Technical Sessions: Weds., November 6 | Thurs., November 7 | Fri., November 8 | All in one file

• Keynote (Wednesday morning)
• General Refereed Paper Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Invited Talks Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Networking Track (Wednesday)
• Security Track (Thursday)
• Guru Is In Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Work-in-Progress Reports (Friday, 2pm)
• LISA Game Show (Friday, 4pm)

Keynote: Scaling the Web: An Overview of Google (A Linux Cluster for Fun and Profit)
Jim Reese, Chief Operations Engineer, Google

Want to know how to build an Internet search engine that indexes several terabytes of data—over 3 billion Web documents—and serves it up at a rate of thousands of requests per second? (Hint: Start with a farm of 10,000+ Linux servers.) This talk will cover the technology behind Google: company overview, search parameters and results, hardware and query load balancing, Linux cluster topology, scalability, fault tolerance, and more.

Working Smarter

Chair: Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Awarded Best Paper!
Work-Augmented Laziness with the Los Task Request System
Thomas Stepleton, Swarthmore College Computer Society

Spam Blocking with a Dynamically Updated Firewall Ruleset
Deeann M.M. Mikula, Chris Tracy, and Mike Holling, Telerama Public Access Internet

Holistic Quota Management: The Natural Path to a Better, More Efficient Quota System
Michael Gilfix, Tufts University

Domain Name Server Comparison: BIND 8 vs. BIND 9 vs. djbdns vs. ???

Brad Knowles, Snow BV

Name server administration is getting harder. With "black hats" trying to break in or use your machine for attacks elsewhere, 5kr1pt-k1dd135 DoS-ing it, and misconfigured clients burying it, you still have to serve your clients. We'll look at DNS server programs for RFC compliance, performance, ease of use, and security. We'll also survey the root and various TLD name servers. Finally, we'll recommend improvements, with particular attention paid to the default installation.

Security on Macintosh OS X

John Hurley, Apple, Inc.

Leveraging the power of UNIX, many security features have been integrated into Apple's new operating system. The security architecture will be presented, along with ideas on how to configure and use the security features of OS X.

As the Security Policy Architect for Apple, John Hurley works with the Data Security team and other groups at Apple to define the security policies for Mac OS X.

SAMBA Guru

Gerald Carter, SAMBA Team/
Hewlett-Packard

Gerald has been a member of the SAMBA Team since 1998. At Hewlett-Packard, he works on Samba-based print appliances and acts as the release coordinator for the SAMBA project. He is currently working on a guide to LDAP for system administrators with O'Reilly Publishing and is the author of Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours for Sams Publishing.

Service, Risk, and Scale

Chair: Alex Keller, IBM Research

Application Aware Management
of Internet Data Center Software
Alain Mayer, CenterRun, Inc.

Geographically Distributed System for Catastrophic Recovery
Kevin Adams, NSWCDD

Embracing and Extending
Windows 2000
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Load Balancers

Tony Bourke

Tony Bourke will inspect the changing landscape of server load balancing
technology, including the integration of SSL acceleration, persistence issues, and performance metrics. This talk will go into both problems and solutions for today's site administrator, offering advice on challenges ranging from technical issues to office politics.

The Evolving Ethics of System Administration

Lee Damon, University of Washington, & Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director

We'll start with a discussion of the ethics canons of various SAGE organizations and continue on to an interactive, bi-mediated debate on some practical ethical situations from the workplace. Raise your awareness of real-world ethical dilemmas and how to avoid them (or cope with them once they're upon you!).

AFS Gurus

Esther Filderman, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and
Garry Zacheiss, MIT

Having worked for Carnegie Mellon University since 1988, Esther has been working with AFS since its toddlerhood. She is currently a Senior Systems Mangler and AFS administrator for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. As a member of the Athena Server Operations team, Garry maintains and expands the AFS cells used by Athena.

Practical Theory

Chair: Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

Stem: The System Administration Enabler
Uri Guttman, Stem Systems, Inc.

Pan: A High-Level Configuration Language
Lionel Cons and Piotr Poznanski, CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research

Why Order Matters: Turing Equivalence in Automated Systems Administration
Steve Traugott, TerraLuna LLC, and Lance Brown, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Large-Scale 802.11 Deployment

Tim Pozar, Late Night Software

802.11 technology has significantly reduced the cost and technical knowledge needed to deploy wireless networking, making 802.11 radios attractive not only for the office and home user but to ISPs for last-mile, to educational institutions and corporations for campus networking, and to the Internet activist working on full neighborhood connectivity. This presentation will address what the technology can and can't do, available equipment, security, and the regulatory issues in deploying networks.

The Constitutional & Financial Argument Against Spam

Daniel V. Klein, LoneWolf Systems

Spam: you either loathe it or you hate it. It consumes bandwidth, disk space, and, perhaps most important, your time. It is, however, defended by the spammers themselves as an exercise of free speech. We will look at how spammers avoid detection and payment, and how you can defend against spam. The ultimate thrust of the talk will be to show the economic impact of spam and to examine the
constitutional arguments against it.

Consulting Guru

Nick Stoughton, MSB Associates

Nick is a principal with MSB Associates. He has been working as a
consultant since 1984, with both small and large consulting firms, and has undertaken projects ranging from one day to over one year in duration. Nick
is well known as a specialist in International Standards and in help desk systems and has a wealth of experience in Open Systems development and administration.

Logging and Monitoring

Chair: Marcus Ranum, Ranum.com

A New Architecture for Managing Enterprise Log Data
Adam Sah, Addamark Technologies, Inc.

MieLog: A Highly Interactive Visual Log Browser Using Information Visualization and Statistical Analysis
Tetsuji Takada and Hideki Koike, University of Electro-Communications

Process Monitor: Detecting Events That Didn't Happen
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Internet Security: Beyond Firewalls, Passwords, and Crypto

Peter Salus, Matrix NetSystems, Inc.

If you are safely dug in behind your firewall and everyone in your company employs password security and cryptography, are you OK? No. You're as safe as the inhabitants of a mediaeval city under siege. DDoS attacks and SYN floods render you helpless, for businesses require constant traffic.

Using graphs and numbers from past attacks, this presentation will discuss the nature of such attacks and will suggest ways their effects can be reduced.

Risk-Taking vs. Management

Paul Evans

The fundamental role of operational management in the modern corporation is to balance the equation of putting assets at risk in the service of profit. What happens in a world where management doesn't understand the risks well enough to judge? The experience of the dot-com years gives the answer: managers will underestimate familiar risk and overestimate unfamiliar risk. In combination with the obsessively risk-averse American culture of the 1990s, this fact about human nature produced some very unfortunate economic consequences. Find out what happens when Boss-bert meets the world of production Internet service operations!

Backups Guru

W. Curtis Preston,
The Storage Group, Inc.

Curtis is the president of a storage consulting firm focused on bridging the gap between customers and storage products. Curtis has ten years' experience designing storage systems for environments both large and small. He has advised the major product vendors regarding product features and implementation methods. Curtis is the administrator of the NetBackup and NetWorker FAQs, and answers the "Ask The Experts" backup forum on SearchStorage.com. He is the author of O'Reilly's UNIX Backup & Recovery and Using SANs & NAS, as well as a monthly column in Storage Magazine.

Short Subjects

Chair: Alva Couch, Tufts University

An Analysis of RPM Validation Drift
John Hart and Jeffrey D'Amelia, Tufts University

Awarded Best Paper!
RTG: A Scalable SNMP Statistics Architecture for Service Providers
Robert Beverly, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

Environmental Acquisition in Network Management
Mark Logan, Matthias Felleisen, and David Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

A Simple Way to Estimate the Cost of Downtime
David A. Patterson, University of California at Berkeley

The Promise of Privacy

Len Sassaman, Consultant

More than ten years have passed since the release of the controversial encryption program PGP, which proclaimed itself "encryption for the masses". In this presentation, I will discuss how PGP and other privacy-enhancing technologies have failed in their mission. I will examine the different problems that companies, governments, implementers, and individuals face when attempting to harness the benefits of privacy-enhancing technologies, using PGP as the primary example of these failures.

Among the issues: the importance of usability, reliability, and interoperability, the role of government interference, and public misconceptions.

So You Want to Do a Startup?

Eric Allman, Sendmail, Inc.

So you want to start your own company. Is it too late to talk you out of it? Let me warn you: it probably won't turn out the way you expect. Company founders have to deal with a maze of annoying but critical details you know nothing about, and you often have to make decisions without all the information you feel you need.

In this talk I'll relate some of my experiences founding Sendmail, Inc. I am (more accurately, used to be) an engineer, so that's the perspective you'll hear. The focus will be on the first six months, but
I will also talk about how the company adapted to fast growth followed by the loud pop of the Internet Bubble—and how I've changed and adapted with it.

Perl/Scripting Gurus

Daniel V. Klein, LoneWolf Systems, and Mark-Jason Dominus, Plover Systems Co.

Dan Klein started programming in Perl in 1995, about a month before he started teaching it (the best way to learn things is to tackle new problems, and there's no better way to find new problems than to hear other people's). He is the author of dozens of Perl-based Web applications, and tends to specialize in logfile analysis and compression.

Mark-Jason Dominus has been programming in Perl since 1992. He is a moderator of the comp.lang.perl. moderated newsgroup; the author of the Text::Template, Tie::File, and Memoize modules; a contributor to the Perl core; and author of the perlreftut man page. Last year his work on the Rx regular expression debugger won the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility.

Service and Network Upgrades

Chair: Steve Traugott, TerraLuna LLC

Defining and Monitoring Service-Level Agreements for Dynamic e-Business
Alexander Keller and Heiko Ludwig, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

HotSwap–Transparent Server Failover for Linux
Noel Burton-Krahn, HotSwap Network Solutions

Over-Zealous Security Administrators Are Breaking the Internet
Richard van den Berg, Trust Factory b.v.; and Phil Dibowitz, University of Southern California

My Years with the NSA
Red Team

Tim Nagle, TRW Systems

Ready for a surprise visit from the Red Team? Tim Nagle will talk about NIST/NSA authorities and their partnership for government information security, and about NSA Information Security services. He'll discuss his experiences: the rules that must be followed, the tools and techniques, the legal issues—and his own views on the "ethical hacker."

Mr Nagle served as Deputy Associate General Counsel (Information Systems Security) at the National Security Agency, acting as the principal legal advisor to all teams conducting government-wide information system and network vulnerability assessments, and directing the procedures to be followed before and during the evaluations.

Making Backups Easier with Disk

Curtis Preston, The Storage Group

A new weapon in the backup and recovery arsenal: ATA-based, SCSI- and fiber-channel-addressable storage arrays. They come in three flavors, and are turning the backup world on its head.

Why should you look at these new tools? Wonder how they can help you? If you'd like to increase your backup and recovery speeds significantly, and simultaneously get your onsite backups much easier to administer and your offsite backups
easier to make, you need to learn about these arrays.

Email/MTAs Guru

Eric Allman, Sendmail, Inc.

Eric is the original author of sendmail. He is the author of syslog, tset, the -me nroff macros, and trek. He was the chief programmer on the INGRES database management project, designed database user and application interfaces at Britton Lee, and contributed to the Ring Array Processor project at the International Computer Science Institute. He is a former member of the USENIX Board of Directors.

"Who ARE These People?" Internet Governance, Peering, and Legislation (PDF)

Paul Vixie, Internet Software Consortium

As the Internet engineering community ages, it seems as though the "Internet graybeard" population is burgeoning. Who are these people, and what are they doing to our playground? Mr. Vixie, as a member of the loyal opposition, will try to sort it all out for you.

The Intrusion Detection Timeline

Paul Proctor, Practical Security, Inc.

Numerous intrusion detection technologies can be found on the market today: TCP/IP analysis, log analysis, system call trapping, vulnerability assessment, network-node intrusion detection, file integrity—to name but a few. Each of these has its own value proposition, and each organization has its own requirements. This presentation shows enterprises how to match needs to capabilities so that you can choose the best tools to maximize your security effectiveness and minimize your budget. This is a vendor-neutral presentation.

"Who ARE These People?" Internet Governance, Peering, and Legislation (PDF)

Paul Vixie, Internet Software Consortium

See column 1 for talk description.

Project Management Guru

Strata Rose Chalup, VirtualNet Consulting

Strata Rose Chalup has managed project teams on Internet service rollouts from 50K to 500K users, and has managed to keep a sense of humor. Come on down!

Security

Chair: Marcus Ranum, Ranum.com

An Approach for Secure Software Installation
V.N. Venkatakrishnan, R. Sekar, T. Kamat, S. Tsipa, and Z. Liang, StonyBrook University

Network-based Intrusion Detection–Modeling for a Larger Picture
Atsushi Totsuka, Tohoku University; Hidenari Ohwada, NTT, Tokyo; Nobuhisa Fujita and Debasish Chakraborty, Tohoku University; Glenn Mansfield Keeni, Cyber Solutions, Inc.; Norio Shiratori, Tohoku University

Timing the Application of Security Patches for Optimal Uptime
Steve Beattie, Seth Arnold, Crispin Cowan, Perry Wagle, and Chris Wright, WireX Communications, Inc.; Adam Shostack, Zero Knowledge Systems, Inc.

Panel: Nobody Notices Until It's Broken: Self-Marketing for Sysadmins (PDF)

Moderator: Lee Damon, University of Washington

This panel will explore the issues of keeping your management and co-workers up-to-date on what you do and why it's important. We will include discussion on topics such as how you can let them know why the
systems are doing so well, and why they need to keep you around.

Performance Tuning Guru

Jeff R. Allen, Tellme Networks, Inc.

Jeff has been working in the sysadmin field since 1992. He finds himself drawn to running large, complex
systems that serve people who don't want to know they are using a computer (therein lies the complexity). He developed tools for the NOC at WebTV Networks, then moved to Tellme Networks, where today he acts as a bridge between engineering and the NOC, interfaces with the European operations team, and solves tricky problems as they arise.

SysAdmin, Stories, and Signing: Learning from Communication Experts

David Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

To communicate effectively, you have to know how to tell a good story and how to speak someone else's language. With peers, sysadmins can use the model of storytelling to relate better and to understand the complex, multi-variate scenarios that make up our lives. With other species, such as users and managers, sysadmins can use wisdom gleaned from professional American Sign Language interpreters.

We will test these ideas by applying them to some difficult sample exchanges like those in my "Taxonomy of Useless Support Email Requests." Audience members will leave this talk with concrete tools to improve communication with peers, users, and managers.

Perl 6

Larry Wall, Creator of Perl

Perl has always been good for those little household cleanup chores, but there's nothing so good it can't be improved upon. In this talk Larry will hype the latest and greatest thinking on where Perl 6 is going, and how that will help you get your job done—all for the same low, low price!

System Monitoring Guru

Doug Hughes, Global Crossing, Ltd.

System monitoring covers the gamut of activities from intrusion detection through availability to performance and response. Doug Hughes has been doing various forms of system monitoring since the early 1990s. Tools he uses range from such home-grown utilities as cpupie, qps, and various ping and pager scripts, to OS-integrated apps such as vmstat, iostat, and sar, freeware such as SE toolkit, big brother, and netsaint, and commercial suites such as Netcool and OpenRiver. Sites he's monitored include educational/university, commercial, quasi-governmental/financial, and military/industrial.

Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs)

Chair: Peg Schafer

Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting new or on-going work, and the LISA audience provides valuable discussion and feedback. A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference.

See the activities page for complete information on how to submit presentations.

How to Write a Book with Someone You Don't Know: Internet Collaboration for the Truly Geeky

Tom Limoncelli, Lumeta Corp., and Christine Hogan, Independent Consultant

When Tom and Chris began writing The Practice of System and Network Administration, they faced a few challenges: They didn't know each other. They were five time zones apart. They had to share and interact with gigabytes of data. Amazingly enough, the book was completed, nobody went crazy in the process, and they've still only met in person 7 times. This conference will be the 8th.

While this talk sounds as though it's about collaboration, it's really about system administration. The project had security requirements, reliability requirements, bandwidth requirements, processes to be defined, and tons of scripting. The talk will cover all of these issues and more. We can't imagine how non-sysadmins could ever write a book!

Infrastructures Guru

Steve Traugott, TerraLuna LLC

Steve helped pioneer the term "Infrastructure Architecture" and has worked toward industry acceptance of this SysAdmin++ career track for the last several years. He is a consulting Infrastructure Architect and publishes tools and techniques for automated system administration. His deployments have ranged from financial trading floors and NASA supercomputers to Web farms and growing startups.

The LISA Game Show

Closing out this year's conference, the LISA Quiz Show will once again pit attendees against each other in a test of technical knowledge and cultural trivia. Host Rob Kolstad and sidekick Dan Klein will provide the questions and color commentary for this always memorable event.