BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS

Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic.

Vendor BoFs
Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your company's latest technologies with LISA attendees? Host a Vendor BoF! These sponsored one-hour sessions give companies a chance to talk about products and proprietary technology—and they include promotional benefits. Email sponsorship@usenix.org if you're interested in sponsoring a Vendor BoF. Click here for more information about sponsorship opportunities.

Scheduling a BoF
To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on one of the BoF Boards located in the registration area in the Ballroom Foyer. If you have a description of our BoF you'd like posted on this Web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send its title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "LISA '11 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule

BoF Descriptions

SMALL Installation Systems Administration
Christopher DeMarco, MAYA Design
Monday, December 5, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Constitution A

Implementation and practice are totally different at a small organization.

OpenAFS Community
Brian Sebby, Argonne National Laboratory
Monday, December 5, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Constitution B

AFS is a distributed file system that is available on a broad range of platforms and provides global access to a unified namespace providing location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration capabilities. OpenAFS is the open source, community maintained branch of the AFS software originally developed by IBM/Transarc. While OpenAFS now has its own conference, this BoF is intended for AFS administrators at LISA to meet and discuss any issues they may be having, and for people interested in AFS to find out more information.

Software Patents and Linux
Deb Nicholson, Open Invention Network
Monday, December 5, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Gardner

If you're a Linux developer or you work with Linux developers, it's important to understand the situation with software patents. Learn more about the current landscape and what you may be able to do about it.

Information Management for Sites: How Do We Organize?
Monday, December 5, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Constitution A

Config Management=Desired. CMDB=Actual?
Christopher Hoey, Wireless Generation
Monday, December 5, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Constitution A

You define the desired state of your system in your configuration management tool. You want a CMDB because that is all the rage these days. Is your configuration management tool a CMDB? Come share your CMDB hacks/projects/works and see a quick overview of a CouchDB based CMDB we built in house to compare the actual state of our systems to the desired state of the system. We would like to give this work to the community but come give us feedback if the idea is even sane to begin with. =)

Opscode Vendor BoF
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Fairfax A

devops BoF
Kris Buytaert
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Gardner

Some call this phenomenon devops, others agile system administration. Truth is that agile techniques used in development have an impact on the way operations organizes its work. Similarly, operations and sysadmins are becoming programmers because of the virtualization and automation trend, where everything is managed through an API. devops is a new movement—it's the way lots of sysadmin people have been working, do work, or should work. So if you are a developer with a interest in system administration, or a sysadmin interested in development, join us in the discussion.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Friends BoF
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Hampton

Oracle Vendor BoF: Oracle Vendor BoF: Zero Downtime Updates for Oracle Linux with Ksplice
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Republic A

On July 21, 2011, Oracle announced that it has acquired Ksplice, a privately-held company based in Cambridge, MA. Ksplice is the creator of innovative zero downtime update technology for Linux. The addition of Ksplice's technology will increase the security, reliability and availability of Oracle Linux by enabling customers to apply security updates, diagnostics patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting. As of September 1st, 2011, this technology is available for Oracle Linux Premier Support customers. In this session you will hear about:

• The benefits of Ksplice patching in customer's Linux environment
• How Ksplice technology will help save money by avoiding downtime and remain compliant with security vulnerability and critical patch updates
• The impact in a multi-tier application environment when applying patches

Cambridge Storage Vendor BoF
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Republic B

Want free beer? Want free ice cream? Want a sneak peek at the hottest topics in storage and data protection? If you answered "yes" to at least one of these questions, then plan to join Cambridge Computer and its selected storage technology showcase partners at this BoF. To show our thanks and appreciation to the USENIX and SAGE community, we invite all LISA attendees to join us for an informal evening of beer, ice cream, and a little bit of storage sprinkled on top.

CFEngine Vendor BoF
Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Fairfax A

Come meet the team behind CFEngine 3!

ScaleXtreme Vendor BoF: Managing Compute Systems from the Cloud
Nand Mulchandani, CEO and Co-Founder, ScaleXtreme, Inc.
Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Berkeley

ScaleXtreme offers a radically different and easier way of managing your servers, enabling developers to roll up their sleeves and get into operations faster than ever. We transform the way IT admins manage their Amazon EC2, VMware virtual machine and physical server deployments—allowing them to focus on writing code rather than worry about provisioning servers. Our Dynamic Server Assembly™ gives Devops the unprecedented agility to build and deploy templates across both physical servers and multiple cloud providers. ScaleXtreme is designed from the ground up to be simple, scalable and social so that Devops can build bridges between applications and infrastructure faster than ever.

VMware Vendor BoF
John Arrasjid, Principal Architect in GTS Solutions and Services, VMware; Carlos Camacho, vShield Engineer, VMware; Alexandre Depoutovich, Sr. Member of Technical Staff, Kernel & Performance, Storage, VMware; Robert Ide, Sr. Systems Engineer, SpringSource Field Sales, VMware; Felicia Jadczak, VMAP Project Analyst, VMware; Aju John, Director, R&D, Storage, VMware; Ben Lin, Cloud Architect in GTS Center of Excellence, VMware; Steve Muir, VMAP Director, VMware; Phil Pearl, Consulting Architect, VMware Applications, Zimbra, VMware; Mahesh Rajani, Cloud Architect in GTS Center of Excellence, VMware; Meagan Shannon, University Relations, VMware; Todd Valentine, VMAP Intern/Student Cloud, VMware; Matthew Wendorf, University Relations, VMware; Elisha Ziskind, Staff Engineer, Availability, Clustering, & Federation, VMware
Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Republic A

We invite all LISA attendees to join us for an informal gathering with refreshments and virtualization. (The drinks will not be virtual). Ask questions, learn more about the cool projects we're currently working on, and mingle with other attendees. We'll also be raffling off some awesome prizes, including our grand prize: a Kindle Fire!

SRE@Google: Thousands of DevOps Since 2004
Tom Limoncelli, Google NYC
Tuesday, December 6, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Fairfax B

Tom will describe technologies and policies that Google uses to do what is (now) called DevOps. Google doesn't just empower developers and operations to work together, we have a system that empowers all groups to be their own devops team. (This is a repeat of his opening keynote at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop.)

Getting Started with Configuration Management
Cory Lueninghoener, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Tuesday, December 6, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Republic B

Are all of your friends talking about configuration management, but you don't know where to start? Do you have a friend who needs to jump on the bandwagon but just hasn't been able to? Did you make mistakes during your deployment that you don't want others to make again? Come talk about what's keeping you back, what has helped get you going, what tools have worked well for you, and anything else that can help the process. Make this year the year that you finally get your configurations managed. Experienced and inexperienced configuration managers welcome.

Extopus and RemOcular: Tobi Oetiker's New OSS Monitoring Tools
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG
Tuesday, December 6, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Berkeley

In this BoF I will present two new OSS tools I have been working on in 2011:
   Extopus: A Web 2.0 front end to existing monitoring systems. Extopus can integrate millions of nodes from multiple monitoring servers into a single front end. Visualization plugins provide custom presentation for each node type. The ability to integrate all nodes into a single tree structure, as well as full search capabilities, make this tool especially powerful. http://www.extopus.org
   RemOcular: An attractive Web 2.0 front end to UNIX command-line information-gathering tools (top, traceroute, df, nmap, etc.). RemOcular makes it extremely simple to cater to environments where shell access is not possible or not desirable. http://www.remocular.org
   Both tools are plugin-based—the ideal hacking target for all you new devops.

Oracle Solaris 11 Engineering Panel Vendor BoF
Bart Smaalders, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle; Mike Gerdts, Senior Software Engineer, Oracle; Sebastian Roy, Software Engineer, Oracle; Dave Miner, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle; Glenn Faden, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Oracle; David Brean, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle; Mark Maybee, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle; Gia-Khan Nguyen, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Back Bay A

This session covers Oracle Solaris 11, the first Cloud OS, which was released on November 9, 2011. Come learn why Oracle Solaris 11 is the best OS to run your applications, be it your custom apps, Oracle apps or any other 3rd party ISV apps. Solaris 11 not only offers world-record scale and performance, but also introduces a number of break-through features, everything from world-class network virtualization, zfs encryption and deduplication, immutable zones, just to name a few. In this session you'll get to talk directly to the engineers behind these innovations.

PuppetLab Vendor BoF
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Fairfax A

Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group Vendor BoF
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Back Bay C

Come join us for beer and snacks and discuss the challenges, ideas, and best practices for deploying, managing, and using Firefox, the most widely used open source web browser on the desktop! Hear the latest regarding future direction for desktop and mobile, ask questions, trade tips and tricks, and provide us with valuable feedback on topics such as rapid release, version numbering, and deployment. Be part of the Mozilla community, and help shape the future of the free and open web! We will be giving away one Asus Eee Pad Transformer, one Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Firefox t-shirts and stickers!

USENIX BoF
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Beacon A

Come meet the USENIX Board and staff. Find out what's going on, give us your ideas on how we can better serve you, and enjoy some refreshments.

HPC
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Beacon B

The Assimilation Monitoring System
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Beacon A

• "Resistance is Futile
• Scalability
• Stealth discovery

NFSv4.1 and pNFS Ready for Prime Time Deployment
Sorin Faibish, EMC
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Berkeley

With the acceptance of RFC 5661, NFSv4.1 and pNFS entered the implementation and deployment phase. Most of the NFSv4.1 and pNFS code is already checked into the Linux kernel, and many early adapters are already using NFSv4.1 and pNFS file, block and object layouts. We expect the major Linux distributions to include pNFS and NFSv4.1 in their distributions. This BOF will offer current information on the availability of NFSv4.1 implementations now reaching the market, and attendees will have the opportunity to provide direct feedback to major vendors on user requirements.

Skybot Software Vendor BoF: Stump Industry Experts at This Automation Challenge!
Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology, and Anna Deuel, Product Support Manager, Skybot Software
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Fairfax A

Accept our automation challenge and get your geek on! Try to stump our Regional Sales Manager and her trusty sidekick, our Technical Consultant, with your most complex business processes. If they can't find a way to automate them using our flagship product, Skybot Scheduler, you win a free t-shirt! Even if you don't participate, this is a great opportunity to meet the hottest up-and-coming WLA tool, Skybot Scheduler. Enjoy a cocktail and network with other IT professionals as we discuss the challenges, options, and best practices for automating your data center and how Skybot Scheduler can help. Stick around until the end—all attendees are eligible to win a $100 gift card from ThinkGeek.com!

Gluster BoF
John Mark Walker, gluster.org community guy, and Jeff Darcy, Red Hat Sr. Filesystem Engineer
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Clarendon

It's been a few weeks since our acquisition by Red Hat. Things have been moving forward fairly rapidly since then, and you may have questions about what has changed regarding the direction of GlusterFS and associated projects. Come to our meetup and learn about all the exciting things that are happening and how you can benefit. Here is just a sampling of what will be included in the discussion:

• HekaFS—the multi-tenancy extension for cloud providers
• Feature list for 3.3—Simultaneous file and object access, HDFS compatibility, and more
• Tentative release schedule
• Project structure—changes are afoot for gluster.org
• How you can get involved

OTN-OU Vendor BoF: Oracle Resources for System Administrators
Rick Ramsey
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Back Bay A

Isilon Vendor BoF: Design and Administration of Extremely Large Data Clusters
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Berkeley

This BoF will cover optimal design and administration/operation of extremely large file-oriented data clusters using the Isilon OneFS filesystem. Best practices to manage and expand clusters of petabyte and tens-of-petabyte scale will be discussed, as well as applicability to analytic workloads and concurrent performance models.

LOPSA Annual Meeting and Town Hall
Philip Kizer, LOPSA
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Back Bay C

Join us for this League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) meeting and town hall to meet fellow system administrators, hear the latest news about LOPSA, and ask questions or give feedback about our profession or LOPSA itself.

The Assimilation Monitoring System
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Beacon A

• "Resistance is futile"
• Scalability
• Stealth discovery

Identity Management
Wednesday, December 7, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Beacon B

LOPSA Mentorship Program
LOPSA Mentorship Program
Wednesday, December 7, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Back Bay C

Meet the LOPSA Mentorship Program and hear about the state and future outlook of the program.

Oracle Solaris 11—Cloud Management Vendor BoF
Bart Smaalders, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle; Dave Miner, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle
Wednesday, December 7, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Back Bay A

This session covers How Oracle Solaris 11 redefines life cycle management in both a cloud environment as well as in a traditional data center environment. With Oracle Solaris 11 we are introducing the concept of boot environments which allow you to safely update Oracle Solaris in a fraction of the time it takes for other OS'es by leveraging the power of ZFS. You can safely roll-back to your previous environment. By stream-lining the reboot process Oracle Solaris 11 allows you to do that 2-3 times faster than other OS'es. Together with the new Image Packaging System and the Automated Installer, Oracle Solaris 11 provides you with the agility and simplicity you need to manage a large-scale infrastructure safely.

Bcfg2 BoF
Narayan Desai, Argonne National Lab, and Chris St. Pierre, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Wednesday, December 7, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Berkeley

IBM Power Systems (AIX)
Garry Dale, AIX System Admin in Houston, TX
Wednesday, December 7, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Clarendon

Meet other system admins with interests in IBM Power Systems and AIX.

Configuration Management from the Trenches
Nico Halpern and Noble Thomas, Wireless Generation
Wednesday, December 7, 10:30 p.m.–11:30 p.m., Berkeley

What configuration management system do you use? Why did you choose it? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? What do you wish could be improved?

In this BoF we'd like to discuss what configuration management systems and in-house tools various folks are using. This is a time to compare notes and best practices, and share war stories.

Dropbox Vendor BoF
Wednesday, December 7, 9:30 p.m.–11:30 p.m., Fairfax A

Happy hour with Dropbox! Hang out with the Dropbox crew. Enjoy dessert and open bar.

Nagios
Wednesday, December 7, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Beacon A

• Open discussion
• Scalability & performance
• Designing a monitoring architecture
• Anything Nagios!

Zenoss Vendor BoF: An Introduction to the Core 4 Architecture
Simon Jakesch, Zenoss
Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Fairfax A

Service Orchestration: The Next Step in DevOps Evolution
Robbie Williamson, Ubuntu Server Director of Engineering, Canonical
Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Fairfax B

Ubuntu is the #1 operating system for the cloud right now, we at Canonical want to keep bringing the best experience possible for users who need to deploy and/or operate within a cloud. This BoF will cover the current engineering efforts within Ubuntu Server focused on improving the cloud experience, highlighting the recent work we've done around our Juju project and the concept of service orchestration.

illumos—the Open Fork of OpenSolaris
Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Beacon A

Storage Management for Scientific Research Data
Jacob Farmer and David Bernick, Cambridge Computer
Thursday, December 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Beacon B

An open discussion of the challenges and possible solutions. Topics include: tiered storage; life cycle management; charge-back; content classification; backups; collaboration; etc.

Google Vendor BoF
Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Commonwealth

Google is back for their annual beer and ice cream social. Join Google Engineers at their vendor BoF, enjoy dessert and refreshments, and participate in the raffle!

Splunk Users
Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Fairfax A

Application-aware/Session-based Routing
Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Fairfax B

Converged applications, virtualization, horizontal and vertical cloud computing models are rapidly changing how networks are being conceived and built to accommodate the demands of today and the needs of tomorrow. An old idea that has recently reemerged and is application aware is session based routing (AAR/SBR). Over the years this concept has been executed in various forms in software and hardware and by product vendors and researchers alike. This BOF will review current vendor thinking around this area, the need and application of AAR/SBR in cloud and enterprise computing environment.

Higher Education & Friends
Christopher Allison and David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science
Thursday, December 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Beacon A

Many aspects of systems administration at a college, university, or other research or educational institution are indistinguishable from the work encountered by our colleagues in private industry, government, and other sectors. Other aspects—either of the work we do or the environments in which we do it—stand in stark contrast to the experiences of systems administrators working in other fields.
   Come talk about the challenges, rewards, and quirks of being a sys admin in higher ed and research organizations; bring any matters on which you'd like input, as well as any secrets to success that you'd like to share with others.

Vogzant for Sysadmins
Thursday, December 8, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Fairfax A

HealthOPS: Using Metrics to Improve Your Health and Lose Weight
Thursday, December 8, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Fairfax B