Electronic Mail
Session Chair: John "Rowan" Littell, California College of the Arts

Privilege Messaging: An Authorization Framework over Email Infrastructure
Brent ByungHoon Kang, Gautam Singaraju, and Sumeet Jain, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Securing Electronic Mail on the National Research and Academic Network of Italy
Roberto Cecchini, INFN, Florence; Fulvia Costa, INFN, Padua; Alberto D'Ambrosio, INFN, Turin; Domenico Diacono, INFN, Bari; Giacomo Fazio, INAF, Palermo; Antonio Forte, INFN, Rome; Matteo Genghini, IASF, Bologna; Michele Michelotto, INFN, Padua; Ombretta Pinazza, INFN, Bologna; Alfonso Sparano, University of Salerno

Awarded Honorable Mention!
A Forensic Analysis of a Distributed Two-Stage Web-Based Spam Attack
Daniel V. Klein, LoneWolf Systems

Sysadmins, Network Managers, and Wiretap Law
Alex Muentz, Geek and Corporate Counsel, Cornerstone IT

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How does the law affect how you secure your network and the privacy of your users? CALEA, the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and FISA all affect how you do your job—how you can protect yourself, your company, and your users from lawsuits and prosecution.

Alexander Muentz is currently corporate counsel and a geek for Cornerstone IT. He's been a sysadmin and network engineer in corporate IT for several years before graduating from Temple Law School in 2006. He's worked with the New Jersey Public Defender and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, helping draft their network privacy policy.

UNIX and Microsoft Interoperability
Joseph Radin, Ricoh Company

Joseph Radin is currently working at the Ricoh Company as an Engineering Manager. For the past 6 years Joseph has served as a technical advisor to a number of major FORTUNE 500 companies, defining problems and implementing solutions, many of which involved UNIX-Microsoft interoperability. Mr. Radin has authored four books on UNIX system administration, UnixWare OS, the Mosaic Internet browser, and X Windows.

Boundaries
Session Chair: Rudi Van Drunen, Competa IT

Firewall Analysis with Policy-based Host Classification
Robert Marmorstein and Phil Kearns, The College of William and Mary

Secure Mobile Code Execution Service
Lap-chung Lam, Yang Yu, and Tzi-cker Chiueh, Rether Networks Inc.

FLAIM: A Multi-level Anonymization Framework for Computer and Network Logs
Adam Slagell, Kiran Lakkaraju, and Katherine Luo, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Site Reliability at Google/My First Year at Google
Tom Limoncelli, Google

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Tom will speak about what it's like to be on the team that runs www.google.com's services and explore some of the technologies that enable Google's Web services to maintain their high uptime. Google's "service oriented network" (SON) enables the creation of new products that are scalable and maintainable. Tom will give a sysadmin's view of Google technologies such as GFS, MapReduce, Sawmill, and more. He will also describe how to make a policy that is "Googley."

Tom is the author of O'Reilly's Time Management for System Administrators and co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley. He joined Google in January 2006. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he has worked at Cibernet, Dean for America, Lumeta, Bell Labs/Lucent, Mentor Graphics, and Drew University. He is a frequent presenter at LISA conferences and joint recipient of USENIX and SAGE's 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award.

Leveraging the IT Community
Patrick McGovern, Chief Community Splunker, Splunk

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Troubleshooting servers can be a daunting task, particularly at 3:00 a.m. Leveraging the expertise and knowledge of IT professionals globally to find the solution greatly reduces the mean-time-to-resolution. This talk is focused on building a new broad resource for sysadmins by sysadmins. Starting with the concepts that made the site Wikipedia a great success and tools like grep so universal, this talk will discuss the challenges of building a large IT community/knowledge base and how to bring IT troubleshooting to the next level.

Patrick is Chief Community Splunker and an expert in building thriving online communities. Prior to joining Splunk, he oversaw SourceForge.net for five years. Patrick grew the site from a few thousand users to over a million registered open source developers and 97,000 open source software projects. Splunk is leveraging his experience to build a vibrant community around key Splunk technologies and services.

LDAP
Howard Chu, Chief Architect, Symas Corp.

Howard Chu has deep experience with system networking and security technologies. He started working with OpenLDAP in 1998 and has been one of the leading developers on the OpenLDAP core team since 1999. He is currently working on a book on OpenLDAP administration, to be released in spring 2007.

Security
Session Chair: Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

Centralized Security Policy Support for Virtual Machine
Nguyen Anh Quynh, Ruo Ando, and Yoshiyasu Takefuji, Keio University

Awarded Best Paper!
A Platform for RFID Security and Privacy Administration
Melanie R. Rieback, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Georgi N. Gaydadjiev, Delft University of Technology; Bruno Crispo, Rutger F.H. Hofman, and Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Open Source Software and Its Role in Space Exploration
DJ Byrne, Software Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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View video clips in MP4 format: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Open source developers and NASA have a lot in common. Both are dedicated to expanding the pool of information floating freely through society. Both are focused on the cutting edge, creating new tools and capabilities. Open source software explores our solar system and observes the universe. For example, software on and around Mars today was built with gcc out of a CVS repository stored in AFS, using Kerberos authentication.

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, DJ is privileged to be writing flight software for the 2009 Mars rover's landing radar. He has written ground system software for Voyager, Galileo, Magellan, and other missions. He's been a System Administrator for several projects and sections on a variety of operating systems. He's been JPL's kerberos admin (10,000 principals), AFS administrator (200 users), public-domain tool builder (set of ~700 for 3 platforms), a Knowledge Management System Engineer, and postmaster (~3000 mailboxes).

Virtualization: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Michael Baum, Splunk

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As virtualization goes mainstream into the IT infrastructure, IT managers and admins must contend with the new level of system complexity it introduces into the data center. It's not possible to virtualize without adding an additional layer of software and hardware to the myriad technologies already deployed within its legacy systems. This session will discuss the challenges of virtualization and offer troubleshooting tips within the IT environment.

Michael Baum is Chief Executive Splunker. Splunk is the world's first search software that indexes and links together all data being furiously logged by services, applications and devices in the data center making it possible to search and navigate IT systems at runtime. During his career, Michael has been building and managing complex computing environments at Yahoo, Infoseek, and several companies he's co-founded. His focus now is applying many of the innovations and affordances that grew out of the Web to the challenges of managing the modern data center.

4:40 p.m.–5:20 p.m.
The New Economics of Virtualization
Alex Vasilevsky, Founder and CTO, Virtual Iron Software
Cancelled

Spam
Doug Hughes, Global Crossing

Doug Hughes takes care of the ISP and relay mail servers for an international telecommunications provider and spends far too much time figuring out how to stop the servers from being overwhelmed with spam. He talked about some of the techniques used to do so at LISA '04's Spam Mini-Symposium and also last year in a Guru session. This will be a practical discussion of what things work, what things don't, and what things might.

Theory
Session Chair: Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory

Specification-Enhanced Policies for Automated Management of Changes in IT Systems
Chetan Shankar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Vanish Talwar, Subu Iyer, Yuan Chen, and Dejan Milojicić, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories; Roy Campbell, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Experience Implementing an IP Address Closure
Ning Wu and Alva Couch, Tufts University

Modeling Next Generation Configuration Management Tools
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Alva Couch, Tufts University

Everything You Know About Monitoring Is Wrong
Mazda A. Marvasti, Integrien Corporation

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This talk will propose an alternative approach to managing complex distributed systems. Mazda will explain why inference from key metrics allows real-time understanding of the health of a distributed system in a way that sucking data from a packet-level fire hose does not. He'll explore the value of a steady stream of out-of-normal alerts, question the value of end-to-end service mapping, and explore whether virtualization is the silver bullet for coping with complexity.

Dr. Mazda Marvasi, Ph.D., is CTO of Integrien Corporation. Mazda leads Integrien's extensive global R&D effort as well as overseeing technology, architecture, and engineering infrastructure development at Integrien. Mazda has deep experience in leading teams in the development, deployment, and monitoring of global enterprise networks and application environments. Mazda has been recognized by "Who's Who in Science and Engineering", and received the Lockheed Leadership Fellowship Award.

Is Entropy Winning? Drowning in the Data Tsunami
Lee Damon, Sr. Computing Specialist, University of Washington; Evan Marcus, CTO and Founder, Aardvark Technologies, Ltd

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We're drowning under a wave of data and are oblivious to it. As data space expands we will start losing track of—and thus losing—our data. Archival backups add complexity to this already confusing situation. Then we toss in security and availability issues for some spice. Where is this going, and how can we handle it in the face of millions of gigabytes of "old cruft"?

Lee Damon has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE since its inception. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington. He is past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups and he chaired LISA '04.

Evan founded Aardvark Technologies in 1994, which has since produced many books, papers, and tutorials. He has acquired more than 15 years of experience in UNIX systems. Evan also spent 5 years at Sun Microsystems, and 2.5 years at Fusion Systems, where he worked to bring the first high availability clustering software applications for SunOS and Solaris to market. He is the lead author of Blueprints for High Availability, and co-author and co-editor of The Resilient Enterprise.

Find out from the experts everything you need to know to get started on the following topics:

Identity Management
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

AFS
Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project

Build a Linux Oracle RAC Cluster
Chris Page, Corporate Technologies, Inc.

NFSv4
Michael Eisler, NetApp

SNMP
Doug Hughes, Global Crossing

For more information about the Hit the Ground Running track, click here.

Analysis
Session Chair: Mario Obejas, Raytheon

Windows XP Kernel Crash Analysis
Archana Ganapathi, Viji Ganapathi, and David Patterson, University of California, Berkeley

SUEZ: A Distributed Safe Execution Environment for System Administration Trials
Doo San Sim and V.N. Venkatakrishnan, University of Illinois, Chicago

WinResMon: A Tool for Discovering Software Dependencies, Configuration, and Requirements in Microsoft Windows
Rajiv Ramnath, National University of Singapore; Sufatrio, Temasek Laboratories, National University of Singapore; Roland H. C. Yap and Wu Yongzheng, National University of Singapore

Perfect Data in an Imperfect World
Daniel V. Klein, Consultant

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It is no secret that we are at the dawn of the digital age—our parents have computers, digital cameras, MP3 players, etc. We each have more computing power in our cell phones than the mainframes of 35 years ago, and everywhere we find data acquisition and tracking systems. Privacy has never been more zealously guarded nor more freely abandoned. This talk will take a look at what our world is becoming, and perhaps suggest what we can do to make it a little less imperfect.

Dan Klein began his life of crime in 2nd grade, when he was caught with a pack of firecrackers. Since then his brushes with authority have been sporadic but relentless, but have not managed to deny him a security clearance, a job, or his well deserved reputation as an off-the-wall maverick. His computer experience has included simulation and process control, the internals of almost every UNIX kernel released in the past 28 years, and graphical user interface management systems.

QA and the System Administrator
Adam Haberlach, Google

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As enterprises grow and more tools and services are provided by the System Administration Organization, there is a greater need for customer representation and independent validation of both internal and external applications. We will share with you some of the tools and techniques that we've developed in order to guarantee a quality experience and maximize the productivity of our engineers. At the very least, we'll tell you why they only notice when things don't work.

Adam Haberlach leads an elite group of QA Engineers who serve the the System and Network Operations teams at Google. In his previous lives, he's been a QA engineer for Be Inc. and the sales/support engineer for a startup developing software for managing wireless networks. In between checking LDAP performance metrics and sorting bugs, his hobbies include photography and the occasional bout of rock climbing.

VoIP
Robert Sparks, Estacado Systems

Robert Sparks is the VP of Research and Development at Estacado Systems, providing solutions in real-time IP communications. He is a co-author of the core SIP specification, RFC3261, and several of its extensions. He is also co-author of the book SIP Beyond VoIP: The Next Step in the IP Communications Revolution. He co-chairs the IETF's SIMPLE working group, is currently President and on the board of directors of the SIP Foundry, and is an active contributor to the reSIProcate project.

Systems and Network Management
Session Chair: Elizabeth Zwicky, Acuitus

LiveOps: Systems Management as a Service
Chad Verbowski, Microsoft Research; Juhan Lee and Xiaogang Liu, Microsoft MSN; Roussi Roussev, Florida Institute of Technology; Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research

Managing Large Networks of Virtual Machines
Kyrre Begnum, Oslo University College

Directing Change Using Bcfg2
Narayan Desai, Rick Bradshaw, and Cory Lueninghoener, Argonne National Laboratory

High Availability: From Luxury to Commonplace Necessity in 10 Years
Eric Hennessey, Group Technical Product Manager, Symantec Corp.

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This session will cover the evolution of high-availability clustering, from server-centric active-passive paired systems, through larger and more sophisticated clusters, to wide-area clustering. We'll discuss the technologies that have enabled the evolution and the current state of clustering technology. We'll discuss the trend of using clustering as a service management tool, and the evolution to full data center and application management.

Eric Hennessey is Group Technical Product Manager for UNIX clustering solutions at Symantec. Prior to that, he spent five years with Veritas Professional Services as an Enterprise Architect deploying high availability and disaster recovery solutions for Veritas customers. He has authored a number of papers on best practices for HA and DR solutions and has over 25 years of IT industry experience.

What Do You Mean, Identity 2.0?
Cat Okita, Earthworks

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Identity management means different things to different people—everything from passwords through pgp to marketing preferences. What are the essential elements of the Identity 2.0 movement, and why should a system administrator care about any of this in the first place?

This talk will discuss the current state of Identity 2.0, starting with a brief survey of identity management from AAA to the user-centric identity model of Identity 2.0. I will then use Jon Callas's breakdown of identity management types to categorize and describe how and why the average system administrator would implement Identity 2.0.

Cat Okita is a professional paranoid and lapsed system administrator.

How to Get Your Paper Accepted at LISA
Tom Limoncelli, Google; Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

Tom Limoncelli, author of O'Reilly's The Art of Time Management for System Administrators and co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley (second edition to be premiered at this conference), is a system administrator at Google in NYC. He received the USENIX/SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement award. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he is a frequent presenter at LISA conferences.

Adam Moskowitz, author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Budgeting for SysAdmins, is a Senior System Administrator at Menlo Computing; he has also been a programmer, a manager of system administrators, and a certified barbecue judge. Adam has run the LISA Advanced Topics Workshop for almost 10 years and has served on more program committees than he can remember; he has served as Invited Talks (Co-)Chair three times.

Visualization
Session Chair: Amy Rich, Tufts University

NAF: The NetSA Aggregated Flow Tool Suite
Brian Trammell, CERT/NetSA, Carnegie Mellon University; Carrie Gates, CA Labs

Interactive Network Management Visualization with SVG and AJAX
Athanasios Douitsis and Dimitrios Kalogeras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Bridging the Host-Network Divide: Survey, Taxonomy, and Solution
Glenn A. Fink and Vyas Duggirala, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Ricardo Correa, University of Pennsylvania; Chris North, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The Last, Best Hope: Sysadmins and DBAs as the Last Guardians of Privacy
Danny O'Brien, Activism Co-ordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Accusations that the NSA has access to 20Tb of commercial phone data. Mooted plans by the Attorney General to introduce compulsory data retention. Meanwhile, Google has all your email, that online quiz site knows your political opinions, and MySpace knows what your children like for lunch. Danny O'Brien takes a whistle-stop tour of our privacy laws, the current status of surveillance, and how the best chance of protecting privacy in a digital age might just lie in the BOFH.

Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also writes the "Life Hacks" column for MAKE magazine, and continues to edit Need To Know, Britain's most sarcastic geek newsletter since 1997. He has written and presented science and travel shows for the BBC, and performed a solo show about the Net in the London's West End.

Command and Control: System Administration at U.S. Central Command
Andrew Seely, Global Command and Control System Lead, HQUSCENTCOM-J6/Northrop Grumman Defense Mission Systems

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This talk will serve as an introduction to the function of military Command and Control (C2) from a systems support perspective. Andy will discuss performing the sysadmin role in a military environment where systems can have a critical life-or-death function. He will also share examples of scripts and techniques used to solve problems created by the C2 systems environment. Finally, he will offer a glimpse into this unique environment's special quirks, challenges, and interesting lessons learned.

Andy works for Northrop Grumman as the technical lead for the Global Command and Control System at the Headquarters, U.S. Central Command (J6) in Tampa, Florida. He taught Linux and UNIX courses at the University of Maryland in Europe for five years, has been a command and control system administrator for over a decade, and was the promoter for the 2006 GCCS System Administration and Engineering Conference.

Time Management for System Administrators
Tom Limoncelli, Google

Tom Limoncelli, author of O'Reilly's The Art of Time Management for System Administrators and co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley (second edition to be premiered at this conference), is a system administrator at Google in NYC. He received the USENIX/SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement award. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he is a frequent presenter at LISA conferences.

Seriously, Tape-Only Backup Systems Are Dead
W. Curtis Preston, Glasshouse

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If you're performing LAN-based backups directly to today's tape drives, you're doing nothing but shooting yourself in the foot. The good news is that a number of vendors have worked very hard on disk-based solutions that solve all these problems. This talk will sift through your options while offering many stories of real people who have actually made their backup system faster and more reliable by using one or more these disk-based options.

W. Curtis Preston is well known to LISA audiences, and has spoken at several LISA shows over the years. He's been a data protection specialist for 13 years, and is known to his friends as "Mr. Backup." He's the author of the O'Reilly books Backup & Recovery and Using SANs and NAS, and has hundreds of articles to his credit as well.

Virtualization and the Virtual Infrastructure
John Arrasjid, John Gannon, and Michael DiPetrillo, VMware

John Arrasjid has 20 years' experience in the computer science field. He is currently a senior member of the VMware Professional Services Organization as a Consulting Architect. John has developed a number of service offerings focused on performance management, security, and disaster recovery and backup.

John Gannon has over ten years of experience architecting and implementing UNIX, Linux, and Windows infrastructures. John is currently responsible for delivering server consolidation, disaster recovery, and virtual infrastructure solutions to VMware's FORTUNE 500 clients.

Potpourri
Session Chair: David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison

The NMI Build & Test Laboratory: Continuous Integration Framework for Distributed Computing Software
Andrew Pavlo, Peter Couvares, Rebekah Gietzel, Anatoly Karp, Ian D. Alderman, and Miron Livny, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Charles Bacon, Argonne National Laboratory

Unifying Unified Voice Messaging
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Fighting Institutional Memory Loss: The Trackle Integrated Issue and Solution Tracking System
Daniel S. Crosta and Matthew J. Singleton, Swarthmore College Computer Society; Benjamin A. Kuperman, Swarthmore College

Zombies and Botnets: Attacks on Messaging Security by Organized Criminal Enterprises
Dmitri Alperovitch, Research Scientist, CipherTrust Inc.

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Today millions of zombies—innocent home and business computers that have been taken over by highly organized, interconnected criminal groups—are the biggest IT threat to organizations and individuals. Dmitri Alperovitch sees firsthand billions of global messages per month and will provide a view into zombie networks, an analysis of attacker methods and techniques, an overview of phishing and how phishing attacks propagate, and what organizations can do to protect themselves.

As one of the leading researchers at CipherTrust since December 2003, Dmitri Alperovitch manages its Global Research team and is one of the lead inventors of its key patent-pending anti-spam and anti-phishing technologies. Alperovitch has accomplished extensive research in the areas of public-key and identity-based cryptography, as well as network intrusion detection and prevention. A recognized authority on messaging security, he has appeared in media outlets including the New York Times, Business Week, and the LA Times.

Power-Managed Storage: Longer Data Life and Lower Energy Consumption
Aloke Guha, COPAN Systems

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With escalating energy costs and growing power consumption, the utility bills at many enterprise datacenters now exceed hardware acquisition costs. This talk will discuss the reliability of high-capacity disk storage systems that are being increasingly used to archive persistent data over long time periods. We will cover how long-term data repositories using Massive Array of Idle Disk (MAID) technologies that power-manage drives can reduce the failure rates.

Aloke Guha is a co-founder and CTO of COPAN Systems, a storage systems and solutions company focused on long-term, persistent data. Prior to COPAN, he was the founding CEO of Datavail Systems, the Vice President and Chief Architect at StorageTek, and the CTO of Network Systems. He is a senior member of IEEE, and has authored 24 patents (eight issued) and over 60 technical publications.

Find out from the experts everything you need to know to get started on the following topics:

Bad Interview Questions
Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

Spam
John "Rowan" Littell, California College of the Arts

Mac OS X
Tom Limoncelli, Google

bcfg2
Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory

Puppet
Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs

For more information about the Hit the Ground Running track, click here.

The Future of System Administration: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Self-Managing Systems
Alva L. Couch, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Tufts University

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The profession of system administration is currently threatened by many forces, including self-managing products that seem to obsolete the system administrator, a lack of upward mobility paths for professional system administrators, and a growing trend toward outsourcing system administration and related tasks. In this talk, I explore how ongoing changes in the systems we manage can drive positive changes in the profession. The bad news is that the way we prepare system administrators today is woefully inadequate for managing the systems of the future, and we must also rise to the challenge by learning to interact with the systems we manage at a very different level than we are currently trained to do.

Alva L. Couch is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tufts. Prof. Couch is the author of many LISA papers, and received "best paper" awards in both 1996 and 2005. In 2003, he received the SAGE Professional Service Award for his contributions to the theory of system administration. He currently serves as Secretary of the USENIX Board of Directors.

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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- or two-paragraph summary to lisa06wips@usenix.org. We are particularly interested in presenting students' work. There are only a few slots available: submit your work before the session fills up! The current list of accepted WiPs is available here. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations; the time limit will be strictly enforced.

Corporate Security: A Hacker Perspective
Mark "Simple Nomad" Loveless, Security Architect, Vernier Networks, Inc.

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Hackers typically have a flavor of the month when it comes to getting in. This talk will walk you through what hackers are truly looking to achieve—their holy grail—and what avenues they are currently looking to exploit to find it. The talk will be frank and to the point, based upon personal interactions and experiences. Expect an extremely lively, educational, controversial, and entertaining talk.

Mark Loveless, also known as "Simple Nomad," works to allow Vernier's Threat Labs to rapidly respond to new security threats and exploits, as well as give a more focused direction to the labs for future research. Mark is also the founder of the Nomad Mobile Research Center, an international group of hackers that explores technologies. He has spent years developing and testing security strengths for a broad range of computer systems.

System Administration: Drowning in Management Complexity
Chad Verbowski, Software Architect, Microsoft Research

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Yearly increases in the variation, complexity, and volume of systems management tasks are outpacing our ability to hire qualified administrators to maintain our IT environments. This talk presents a new black-box approach for reducing the complexity of systems and security management faced by administrators. The goal is to show this as a scalable alternative compared with current signature and declarative management approaches.

Chad's research on network management led to a job offer from MFS Datanet. He eventually arrived at Microsoft where he worked on the headless support in Windows 2000, then ran the development team for the first release of Microsoft Operations Manager before finding his niche at Microsoft Research. At MSR Chad cofounded the Cybersecurity and Systems Management research group, where he focuses on his area of interest: reducing complexity in software.

Backups
W. Curtis Preston, Glasshouse

W. Curtis Preston is well known to LISA audiences, and has spoken at several LISA shows over the years. He's been a data protection specialist for 13 years, and is known to his friends as "Mr. Backup." He's the author of the O'Reilly books Backup & Recovery and Using SANs and NAS, and has hundreds of articles to his credit as well.

Improv for Sysadmins
Bob Apthorpe, St. Edward's University; Dan Klein, Consultant

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