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WORK-IN-PROGRESS REPORTS
Friday, December 8
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m., Maryland Suite

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 below. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations; the time limit will be strictly enforced.

Best WiP Award goes to ... Anthony from MSI ("the A/V guy"), who whipped the WiP laptops into presentational shape!

Accepted WiPs (Current as of 10:00 a.m. on December 8, 2006)

  1. Nagios and SEC a Happy (Re-)union for Advanced System Monitoring
    John Rouillard, University of Mass, Boston

    Nagios is a freely available open source network monitoring package for services. It comes with the ability to do some simple de-duplication and time based correlations, however it is missing the ability to do higher order correlation without cluttering the interface with dummy services and duplicated entries.

    This talk will center on implementation of an event broker module and patches to nagios 2.x to provide pre and post core correlation of events using standard nagios plugins and the Simple Event Correlator (SEC). These patches provide a mechanism for changing the standard nagios event decisions using an external module. This allows much better inter-service correlation as well as correlations based on external factors.

  2. PoDIM: Policy-Driven Infrastructure Management
    Thomas Delaet, K.U. Leuven

    I am a Ph.D student at the K.U.Leuven (Belgium). My research is, what I call in the field of Policy-Driven Infrastructure Management. I am developing a prototype language/platform to model the policy specification of a network independent of operating systems/implementation software used and for all devices in a network. Special attention goes to conflict detection/dependency modelling between different devices/subsystems in a network infrastructure.

  3. NIS to Kerberos in a Psynch Environment
    David Pullman, National Institue of Standards & Technology

    In our org unit, a part of the campus at NIST, we have an NIS domain for UNIX/Linux logins and for services like pop and imap. We also have an Active Directory domain for Windows logins. The username/uid is a campus wide system.

    The NIST campus implemented Psynch for password synchronization. The Psynch implementation is a Windows product and it's simple to hook up the AD domain. Of course we wanted to have UNIX/Linux and Email synchronized with the campus system, but we also wanted to migrate from NIS to a new authentication and account management system. So we built a Kerberos realm and an LDAP directory, and we use perl-LDAP to connect the NIS domain and campus account system to the Kerberos realm and the LDAP directory. Adds and changes to the NIS domain or the campus system are propagated to the Kerberos and LDAP implementations.

    We're testing the login capability of the Kerberos realm and the LDAP account info on the workstations. Then we'll look into moving the authentication for Email over to the Kerberos domain.

  4. A User-Mode Redirection Layer for Improving Software Package Management
    Marc Chiarini, Tufts University

    The installation and use of software packages on modern *NIX systems is fraught with peril. The pitfalls are myriad: undeclared or misdeclared package dependencies; attempts to maintain multiple versions of the same package; upgrades and rollbacks; non-atomic package manipulation; and in particular, the out-of-band installation of software via tools such as make. The authors of "An Analysis of RPM Validation Drift" [ref] observed that many of these pitfalls are absent or insignificant within core vendor distributions. However, a comprehensive look at repositories containing contributed packages revealed severe inconsistencies, especially between packages that install commonly used shared libraries. This paper introduces a user-mode redirection layer for isolating the installation and execution of any software package installed on a host. Our approach eliminates the problem of library version conflicts and takes great strides toward mitigating the unknown effects of source-built installs. We also demonstrate how system-call auditing can be used to learn about shared package dependencies over time, expanding the breadth and improving the accuracy of redirection.

  5. Symlinking for Fun and Profit
    Wout Mertens, Cisco

  6. Portable Cluster Computers and InfiniBand Clusters
    Mitch Williams, Sandia National Laboratories

    Works in Progress:

    • Miniclusters III: Specifications for and status of the next generation Minicluster project. LinuxBIOS portion of project an outgrowth of the MIT One Laptop Per Child bios port. Sized at less than 6"x6"x13", each of these clusters fit into a carry-on case for airline travel.
    • Catalyst: 128 Node InfiniBand 'Science Appliance' Cluster.
    • Prism: Test Cluster composed of 85 InfiniBand interconnected dual processor Intel EM64T 3.2GHz nodes.
    • Flustre: cluster consisting of 64TB of DDN storage connected via InfiniBand, with Lustre file system.
    • Talon: 128 node InfiniBand Testbed.

  7. Miscellaneous Data Management II
    Jason Heiss, Yahoo!

    There's a lot of discussion at LISA regarding configuration management. But a lot of these services we're talking about configuring have some data that they serve or state that must be retained. Most configuration management authors pretend that these services can just spring into being from scratch. But your Kerberos server needs a database to serve! Managing large chunks of data (large file repositories on file servers, mail spools, etc.) is a well-understood problem. But what about these smaller chunks of data that exist in the nooks and crannies of your server room? I'll present some thoughts on handling backups and managing this data across server rebuilds.

  8. Configuration Management System
    David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison

  9. What Is a Computer?
    Beth Lynn Eicher, Look and See Network

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Last changed: 20 Dec. 2006 ch