points for your FREE Thawte or CAcert X.509 certificate by having you assured. Bring along an Assurance Form completed with your name, birthdate and registrated email address and your ID in order to identify yourself. If you are a CAcert Assurer or Thawte Notary please come forward and help to Assure others. If you did not join or did not register yourself at https://www.CAcert.org, please do so in advance and print off an Assurance Form. The form will have your name printed on the Form. For every Assurance you need one form. Three upto four Assurances are needed to have your name on your free digital certificate. During the conference some attendees will have a sticker on their conference badge signaling that the person will be happy to do PGP signing or do a CAcert Assurance. Automating Network Configuration & Management Organizer: Brent Chapman, Great Circle Associates, Inc. Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 What's the state of the art for automated network configuration and management? What systems and tools are available, either freely or commercially? Where are these issues being considered and discussed? Over the last 15 years or so, much of the research in the system administration field has focused on automation. It's now well accepted that a well-run operation doesn't manage 10,000 servers individually, but rather uses tools like cfengine to manage definitions of those servers and then create instances of those servers as needed. In the networking world, though, most of us seem to be still manually configuring (and reconfiguring) every device. Robust Malware Defense through Mandatory Access Control as Organizer: Eric Freudenthal, Univ. of Texas, El Paso Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Crescent My students are investigating the use of mandatory access control mechanisms such as SE-Linux to limit the risk of information corruption or leakage due to attacks from malicious or buggy software. In this BoF, I would like to learn of experiences, administrative challenges (& success stories) in this approach to malware defense. Salary Survey Organizer: David Parter, LOPSA Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Garden Salon 2 An open discussion about the goals, methodology, possible improvements and other issues with salary surveys. System Administration Code of Ethics Organizer: Stephen Potter, Director, LOPSA Executive Board Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Ascot Ethics are becoming a much larger focus of business than ever before. Increasingly system administrators are being asked to safeguard a company's ethics through their control of the systems. Where is the line between what is ethical and what isn't ethical? This BOF will focus on discussing the current state of system administration ethics and determining the next steps for the acceptance of a system administration code of ethics. Splunk Vendor BoF Take the sh Out of IT with the Wikipedia for Troubleshooting Organizer: Splunk, Developers of the First Search Engine for IT Data Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Pacific Salon 3 Java exceptions got you stymied? Administrative actions on your firewall coming out of nowhere? Syslog messages from the kernel a mystery? Are you tired of searching the Web to find out what is that stuff in my log files? Wouldn't it be great if there was a Wikipedia of troubleshooting event information? Now there is! Splunk invites all you sys admin gurus to join us and get involved and support a community effort to build a troubleshooting Wikipedia. IT data is unstructured, difficult to understand and streams real-time from all kinds of applications, services, devices and technologies. Troubleshooting your way through it isn't easy. By joining the Splunk Community you can leverage the collective knowledge of thousands of sys admins and developers to figure out what your systems are doing. Join us for a beer as we "Take the sh out of IT" and discuss the power of participating in our online community. BayLISA & Technical User Groups Locally Organizer: Jennifer Davis, BayLISA Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Pacific Salon 1 Forum for discussing professional associations, and user groups available to System Administrators locally throughout the year. What is available, what do people expect/need, and how to start up a successful group, and other questions answered. What Flavor of Linux Have You Chosen and Why? Organizer: Derek J. Balling, Systems Administrator, Vassar College Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Garden Salon 2 At Vassar College, we have a mix of Debian and Red Hat Linux servers, with one or two SUSE boxes snuck in by vendors. However, we're encountering issues where vendor support for a platform may not be that great (e.g., "Oracle on Debian"), or where because of distro politics, hardware support may be sub-optimal (e.g., "QLogic on Debian"). If you're sensing a pattern here, it's true. We love our Debian, but keep running into issues that might just be best solved by going with a different distribution. What are other organizations doing to solve the problems of "the distro we like" versus "the distro with support"? An Update on Standards Organizer: Nick Stoughton, USENIX Standards Liaison Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Crescent Nick is the USENIX Standards Liaison, and will discuss recent developments in the formal Standards world, including the latest news from the Linux Standard Base project (LSB), POSIX and ISO-C language. Will there be an ISO-Linux? LOPSA Resume Standards Program Organizer: Trey Harris, LOPSA Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Ascot A discussion about the SAGE project to create a standardized form for the "skills" section of system administrator resumes and job postings. Advanced Server Load Balancing and SSL Acceleration Organizer: Joe Morris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Thursday, December 8, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Crescent We've been doing server load balancing for about four years now utilizing Alteon hardware. Starting to look at other vendors like Cisco. Also having some growing problems, redundancy issues, considering global server load balancing, etc. Will share our experiences with load blancing about 50 VIP's right now along with another 50 SSL sites on SSL accelrator.