Join Your Peers for Three Days of Focused Discussion Senior system administrators will want to participate in one or more of these all-day workshops. Attendance is limited to 30 participants for each workshop, which ensures a seminar-like atmosphere. To attend a workshop, you must be a registered conference attendee. Please note that these workshops are full-day sessions. Attending a workshop precludes attending any tutorials on that day. See the individual descriptions for information on how to register for a workshop. Accepted registrations will be confirmed by the workshop coordinator.

Sunday, October 26

Workshop 1: Configuration Management Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 Specifying the required configurations for large numbers of interconnected machines and automatically installing those configurations to produce reliable clusters have been important topics since the very early LISA conferences. This workshop intends to discuss the fundamental problems of current approaches to system configuration and to look at the requirements and possible solutions for the next generation of configuration languages and tools. The Web page includes a summary of last year's workshop, an archive of the mailing list, and pointers to some relevant papers. The workshop will be a mixture of short presentations and informal discussions, and active participation will be encouraged. For an invitation, send a short email to lisa03confwshop@usenix.org. Please include a brief description of your areas of interest/experience and indicate whether you would be prepared to make a short presentation. Workshop 2: AFS Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project; Garry Zacheiss, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Derrick Brashear, Carnegie Mellon University 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Garden Salon 2 This workshop for experienced AFS administrators will be a mix of papers presented by willing participants and active discussion about work currently being done, issues in AFS administration, and issues relating to IBM-AFS, OpenAFS, and Arla. Writing or presenting a paper is not required, but a willingness to participate actively in the workshop is essential. For information about the workshop and how to apply to participate, please see the AFS Workshop page.

Monday, October 27

Workshop 3: Enterprise Infrastructure Steve Traugott, Infrastructures.Org 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Garden Salon 1 This workshop is dedicated to the premise that a good infrastructure, whether departmental, divisional, or enterprise-wide, is a single, loosely coupled virtual machine or "enterprise cluster," with hundreds or thousands of hard drives and CPUs. Administration of this infrastructure is fully automated. Any node can be destroyed without impacting users for more than a few minutes. Any destroyed node can be rebuilt unattended. Users experience free seating, single sign-on, and a single system image. Sysadmins spend their evenings at home. In this workshop, we'll discuss concepts, terminology, and tools that meet these criteria. We'll give attention to all phases of infrastructure administration, financial and organizational benefits, and career implications. The format of the workshop is facilitated discussion of short presentations; participants are encouraged but not required to present their own findings. For more information and to register for the workshop, see https://www.infrastructures.org/workshop. Workshop 4: SysAdmin Education Curt Freeland, University of Notre Dame; John Sechrest, PEAK Internet Services 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Garden Salon 2 Curt Freeland and John Sechrest have run the SysAdmin Education Workshop at LISA for 4 years. This workshop is focused on bringing together people who teach system administration in a university setting. This year, the focus is on curriculum and curriculum development. How do system administration courses work together with other courses? How do those courses fit into degree programs? How do networking and system admin classes connect? Part of the goal of the workshop will be to list existing courses and programs and to try to expand this list to include system administration education resources. To register for the workshop, please send an outline of your experience and interest in sysadmin education to lisa03eduwshop@usenix.org.

Tuesday, October 28

Workshop 5: Advanced Topics Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing; Rob Kolstad, SAGE 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Sunset Room, Meeting House As in the past six years, the Advanced Topics Workshop provides an informal roundtable discussion of pressing issues in system administration. This discussion is intended for very senior attendees, with moderator Adam Moskowitz and scribe/comic relief Rob Kolstad. The basic premise is "a private hallway track for senior folks to talk with other senior folks, to concentrate on hard problems, or just to gripe." Admission is by acceptance of a position paper; please send your position paper to lisa03atwshop@usenix.org. Position papers must be in plain ASCII and no more than three paragraphs long.