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BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS

All sessions taking place in the San Jose Marriott are denoted by the Marriott logo icon throughout the LISA '10 Web site. All other session locations are in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

See the floor plans: Marriott | Convention Center


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 evenings, the BoF Boards will be located in the Marriott Salons 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 '10 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule (as of November 11, 2010, 9:00 a.m. PST)
For the most current schedule, please see the BoF Boards in the registration area.

Monday, November 8, 2010
A/V will be provided in all rooms, unless otherwise noted.
ROOM # of
seats
7:00 p.m.–
8:00 p.m.
8:00 p.m.–
9:00 p.m.
9:00 p.m.–
10:00 p.m.
10:00 p.m.–
11:00 p.m.
Salon I/II 60 DNS BoF
David Ulevitch,
OpenDNS Founder
and CEO
Mentor Meetup
LOPSA Mentorship
OpenAFS
Community
BoF

Brian Sebby,
Argonne National
Laboratory
 
Salon V/VI 60 An Update
on Standards

Nick Stoughton
     
Salon III 100 DevOps GameDay
Mark R. Hinkle, Zenoss; Aaron Peterson, OpsCode; Kevin Gray, DynDNS
 
Salon IV 100        
Almaden 30 Zimbra BoF
Steve Hillman,
Simon Fraser University
Minecraft!
David Kowis
and Dave Ellis
 
Willow Glen 60   NetApp Storage
Admins Unite

Don Johnsen, NetApp
AIX Admins
Nate Tade, ACT Inc.
 
Blossom Hill 60        

 

Tuesday, November 9, 2010
A/V will be provided in all rooms, unless otherwise noted.
ROOM # of
seats
7:00 p.m.–
8:00 p.m.
8:00 p.m.–
9:00 p.m.
9:00 p.m.–
10:00 p.m.
10:00 p.m.–
11:00 p.m.
Salon IV 100 Cambridge Computer
Beer and Ice Cream Social
Vendor BoF
Manage Your Data
Center Storage Power 
with SNIA Standards
and/or Programs

Arnold Jones, SNIA
 
Willow Glen 60 Workload Management
Needs and Solutions
(DRMS)

Daniel Templeton, Oracle
Open Source and
Open Standards-based
Cloud Computing

Todd Deshane,
Clarkson University
Fedora BoF
Beth Lynn Eicher
and David Nalley
Salon III 100 Facebook Engineer Panel
Vendor BoF
ISC DHCP Roadmap
Vendor BoF

David Hankins and
Larissa Shapiro, ISC
IPv6 Technologies
Roundtable

Sue Graves, ISC
Reddit Users
Meetup

Jay Faulkner
Salon I/II 60 Oracle Solaris 10
and Beyond
Vendor BoF

Oracle Solaris
Engineer Panel
Where'd BigAdmin Go?
Vendor BoF

Rick Ramsey, Oracle
Getting Started
with Configuration
Management

Cory Lueninghoener,
Los Alamos National
Laboratory
GBLTQ*
(Alphabet Soup)
Almaden 30 Condor Users BoF
Ben Cotton,
Purdue University
Amanda Backup BoF
Paddy Sreenivasan
and Chander Kant,
Amanda Project
SystemImager BoF
Brian Elliott Finley
and Bernard Li
 
Blossom Hill 60 Cfengine 3
(including Multi-node
Orchestration)

Mark Burgess,
Cfengine, Inc.
GPG Key
Signing BoF

Ken Schumacher,
Fermi National
Accelerator Lab
CAcert.org
Assurance Process

Ken Schumacher,
Fermi National
Accelerator Lab
 
Salon V/VI 60 MRTG and RRDTool
Users BoF

Steve Shipway,
The University of Auckland
Ganglia Monitoring
System BoF

Matt Massie
and Bernard Li
VMware vSphere
Administrators'
BoF

Derek Balling,
Answers.com
 

 

Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A/V will be provided in all rooms, unless otherwise noted.
ROOM # of
seats
7:00 p.m.–
8:00 p.m.
8:00 p.m.–
9:00 p.m.
9:00 p.m.–
10:00 p.m.
10:00 p.m.–
11:00 p.m.
Willow Glen 60 Splunk, the Future:
4.2 and Beyond
Vendor BoF

Gaurav Gupta,
Archana Ganapathi,
and Jim Hansen,
Splunk
PostgreSQL 9.0: Binary
Replication and More

Josh Berkus,
PostgreSQL
  Minecraft!
David Kowis
and Dave Ellis
Salon III 100 Lightning Talks
Duncan Hutty,
Carnegie Mellon
University
Ensure the Highest Levels of
Availability for Applications
and Data Vendor BoF

Celia Cattani and
Tony Tomarchio, SIOS
(formerly SteelEye)
10 Gigabit Ethernet:
System Tuning Approach
for Applications

Michael J. Martin,
SearchNetworking blogger
Intrusion
Prevention
& Detection

Matt Disney
Salon I/II 60 Tiered File Systems
w/o Tiers Vendor BoF

Rob Terlizzi,
Isilon Systems
Zenoss Open Source
Monitoring Vendor BoF
Will Cloud Computing
be Open and
Interoperable?

DMTF
 
Salon V/VI 60 Puppet BoF
Nan Liu,
Puppet Labs
LOPSA Annual
Community Meeting
MicroLISA
(small site sysadmin;
you define "small")

Matt Simmons,
Standalone Sysadmin;
and Robert Au
 
Salon IV 100 'One Click' OS Hardening
Vendor BoF

Jamie Adams,
Trusted Computer Solutions
Bcfg2 BoF
Narayan Desai,
Argonne National
Laboratory
 
Blossom Hill 60 Image Packaging
System/Installation
Vendor BoF

Bart Smaalders and
Dave Miner, Oracle
DTrace and Performance
with Oracle Solaris 11
Express Vendor BoF

Jim Mauro, Oracle
Developer Tools for
[C/C++/Fortran Application
Development for]
Solaris 11 Express
Vendor BoF

Vijay Tatkar, Oracle
Topics in
Configuration
Management

Hal Snyder and Jason Olson,
Orbitz;
Nico
Schottelius,
ETH Zurich

 

Thursday, November 11, 2010
A/V will be provided in all rooms, unless otherwise noted.
ROOM # of
seats
8:30 p.m.–
9:30 p.m.
9:30 p.m.–
10:30 p.m.
10:30 p.m.–
11:30 p.m.
Willow Glen 180 Google Vendor BoF  
Blossom Hill 60 Hewlett-Packard
Open Source Programs
Vendor BoF
Academic Roundtable
Melissa Danforth,
California State University,
Bakersfield
 
Almaden 30 Ironport eMail
Appliance Admins BoF

Steve Shipway,
The University of Auckland
Human-Computer
Interaction: Experiences and
Difficulties in IT Management,
Security, and Privacy

Patrick F. Wilbur,
Clarkson University
 
Guadalupe 30 Centralized Logging
Leon Towns-von Stauber,
Intelius
HP Proliant Firmware:
HP SIM, HP SUM, sh CPXXX.exe Reporting
 

BoF Descriptions

DNS BoF
David Ulevitch, OpenDNS Founder and CEO
Monday, November 8, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon I/II

Learn about how to build, deploy and manage a global DNS service from the team at OpenDNS. Presentation and plenty of time for Q & A. Afterwards, join us for drinks and eats down the street at Gordon Biersch to continue the conversation. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160375907327670

Mentor Meetup
LOPSA Mentorship
Monday, November 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon I/II

An Update on Standards
Nick Stoughton
Monday, November 8, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

C, C++, Posix, etc.

Zimbra BoF
Steve Hillman, Simon Fraser University
Monday, November 8, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Almaden

Zimbra is an open source mail and collaboration server suite (think "Exchange for the Unix crowd"). If you're running it, or thinking about it, come meet with other email administrators to discuss implementations, experiences, and issues.

NetApp Storage Admins Unite
Don Johnsen, NetApp
Monday, November 8, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Willow Glen

DevOps GameDay 
Mark R. Hinkle, Zenoss; Aaron Peterson, OpsCode; Kevin Gray, DynDNS
Monday, November 8, 7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon III

Agenda:

  • 6:45pm Networking
  • 7:00pm Intro to Project
  • 7:30pm Live Fail-over Demo
  • 8:00pm Walk-thru of code
  • 9:00pm Drinks & Appetizers for attendees
devops [dev-ops]
-noun
1. A cultural and professional movement of developers, system administrators, and network engineers who choose to lock arms, work together to solve problems, and genuinely care about the success of their organization.

gameday [game-day]
-noun
1. A tournament of trial by fire.

When you put the two together, you get a group of devops gurus integrating the tools and systems used by some of the world's largest web sites, putting them to the test through a series of this-actually-happened failure scenarios, and experimenting with how we can all maximize our uptime.

We've created a simple web application running WordPress at http://reserve.dyntini.com in Amazon EC2. The system in nominal state looks like the diagram below.

The web applications are structured with half running in the East coast data center and half in the West coast data center.

We will simulate a server failure for some of the servers in the West coast data center. Zenoss monitoring will notice that a single server on the West coast is receiving 100% of the traffic and send an alert to OpsCode's Chef. Chef recipes will then modify the Dynect Platform's service via the Dynect API to move some of the traffic to the East coast facility. Once the new servers are live in the West, Zenoss will verify they are up.

Once we get this scenario working, we'll continue to add complexity and seek real-time suggestions from the audience on what other failures can occur and what can be done to automate their mitigation.

For more information visit http://github.com/cloudworkshop/devopsgameday/wiki.

OpenAFS Community BoF
Brian Sebby, Argonne National Laboratory
Monday, November 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon I/II

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 week-long 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.  

Minecraft!
David Kowis and Dave Ellis
Monday, November 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Almaden
Wednesday, November 10, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Willow Glen  

AIX Admins
Nate Tade, ACT Inc.
Monday, November 8, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Willow Glen

Love it or hate it, it does exist. Come discuss AIX with people who whare your pain.

Cambridge Computer Beer and Ice Cream Social Vendor BoF
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon IV

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.

Workload Management Needs and Solutions (DRMS)
Daniel Templeton, Oracle
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Willow Glen

Facebook Engineer Panel Vendor BoF
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon III

Want to know what it takes to go from managing 100 systems to 10,000 systems and beyond? Ever wonder what it's like to have the largest memcache infrastructure in existence at your fingertips? Would you like to know how to engage an engineering team to build reliable services that can be managed by small teams?

Come and find out! Drink some beer, learn something new and ask members of the Facebook Applications Operations team your questions about how to run systems at scale in this unprecedented open Q&A session. The team attending helps manage these portions of the infrastructure: hadoop, search, news feed, memcache, load balancing and general OS systems administration.

Oracle Solaris 10 and Beyond Vendor BoF
Oracle Solaris Engineer Panel
Moderator: Dan Roberts, Oracle
Bart Smaalders and Dan Price, Oracle
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon I/II

This session covers the current state of the Oracle Solaris 10 and gives insights into the future direction of Oracle Solaris technologies and products. Come learn how Oracle Solaris can benefit your environment today and what will continue to make Oracle Solaris the most advanced mission critical enterprise OS going forward, with even more features for performance, serviceability, and ease of administration in both small- and large-scale deployments.

Condor Users BoF
Ben Cotton, Purdue University
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Almaden

We're halfway to Condor Week 2011, so now's a great time for users of the Condor software to meet up and discuss implementation and projects.

Cfengine 3 (including Multi-node Orchestration)
Mark Burgess, Cfengine, Inc.
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

Meeting for Cfengine users. Demonstration of multi-node orchestration. (Work through issues involved in adding a Web server to an existing multi-tier system through Cfengine alone.)

MRTG and RRDTool Users BoF
Steve Shipway, The University of Auckland
Tuesday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

A general meeting for people who use, or want to use, the popular MRTG and RRDtool software. MRTG can be used stand-alone, or with the RRDtool database backend and Routers2 frontend. RRDtool also has far more features enabling it to be used by many other applications. Learn new tips or techniques to get the most out of these from the authors of the software.

This is the place to go for:

  • Installing MRTG and getting the best performance
  • Using RRDtool in other applications
  • Using Routers2 to create custom MRTG graphs
  • Configure your MRTG to monitor unusual things
  • Monitoring virtualised hosts
  • Show off what you've achieved with your installation

Open Source and Open Standards-based Cloud Computing
Todd Deshane and Patrick F. Wilbur, Clarkson University; Ben Pfaff, Nicira Networks; Jason Faulkner, Rackspace
Tuesday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Willow Glen

In this session, we will describe some of the open source components available to support hybrid (public/private) cloud computing. We have some interest and expertise with various open source components, such as the hypervisor (Xen), the infrastructure platform (the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP)), the virtual networking switch layer (Open vSwitch), and the cloud computing software (OpenStack). We invite others that are interested in learning about, describing experiences with, and discussing the role open source and open standards-based solutions play in the cloud.

ISC DHCP Roadmap Vendor BoF
David Hankins and Larissa Shapiro, ISC
Tuesday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon III

Open meeting to Forum and non-Forum members to discuss ISC's DHCP roadmap information, and open discussion on trends and features.

Where'd BigAdmin Go? Vendor BoF
Rick Ramsey, Oracle
Tuesday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon I/II

Q&A plus discussion. Where content from BigAdmin was moved to on the Oracle Technology Network. How to find it. What didn't get moved? Where'd the HCL go? Other aspects about the Oracle Technology Network of interest to BigAdmin fans. How to stay informed and contribute content or suggestions. What would you like us to focus on?

Amanda Backup BoF
Paddy Sreenivasan and Chander Kant, Amanda Project
Tuesday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Almaden

Amanda is the leading open source backup software in the world. During this BoF we invite current and future Amanda users to share their experiences. We would also discuss future directions of Amanda and get your input.

GPG Key Signing BoF
Ken Schumacher, Fermi National Accelerator Lab
Tuesday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

There has always been a key signing BOF at each of the LISA conferances (at least the one's I've attended) in the past. This year, our gathering is scheduled for 8:00pm Tues in the Blossom Hill room. Those of you attending the GPG key signing BOF might also be interested in the CAcert BoF starting at 9:00 in the same room.

If you are interested in attending this event, please e-mail your key to me prior to the BoF session. It is much better to send your key even if it turns out you can't attend the event, than to show up without your key on the printout. I will build up a new keyring of the keys submitted to me. I will send a URL for that keyring only to those who submit a key.

For more information on Key Signing Parties, I recommend the "GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO" document. Our format will follow the suggestions there, specifically the List Based party format. I will bring a printout with fingerprints of the submitted keys. Please submit your keys at least 24 hours in advance of the party to ensure your key fingerprint is on the list.

You should bring a copy of your own key fingerprint so we can ensure that the printout is correct. Please bring multiple forms of photo ID. This is not a requirement, just a strong suggestion.  Other attendees may not be familiar with your states drivers license format (such as those coming from over seas). By having multiple IDs, you should have at least one that others will find acceptable.

Ganglia Monitoring System BoF
Matt Massie and Bernard Li
Tuesday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

Come celebrate 10 years of monitoring clusters, grids and clouds with members of the Ganglia community.  You will learn about the history of the project and why large sites like Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, StumbleUpon, Pandora, Flickr, and major High Performance Computing centres use Ganglia for metrics monitoring and trending. We will also give you a taste of what's coming down the pipe in our roadmap.  More information about the project can be found at: http://ganglia.info.

Manage Your Data Center Storage Power with SNIA Standards and/or Programs
Arnold Jones, SNIA
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon IV

Manage and optimize your power consumption with SNIA Energy standards and SNIA Emerald Program. SNIA is seeking requirements for what your data center needs are for operational energy metrics and policy driven management. Be part of a lively discussion of available SNIA standards, capacity optimization best practices, and SNIA Emerald Program.

Fedora BoF
Beth Lynn Eicher and David Nalley
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Willow Glen

SELinux, F14, Giveaways

IPv6 Technologies Roundtable
Sue Graves, ISC
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon III

Short presentation on what technologies are out there, AFTR, DNS64, DS-Lite, PCP... and then open discussion, Q&A on what folks want and need.

Getting Started with Configuration Management
Cory Lueninghoener, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon I/II

Are all of your friends talking about Configuration Management, but you don't know where to start? Do you have a friend that needs to jump on the bandwagon but just hasn't been able to? 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 out the process. Make this year the year that you finally get your configurations managed. Experienced and inexperienced configuration managers welcome.

GBLTQ* (Alphabet Soup)
Tuesday, November 9, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Salon I/II

SystemImager BoF
Brian Elliott Finley and Bernard Li
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Almaden

Come meet Brian Elliott Finley, the original creator of SystemImager and share interesting stories about how you use this software in your work place. SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. Imaging can be done via rsync, flamethrower (multicast) or BitTorrent. More information about the project can be found at: http://systemimager.org.

CAcert.org Assurance Process
Ken Schumacher, Fermi National Accelerator Lab
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

The goal of this session is to inform attendees how the CAcert assurance process works. CAcert has developed new policies and procedures over the last few years. The presentation will introduce the CAcert Community Agreement  and describe the audit as it relates to getting our CAcert ROOT certificate included with distributions. The primary purpose is to bring together qualified assurers in order to help those interested in attaining the points needed to start assuring others. By adding qualified assurers, we will help make CAcert free digital certificates available to more people

For a more details, I recommend that you review the event description on the CAcert Wiki site specifically for this LISA BoF session. There are instructions there for preparations you can accomplish in advance of the BoF session. Make sure you bring more than one government issued photo ID to the event.

If you are a qualified CAcert Assurer, please consider attending this session and helping us get a pool of new assurers started with their first 100 points. Please contact Ken Schumacher to discuss your availability.

VMware vSphere Administrators' BoF
Derek Balling, Answers.com
Tuesday, November 9, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

Are you running vSphere, or considering a move to vSphere? Discuss ways of implementing, using, and monitoring vSphere in your environment with other folks who face similar challenges.

Reddit Users Meetup
Jay Faulkner
Tuesday, November 9, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Salon III

Splunk, the Future: 4.2 and Beyond Vendor BoF
Gaurav Gupta, Archana Ganapathi, and Jim Hansen, Splunk
Wednesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Willow Glen

Expected early next year, Splunk 4.2 promises some key features and benefits for system administrators, developers and IT managers. Included in this release will be real-time alerting, to go with the real-time search capability that debuted in 4.1. There will also be the ability to manage Splunk deployments and some nice solutions apps, including VMware and ESS apps.

At the end of the product roadmap, you'll also hear about Splunk's community initiatives over the last year and what to expect in the coming year.

The presentations will be followed by a lively Q and A session.

Drinks will be served.

Lightning Talks
Duncan Hutty, Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon III

A series of five-minute talks where enthusiasm is paramount and almost anything that might be of interest to sysadmins is ontopic. http://www.allgoodbits.org/other/lt.html

Tiered File Systems w/o Tiers Vendor BoF
Rob Terlizzi, Isilon Systems
Wednesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon I/II

This is an overview of scale-out storage systems and their underlying file  system technologies - primarily focused on network-attached storage systems.  In this presentation, scale-out will be defined in contrast with scale-up  storage systems, the market, user, and technology needs driving new class of  storage systems will be explained, as well as a survey of open-source and  commercial implementations available today.

Learning Objectives

  • What is a Scale-Out Storage system and how does it differ from a "traditional" storage system?
  • How do different implementations of Scale-Out technologies differ—what are the pros/cons of the various design choices?

Puppet BoF
Nan Liu, Puppet Labs
Wednesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

Let's get together to talk about configuration management. Nan can talk about what's new and coming in Puppet, and users can get together to trade Puppet tips, and tricks. We can also talk about new features you'd like to see in the application and clever things that you're doing in your infrastructure with related applications. There should be good information here for new and prospective users and experienced Pupeeteers alike.

Image Packaging System/Installation Vendor BoF
Bart Smaalders and Dave Miner, Oracle
Wednesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

This BoF will focus on how the Packaging and Install components in Oracle Solaris 11 have been redesigned. This session is a chance to talk with the architects and find out how this will simplify deployment and maintenance of Oracle Solaris 11.

'One Click' OS Hardening Vendor BoF
Jamie Adams, Principal Secure Systems Engineer, Trusted Computer Solutions
Wednesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon IV

Join us to learn how automating operating system hardening will provide consistent and predictable system security in a fraction of the time that it takes to do it manually. Security Blanket, by Trusted Computer Solutions, can automatically assess and configure the technical controls to meet industry standard or customized security requirements. Along with some great information, we'll be providing a 'build your own' sandwich bar, snacks, beer, wine and fun! Hope to see you there.

PostgreSQL 9.0: Binary Replication and More
Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL
Wednesday, November 10, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Willow Glen

Core Team Member Josh Berkus will explain and demonstrate many of the new features of version 9.0 of the PostgreSQL Open Source Database. Chief among these is Binary Replication, otherwise known as Hot Standby. Attendees who bring a laptop with PostgreSQL 9 installed can walk through the steps required to set up the new replication.

Ensure the Highest Levels of Availability for Applications and Data Vendor BoF
Celia Cattani and Tony Tomarchio, SIOS (formerly SteelEye)
Wednesday, November 10, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon III

Ensuring the availability of business-critical applications and data running within Linux environments is a requirement for a successful enterprises. Any strategy to address these requirements must include the right solutions to maximize application and data availability and to provide protection against events ranging from human error to natural disasters - that may impact access to these business resources.

SIOS Technology Corp. (formerly SteelEye Technology, Inc.) has been a leading supplier of solutions that meet the stringent requirements of business continuity planning for over a decade with a focus on two primary elements that make up the core of any business continuity plan, data protection and application availability.

Zenoss Open Source Monitoring BoF
Wednesday, November 10, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon I/II

Today's data centers are more dynamic than ever before. New hardware appears and disappears regularly, servers are virtualized and move in and out of the data center. Fortunately there is an open source tool that makes this all manageable and allows you to monitor your network, wherever it is. Zenoss Core is a free and open source (GPLv2) IT monitoring solution written in Python that has been downloaded over 1 million times and used in over 25,000 organizations worldwide. Zenoss delivers the functionality to monitor the health and performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package. At the heart of Zenoss is a dynamic unified model of the entire IT environment, which allows system administrators to manage and monitor the ever-increasing complexity of their environments. The demonstration will cover Zenoss' capabilities and discuss how the large and active community around Zenoss gives it an advantage over closed-source alternatives. More information about Zenoss Core can be found at: http://community.zenoss.org

LOPSA Annual Community Meeting
Wednesday, November 10, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

Join the League of Professional System Administrators' Board of Directors for a presentation of the past year's activities as well as what's being planned for the future, followed by a Q & A. This meeting is open to all, members and non-members of LOPSA alike.

DTrace and Performance with Oracle Solaris 11 Express Vendor BoF
Jim Mauro, Oracle
Wednesday, November 10, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

This BoF will focus on Oracle Solaris Performance topics, with special focus on DTrace, the dynamic tracing framework built into the OS.

10 Gigabit Ethernet: System Tuning Approach for Applications
Michael J. Martin, SearchNetworking blogger
Wednesday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon III

This BOF session will focus on sharing experiences on utilizing 10 Gigabit Ethernet in both virtual and real hardware systems environments. The following subtopics will be covered:

  • Application Base lining and auditing
  • Linux TCP Implementations and TCP performance expectations
  • Linux TCP Tunable Parameters
  • 10Gb Performance Testing and Verification

Will Cloud Computing be Open and Interoperable?
Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF)
Wednesday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon I/II

This BoF will look at work done in the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator and its alliance partners as it relates to the workloads and interfaces between cloud service providers and cloud service consumers. The goal of cloud standards is to improve cloud consumer agility and define a set of architectural semantics that unify the interoperable management of workloads and resources between enterprises and cloud computing infrastructures. This BoF will  look at the core use cases, and the reference architectures which are the basis for open cloud provider interfaces, common data models, and standards profiles, which are essential to achieve cloud computing interoperability.

MicroLISA (small site sysadmin; you define "small")
Matt Simmons, Standalone Sysadmin; and Robert Au
Wednesday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon V/VI

Join a group of other small infrastructure sysadmins for an informal discussion about issues the big guys don't have to worry about or solve very differently. "Small infrastructure" means whatever you want it to...few servers, few users, few staff, or all of the above.

Bcfg2 BoF
Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory
Wednesday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Salon IV

Meeting for Bcfg2 users. Learn what is new in Bcfg2, and get an overview of the roadmap for the next year.

Developer Tools for [C/C++/Fortran Application Development for] Solaris 11 Express Vendor BoF
Vijay Tatkar, Oracle
Wednesday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

Oracle Solaris Studio and GNU/GCC tools deliver a comprehensive, fully-optimized set of compilers, libraries and tools. GNU/GCC toolchain is the industry's common cross-platform, community driven set of compilers and tools. Studio provides maximum performance on SPARC and x86 Solaris Sun systems, allows developers to take advantage of, and leverage, the most prominent Solaris features (like DTrace, Zones, etc) and provide a wealth of over 100 tools and 200+ libraries that make it the #1 development platform for building scalable, secure and reliable mission-critical SPARC and x86 applications for the #1 enterprise OS, Oracle Solaris.

Intrusion Prevention & Detection
Matt Disney
Wednesday, November 10, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Salon III

Topics in Configuration Management (Slides: version 1, version 2)
Hal Snyder and Jason Olson, Orbitz; Nico Schottelius, ETH Zurich
Wednesday, November 10, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Blossom Hill

Possible topics:

  • Continuous Delivery and How Do We Get There
  • ITIL and the CMDB
  • Scalability of CM infrastructure
  • Applied DevOps and Agile Release Management
  • + your CM interests

Centralized Logging
Leon Towns-von Stauber, Intelius
Thursday, November 11, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Guadalupe

Let's talk about what you're using to aggregate and analyze the logs from your systems. Or if you're not already doing that, come find out how. Trade tips, proud moments, or horror stories about centralized logging.

HP Proliant Firmware: HP SIM, HP SUM, sh CPXXX.exe Reporting
Thursday, November 11, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Guadalupe

Tools, techniques, discuss what people find works and what doesn't.

Hewlett-Packard Open Source Programs Vendor BoF
Thursday, November 11, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Blossom Hill

Ironport eMail Appliance Admins BoF
Steve Shipway, The University of Auckland
Thursday, November 11, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Almaden

For administrators of the Cisco Ironport email appliance to compare experiences and to share tips and tricks, and for people currently evaluating email appliance solutions to gain more information before making a decision.

  • How do you monitor capacity and performance?
  • What pitfalls have you encountered?
  • What clever configuration tricks do you want to share with other admins?
Hear the experiences of Auckland University in their recent evaluation of various solutions and why we chose this solution.

Google Vendor BoF
Thursday, November 11, 8:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Willow Glen

Academic Roundtable
Melissa Danforth, California State University, Bakersfield
Thursday, November 11, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Blossom Hill

Come discuss the issues relating to researching, teaching or practicing system administration in a university setting. This will be an informal discussion and brainstorming session.

Human-Computer Interaction: Experiences and Difficulties in IT Management, Security, and Privacy
Patrick F. Wilbur, Clarkson University
Thursday, November 11, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Almaden

In this session, we invite researchers and practitioners to discuss their experiences, ideas, and other interests in human-computer interaction (HCI) as it relates to information technology and security and privacy (HCISEC, CHISEC, usable security). The organizer will bring into the discussion recent published works related to understanding user intent and incorporating it into the security equation, as well as usable security metrics. Attendees will discuss these works and other favorite works of theirs, and offer their own insights for improving usability and security—while not forgetting to take into account the needs of the poor, overworked, highly-stressed system administrator.

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Last changed: 12 Nov. 2010 jp