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TRAINING TRACK

Overview | Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | By Instructor | Series

Tutorial Instructors
A–C   |  D–F   |  G–M   |  O–R   |   S–T   |   V–Z

John Arrasjid John Arrasjid (T1, W1) has 20 years of experience in the computer science field. His experience includes work with companies such as AT&T, Amdahl, 3Dfx Interactive, Kubota Graphics, Roxio, and his own company, WebNexus Communications, where he developed consulting practices and built a cross-platform IT team. John is currently a senior member of the VMware Professional Services Organization as a Consulting Architect. John has developed a number of PSO engagements, including Performance, Security, and Disaster Recovery and Backup. John is the Worldwide BC/DR Practice lead in VMware's Professional Services group. He is co-author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Deploying the VMware Infrastructure.

Kyrre Begnum Kyrre Begnum (S1) is currently completing his Ph.D. in Network and System Administration at Oslo University College in Norway. Part of his research focuses on managing virtual infrastructures, and he is the author of the Manage Large Networks (MLN) VM administrative tool.

David N. Blank-Edelman David N. Blank-Edelman (R4, R6) is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O'Reilly book Perl for System Administration. He has spent the past 20+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of LISA '05 and was one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs.

Mark Burgess Mark Burgess (T8, T15) is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, Norway (a member of the EMANICS Network of Excellence). He is the author of the configuration management system Cfengine and of several books and many papers on the topic, including the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, coauthored with Æleen Frisch.

Gerald Carter Gerald Carter (M11, R2, F3) has been a member of the Samba Development Team since 1998. He has been developing, writing about, and teaching on open source since the late 1990s. He authored LDAP System Administration and the third edition of Using Samba for O'Reilly Publishing. Currently Jerry is employed by Likewise Software as a Samba and open source developer.

Tom Christiansen Tom Christiansen (S7, S10, M7) has been involved with Perl since day zero of its initial public release in 1987. Author of several books on Perl, including the Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl from O'Reilly, Tom is also a major contributor to Perl's online documentation. He holds undergraduate degrees in computer science and Spanish and a Master's in computer science. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Mike Ciavarella Mike Ciavarella (M5, T5, T12) has been producing and editing technical documentation since he naively agreed to write application manuals for his first employer in the early 1980s. He has been a technical editor for Macmillan Press and has been teaching system administrators about documentation for the past eight years. Mike has an Honours Degree in Science from the University of Melbourne. After a number of years working as Senior Partner and head of the Security Practice for Cybersource Pty Ltd, Mike returned to his alma mater, the University of Melbourne. He is now an independent consultant. In his ever-diminishing spare time, Mike is a caffeine addict and photographer.

Adrian Cockcroft Adrian Cockcroft (S3) is well known as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and eBay Research Labs and is currently Director of Web Engineering at Netflix. Author of four books on performance tuning and capacity planning, he has been inspired by his involvement in the Homebrew Mobile Phone club to invent the term "Millicomputing" and apply ultra low power devices to enterprise computing applications.

Phil Cox Phil Cox (R1) is a Principal Consultant of SystemExperts Corporation, a consulting firm that specializes in system security and management. He is a well-known authority in the areas of system integration and security. His experience includes Windows, UNIX, and IP-based networks integration, firewall design and implementation, and ISO 17799 and PCI compliance. He frequently writes and lectures on issues dealing with heterogeneous system integration and compliance with PCI-DSS. He is the lead author of Windows 2000 Security Handbook 2nd Edition (Osborne McGraw-Hill) and contributing author for Windows NT/2000 Network Security (Macmillan Technical Publishing). He holds a BS in Computer Science from the College of Charleston.

Lee Damon Lee Damon (M5) has a BS in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE and LOPSA since their inceptions. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of LISA '04.

Shridhar Deuskar Shridhar Deuskar (T1, W1) is an experienced professional in the IT industry. He has over 10 years of experience in system administration of UNIX and Windows servers. He has consulted with companies such as Caterpillar, HP, and EMC. Currently he is a Consulting Architect in VMwares Professional Services organization and is responsible for delivering services tied to virtualization to clients worldwide.

Jacob Farmer Jacob Farmer (T6, T13) is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has written numerous papers and articles and is a regular speaker at trade shows and conferences. In addition to his regular expert advice column in the "Reader I/O" section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade magazine of the data storage industry, Jacob also serves as the publication's senior technical advisor. Jacob has over 18 years of experience with storage technologies and is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a national integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.

Rik Farrow Rik Farrow (M8) has been teaching UNIX security classes since 1987. He wrote the second book on UNIX security, as well as hundreds of security-related articles. His experience with Linux security goes back over ten years and has led him to believe that sandboxing applications with SELinux is not just a good idea, but necessary. Rik Farrow is also editor of ;login:.

Aeleen Frisch Æleen Frisch (S1, M4, W5) has been working as a system administrator for over 20 years. She currently looks after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential System Administration (now in its 3rd edition) and the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, coauthored with Mark Burgess. Æleen was the program committee chair for LISA '03 and is a frequent presenter at USENIX and SAGE events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.

Peter Baer Galvin Peter Baer Galvin (W3, W6, R3, R5) is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR. Previously he was the Systems Manager for Brown University's Computer Science Department. Peter is currently a columnist for ;login:. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines, as well as columns for SunWorld and Sys Admin magazines. Peter is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter has taught tutorials on security and system administration and has given talks at many conferences and institutions on such topics as Web services, performance tuning, security, system administration, and high availability.

Simson L. Garfinkel Simson L. Garfinkel (S4, M3) is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and a fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems. Garfinkel has research interests in computer forensics, the emerging field of usability and security, information policy, and terrorism. He has actively researched and published in these areas for more than two decades. He writes a monthly column for CSO Magazine, for which he has been awarded four national journalism awards, and is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century and for Practical UNIX and Internet Security.

Geoff Halprin Geoff Halprin (S8, S11, M6) has spent over 30 years as a software developer, system administrator, consultant, and troubleshooter. He has written software from system management tools to mission-critical billing systems, has built and run networks for enterprises of all sizes, and has been called upon to diagnose problems in every aspect of computing infrastructure and software. He is the author of the System Administration Body of Knowledge (SA-BOK) and the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Administrator's Guide to Auditing, and was the recipient of the 2002 SAGE-AU award for outstanding contributions to the system administration profession. Geoff has served on the boards of SAGE, SAGE-AU, USENIX, and LOPSA. He has spoken at over 20 conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, and the U.S.

David Hankins David Hankins (W8) is a software engineer at ISC who has in the past worked in the trenches as a sysadmin and a network administrator. He is the engineering lead on the ISC DHCP project and knows more about it than anyone.


Steve Holden Steve Holden (F4) is the author of Python Web Programming and the chairman of the Python Software Foundation. His interest in object-oriented programming extends back to the original SmallTalk implementation, but after he discovered Python ten years ago he made it his language of choice for most programming tasks. Steve has over twenty years of experience as an instructor and teacher. He consults for government agencies and private corporations and is a contributing editor for Python Magazine.

Wenjin Hu Wenjin Hu (M1) is a graduate student at Clarkson University. He is the author of the network chapter in the book Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization. While at Clarkson, Wenjin has investigated a lot of different virtualization systems and coauthored an academic paper entitled "Quantifying the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems." For his PhD research, he focuses on Xen virtualization and file systems, trying to apply the techniques in those two fields to provide a more secure and reliable desktop enviroment for common users. Currently, he is also tackling Solaris xVM and writing an introductory article for ;login:.

Evan Marcus Evan Marcus (W4, W7) joined Global Data Center Management (GDCM) as the Lead Sales Engineer for North America in 2007. He has more than 20 years of experience on UNIX systems. Before joining GDCM, he spent 8 years at VERITAS Software as a systems engineer, speaker, and author. He also spent 5 years at Sun Microsystems and 2+ years at Fusion Systems, where he worked to bring the first high availability software applications for SunOS and Solaris to market. He also spent two years as a system administrator on the equities trading floor of a multinational trading institution. He is the co-author of Blueprints for High Availability, 2nd edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) and coauthor and co-editor of The Resilient Enterprise (VERITAS Publications, 2002). He is a well-regarded and popular speaker on the design of highly available and disaster-resilient systems and on fixed-content storage archives.

James Mauro James Mauro (S2, T2) is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance and Availability Engineering group at Sun Microsystems. Jim's current interests and activities are centered on benchmarking Solaris 10 performance, workload analysis, and tool development. This work includes Sun's new Opteron-based systems and multicore performance on Sun's Chip Multithreading (CMT) Niagara processor. Jim resides in Green Brook, New Jersey, with his wife and two sons. He spent most of his spare time in the past year working on the second edition of Solaris Internals. Jim coauthored the first edition of Solaris Internals with Richard McDougall and has been writing about Solaris in various forums for the past nine years.

Richard McDougall Richard McDougall (F1) is a Principal Engineer and the Chief Performance Architect in the Office of the CTO at VMware. A recognized expert in operating systems, virtualization, performance, resource management, and filesystem technologies, Richard is a frequent speaker and has published several papers and books on these topics. Prior to VMware, most recently he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he wrote the authoritative books Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools.

Tobias Oetiker Tobias Oetiker (M9, M12, T4, T11) is an electrical engineer by education and a system administrator by vocation. For ten years he has been working for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, providing students and staff with a deluxe UNIX workstation environment. In 2006 he started his own company, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, running UNIX servers for industry customers, improving his pet open source projects MRTG, RRDtool, and SmokePing, and applying these tools to solve the customers' problems. These days, Tobias uses a SunRay appliance running off a diskless, Ubuntu-based SunRay server as his personal workstation environment. In 2006, Tobias received the prestigious SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on MRTG and RRDtool.

Marcus Ranum Marcus Ranum (T9) has been building and designing security and security systems since 1989. He is the author of several books on security and has been, variously, network manager, C programmer, development team leader, VP of engineering, CSO, CEO, and consultant. He is currently the CSO of Tenable Network Security.

John Sellens John Sellens (M10, T3, T10) has been involved in system and network administration since 1986 and is the author of several related USENIX papers, a number of ;login: articles, and the SAGE Short Topics booklet #7, System and Network Administration for Higher Reliability. He holds an MMath in computer science from the University of Waterloo and is a Chartered Accountant. He is the proprietor of SYONEX, a systems and networks consultancy, and is currently a member of the systems team at Magna International. From 1999 to 2004, he was the General Manager for Certainty Solutions in Toronto. Prior to joining Certainty, John was the Director of Network Engineering at UUNET Canada and was a staff member in computing and information technology at the University of Waterloo for 11 years.

Zach Shepherd Zach Shepherd (M1) is an undergraduate student studying computer science, physics, and mathematics at Clarkson University. At Clarkson, he has collaborated with students and professors on various Xen-related projects, including the setup of a Xen-based infrastructure for the Clarkson Open Source Institute and research in virtualization benchmarking. Zach was a technical reviewer for Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization.

Abe Singer Abe Singer (S6, T16) is a Computer Security Researcher in the Security Technologies Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In his operational security responsibilities, he participates in incident response and forensics and in improving the SDSC logging infrastructure. His research is in pattern analysis of syslog data for data mining. He is also the author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Building a Logging Infrastructure, and a soon to be released O'Reilly book on log analysis.

Stephen Spector Stephen Spector (M1) brings more than 15 years' experience in software engineering, product marketing, and developer and alliance marketing programs to the Xen.org community as the current community program manager. He has spent more than 10 years at Citrix, founding the Citrix Developer Network and supporting the release of the first Windows CE 1.0 client, as well as working on various marketing and alliance programs. He has previously held various positions at Turbolinux, Racal Datacom, and Siemens. Stephen holds an MBA from Florida Atlantic University, an MS in computer science from the University of Florida, and a BS in computer engineering from The Ohio State University.

Marc Staveley Marc Staveley (M2, W3, W6, R3, R5) now works with Soma Networks, where he is applying his many years of experience with UNIX development and administration to leading their IT group. Previously Marc had been an independent consultant and also held positions at Sun Microsystems, NCR, Princeton University, and the University of Waterloo. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of standards-based development, multi-threaded programming, system administration, and performance tuning.

Theodore Ts'o Theodore Ts'o (S5, T7, T14) has been a Linux kernel developer since almost the very beginnings of Linux: he implemented POSIX job control in the 0.10 Linux kernel. He is the maintainer and author of the Linux COM serial port driver and the Comtrol Rocketport driver, and he architected and implemented Linux's tty layer. Outside of the kernel, he is the maintainer of the e2fsck filesystem consistency checker. Ted is currently employed by IBM Linux Technology Center.

Jeff Victor Jeff Victor (F2) has been using UNIX systems since 1984. His two-decade career has included software design and development, network and telecomm administration, and ten years as a Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Jeff wrote the Sun BluePrint "Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide" and the "How to Move a Container" guide, both available at https://www.sun.com/ . He also maintains the Solaris Zones and Containers FAQ at https://opensolaris.org/. Jeff holds a BS in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky (S8, S11) has been managing system administrators off and on since her first job. Recently, she's been hanging out with educational theorists and testing ways of teaching problem solving to system administrators, high-school graduates who may or may not have any interest in system administration but are being paid to listen, and a four-year-old.

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Last changed: 14 Oct. 2008 ch