LISA '10 Training Program

TRAINING PROGRAM

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Sunday Full-Day Tutorials

S1 Virtualization with VMware vSphere: The Fundamentals NEW!

Rupen Sheth and Shridhar Deuskar, VMware

Who should attend: System administrators and architects who are interested in deploying VMware vSphere, including ESX and vCenter Server, in a production environment. No experience with VMware products is required. Experience with shared storage (SAN and NAS) and networking (switches and VLANs) is recommended.

VMware vSphere is the latest virtualization environment from VMware, consisting of ESX/ESXi hosts and vCenter servers for hosting and managing virtual machines. It provides capabilities to support various infrastructure management features (consolidation, patching/upgrading, automation, data protection) with features and extensions to support high availability (VMware HA), fault tolerance (VMware FT), and security (VMware vShield Manager). There are numerous other enhancements to improve efficiency, control, and choice for your virtual infrastructure.

Take back to work: The knowledge needed to design, install, and test a VMware vSphere–based virtual infrastructure as the foundation for cloud computing.

Topics include:

Virtualization overview
Current vSphere core concepts and features
vSphere installation and configuration (ESX, vCenter, and extensions)
Networking and storage overview and configuration
Virtual machines, virtual appliances, and the OVF
Clusters, Resource Pools, VMware HA, VMware FT, and VMware DRS
Demonstration of features

Sunday Morning Half-Day Tutorials

S3 DNSSEC Implementation Overview: It's Not That Scary If You Do It Right NEW!
Alan Clegg, Internet Systems Consortium

Who should attend: System administrators and network engineers who are knowledgeable about DNS and have been asked by their managers to deploy DNSSEC.

Using an example of a recent deployment ISC performed for a customer, this tutorial will provide an overview of planning, implementation, and deployment of DNSSEC. Included will be discussion of Hardware Security Module (HSM) use and of implementation issues dealt with during the signing and deployment of the DNSSEC signed Portugal ccTLD (.PT). It will give the attendee the basic knowledge to deploy DNSSEC signed zones on authoritative servers and to configure validating recursive servers.

Take back to work: A thorough understanding of what you need to know and do to deploy DNSSEC in your organization.

Topics include:

Determination of needs
Hardware overview
HSM (key storage) vs. crypto acceleration
Evaluation of existing infrastructure and processes: what can be used and what must be extended
Deployment considerations
Evaluating signing requirements

NSEC vs. NSEC3
Key length
Key rollover periods

Testing the system
Quality assurance: zone correctly signed, keys appropriately secure and ready for publication

S4 Nagios: Advanced Topics
John Sellens, SYONEX

Who should attend: Network and system administrators ready to implement or extend their use of the Nagios system and network monitoring tool.

Nagios is a very widely used tool for monitoring hosts and services on a network. It's very flexible, configurable, and can be extended in many ways, using home-grown or already existing extensions.

This tutorial will cover the advanced features and abilities of Nagios and related tools, which are especially useful in larger or more complex environments, or for higher degrees of automation or integration with other systems.

Take back to work: The information you need to immediately implement and use the advanced features of Nagios and related tools for monitoring systems and devices on your networks.

Topics include:

Theory of operation
Configuration for more complex environments
Plug-ins: Their creation, use, and abuse
Extensions: NRPE, NSCA, NDOUtils
Add-ons: Graphing, integration with other tools
Abuse: Unexpected uses and abuses of Nagios

S5 Techniques for Managing Huge Amounts of Data NEW!
Richard Elling, Nexenta Systems

Who should attend: Storage administrators and systems architects who are challenged by the ever-increasing mass of information being stored.

This intermediate-level tutorial explores techniques for managing 100+ TB of data. Today's disk technology can easily place 250TB in a single rack footprint at a reasonable hardware cost. But managing large amounts of data is not easy—it must be accessible, searchable, dependable, secure, fast, and able to grow. Engineering trade-offs abound and all angles will be examined.

Take back to work: An understanding of the tips, tricks, and traps involved in implementing and managing huge amounts of data.

Topics include:

Introduction to storage technologies

Evolution of storage media
Big movers in the storage world: data transports
Magnetic tape technology, still alive and kicking
Magnetic hard disk technology, the mainstay of modern storage systems

When good data goes bad

How storage fails
Techniques for error detection and correction
RAID and emerging redundancy technologies
Tools for evaluating data retention
Considerations for long-term data maintenance

Capacity planning and performance

Fast, inexpensive, or dependable?
Design for bandwidth
Design for latency
Design for retention

Tips for managing user expectations

S6 Wireshark and the Art of Debugging Networks
Gerald Carter, Likewise Software

Who should attend: System and network administrators who are interested in learning more about the TCP/IP protocol and how network traffic monitoring and analysis can be used as a debugging, auditing, and security tool.

System logs can turn out to be incomplete or incorrect when you're trying to track down network application failures. Sometimes the quickest, or the only, way to find the cause is to look at the raw data on the wire. This course is designed to help you make sense of that data.

Take back to work: How to use the Wireshark protocol analyzer as a debugging and auditing tool for TCP/IP networks.

Topics include:

Introduction to Wireshark (Ethereal) for local and remote network tracing
TCP/IP protocol basics
Analysis of popular application protocols such as DNS, DHCP, HTTP, NFS, CIFS, and LDAP
How some kinds of TCP/IP network attacks can be recognized

Sunday Afternoon Half-Day Tutorials

S7 Getting It Out the Door Successfully NEW!
Strata Rose Chalup, Project Management Consultant

Who should attend: Sysadmins, managers, and engineers who are involved with shipping a product or live service to external customers.

When introducing large changes in features or functionality, whether in an IT infrastructure, established product/service, or new initiative, your pilot and release process can save you time, money, and aggravation—but only if you do it right. We all know stories of pilot programs that killed the original idea, or the release with fanfare that was rolled back a month later. Whether to internal or external customers, there's a class of infrastructure and process work you can do up front that will minimize your pain later—and the sooner, the better!

Take back to work: Tried and true methods for ensuring that you have something of quality to release by your deadline.

Topics include:

Stack the odds for success

New school or old school? It depends
Agile process flow
Traditional process flow

Laying out the puzzle pieces

Infrastructure, yeah, but what else?
Integrating with other teams

Engineering for supportability

Plan for failure and happy surprises
To phone home, or not?

Release process

Release prep
License management
QA and deployment issues

Source code control

Code and component structure for smooth deploys
Managing IT and engineering development
What else besides code? Lots!

Catastrophic success

Planning for the worst best
When sales throws wild cards

Accounting and finance

Proving the win
COGS, ROI, and you

On beyond Zebra: working with Bizdev

Product Manager, Provost, Principal Investigator
Setting up for case studies
Escalation management with partners

S8 Databases: What You Need to Know
John Sellens, SYONEX

Who should attend: System and application administrators who need to support databases and database-backed applications.

Databases used to run almost exclusively on dedicated database servers, with one or more database administrators (DBAs) dedicated to their care. These days, with the easy availability of database software such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, databases are popping up in many more places and are used by many more applications.

As a system administrator you need to understand databases, their care and feeding. This course provides an introduction to database concepts, use, and implementation, specifically aimed at system administrators.

Take back to work: A better understanding of databases and their use and of how to deploy and support common database software and database-backed applications.

Topics include:

An introduction to database concepts
The basics of SQL (Structured Query Language)
Common applications of databases
Berkeley DB and its applications
MySQL installation, configuration, and management
PostgreSQL installation, configuration, and management
Security, user management, and access controls
Ad hoc queries with standard interfaces
ODBC and other access methods
Database access from other tools (Perl, PHP, sqsh, etc.)

S9 Working with SELinux
Rik Farrow, Security Consultant

Who should attend: Sysadmins and security managers of Linux systems who want or are required to use SELinux. Participants must be familiar with Linux system administration: previous frustration using SELinux is expected but not required.

This tutorial focuses on getting SELinux working again in enforcing mode after it has been disabled. SELinux is included by default in many popular distros, along with a policy targeted at sandboxing popular network services and some applications. But even minor changes to a server's files, or enabling features in a currently running server, will cause SELinux to prevent an application from working. The usual fix is to disable SELinux.

Take back to work: An awareness of new tools and techniques for debugging problems with SELinux configuration and applications: how to switch SELinux from permissive (or disabled) mode to enforcing and how to sandbox other, not currently covered applications.

Topics include:

SELinux uncloaked

Types, contexts, and roles
Context-based policy
Extensions to familiar commands

Using the audit file

Tools for deciphering log messages

Adjusting file/directory context

Fixing common access problems

Using Booleans to adjust policy
Extending policy

Using audit2allow to correct policy
Adding new policy modules

S10 Have a Drink from the Network Services Firehose
Gerald Carter, Likewise Software

Who should attend: System and network administrators who, whether to brush up on overall network expertise or to cover for a collegue who is out sick one day, need a fast introduction to core network services.

There is a collection of network services we use every day when performing basic tasks such as checking email, sharing documents, and browsing the Web.

For each topic, we'll answer the questions:

What does it do?
Why do I have it or need it on my network?
What are the popular (or at least common) applications I might run into?
How does it work on Solaris, Linux, and *BSD systems?
What is in the configuration files and where do they live?

Take back to work: An introduction to the stable of core services every network requires to function properly.

Topics include:

DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol)
DNS (Domain Name System)
Electronic mail servers
LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
NFS (Network File System) and automounters
Web servers

Monday, November 8, 2010

Monday Full-Day Tutorials

M1 VMware Cloud and Cloud Architecture Design NEW!
John Arrasjid and Ben Lin, VMware

Who should attend: System administrators and architects who are interested in deploying a VMware Cloud.

VMware Cloud is a suite of VMware technologies used to stand up private clouds (on premises and off premises) and public clouds. VMware Cloud includes several technologies to provide multi-tenancy, resource elasticity, segmentation of resources, and provisioning mechanisms.

Taking the S1 Fundamentals class or having some experience with VMware vSphere, VMware Chargeback, and Distributed Virtual Switches is a prerequisite to this class.

Take back to work: The knowledge needed to design a VMware Cloud for use as an enterprise private cloud.

Topics include:

VMware Cloud core concepts and features
Cloud design considerations
Cloud design patterns and best practices
Demonstration of features

M3 ZFS: A Filesystem for Modern Hardware
Richard Elling, Nexenta Systems

Who should attend: Systems engineers, integrators, and administrators who are interested in deploying ZFS on Solaris, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD. Participants should be familiar with storage devices, RAID systems, logical volume managers, backup, and file system features. Special emphasis will be placed on integration considerations for virtualization, NAS, and databases.

File systems developed in the mid-20th century were severely constrained by the storage hardware available at the time. ZFS was conceived with an eye toward the hardware of the future and how storage will evolve. This presented an opportunity to rethink how file systems use storage hardware. The result is a new way of managing data which can evolve as the hardware changes while remaining compatible with earlier notions of file system use. Along the way, new concepts such as the Hybrid Storage Pool provide new opportunities for optimization, efficiency, and data protection. In this tutorial, ZFS will be examined from the bottom up, to build a solid understanding of the data-hardware interface, and then from the top down, to provide insight into the best ways to use ZFS for applications.

Take back to work: A solid understanding of the concepts behind ZFS and how to make the best decisions when implementing storage at your site.

Topics include:

Evolution of hardware and file systems
Storage pools

RAID data protection
Import/export and shared storage
Pool parameters and features
On-disk format

Data sets

Volumes
POSIX-compliant file systems
Snapshots
Replication

Practical considerations and best practices

Deployment and migration
Virtualization
Sharing
Performance, observability, and tuning
Data protection
Hybrid storage pools
Backup, restore, and archiving

Monday Morning Half-Day Tutorials

M4 Time Management for System Administrators: The Basics
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Google

Who should attend: Sysadmins and developers who need more time in their day or who have problems getting projects done because of constant interruptions; those who want more control over their time and the ability to schedule work instead of working at the whim of their users.

If you agree with any of these statements, this class is for you:

I don't have enough time to get all my work done.
As a sysadmin, I can't schedule, prioritize, or plan my work.
I'm spending all my time mopping the floor; I don't have time to fix the leaking pipe.
My boss says I don't work hard enough, but I'm always working my ____ off!

Take back to work: The skills you need to get more done in less time.

Topics include:

Why typical "time management" books don't work for sysadmins
What makes "to-do" lists fail, and how to make them work
How to eliminate "I forgot" from your vocabulary
How to prevent unwanted interruptions
How to prioritize tasks so that users think you're a genius
Ways to have more time for fun (for people with a social life)
Three policies that make everyone more productive
How to prioritize your work instead of letting other people boss you around
How to plan and control your day instead of your work controlling you
How to do everything you need to get done and only work 40 hours per week
How to leave the office every day with a smile on your face

M5 Real-World Insights on How to Secure and Route Your Linux Network NEW!
Jason Faulkner, Rackspace

Who should attend: Novice and intermediate Linux system and network administrators, or anyone who wants to understand the ins and outs of networking on Linux.

We will be talking about how to configure IP addresses and static routes, securing Linux servers on a network level, using the iproute2 utilities for advanced routing and IP configurations, and some things to look out for with Linux networks. You'll learn why you should throw away "ifconfig" on Linux in favor of "ip," how to create and optimize iptables rule sets, and even how to do some basic load balancing using ipvsadm.

Take back to work: Real-world insights on how to expertly secure and route your Linux-centric network.

Topics include:

Basics

Networking review
Basic network configuration (Sysconfig-based configuration, ifconfig/route, iproute2)
Other useful network troubleshooting tools (ethtool, sysctl -a, ip route get [ip address])

Firewalls

High-level firewall architecture
iptables (syntax, chains, tables, targets, matches, assembling the pieces into a rule, optimization, complex rulesets, custom chains)
Other ways to block packets (ebtables, arptables, null-routing)

Advanced routing

Metric-based routing
Multiple routing tables
Multicast routing

Other topics

Simple LB using ipvsadm
Network tuning using sysctls

M6 Perl 6 for Perl Users and Sysadmins NEW!
Tobias Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Switzerland

Who should attend: People who work with Perl and would like to try their hand at working with a real implementation of Perl 6.

Perl 6 was conceived over ten years ago. The long gestation time has prompted many eulogies and second system syndrome remarks. All the while Larry Wall and a bunch of diehards have been working at designing and implementing a new language called Perl 6. Perl 6 is heavily inspired by Perl 5, but it also introduces many new ideas on all levels.

For years Perl 6 existed mainly on paper. With Rakudo we now have a real implementation of the language at our disposal. This course is based on actual working Rakudo code, focusing on upgrading your Perl knowledge to Perl 6.

Take back to work: The ability to harness Perl 6 for solving problems with less effort and more fun than ever before.

Topics include:

Getting Rakudo up and running
Perl 6 basic concepts
Perl 5 to Perl 6 feature match
Object-oriented programming in Perl 6
Perl 6 one-liners
Lots of actual running Perl 6 code
Some cool Perl 6 features you can use to impress your friends and frighten your enemies

M7 NASes for the Masses NEW!
Lee Damon, University of Washington

Who should attend: Beginner or intermediate system administrators or anyone else in need of a small (1TB to 24TB) file server for office or home.

Take back to work: The basic ideas and understanding necessary to build/buy and implement file services for a small office or home use.

Topics include:

Pros and cons of different base OSes
Off-the-shelf NAS servers
RAID, including popular levels, software vs. hardware implementations, data reliability, and build time
ZFS
Backups
Issues of setup and maintenance

Monday Afternoon Half-Day Tutorials

M8 Advanced Time Management: Team Efficiency NEW!
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Google

Who should attend: All sysadmins, whether they are a team of 100 or a team of one, who want to collaborate efficiently within their team and with others.

All attendees must bring a laptop: we will be practicing these techniques live. All techniques taught will apply to users of any wiki or collaborative document system, but the labs and demos will be done using Google Apps.

Take back to work: Techniques to help your IT team work better, faster, and more transparently.

Topics include:

Efficient meetings

Why meetings are a big waste of time
How to improve bad meetings, and how to skip unfixable meetings
Being a better meeting facilitator using shared documents
Taking detailed meeting notes using multi-user text editors
Lab: Using Google Wave to host an online meeting with detailed notes
Using Google Moderator to manage Q&A sessions
How to get people to volunteer for tasks
Lab: Planning a weekly meeting

Eliminate email overload

What are the causes?
Gmail searching and filtering tips (demo)
Three rules for more productive mailing list operation

How to use collaborative document systems such as wikis and Google Docs

To coordinate a system upgrade (with a large team)
To maintain common reference material (emergency contact lists, etc.)
To cooperatively write a budget or presentation slides
Lab: Group budget writing
Lab: Group presentation editing

Collect data and surveys using Web survey tools

Lab: Gathering sign-up information for a team BBQ
Lab: Using a spreadsheet to manage a pool of test machines

Communicate more effectively with users; create screen-casts to help users
Improved "institutional memory" using wikis

Document processes to trick other people into doing your work
Creating a simple home page and FAQ system for your users
Creating a department home page easily

M9 Understanding Service Levels and Service Level Agreements NEW!
Mike Ciavarella, Coffee Bean Software Pty Ltd

Who should attend: Sysadmins who want to understand how SLAs work, and, more importantly, how to make them work for you, not against you.

With the uptake of formalized service delivery models such as ITIL, it has become commonplace for organizations to use SLAs (Service Level Agreements) as an indicator of service delivery performance, both for internally delivered services and when dealing with third parties.

Service Level Agreements are a part of daily life for system administrators. Whether it's your own performance being measured against internal metrics, or dealing with third-party providers and their service, you need to be able to understand and work with (and within) Service Level Agreements. This class looks at how Service Levels are defined, measured, and delivered, from the point of view of establishing and working within the framework of a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Take back to work: How to understand and work with (and within) Service Level Agreements.

Topics include:

What is, and what is not, a "Service"
Which services can be effectively managed with SLAs
Metrics: what works, what doesn't, and why
How to read SLAs, and how to read between the lines of an SLA
Balancing the requirements of supplier and customer when setting up an SLA
"Why SLAs fail"

M10 Recovering from Linux Hard Drive Disasters
Theodore Ts'o, Google

Who should attend: Linux system administrators and users.

Ever had a hard drive fail? Ever kick yourself because you didn't keep backups of critical files, or you discovered that your regularly nightly backup didn't succeed? Of course not: everybody keeps regular backups and verifies them to make sure they are successful. But for those people who think they might nevertheless someday need this information, this tutorial will discuss ways of recovering from storage disasters caused by failures somewhere in the hardware or software stack.

Take back to work: How to recover from storage disasters caused by failures somewhere in the hardware or software stack.

Topics include:

How data is stored on hard drives
Recovering from a corrupted partition table
Recovering from failed software RAID systems
Low-level techniques to recover data from a corrupted ext2/3/4 filesystem when backups aren't available
Using e2image to back up critical ext2/3/4 filesystem metadata
Using e2fsck and debugfs to sift through a corrupted filesystem
Preventive measures to avoid needing to use heroic measures

M11 IPv6: An Introduction NEW!
Rudi Van Drunen, Competa IT and Xlexit Technology

Who should attend: System administrators who need to prepare for migration to IPv6 and want to know what's involved or who just want to know more about IPv6.

Since IPv4 numbers really are running out fast, we need to think about moving to IPv6 as soon as possible. This tutorial brings you the basics on IPv6, what is involved in moving, and how to go about making your move to IPv6.

Take back to work: Knowledge of IPv6, what is involved in moving to IPv6, and how to start now building tunnels between IPv4 and IPv6.

Topics include:

The IPv6 frame and addressing
Services (autoconfig, DHCP6, DNS)
Applications
Dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) operation
Tunnelling
Security aspects
How to start now

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Tuesday Full-Day Tutorials

T1 Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor
Todd Deshane and Patrick Wilbur, Clarkson University

Who should attend: System administrators and architects who are interested in running server services in virtual machines and deploying the open source Xen hypervisor in a production environment. No prior experience with Xen is required; however, a basic knowledge of Linux is helpful.

The Xen hypervisor, an innovative virtualization infrastructure to provide fast and secure execution to multiple virtual machines, has been used to virtualize a wide range of guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and *BSD. Widely regarded as a compelling alternative to proprietary virtualization platforms and hypervisors for x86-compatible platforms, it is commonly deployed in industrial and commercial environments as a promising approach to dynamic datacenters and virtual servers.

Take back to work: How to build and deploy the Xen hypervisor.

Topics include:

Basic overview of virtualization
Xen architecture overview
Virtual machine creation and operation
Installation and configuration
Performance: tools and methodology
Best practices using Xen

T2 Administering Linux in Production Environments
Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Who should attend: Both current Linux system administrators and administrators from sites considering converting to Linux or adding Linux systems to their current computing resources.

Linux system administrators in production environments face many challenges: the inevitable skepticism about whether an open source operating system will perform as required; how well Linux systems will integrate with existing computing facilities; how to locate, install, and manage high-end features which the standard distributions may lack; and many more. Sometimes the hardest part of ensuring that the system meets production requirements is matching the best solution with the particular local need. This course is designed to give you a broad knowledge of production-worthy Linux capabilities, as well as where Linux currently falls short. The material in the course is all based on extensive experience with production systems.

This course will cover configuring and managing Linux computer systems in production environments. We will be focusing on the administrative issues that arise when Linux systems are deployed to address a variety of real-world tasks and problems arising from both commercial and research and development contexts.

Take back to work: The knowledge necessary to add reliability and availability to your systems and to assess and implement tools needed for production-quality Linux systems.

Topics include:

Recent kernel developments
High-performance I/O
- Advanced file systems and the LVM
- Disk striping
- Optimizing I/O performance
Advanced compute-server environments

HPC with Beowulf
Clustering and high availability
Parallelization environments/facilities
CPU performance optimization

Enterprise-wide security features, including centralized authentication
Automation techniques and facilities
Linux performance tuning

T3 Configuration Management Solutions with Cfengine 3
Mark Burgess, Cfengine, Inc.

Who should attend: Anyone with a basic knowledge of configuration management who is interested in learning the next-generation tool.

Following a complete rewrite of Cfengine with its popular new syntax and powerful pattern matching capabilities, this full-day tutorial presents an introduction suitable for new users, as well as for users of Cfengine 2.

The tutorial is peppered with configuration examples, which can now be self-contained and modularized to an unprecedented degree in the new language.

Take back to work: An understanding of the new features of the completely rewritten Cfengine 3, including its new syntax and benefits.

Topics include:

Moving from ad hoc scripts to automation
The importance of convergence
The promise model
Templates and data types
Quickstart configuration
Creating configuration libraries
Upgrading from Cfengine 2
Example configurations and demos
Achieving compliance with standards and regulations
Cfengine on Windows and the registry
Monitoring and self-healing
Brief overview of the community and commercial Cfengine roadmap

SANS Security 464 Hacker Detection for System Administrators: Catching the Wily Hacker (Day 1) Seth Misenar, Context Security

Who should attend: Systems administrators who interact on a regular basis with their security team or with an auditor; any system administrator who is curious about the things security teams require.

Take back to work: Full course documentation and open source tools with documentation for running the eight hands-on labs we'll cover during class; Four quarterly 90-minute tool update and threat briefings, delivered live on the Web (the next is scheduled for February 4, 2011).

Topics include:

Why bad things happen to good system administrators: five common misconfigurations and mistakes that lead to a system being compromised
Security methodology and thought process in daily system administration activities
A sysadmin's view of what matters in systems architectures
Security monitoring: not knowing makes the auditors and hackers happy
The hard part: knowing what is normal for Windows and UNIX systems
The harder part: knowing what is abnormal for Windows and UNIX systems
Hardening Windows and UNIX systems is easier than you thought
Command line kung fu for UNIX and Windows
Understanding network traffic for system administrators
Malware: why it is still effective in your environment

Tuesday Morning Half-Day Tutorials

T4 Backups, Archiving, and Life Cycle Management: Riding the Wave of Data Proliferation NEW!
Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services

Who should attend: System administrators involved in the design and management of backup systems and policymakers responsible for protecting their organization's data.

Most IT organizations report exponential data growth over time, and whether your data doubles every year, every two years, or every five years, the simple fact remains that if your data capacities double, then both the capacity and the performance of your backup system must double. All of this doubling stresses traditional approaches to data management. Thus, it is no surprise that backup/recovery is one of the most costly and unforgiving operations in the data center. Meanwhile, most IT organizations also report that the vast majority of their unstructured data is seldom or never accessed. Files accumulate year after year, choking the backup systems and driving up costs.

This course explores two main ways to manage the data deluge: (1) optimize backup systems by eliminating bottlenecks, streamlining operations, and bulking up backup infrastructure; and (2) manage the life cycles of unstructured data so that files that are not in active use can be managed separately from files that are in active use. We start by offering a simple framework for defining business requirements and comparing solutions at a high level. We then delve into the various mechanisms for lifecycle management and for eliminating backup system bottlenecks. Some time is spent exploring storage systems that have built-in mechanisms for data protection and lifecycle management.

Take back to work: Ideas for immediate, effective, inexpensive improvements to your backup systems and a vision for how you might deploy a lifecycle management system that fits your organization.

Topics include:

Formulating strategies for data protection and lifecycle management
Identifying and addressing backup system bottlenecks
Managing fixed content
Hierarchical storage management and data migration
In-band versus out-of-band approaches to file lifecycle management
Breathing new life into tape storage
Deduplication: separating hype from reality
Object-based storage models for backup and archiving
Self-healing and self-protecting storage systems
Leveraging the cloud for backup and archiving

T5 Advanced Shell Programming
Mike Ciavarella, Coffee Bean Software Pty Ltd

Who should attend: Junior or intermediate system administrators or anyone with a basic knowledge of programming, preferably with some experience in Bourne/Korn shells (or their derivatives).

The humble shell script is still a mainstay of UNIX/Linux system administration, despite the wide availability of other scripting languages. This tutorial details techniques that move beyond the quick-and-dirty shell script.

Take back to work: An understanding of how to use the "lowly" shell to achieve lofty goals.

Topics include:

Common mistakes and unsafe practices
Modular shell script programming
Building blocks: awk, sed, etc.
Writing secure shell scripts
Performance tuning
Choosing the right utilities for the job
Addressing portability at the design stage
When not to use shell scripts

T6 Project Troubleshooting

Strata Rose Chalup, Project Management Consultant

Who should attend: Anyone with an existing project that isn't going well and they're not sure why, or with a big initiative at work that they'd like to turn into a project but can't seem to get beyond a certain point with it.

Take back to work: Project refactoring tools, a better understanding of where attention is best focused to keep a project on track, and specific advice about project difficulties you may be encountering.

Topics include:

Problem-solving patterns
Best practices
How to recognize an "albatross" and what to do about it
Specific project workflow fixes

T7 RRDtool First Steps
Tobias Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Switzerland

Who should attend: Scripters and programmers who would like to create a custom monitoring application with great presentation tools. Attendees are expected to have some scripting experience.

Over the past few years RRDtool has become the standard method for handling time-series data in the networking area. RRDtool takes care of all the work related to data storage and presentation. Many users only access RRDtool through some front-end application like Cacti or Cricket.

In this half-day tutorial you will learn how RRDtool works from a programmer's point of view and how you can use it to write your own custom monitoring applications. An emphasis will be put on presentation aspects. The best data is worth only as much as your bosses and customers understand and appreciate the graphs you create with it.

Take back to work: Ideas for building the monitoring application of your dreams.

Topics include:

RRDtool overview

Problems to be solved
Round Robin Database setup
Data acquisition
Graphing

Programming with RRDtool

The command line interface
The pipe interface
The Perl API

In-depth graphing

Concepts
Simple graphs
The joy of RPN
Graph disassembly
How to make graphs talk

Scaling RRDtool

The RRD file format
Optimizing OS interaction
Tweaking Linux for speed

Latest developments

Tuesday Afternoon Half-Day Tutorials

T8 Next-Generation Storage Networking FULLY REVISED FOR 2010!
Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services

Who should attend: Sysadmins running day-to-day operations and those who set or enforce budgets.

There has been tremendous innovation in the data storage industry over the past few years. New storage architectures have come to market to challenge traditional SAN and NAS products with nimble new designs that are much better suited to serving the increasingly virtual nature of applications and server infrastructure. Meanwhile, the allure of cloud computing and the emergence of affordable enterprise-class solid state storage devices have inspired ever more innovative approaches to storage caching, addressing, tiering, and deduplication. This course is a survey of the latest trends and advances in the data storage industry. We trace the I/O path from application to storage media and look at a wide variety of solutions to the ever-changing challenges of data storage.

Take back to work: An understanding of modern storage architectures, various approaches to scaling both performance and capacity, and a framework for comparing and contrasting various types of storage solutions.

Topics include:

The fundamentals of storage virtualization: the storage I/O path
Shortcomings of conventional SAN and NAS architectures
Spindle virtualization
Deduplication of primary storage
Object storage models and content-addressable storage
Leveraging the cloud for primary storage
Application acceleration with solid state storage devices (SSDs)
Automated tiered storage and information life cycle management (ILM)

T9 Documentation Techniques for Sysadmins
Mike Ciavarella, Coffee Bean Software Pty Ltd

Who should attend: System administrators who need to produce documention for the systems they manage or who want to improve their documentation skills.

Particular emphasis is placed on documentation as a time-saving tool rather than a workload imposition.

Take back to work: The ability to make immediate, practical use of the documentation techniques presented in this tutorial in your day-to-day tasks.

Topics include:

Why system administrators need to document
The document life cycle
Targeting your audience
An adaptable document framework
Common mistakes
Tools to assist the documentation process

T10 Problem-Solving for IT Professionals
Strata Rose Chalup, Project Management Consultant

Who should attend: IT support people who would like to have a better grasp of problem-solving as a discipline.

In the world of IT support, you build up a lot of specialized domains of knowledge that may or may not interact. We're going to trace common patterns of interaction and show you how you can apply basic principles to isolate symptoms and interactions between subsystems. As you will see, most types of troubleshooting rely on what you might call call "guided intuition"—focusing your attention down a probable path of diagnosis, and then making an intuitive leap.

If you haven't practiced your intuitive pole vaulting lately, don't worry. By using checklists and patterns to do brute-force troubleshooting, you will gradually build up a reservoir of understanding that will eventually have you shouting "Aha!" while other folks are still scratching their heads in puzzlement.

Take back to work: A solid grounding in how to solve problems, with a framework on which to build specialized troubleshooting techniques that are specific to your environment.

Topics include:

Client-server interaction patterns
Multi-variant problem solving
Using formal logic in problem solving
Building workflow checklists for troubleshooting

T11 RRDtool Advanced Topics
Tobias Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Switzerland

Who should attend: Sysadmins who may only have accessed RRDtool through some front-end application such as Cacti or Cricket and would like to get a look under the hood. Attendees are expected to have some scripting experience.

Over the past few years RRDtool has become the standard method for handling time-series data in the networking area. RRDtool takes care of all the work related to data storage and presentation. In this half-day tutorial you will see RRDtool in action: many examples will be demonstrated and explained live.

Take back to work: How to use RRDtool directly to handle time-series data in the networking area.

Topics include:

RRDtool overview

Rundown on components of RRDtool
Update on new functionality in version 1.3

The RRD database format

How RRDtool stores data
Interaction with the OS cache subsystem
Linux tricks
Fixing "bad data" after the fact

How to set up an RRD performance test
RRD graphing

Simple graphs and autoconfiguration
Alternate scaling
Working with transparency
Creating gradients
RPN magic

Putting it together

Scripting interface
The graphv, updatev, and info interfaces

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Wednesday Full-Day Tutorials

W2 Linux Performance Tuning NEW!
Theodore Ts'o, Google

Who should attend: Intermediate and advanced Linux system administrators who want to understand their systems better and get the most out of them.

The Linux operating system is commonly used in both the data center and for scientific computing applications; it is used in embedded systems as small as a wristwatch, as well as in large mainframes. As a result, the Linux system has many tuning knobs, so that it can be optimized for a wide variety of workloads. Some tuning of the Linux operating system has been done "out of the box" by enterprised-optimized distributions, but there are still many opportunities for a system administrator to improve the performance of his or her workloads on a Linux system.

This class will cover the tools that can be used to monitor and analyze a Linux system, and key tuning parameters to optimize Linux for specific server applications, covering the gamut from memory usage to filesystem and storage stacks, networking, and application tuning.

Take back to work: The ability to hone your Linux systems for the specific tasks they need to perform.

Topics include:

Strategies for performance tuning

Characterizing your workload's requirements
Finding bottlenecks
Tools for measuring system performance

Memory usage tuning
Filesystem and storage tuning
NFS performance tuning
Network tuning

Latency vs. throughput
Capacity planning

Profiling
Memory cache and TLB tuning
Application tuning strategies

SANS Security 464 Hacker Detection for System Administrators: Catching the Wily Hacker (Day 2) Seth Misenar, Context Security

See the full class description.

Wednesday Morning Half-Day Tutorials

W3 Monitoring Servers, Networks, and Lunchrooms with Zenoss NEW!
David Nalley, The Fedora Project

Who should attend: Sysadmins and managers who are looking to use or evaluating Zenoss as a monitoring platform, those who are new to monitoring, and those who are experiencing scaling or scope issues with other tools.

To quote Tom Limoncelli, "It's not a service if you aren't monitoring it." A decade ago, monitoring effectively meant either cobbled together, home-grown scripts or massive and inflexible enterprise applications. In the intervening time, monitoring has become a must-have for even the smallest environment, the hodgepodge collection of scripts has grown to become unmaintainable, and the massive enterprise applications, while working well, are slow to respond to the changes happening everywhere. In that interim, monitoring with open source software has effectively become the de facto standard, because, like the browser and operating system, monitoring is now a commodity.

Take back to work: The ability to put the basics of Zenoss and monitoring theory in general into practice immediately, with some understanding of some of Zenoss's more esoteric features.

Zenoss is free/libre open source software for monitoring applications, networks, servers, and even whether the restroom is in use.

Topics include:

Monitoring theory

Status monitoring
Performance monitoring
Predictive monitoring

Overview of Zenoss capabilities
Overview of Zenoss installation
Methods to jumpstart monitoring

Auto discovery
Templating and inheritance

Deep inspection of monitoring capabilities

SNMP
WMI
Network Service Checks
Nagios
Syslog
WBEM
Esoteric things

Dealing with the information/alerts

Reporting
Alerts

Taking your monitoring to the next level

Automated dependency checking
Integration with configuration management systems
ZenPacks—monitoring everything
Event transforms

W4 A Sysadmin's Guide to Navigating the Business World NEW!
Mark Burgess, Cfengine; Carolyn Rowland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Who should attend: IT people and sysadmins interested in taking their career to the next level, improving their relationship with senior management, and increasing their value and marketability.

As a system administrator, you are already a crack technical analyst or engineer, but does your management understand the value and importance of your work? When you ask for staff or funding to support new or existing efforts, does management readily support you? Does management look to you to develop the future of IT services in your organization? Do you feel you have enough time to focus on projects and innovation instead of fire-fighting?

If you answered no to several of the above questions, then this course is for you. The first step toward improving your professional quality of life is to create a positive and collaborative relationship with your management. So why not take responsibility for the relationship? Senior management makes the decisions about budget, staffing, and, often, new services, without understanding the full impact of their decisions. What if you could make yourself part of that process? What if it was easy to ask your management for more resources because they already believed strongly in your positive contribution to the organization?

System administrators often have all the responsibility for IT systems, but none of the control. In this course we bring the two sides together by teaching the system administrator how to communicate effectively so that management will listen and understand. You can use the tactics presented here to increase your value in the organization and improve your marketability.

Make business look good, and you become an important asset to your organization. Your management will appreciate these skills because you will be demonstrating your value in ways they understand and that empower them to make smart IT investment decisions. In turn, your professional credibility increases, putting you in a position to influence decisions impacting your role in the organization.

Take back to work: Skills to help you develop a productive relationship with your management.

Topics include:

How to approach management to ask for resources you need
Empowering management to make good IT decisions
Demonstrating the value of your work in a way that management will understand
Convincing management of the importance of time to innovate (R&D)
Reducing time spent fire-fighting (efficiencies and cost savings)
Growing organizational loyalty for your team
How to build the perception that you are customer-focused and mission-oriented
Ways to communicate the benefits of supporting a strong IT presence

Increased organizational competitiveness
Increased employee productivity
Cost avoidance and efficiencies
Risk management
Knowledge and information management

How to develop a collaborative relationship with your management that enables both sides to be successful

W5 Cfengine 3 for Cfengine 2 Users NEW!
Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Who should attend: Anyone currently using Cfengine 2 or who needs to convert Cfengine 2 promises to Cfengine 3.

Do you use Cfengine? Have you heard that there is a new version but don't know how it differs from what you have now? Have you heard a little or a lot about the new version but have not had a chance to install or experiment with it yet? Would you like an easy and quick way to learn how to upgrade your installation?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, this class will be very helpful to you. It will cover the major features of the Community Edition of Cfengine 3, with frequent references to Cfengine 2 constructs and configuration patterns.

This class will be useful even if you take Mark Burgess's T3 class, Configuration Management Solutions with Cfengine 3!

Take back to work: How to migrate from Cfengine 2 to Cfengine 3, with an understanding of the new features and syntax of Cfengine 3.

Topics include:

New Cfengine 3 syntax
Unified and integrated treatment of files
Process handling
Local entry-mode operation

Wednesday Afternoon Half-Day Tutorials

W6 Practical Project Management for Sysadmins and IT Professionals
Strata Rose Chalup, Project Management Consultant

Who should attend: System administrators who want to stay hands-on as team leads or system architects and need a new set of skills with which to tackle bigger, more complex challenges. No previous experience with project management is required.

People who have been through traditional multi-day project management courses will be shocked, yet refreshed, by the practicality of our approach. To get the most out of this tutorial, participants should have some real-world project or complex task in mind for the lab sections.

This tutorial focuses on complementing your own organizational style (or lack thereof) with a toolbox of ways to organize and manage complex tasks without drowning in paperwork or clumsy, meeting-intensive methodologies. Also emphasized is how to bridge the gap between ad hoc methods and the kinds of tracking and reporting traditionally trained managers will understand.

Take back to work: A no-nonsense grounding in methods that work without adding significantly to one's workload.

Topics include:

Quick basics of project management
Skill sets
Problem areas
Project management tools

W7 Over the Edge System Administration, Volume 1
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

Who should attend: Old-timers who think they've already seen it all and those who want to develop inventive thinking early in their career. Join us and be prepared to be delighted, disgusted, and amazed. Most of all, be ready to enrich your network and system adminstration by learning to be different.

It's time to learn how to break the rules, abuse the tools, and generally turn your system administration knowledge inside out. This class is a cornucopia of ideas for creative ways to take the standard (and sometimes not-so-standard) system administration tools and techniques and use them in ways no one would expect. We'll also cover some tools you may have missed.

Note: The teacher takes no responsibility should your head explode during this class.

Take back to work: New approaches to old problems, along with some ways to solve the insolubles.

Topics include:

How to (ab)use perfectly good network transports by using them for purposes never dreamed of by their authors
How to increase user satisfaction during downtimes with 6 lines of Perl
How to improve your network services by intentionally throwing away data
How to drive annoying Web-only applications that don't have a command line interface—without lifting a finger
How to use ordinary objects you have lying around the house, such as Silly Putty, to make your life easier (seriously!)

W8 Take a Gulp from the Sysadmin Automation Firehose
Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Who should attend: System administrators who want to explore new ways of automating administrative tasks. Shell scripts are appropriate for many jobs, but more complex operations will often benefit from sophisticated tools.

As the complexity of modern UNIX/Linux systems has increased, the tried-and-true method of "just write a shell script" has become outdated. While simple tasks can still be performed this way, tools are available that can make your job simpler, yet much more sophisticated, especially when managing large numbers of systems.

Take back to work: An introduction to the most essential tools for making your work easier. For each tool, we will consider what tasks it does well, how to get started using it, and which of its advanced features to consider next.

Topics include:

Expect: Automating interactive processes
Bacula: Open source enterprise backup
Nagios: Monitoring network and device performance
RRDTool: Examining retrospective system data
Front ends to RRDTool: Munin and others
Other tools of interest and importance

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Thursday Full-Day Tutorials

R1 VMware ESX Performance and Tuning
Richard McDougall, VMware

Who should attend: Anyone who is involved in planning or deploying virtualization on VMware ESX and wants to understand the performance characteristics of applications in a virtualized environment.

We will walk through the implications to performance and capacity planning in a virtualized world to learn about how to achieve best performance in a VMware ESX enviroment.

Take back to work: How to plan, understand, characterize, diagnose, and tune for best application performance on VMware ESX.

Topics include:

Introduction to virtualization
Understanding different hardware acceleration techniques for virtualization
Diagnosing performance using VMware tools
Diagnosing performance using guest OS tools in a virtual environment
Practical limits and overheads for virtualization
Storage performance
Network throughput and options
Using Virtual-SMP
Guest Operating System Types
Understanding the characteristics of key applications, including Oracle, MS SQLserver, and MS Exchange
Capacity planning techniques

R2 Issues in Infrastructure Design
Lee Damon, University of Washington

Who should attend: Anyone who is designing, implementing, or maintaining a UNIX environment with 2 to 20,000+ hosts; system administrators, architects, and managers who need to maintain multiple hosts, real or virtual, with few admins.

This intermediate class will examine many of the background issues that need to be considered during the design and implementation of a mixed-architecture, mixed hard- and virtual-architecture, or single-architecture UNIX environment. It will cover issues from authentication (single sign-on) to the Holy Grail of single system images.

This class won't implement a "perfect solution," as each site has different needs. We will look at some freeware and some commercial solutions, as well as many of the tools that exist to make a workable environment possible.

Take back to work: Answers to the questions you should ask while designing and implementing the mixed-architecture, mixed hard- and virtual-architecture, or single-architecture UNIX environment that will meet your needs.

Topics include:

Administrative domains: Who is responsible for what, and what can users do for themselves?
Desktop services vs. farming: Do you do serious computation on the desktop, or do you build a compute farm?
Disk layout: How do you plan for an upgrade? Where do things go?
Free vs. purchased solutions: Should you write your own, or hire a consultant or company?
Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous: Homogeneous is easier, but will it do what your users need?
Where does virtualization fit in?
Extending your infrastructure into the clouds
The essential master database: How can you keep track of what you have?
Policies to make life easier
Push vs. pull
Getting the user back online in 5 minutes
Remote administration: lights-out operation; remote user sites; keeping up with vendor patches, etc.
Scaling and sizing: How do you plan on scaling?
Security vs. sharing: Your users want access to everything. So do the crackers . . .
Single sign-on: How can you do it securely?
Single system images: Can users see just one environment, no matter how many OSes there are?
Tools: The free, the purchased, the homegrown

R3 Pacemaker and Linux-HA: World-Class High Availability Software
UPDATED FOR 2010!
Alan Robertson, IBM Linux Technology Center

Who should attend: System administrators and IT architects who architect, evaluate, install, or manage critical computing systems. It is suggested that participants have basic familiarity with system V/LSB-style startup scripts, shell scripting, and XML. Familiarity with high availability concepts is not assumed.

The Linux-HA project (https://linux-ha.org/), together with its child project, Pacemaker, is the oldest and most powerful open source high-availability (HA) package available, comparing favorably to well-known commercial HA packages. This software runs on a variety of POSIX-like systems, including FreeBSD, Solaris, and OS X.

Pacemaker+Linux-HA provides highly available services on clusters from one to more than 16 nodes with no single point of failure. These services and the servers they run on are monitored. If a service should fail to operate correctly, or a server should fail, the affected services will be quickly restarted or migrated to another server, dramatically improving service availability.

Pacemaker supports rules for expressing dependencies between services, and powerful rules for locating services in the cluster. Because these services are derived from init service scripts, they are familiar to system administrators and are easy to configure and manage.

Take back to work: Both the basic theory of high availability systems and practical knowledge of how to plan, install, and configure highly available systems using Linux-HA and Pacemaker.

Topics include:

General HA principles
Installation of the Linux-HA and Pacemaker software
Configuration overview
Overview of commonly used resource agents
Managing services supplied with init(8) scripts
Sample configurations for Apache, NFS, DHCP, DNS, and Samba
Writing and testing resource agents conforming to the Open Cluster Framework (OCF) specification
Creating detailed resource dependencies
Creating co-location constraints
Writing resource location constraints
Causing failovers on user-defined conditions

Thursday Morning Half-Day Tutorial

R4 Advanced UNIX Tools NEW!
Doug Hughes, D. E. Shaw Research, LLC

Who should attend: Sysadmins who wish to refresh their memories about underutilized and underappreciated tools that have been part of the shell world for a long time.

Participants should be familiar with basic shell use, common commands such as cut and ls, and some basic usage of things like awk. We will explore advanced commands in a practical manner, with applications aimed at performance analysis through frequency analysis, statistical methods, and practical shell hackery.

Take back to work: How, why, and when to use a variety of tools that deserve respect and regular use.

Topics include:

Quick and dirty tools: paste, col, split, fold, yes, sdiff
Frequency and statistical analysis with awk
Topological sorting for ordering items
xargs—why you should use it more
diff, dircmp, diff3—compare and contrast
Checking memory issues
Advanced tricks with dd

Thursday Afternoon Half-Day Tutorials

R5 Over the Edge System Administration, Volume 2
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

Join us for volume 2 of the wildly successful Over the Edge System Administration class series. Once again we'll learn how to break the rules, abuse the tools, and generally turn your system administration knowledge inside out with the help of a whole new set of examples. This class is a second cornucopia of ideas for creative ways to take the standard (and sometimes not-so-standard) system administration tools and techniques and use them in ways no one would expect. We'll also cover some tools you may have missed. This class will take some of the concepts from volume 1 and develop them even further.

We feel it is important to remind you: The teacher takes no responsibility should your head explode during this class.

Take back to work: Approaches to system administration you never dreamed of—but you wish you had!

Topics include:

How to exploit side effects to your benefit
Applying the arts and crafts you learned in camp to system administration
Pressing Web apps from places like Google and Yahoo! into service as sysadmin tools
How to perform SQL queries on your network equipment
How to use even more ordinary objects you have lying around the house to make your life easier (seriously!)

Friday, November 12, 2010

Friday Full-Day Tutorials

F1 Using Amazon Web Services NEW!
William LeFebvre, Digital Valence, LLC; Marc Staveley, Consultant

Who should attend: System administrators who currently use or are considering the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as individuals who are tasked with supporting AWS for production services, especially if they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the command-line tools and the Web-based interfaces supplied by Amazon. Experience with cloud computing is not required. Experience with the installation and support of basic tools and languages (especially Java and Ruby) would be beneficial. Time will only permit us to study the creation and support of Linux instances in the Amazon cloud.

Amazon offers a solid collection of cloud services through the Amazon Web Services (AWS). These include virtual machines and storage, load balancers, replicated databases, content data delivery, and automatic scaling and monitoring. AWS provides a very rich API to facilitate building applications that utilize these services, but the actual user interfaces can be difficult to master. This tutorial introduces the Amazon Web Services and describes the more popular services and how they can all fit together to support an infrastructure. It provides in-depth instruction on using the user-level interfaces for the more popular services: EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, Cloudfront, and others. Three interfaces will be taught: the Web console, the Firefox plug-in Elasticfox, and the command-line tools. Cautions and pitfalls will be presented along the way to ensure that the student will not make some common mistakes of first-time AWS users.

Take back to work: Knowledge of the techniques, pitfalls, commands, and programs that will help you make effective use of Amazon Web Services (the Amazon cloud).

Topics include:

Introduction to AWS
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Simple Storage Service (S3)
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Relational Database Service (RDS)
More in-depth topics: accessing EC2 instance data from within the instance, boot-time scripts in common AMIs

F2 Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)
James Mauro, Oracle Corporation

Who should attend: Sysadmins and other production support staff that need to look at systems and figure out what they're doing or why they're running slowly on a regular basis. Some general programming knowledge will be assumed, along the lines of writing shell, awk, or Perl scripts, as well as general familiarity with using and administering systems running some variant of UNIX.

This tutorial covers using the Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology that originated in Solaris and OpenSolaris and is now available in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and FreeBSD 8.0. DTrace is a framework that allows for dynamically inserting points of instrumentation, called probes, in the operating system (kernel) as well as user processes.

This session will combine slides with live demos of DTrace on several operating systems.

Take back to work: How to use Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology to understand the behavior of your systems and the workloads they run, whether you're chasing a performance problem or pathological behavior or you simply wish to better understand how applications are using the underlying system.

Topics include:

Introduction to DTrace
DTrace components
Using DTrace
DTrace in open source software
DTrace advanced topics

F3 Automating Network Configuration and Management NEW!
D. Brent Chapman, Netomata, Inc.

Who should attend: Network and system administrators who want to bring the benefits of automated configuration and management to their networks. These benefits include consistency, reliability, repeatability, and scalability; the automation techniques covered apply to the whole range of network devices (routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) and services (SNMP status and performance monitoring, DNS, DHCP, ACLs, routing, etc.). Students should already be generally familiar with networking fundamentals (addressing, naming, routing, etc.), the roles and basic methods of operation of common network devices and services, and how these devices and services are typically configured and managed by hand; this tutorial isn't going to teach you what a firewall is or how it works, for example, but it will teach you how to automate the configuration and management of a typical firewall.

This tutorial introduces students to a variety of network automation principles and practices, as well as to specific network automation tools such as Netomata Config Generator (NCG) for generating device/service config files, RANCID and ZipTie for managing configs on devices, and Nagios and MRTG for SNMP network status and performance monitoring. In addition, the tutorial shows how to integrate these network automation tools with host automation tools such as Puppet and Cfengine.

Take back to work: Effective techniques for automating the configuration and management of common network devices and services, as well as approaches to getting the most out of automation and arguments to convince peers, managers, and executives that automation is worth the effort.

Topics include: