All Technical Sessions will be held in the San Diego Town and Country Resort Hotel and include:

• Keynote: Greg Bear (Wednesday morning)
• Keynote: Ernest Prabhakar (Thursday afternoon)
• Invited Talk: CNN.com: Facing a World Crisis (Thursday afternoon)
• Refereed Paper Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Invited Talks 1 Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Invited Talks 2 Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Network/Security Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Guru Is In Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• LISA Quiz Show (Friday afternoon)

Keynote Address: Slime vs. Silicon
Greg Bear, Science Fiction Author

The computer-savvy engineer dreams of being relieved of the burden of being encased in an expendable and fragile carbon-based unit, of uncertain but limited lifespan, and with an irritating propensity to fail at unexpected moments. The alternative: a silicon-brained metallic or polyalloy® ("Liquid Metal") body unit with a 1000-year rechargeable powerpack, unlimited warranty, and infinite upgrade capability. Into this unit the engineer will be ported with high speed and complete efficiency, to live a long, long uptime of adventure and discovery, while retaining or perhaps enhancing the ability to attract members of the opposite sex. Greg Bear will discuss the philosophical, biological, and practical aspects of this vision, and try to guess whether the U.S.'s current Republican administration will fund research into such endeavors.

Stirring the Matrix: Organizational System Administration
Session Chair: Eric Anderson, University of California, Berkeley

Defining the Role of Service Manager: Sanity Through Organizational Evolution
Mark Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Remote Outsourcing Services for Multiple Branch Offices and Small Businesses via the Internet
Dejan Diklic, Venkatesh Velayutham, Steve Welch, and Roger Williams, IBM Almaden Research Center

Security for E-Voting in Public Elections
Avi Rubin, AT&T Labs-Research

In this talk Avi will discuss the security considerations pertaining to remote electronic voting in public elections. In particular, he'll examine the feasibility of running national federal elections over the Internet. The focus of this talk is on the limitations of the currently deployed infrastructure in terms of the security of the hosts and the Internet itself.

Zope
Michel Pelletier, Digital Creations

Zope is an open-source Web application server written in Python and C and published by Digital Creations. Michel is a software developer and documentation writer for DC who has worked with Zope for over two years and is co-author of the New Riders publication The Zope Book. He will be presenting some of the cooler features Zope has to offer to the presentation designer, content manager, programmer, and system administrator.

Illuminating the Dark Side: Short Topics on Security Issues (1 Talk, 3 Papers)
Session Chair: Tom Perrine, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Where Has All the Crypto Gone? Long Time Coming: A Speculative and Historical Talk
Greg Rose, Qualcomm Australia
View this slide presentation in HTML.

IPSECvalidate: A Tool to Validate IPSEC Configurations
Reiner Sailer, Arup Acharya, Mandis Beigi, Raymond Jennings, and Dinesh Verma, IBM

ScanSSH: Scanning the Internet for SSH Servers
Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman, CITI, University of Michigan

LDAP
Gerald Carter, Hewlett-Packard

Gerald Carter has been a member of the SAMBA Team since 1998 and is employed by VA Linux Systems. He is currently working on a guide to LDAP for system administrator's with O'Reilly Publishing. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Auburn University where he was also previously employed as a network and systems administrator. Gerald has published articles with various web based magazines such as Linuxworld, and has authored instructional course for companies such as Linuxcare. In addition to this, he acted as the lead author of "Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours" by Sams Publishing.

Technologies Indistinguishable from Magic: Analytical System Administration
Session Chair: Mark Burgess, Oslo University College

Awarded Best Theory Paper!
A Probabilistic Approach to Estimating Computer System Reliability
Robert Apthorpe, Excite@Home, Inc.

Scheduling Partially Ordered Events in a Randomised Framework: Empirical Results and Implications for Automatic Configuration Management
Frode Eika Sandnes, Oslo University College

The Maelstrom: Network Service Debugging via "Ineffective Procedures"
Alva Couch, Tufts University; Noah Daniels, Analog Devices

2001: A Communications Anniversary
Peter Salus, Matrix.Net

We are at the end of a year that provided a flood of important anniversaries important to LISA attendees. Peter will discuss the anniversaries and the significance of this confluence. Among them:

1676: Leibnitz's mechanical calculator
1876: Bell's telephone
1901: Marconi's trans-Atlantic message
1951: The junction transistor
1951: UNIVAC, first commercial computer
1976: John Lions and students install UNIX
1976: 63 hosts on the ARPAnet
1991: Phil Zimmerman posts PGP
1991: Tim Berners-Lee posts what we now call www
1991: Linus Torvalds posts Linux .01

What a ride!

If I Could Talk to the Animals--What Sysadmins Can Learn About Diagnostic Skills from Another Profession
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

Who, outside system administration, really understands our diagnostic processes and how to teach them to others?

Of all of the professionals in the world, a veterinarian must command diagnostic skills closest to those of a system administrator. After explaining this premise, this talk presents some of the concrete wisdom the much older veterinary profession has gained with an eye toward its application to our field. It concludes with an exploration of how vets are taught diagnostic skills and how we can apply those teaching techniques.

Whither End-to-End: Placing Bandwidth and Trust at the Edge
Gordon Cook, The Cook Report

Gordon will look at what went wrong with our infrastructure builds. Why the distinction between bellhead and nethead has become blurred in a race for consolidated control over infrastructure and content. An examination of the Canadian way: light waves for end users, customer-owned networks, mandated open access at carrier-neutral co-los, an outline for cost-effective fiber to the business and neighborhood through municipalities using control over rights of way. Suggestions for the USA's policy that would create a community-owned sanctuary, an edge-controlled Internet.

AFS
Esther Filderman, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Garry Zacheiss, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Having worked for Carnegie Mellon University since 1988 Esther has been working with AFS since it's toddlerhood, and is currently a Senior Systems Mangler and AFS administrator for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Esther has been helping to bring AFS content to LISA conferences for four years. Garry Zacheiss has spent three years working for MIT Information Systems doing both development and systems administration. As a member of the Athena Server Operations team, he works on maintaining and expanding the AFS cells used by Athena, MIT's Academic Computing Environment, as well as enhancing Moira, MIT's host and user account management system.

Monte LISA Overdrive: Empirical System Administration
Session Chair: William Annis, University of Wisconsin

Performance Evaluation of Linux Virtual Server
Patrick O'Rourke and Mike Keefe, MCLX

Measuring Real-World Data Availability
Larry Lancaster and Alan Rowe, Network Appliance

Simulation of User-Driven Computer Behaviour
Hårek Haugerud and Sigmund Straumsnes, Oslo University College

Internet Measurement: Myths About Internet Data
kc claffy, Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

Current papers that propose new techniques and protocols often make assumptions about traffic characteristics that are simply not validated by real data. Hypotheses about the level of fragmented traffic, encrypted traffic, topology characteristics, traffic favoritism, path symmetry, DOS attack prevalence, address space utilization and consumption, directional balance of traffic volume, routing protocol behavior and policy, and distribution statistics of path lengths, flow sizes, packet sizes, prefix lengths, and routing announcements therefore yield questionable analytical results. Even in cases where analysis is based on data attainable by a researcher on his or her local campus, attempts to generalize typically lose integrity in the face of more complete or representative data sets.

This talk will show several examples of measurements that shed doubt on several commonly assumed Internet myths. The implication is that the community could make much better use of its collective intellectual resources if we could validate ideas against a larger variety of empirical data sets before investing research and development time and energy on certain studies.

You'll also see pretty pictures of network data stuff, as always.

Crypto Blunders
Steve Burnett, RSA

Cryptography has emerged as an enormously important component of the networked world. People are hesitant to trust the Web and e-commerce without the protections crypto provides. More and more applications are now built with crypto core components. Many cryptographic algorithms are almost unbreakable . . . if used properly.

This presentation will describe some blunders, famous and not so famous. Some may be a little humorous--to those not involved. If nothing else, the audience will learn what not to do in their products.

Infrastructure Architecture
Steve Traugott, TerraLuna, LLC

Steve helped pioneer the term "Infrastructure Architecture", and has worked towards 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 systems administration. His deployments have ranged from financial trading floors and NASA supercomputers to web farms and growing startups.