Tuesday, December 5, 2000
Full-Day Tutorials T1 Advanced Solaris Systems Administration Topics Peter Baer Galvin, Corporate Technologies T2 Windows 2000 Security NEW Phil Cox, SystemExperts Corp.; Paul B. Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology T3 Topics for System Administrators, 2 NEW Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado; Ned McClain, XOR Network Engineering; Tor Mohling, University of Colorado; and Adam Boggs, Sun Microsystems T4 Large Heterogeneous Networks: Planning, Building, and Maintaining Them While Staying Sane NEW Lee Damon, QUALCOMM, Inc. T5 Wireless Networking Fundamentals: WANs, LANs, and PANs NEW Jon Rochlis, The Rochlis Group, Inc.; Chris Murphy, MIT T6 Linux Administration in Production Environments Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting T7 Forensic Computing NEW Steve Romig, Ohio State University T8 Advanced Topics in Perl Programming NEW Tom Christiansen, Consultant		Half-Day Tutorials - Morning T9 Sendmail and Security Eric Allman, Sendmail, Inc. T10 Administering Backups with Legato NetWorker W. Curtis Preston, Collective Technologies T11 Management 101--The Basics NEW Stephen Johnson, Transmeta; Dusty White, Consultant Half-Day Tutorials - Afternoon T12 What's New in Sendmail 8.11 NEW Gregory Neil Shapiro, Sendmail, Inc. T13 Oracle Backup and Recovery NEW W. Curtis Preston, Collective Technologies T14 Management 102--Empowerment NEW Stephen Johnson, Transmeta; Dusty White, Consultant

Who should attend: UNIX administrators who need more knowledge of Solaris administration.

We will discuss the major new features of recent Solaris releases, including which to use (and how) and which to avoid. This in-depth course will provide the information you need to run a Solaris installation effectively. Updated to include Solaris 8 and several other new topics.

Topics include:

• Installing and upgrading
  • Architecting your facility
  • Choosing appropriate hardware
  • Planning your installation, filesystem layout, post-installation
  • Installing (and removing) patches and packages
• Advanced features of Solaris 2
  • File systems and their uses
  • The /proc file system and commands
  • Useful tips and techniques
• Networking and the kernel
  • Virtual IP: configuration and uses
  • Kernel and performance tuning: new features, adding devices, tuning, debuggingcommands
  • Devices: naming conventions, drivers, gotchas
• Enhancing Solaris
  • High-availability essentials: disk failures and recovery, RAID levels, uses and performance, H-A technology and implementation
  • Performance: how to track down and break up bottlenecks
  • Tools: useful free tools, tool use strategies
  • Security: locking down Solaris, system modifications, tools
  • Resources and references

Peter Baer Galvin (T1) is the chief technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., and was the systems manager for Brown University's Computer Science Department. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines, is systems admnistration columnist for SunWorld, and is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and the Applied Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter has taught tutorials on security and systems administration and has given talks at many conferences.



T2 Windows 2000 Security NEW
Phil Cox, SystemExperts Corp.; Paul B. Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Who should attend: System and network administrators who will need to implement or maintain Windows 2000—based systems and networks, and site managers charged with selecting and setting site security requirements.

The security implications of a large Windows 2000 (Win2K) deployment are not yet well understood. This tutorial presents the problems and solutions surrounding Win2K and the security of the networks it runs on. It will cover the design of Win2K from a security standpoint and outline what Win2K has "out of the box" for security, along with Win2K-related risks and appropriate countermeasures. It will conclude with specific recommendations on firewalling Win2K and offer pointers on how to "harden" the system.

Topics include:

• Overview of Win2K
  • Domains/Active Directory
  • Authentication: Kerberos, NTLM, smart cards, certificates, PKI
  • Authorization: Group policies
  • Auditing: Event auditing, WEBM, WMI, SNMP
  • Network services
• Security threats
  • What are the threats?
  • Who are the hackers?
  • Methods of attacks
  • Win2K—specific threats
• Win2K countermeasures
  • Defining security
  • Authentication
  • Authorization
  • Auditing
  • Protective measures
  • Detecting and dealing with attacks
  • User and group security management
  • File system security and resource sharing
• Firewalling Win2K
  • Defensive strategies
  • What you need to filter
• Steps to hardening Win2K

Phil Cox (M5, T2) is a consultant for SystemExperts Corporation, a consulting firm that specializes in system security and management. Phil frequently writes and lectures on issues bridging the gap between UNIX and Windows NT. He is a featured columnist in ;login;, the USENIX Association Magazine and has served on numerous USENIX program committees. Phil holds a B.S. in computer science from the College of Charleston, South Carolina.



Paul B. Hill (T2) is a programmer/analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in Information Systems. He has been involved with the development of MIT's Kerberos implementation since 1991. Paul has been working with Microsoft operating systems since 1982 and has worked with all version of Windows NT. He is is the senior programmer on MIT's Project Pismere, a project to provide an academic computing environment on Windows 2000 that is integrated into MIT's existing Athena computing environment. Paul also consults on system security.


T3 Topics for System Administrators, 2 NEW
Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado;
Ned McClain, XOR Network Engineering;
Tor Mohling, University of Colorado; and Adam Boggs, Sun Microsystems

Who should attend: This class will cover a range of timely and interesting UNIX system administration topics. It is intended for system and network administrators who are interested in picking up several new technologies in an accelerated manner. The format consists of five topics spread throughout the day.

SNMP: An introduction to SNMP, followed by discussion and live examples of popular SNMP agents for Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, and others. We will look at packaged agents, freely available ones, and also command-line SNMP tools.

RRDtool and Cricket: These free network monitoring tools can be combined to create a highly customizable Web-based network management system. Those familiar with Perl will be able to apply examples from this section to almost any monitoring scenario. Although everyone understands the value of UNIX system logs, many organizations are still in the Stone Age of log management. This section will discuss popular logging strategies and several free tools to help facilitate their use.

Host security: Although the specific configuration tips apply to Linux and Solaris, the concepts are generic, applying well to other UNIX operating systems. The section will include technical discussion designed to help administrators determine weak points in their own installations.

Firewall configuration: This section will integrate ideas from the rest of the day. Examples will be drawn from Cisco and Checkpoint, but the focus will be on generic firewalling strategy. Several tools to check firewall configuration will be demonstrated.

Evi Nemeth (S3, T3), a faculty member in computer sci ence at the University of Colorado, has managed UNIX systems for the past 20 years, both from the front lines and from the ivory tower. She is co-author of the UNIX System Administration Handbook.




Ned McClain (S3, T3) is a lead engineer at XOR Network Engineering. He is currently helping with the 3rd edition of the UNIX System Administration Handbook (by Nemeth, Snyder, and Hein). He has a degree in computer science from Cornell University and has done research with both the CS and Engineering Physics departments at Cornell.





T4 Large Heterogeneous Networks: Planning, Building, and Maintaining Them While Staying Sane NEW
Lee Damon, Amazon.com

Who should attend: Anyone who is designing, implementing or maintaining a UNIX environment with 2 to 20,000+ hosts. System administrators, architects, and managers who need to maintain multiple hosts with few admins.

This tutorial won't propose one "perfect solution." Instead, it will try to raise all the questions you should ask in order to design the right solution for your needs.

Topics include:

• Administrative domains: Who is responsible for what? What can users do for themselves?
• Desktop services vs. farming: Do you do serious computation on the desktop, or do you build a compute farm?
• Disk layout: How should you plan for an upgrade? Where do things go?
• Free vs. purchased solutions: Do you write your own, or do you outsource?
• Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous: Homogeneous is easier, but will it do what your users need?
• Master database: What do you need to track, and how?
• Policies to make your life easier
• Push vs. pull: Do you force to each host, or wait for a client request?
• Quick replacement techniques: How to get the user back up in 5 minutes
• Remote install/upgrade/patching: How can you implement lights-out operation? Handle remote user sites? Keep up with vendor patches?
• Scaling and sizing: How do you plan?
• Security vs. sharing: Users want access to everything. So do crackers. Where and how do you draw the line?
• Single sign-on: Can one-password access to multiple services be secure?
• Single system images: Can you find the Holy Grail? Should each user see everything the same way, no matter what environment they're working in, or should each user's access to each service be consistent with his/her own environment?
• Tools: What's free? What should you buy? What can you can write yourself?

The class will concentrate on UNIX, but integration with NT/2000 will also be discussed.

Lee Damon (S12, T4) holds a B.S. in speech communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE since its inception. He is a member of the SAGE Ethics Working Group and was one of the commentators on the SAGE Ethics document. He has championed awareness of ethics in the systems administration community, including writing it into policy documents.




T5 Wireless Networking Fundamentals: WANs, LANs, and PANs NEW
Jon Rochlis, The Rochlis Group, Inc.; Chris Murphy, MIT

Who should attend: Anyone involved with network design, implementation, and support, and content providers who need familiarity with wireless technologies and how those technologies can affect their service offerings. A basic understanding of wired network architecture over local and/or wide areas is required.

For years people have dreamed of "unwired" access--anywhere, anytime--to networks and the data they contain. Recently, the advent of standards for wireless LANs, the development of powerful handheld devices, and widespread deployment of services such as digital cellular systems have made the promise of wireless networking more realizable than ever before.

Topics include:

• Wide-area networks
  • CDPD
  • Cellular modem
  • PCS
  • GSM
  • pager
  • satellite
• Local-area networks
  • 802.11
• Personal-area networks
  • Bluetooth
  • IrDA
• Home vs. office use
• Standards and interoperability
• Integration with wired networks and services
• Cost: Budget salvation, or sinkhole?
• Support: Will you need new skills?
• Security
• Product survey
• Future trends and possibilities

Jon Rochlis (T5) is a independent consultant, providing high-level advice to large and small businesses in the areas of networking, network security, distributed systems design and management, and electronic commerce. He has been a senior consultant with SystemExperts Corp., an engineering manager with BBN Planet (now GTE), Director of the Cambridge Technology Center of OpenVision Technologies, and a technical supervisor for the Development Group of MIT's Distributed Computing and Network Services (DCNS), the follow-on to Project Athena. Jon has also served on the NEARnet Technical Committee. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science and engineering from MIT.

Chris Murphy (T5) is a network engineer in the Network Operations Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his colleagues manage the design, implementation, and operation of a campuswide TCP/IP and Appletalk network of over 25,000 hosts and 18,000 users. He was responsible for the design and implementation of MIT's dial-up PPP service, Tether. Currently he is involved with an evaluation of wireless technologies in the MIT environment. Mr. Murphy is also a co-manager of MIT's Desktop Products team, which evaluates and recommends computing systems for use at the Institute.


T6 Linux Administration in Production Environments
Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Who should attend: Both current and prospective Linux system administrators. It will cover configuring and managing Linux computer systems in production environments, with a focus on the administrative issues involved in deploying Linux systems for real-world tasks and problems arising from both commercial and R&D contexts.

Topics include:

• Why Linux? How to justify a free operating system in a production environment
• High-performance I/O: advanced file systems (Coda, logical volumes), disk striping, optimizing I/O performance
• Linux and enterprise-level networking
• High-performance compute-server environments: Beowulf, clustering, parallelization environments and facilities, CPU performance optimization
• High-availability Linux: fault-tolerance options, UPS configuration
• Databases and Linux
• Linux systems in office environments
• Automating Linux installation and configuration
• Integrating with (other) UNIX and non-UNIX systems
• Security considerations and techniques for production environments

Aeleen Frisch (M8, T6) has been a system administra tor for over 15 years. She currently looks after a very heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows NT systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential Windows NT System Administration.





T7 Forensic Computing NEW
Steve Romig, Ohio State University

Who should attend: People who investigate computer crimes and are familiar with systems or network administration and the Internet.

This tutorial will explain where evidence can be found, how it can be retrieved securely, how to build a picture of the "crime scene," and what can be done beforehand to make investigations easier and more successful. Examples are drawn from UNIX, Windows NT, and telecommunications hardware.

Topics include:

• Basic forensic science
  • What evidence is
  • How evidence is used in an investigation
  • The investigation game plan
  • How to collect and process evidence
• Where the evidence is
  • How computers and networks work
  • Examples of incidents and location of evidence
• Host-based investigations
  • Memory and swap space
  • Processes
  • Network activity
  • Files and file systems
• Network-based investigations
  • Host-based network service logs
  • Network activity logs
  • Authentication logs
  • Telco logs, including pen registers, phone traces, caller ID
• Tying it all together

Steve Romig (T7) is in charge of the Ohio State University Incident Response Team, which provides incident response assistance, training, consulting, and security auditing service for The Ohio State University community. He is also working with a group of people from Central Ohio businesses to improve Internet security response and practices. In years past Steve has worked as lead UNIX system administrator at one site with 40,000 users and 12 hosts and another site with 3,000 users and over 500 hosts. Steve received his B.S. in mathematics (computer science track) from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. You can reach him by phone at 1-614-688-3412 or by email at romig@net.ohio-state.edu.


T8 Advanced Topics in Perl Programming NEW
Tom Christiansen, Consultant

Who should attend: Perl programmers interested in honing their existing Perl skills for quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, and WWW programming. Participants should have several months' experience of basic Perl scripting.

Topics include:

• Complex data structures
• References
• Memory management and anonymous data structures
• Packages and modules
• Namespaces, scoping, and extent
• Classes and objects
• Object-oriented programming
• Process control and management
• Pipes and signals
• Advanced I/O techniques and file locking
• Assorted tips and tricks to use Perl effectively

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Develop standard and OO modules
• Understand complex and hierarchical data structures
• Understand Perl's facilities for file locking
• Use Perl for multi-process and daemon programming
• Understand inheritance, closures, and scoping in Perl

Tom Christiansen (T8) has been involved with Perl since day zero of its initial public release in 1987. Lead author of The Perl Cookbook, co-author of the second editions of Programming Perl and Learning Perl, and co-author of Learning Perl on Win32 Systems, Tom is also the major caretaker of 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.



T9 Sendmail and Security
Eric Allman, Sendmail, Inc.

Who should attend: This fast-paced tutorial is intended for UNIX administrators who are already familiar with configuring and administering sendmail and who want to learn how to convert to sendmail 8.11 or who want to understand sendmail security better, particularly on firewalls and other similar systems.

Sendmail is a powerful Mail Transport Agent that can be configured for many different environments, from firewalls through workstation mail servers. These environments have different security requirements; in particular, in a pure relay configuration (with no local user accounts or delivery) sendmail can be configured to relinquish root permissions.

Topics include:

• How to configure sendmail on systems that have special security requirements, such as firewalls
• How to run sendmail as anon-root
• Running sendmail in a "chroot"ed jail
• How and when to relax sendmail's file security checks

Eric Allman (M3, T9) is the original author of sendmail. He is the author of syslog, tset, the -me troff 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.




T10 Administering Backups with Legato NetWorker
W. Curtis Preston, Collective Technologies

Who should attend: System administrators involved in the design, implementation, and administration of Legato NetWorker. Participants should be familiar with basic NetWorker installation and administration. Participants who are planning to use, but are not yet using, NetWorker should review the NetWorker documentation.

Anyone who has implemented a medium to large installation of any commercial backup software package understands the challenges of such a project. This tutorial will focus on the challenges unique to Legato NetWorker, with a heavy emphasis on automation, monitoring, and reporting. The tutorial will also answer questions all NetWorker administrators find themselves asking, and it will provide scripts that can be used to automate NetWorker.

Topics include:

• Legato architecture
  • Master servers and storage nodes
  • Media and browse index
  • NetWorker's dynamic parallelism
• System design
  • Setting client, server, and device parallelism for optimal performance
  • Determining the future size of your Networker client indexes
  • Deciding whether a client should back up to its own library or to a remote library
  • Setting up storage node fail-over
  • Determining the number of clients to put in a class
  • Deciding how many pools to use, and why
  • Designing the bootstrap backup to reduce disaster recovery time
• System automation and FAQs
  • How does cloning really work? How do I clone just my full backups, or clone backups that take longer than a day to clone?
  • Why does my index get corrupted, and how can I protect against it?
  • How can I improve NetWorker's email capabilities to send my bootstrap reports somewhere other than my printer? to use a different subject line when the backup fails? to send the report to my pager if the backup fails?
  • Can NetWorker tell me when I'm low on volumes, instead of waiting until I'm out?
  • How do I automate the importing, exporting, and labeling of library volumes?
  • Can NetWorker back up a Veritas snapshoted file system?
  • How do I back up Network Appliance and Auspex systems?
  • What does the Tower of Hanoi have to do with backups?
  • How to make NetWorker automatically retry failed backup jobs?
  • Is there a better way than mmrecov to recover my NetWorker server?

After completing this tutorial, participants will be able to answer these questions, will know how to avoid common pitfalls, and will have the tools necessary to completely automate their NetWorker installation.

W. Curtis Preston (T10, T13) is a Practice Principal for Collective Technologies and manages their Backup and Recovery Practice. He has been specializing in backup and recovery for over seven years and has designed, implemented, and audited enterprisewide backup and recovery systems for many Fortune 500 and e-commerce companies. His O'Reilly & Associates book, UNIX Backup & Recovery, has sold over 20,000 copies, and he writes a regular column for UnixReview online and SysAdmin magazine. Curtis's Web address is https://www.backupcentral.com, and he can be reached at curtis@backupcentral.com.


T11 Management 101--The Basics NEW
Stephen Johnson, Transmeta; Dusty White, Consultant

Who should attend: Newly promoted technical managers and those who expect promotion in the near future.

So you have done well at your technical job and have been asked to take on some management responsibility. You understand the technical side of the jobs your group is doing. What do you need to succeed as a manager?

This class and the accompanying "Management 102" will orient you, introduce you to the skills you will need to be most effective, and suggest ways you can guide your own growth as a manager. (N.B.: The tutorial "Communicating with Everyone" is highly recommended, but not essential.)

Topics include:

• How to find out what your job really is
• Developing a new definition of job satisfaction and success
• Delegation and coaching
• Developing your people
• Performance reviews
• Why being right is not enough
• Common mistakes technical managers make

Stephen Johnson (M11, M14, T11, T14) has been a technical manager on and off for nearly two decades, in both large and small companies. At AT&T, he is best known for writing Yacc, Lint, and the Portable C Compiler. He served as the head of the UNIX Languages Department at AT&T's Summit Labs. He has also been involved in a number of Silicon Valley startup companies. He served for ten years on the USENIX Board of Directors, four of them as president. He presented an invited talk on management at LISA three years ago, he has taught USENIX tutorials on technical subjects, and he has led management training seminars at LISA and the USENIX Annual Conference, as well as at Transmeta.


T12 What's New in Sendmail 8.11 NEW
Gregory Neil Shapiro, Sendmail, Inc.

Who should attend: UNIX system and network administrators already familiar with or responsible for sendmail, who want to learn how to move their sites to sendmail 8.11 or who want to better understand sendmail security, particularly on firewalls and other similar systems.

Sendmail 8.11, the latest release of Open Source sendmail, has many new features. In many cases mail administrators can just compile the new release of sendmail and use their old configuration files, but "power users" may wish to utilize the many new capabilities of version 8.11.

Topics include:

• SMTP authentication, allowing users to gain additional privileges, such as ability to relay
• Performance improvements, including multiple queues, memory-buffered pseudo-files, and more control over resolver timeouts
• The new "message submission agent" port, as defined by RFC 2476
• Ability to connect to servers running on named sockets
• Changes to support IPv6
• Better LDAP integration and support for LDAP-based routing
• Improved support for virtual hosting
• Several new map classes, including ph, arith, and macro

Time permitting, musings on the future direction of sendmail will be indulged in.

Gregory Neil Shapiro (T12) began his professional career as a system administrator for Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) after graduating from WPI in 1992. During his tenure as senior UNIX system administrator, he became involved with beta testing the BIND name server, the sendmail mail transfer agent, and other UNIX utilities such as emacs and screen. He contributed the secure zones functionality included in BIND 4.9.X. When presented with the opportunity to join Sendmail, Inc., he packed his bags and headed west. As lead engineer at Sendmail, Inc., he has continued to support the open source version while working on Sendmail Pro and Sendmail Switch, the commercial versions.


T13 Oracle Backup and Recovery NEW
W. Curtis Preston, Collective Technologies

Who should attend: UNIX administrators who need to back up and recover their Oracle 7 or 8 database, and NT engineers who need to know more about Oracle architecture and recovery.

Topics include:

• Oracle architecture
  • The power user's view
  • The administrator's view
• What is a storage manager?
• Physical backups without a storage manager
  • Cold backups
  • Hot backups
  • Automating backups with oraback.sh
• Physical backups with a storage manager
  • Vendor-supplied managers
  • Oracle managers
  • rman scripts
• Managing the archived redologs
• Recovering Oracle: Steps 1—30
• Logical backups
  • Performing a logical backup
  • Recovering with a logical backup

W. Curtis Preston (T10, T13) is a Practice Principal for Collective Technologies and manages their Backup and Recovery Practice. He has been specializing in backup and recovery for over seven years and has designed, implemented, and audited enterprisewide backup and recovery systems for many Fortune 500 and e-commerce companies. His O'Reilly & Associates book, UNIX Backup & Recovery, has sold over 20,000 copies, and he writes a regular column for UnixReview online and SysAdmin magazine. Curtis's Web address is https://www.backupcentral.com, and he can be reached at curtis@backupcentral.com.


T14 Management 102--Empowerment NEW
Stephen Johnson, Transmeta; Dusty White, Consultant

Who should attend: New technical managers or those who expect to be managers soon. (This is a companion tutorial to "Management 101." The tutorial on "Communicating with Everybody:" is also recommended, but not required.)

Many managers report that their job seemed very powerful when before they took it, does not feel that way now. This tutorial offers practical techniques that allow people to empower themselves and others. True empowerment comes from within and can be developed even in a hostile environment. Empowering yourself also helps you empower your employees and your boss.

Topics include:

• A theory of power and empowerment
• How to empower yourself, or, better said, to experience how empowered you already are
• Common disempowering mistakes and how to remain empowered in spite of them
• Empowerment and trust
• How to gain and keep agreement
• Techniques for gaining and increasing trust

Stephen Johnson (M11, M14, T11, T14) has been a technical manager on and off for nearly two decades, in both large and small companies. At AT&T, he is best known for writing Yacc, Lint, and the Portable C Compiler. He served as the head of the UNIX Languages Department at AT&T's Summit Labs. He has also been involved in a number of Silicon Valley startup companies. He served for ten years on the USENIX Board of Directors, four of them as president. He presented an invited talk on management at LISA three years ago, he has taught USENIX tutorials on technical subjects, and he has led management training seminars at LISA and the USENIX Annual Conference, as well as at Transmeta.