Preliminary Technical Program     Wednesday through Friday, June 9-11, 1999

Wednesday, June 9, 1999
9:00am - 10:30am    Joint Opening Session
Opening Remarks Avi Rubin, AT&T Labs - Research  Keynote Address John Ousterhout CEO, Scriptics Corporation Integration Applications: the Next Frontier in Programming The programming world is undergoing a fundamental shift from monolithic applications to integration applications. Integration applications are created by coordinating and extending existing applications, protocols, frameworks, and devices rather than building from scratch.  In this talk I'll describe why integration applications will dominate software development in the years ahead and what this means for the way we develop programs. In particular, some of the things that are taken for granted today, such as strong typing and inheritance, may not make sense in the future. John Ousterhout is CEO of Scriptics Corporation, a company developing commercial applications around the Tcl scripting language while also advancing the open source Tcl/Tk core.  Before Scriptics, John was a Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

10:30am - 11:00am    BREAK

11:00am - 12:30pm
Refereed Papers - Steinbeck Forum	Invited Talks - Serra Grand Ballroom II	FREENIX - Serra Grand Ballroom I
Resource Management  Session Chair:  Bob Gray, Boulder Labs Implementing Lottery Scheduling: Matching the Specializations in  Traditional Schedulers  David Petrou, John W. Milford, and Garth A. Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University Retrofitting Quality of Service into a Time-Sharing Operating System  John Bruno, Jose Brustoloni, Eran Gabber, Banu Ozden, Abraham Silberschatz,  Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories  Adaptive Modem Connection Lifetimes  Fred Douglis and Tom Killian, AT&T Labs - Research	IP Telephony - Protocols and Architectures Melinda Shore, Nokia IP Telephony Division Rapid developments in IP telephony have, over the period of just a few years, moved us from a situation in which there were no standards into one in which there are many, often conflicting, standards. Different standards bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the International Telecommunications Union Standardization Sector (ITU-T) have developed their own models of how telephone systems should be constructed on packet networks, and what the interfaces to public and private telephone networks should look like. This talk provides an overview of current and developing protocols for IP telephony, as well as of the architectures which they were designed to support. Particular attention will be given to the interconnection of packet-based telephone systems and traditional, circuit-based telephony.	File Systems  Session Chair:  David Greenman, FreeBSD Soft Updates: A Technique for Eliminating Most Synchronous Writes in the Fast Filesystem Marshall Kirk McKusick, Author and Consultant; and Gregory R. Ganger, Carnegie-Mellon University Implementation and Performance of a Transaction-Based Filesystem on FreeBSD. Jason Evans,  Unix Developer The Global File System: A Shared Disk File System for *BSD and Linux  Kenneth Preslan, Matthew O'Keefe,  University of Minnesota;and John Lekashman, NASA Ames
12:30pm - 2:00pm    LUNCH (on your own)
2:00pm - 3:30pm
File Systems  Session Chair:  Orran Krieger, IBM, Inc.  Operation-based Update Propagation in a Mobile File System Yui-Wah Lee, Kwong-Sak Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Carnegie Mellon University Extending File Systems Using Stackable Templates  Erez Zadok, Ion Badulescu, and Alex Shender, Columbia University  Why does file system prefetching work? Elizabeth Shriver, Christopher Small,  Lucent Technologies,  Bell Labs; and Keith A. Smith, Harvard University	Will There Be a Transition to IPv6? Allison Mankin,  USC/ISI Guy Davies, Worldcom UUNET-UK In January 1995, after several years of work on multiple candidates, the Internet Engineering Task Force began the development of the consensus next generation of the Internet Protocol. The driver was the exhaustion of IPv4 address space.  Four years later, that address space is indeed very scarce, but, notwithstanding some notable activities, such as the 6BONE, there appears to be little transition to IPv6.  Davies and Mankin will describe the current tradeoffs of subscribers, equipment vendors and ISPs.  They will evaluate the stability of the Network Address Translator (NAT) solution for address scarcity, present some expectations about device and embedded system uses of IPv6,  and generally cover the question of whether there will be a transition to IPv6.	Device Drivers  Session Chair:  David Greenman, FreeBSD Distributing Device Drivers Outside of the Linux Kernel Theodore Ts'o,  MIT Design and Implementation of Firewire Device Driver on FreeBSD Katsushi Kobayashi, WIDE project , Japan newconfig: an Dynamic-Configuration Framework for FreeBSD  Atsushi Furuta, Software Research Associates, Inc.; and Jun-ichiro Itoh, Research Laboratory, Internet Initiative Japan Inc.
3:30pm - 4:00pm    BREAK
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Virtual Memory  Session Chair:  Yoonho Park, IBM The Region Trap Library: Handling Traps on Application-Defined Regions  of Memory  Tim Brecht and Harjinder Sandhu, University of Waterloo  The Case for Compressed Caching in Virtual Memory Systems  Paul R. Wilson, Scott F. Kaplan, and Yannis Smaragdakis, University of Texas  The UVM Virtual Memory System Charles D. Cranor, and Gurudatta M. Parulkar, Washington University	The Microsoft Antitrust Case: A View from an Expert Witness Edward W. Felten,  Deptartment of Computer Science Princeton University Edward Felton recently served as an expert witness in the Microsoft antitrust case, and as a consultant to the Department of Justice. Edward will talk about his interesting and educational experience.  He will share some of the things he learned about how the law, economics, and the software industry are connected.	File Systems Session Chair:  Theodore Ts'o, MIT The Vinum Volume Manager Greg Lehey, Nan Yang Computer Services Porting the Coda Distributed File System to Windows 95 Peter J. Braam, Carnegie Mellon University; Michael J. Callahan, Stelias Computing, Inc.; M. Satyanarayanan, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy A Network File System Over HTTP: Remote Access/Modification of Files and "files" Oleg Kiselyov
Thursday, June 10, 1999 9:00am - 10:30am
Invited Talks - Steinbeck Forum	FREENIX - Serra Grand Ballroom II	FREENIX - Serra Grand Ballroom I
Y2K: UNIX/Open System meets Real World IT Issues Alan F. Nugent, Independant Consultant To some the Year 2000 problem is an overblown, reactionary, non-issue mushroomed by dinosaur COBOL programmers who have no where else to go and greedy consultants. To many it is frighteningly real and requires immediate remediation. Like so many things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle and definitely in the eye of the beholder. The simple truth is: there are some electronically controlled devices that will function perfectly through the millenium change, while others will need to be fixed or retired. Alan Nugent will examine the many facets of the Y2K problem as it exists in the real world, some of the practices for remediation, potential consequences of action and inaction, and a retrospective of creative solutions borne out of corporate America.	Security Session Chair:  Angelos D. Keromytis, OpenBSD  A Future-Adaptable Password Scheme Niels Provos, University of Michigan; and David Mazieres, OpenBSD Developer Cryptography in OpenBSD: An Overview Theo de Raadt, Niklas Hallqvist, OpenBSD developer;Artur Grabowski, Ericsson Telecom AB; Angelos D. Keromytis, University of Pennsylvania/OpenBSD;Niels Provos, University of Michigan Platform for Privacy Preferences Project Lorrie Faith Cranor, AT&T Labs-Research	Networking Session Chair:  Nathan Torkington, Consultant  Trapeze/IP: TCP at Near-Gigabit Speeds Andrew Gallatin, Jeff Chase and Kenneth Yocum, Duke University Managing Traffic with ALTQ Kenjiro Cho, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. Opening The Source Repository With Anonymous CVS Chuck Cranor,  AT&T Labs-Research and Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD Developer
10:30am - 11:00am    BREAK
11:00am - 12:30pm
Refereed Papers - Steinbeck Forum	Invited Talks- Serra Grand Ballroom II	FREENIX - Serra Grand Ballroom I
Tools and Platforms  Session Chair: Anthony LaMarca, Xerox PARC Lightweight Structured Text Processing  Robert C. Miller and Brad A. Myers, Carnegie Mellon University  SBOX: Put CGI Scripts in a Box  Lincoln D. Stein, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory  The MultiSpace: an Evolutionary Platform for Infrastructural Services  Steven D. Gribble,  Matt Welsh, Eric A. Brewer, and David Culler, University of California at Berkeley	Deploying IP Multicast David Meyer, Cisco Systems Over the past few years, IP multicast and IP multicast capable applications have received significant attention. IP multicast infrastructure enables scaling by conserving the bandwidth required by one-to-many applications, such as broadcast Internet Television. In addition, IP multicast has enabled many new applications such as many-to-many video conferencing. This talk will focus on the building blocks of a multicast backbone, including Multicast BGP (MBGP), Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP), and Sparse Mode PIM, and describe recent experiences in deploying multicast infrastructure.	Business Session Chair: John Ioannidis, Self Open Source Software in a Commercial Operating System Wilfredo Sanchez, Apple Computer Business Issues in Free Software Licensing Don Rosenberg, Author Doing Well, Doing Good, and Staying Sane: A Hybrid Model for Sustainably Producing Innovative Open Software Nathaniel S. Borenstein, Joseph Hardin and Marshall Van Alstyne, School of Information, University of Michigan
12:30pm - 2:00pm    LUNCH (on your own)
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Web Servers  Session Chair: Gary McGraw, Reliable Software Technologies Web++: A System For Fast and Reliable Web Service Radek Vingralek,Yuri Breitbart, Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories; Mehmet Sayal, Peter Scheuermann, Northwestern University Efficient Support for P-HTTP in Cluster-Based Web Servers  Mohit Aron, Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel, Rice University  Flash: An efficient and portable Web server  Vivek Pai, Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel, Rice University	The Joys of Interpretive Languages: Real Programmers Don't Always Use C Henry Spencer, SP Systems Many programmers are far too ready to roll up their sleeves and start writing C (C++, Java, Fortran, etc.) when they should be considering alternatives first. Interpretive languages are often a better way to do things, even fairly ambitious things. Sometimes a certain amount of C (or whatever) is indeed indicated, but even then, often better results can be had with a partner- ship between primitives written in C and overall control written in something else. This talk will discuss why the instant resort to C is a bad idea describe some of the alternatives, including mixing solutions, and explain how to make the choice.	Systems Session Chair: Kirk McKusick, Author and Consultant  Sendmail Evolution: 8.10 and Beyond Gregory Neil Shapiro and Eric Allman, Sendmail, Inc   The GNOME Desktop Project Miguel de Icaza, Universidad de Mexico   Meta: A Freely Available Scalable MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) Assar Westerlund, Swedish Institute of Computer Science; and Johan Danielsson, Center for Parallel Computers (KTH)
3:30pm - 4:00pm    BREAK
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Refereed Papers - Steinbeck Forum	Invited Talks- Serra Grand Ballroom II	FREENIX - Serra Grand Ballroom I
Caching  Session Chair: Christopher Small, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs NewsCache -- A High Performance Cache Implementation for Usenet News  Thomas Gschwind and Manfred Hauswirth, Technische Universität Wien Reducing the Disk I/O of Web Proxy Server Caches  Carlos Maltzahn, University of Colorado Boulder; Kathy Richardson, Compaq Computer Coorporation; Dirk Grunwald, University of Colorado Boulder An Implementation Study of a Detection-Based Adaptive Block  Replacement Scheme  Jongmoo Choi, Sam H. Noh, Sang Lyul Min, Yookun Cho, Seoul National University	E-mail Bombs, Countermeasures, and The Langley Cyber Attack Tim Bass, Consultant The robustness of the sendmail MTA program can be misused in numerous attack scenarios to create dangerously destructive SMTP e-mail bombs. These e-mail bombs are launched by readily available automated software tools which can easily crash chains of SMTP mail servers. SMTP mail relays can also be used covertly to distribute messages and files that could be seriously damaging to the integrity and brands of victims. This talk discusses SMTP mail-bombing techniques, automated attack tools, countermeasures, and "The Langley Cyber Attack." The speaker, who was the Chief Scientist during the 1997 attack, discusses the analysis of the cyber attack, graphs illustrating the attack volume, and a statistical e-mail bomb early warning system. Recent anti-spam enhancements to sendmail are compared to the e-mail bomb countermeasures and "blackhole strategy" used in The Langley Cyber Attack.	Kernel Session Chair: Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD  Porting Kernel Code to Four BSDs and Linux Craig Metz, ITT Systems and Sciences; Ronald Lee and Chris Winters, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory strlcpy and strlcat -- Consistent, Safe, String Copy and Concatenation Todd C. Miller, University of Colorado; Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD Developer pk: An Open-Source POSIX Threads Kernel Frank W. Miller, Cornfed Systems, Inc
Friday, June 11, 1998
9:00am - 10:30am
Refereed Papers - Steinbeck Forum	Invited Talks- Serra Grand Ballroom II	FREENIX - Serra Grand Ballroom I
Operating Systems Structure  Session Chair: Mirjana Spasojevic, Hewlett-Packard Labs  A Scalable and Explicit Event Delivery Mechanism for UNIX Gaurav Banga, Network Appliance, Inc.; Jeffrey C. Mogul, Compaq Computer Corporation, Western Research Lab; Peter Druschel, Rice University The Pebble Component-Based Operating System Eran Gabber, John Bruno, Jose Brustoloni, Avi Silberschatz, and Christopher Small, Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories  Linking Programs in a Single Address Space  Luke Deller, and Gernot Heiser, The University of NSW	Big Data and the Next Wave of InfraStress Problems, Solutions, Opportunities John R. Mashey, Silicon Graphics/Cray Research Data storage is growing at a higher rate than ever before, and coupled with rapidly increasing demand for instant access, will cause great stress on the both physical and human infrastructure of computing. System planners and adminstrators soon face the interesting challenge of dealing with network and backup issues when office systems hold 100s of GBs of disks, and larger servers reach 10s and 100s of TBs and even PBs.  It will also offer great opportunities in both research and commerical applications, but the problems must be understood, and solutions anticipated. John will give some examples, including some large customer problems on which Silicon Graphics has been working, and examine technology trends in storage capacities, access times, computer architectures, and bandwidths, to see what these portend over the next few years.	Applications Session Chair: Jason Thorpe, NetBSD  Berkeley DB Mike Olson, Sleepycat Software The FreeBSD Ports Collection Satoshi Asami, University of California, Berkeley. Multilingual vi clones: past, now and future Jun-ichiro Itoh,  Research Laboratory, Internet Initiative Japan Inc.; and Yoshitaka Tokugawa, WIDE project (Japan)
10:30am - 11:00am    BREAK
11:00am - 12:30pm
Storage Systems  Session Chair: Wu-chi Feng, Ohio State University The Design and Implementation of DCD Device Driver for UNIX  Tycho Nightingale, Yiming Hu, and Qing Yang, University of Rhode Island  An Application-Aware Data Storage Model  Todd A. Anderson and James Griffioen, University of Kentucky	What's Wrong With HTTP And Why It Doesn't Matter Jeffrey Mogul,  Compaq Western Research Lab HTTP quickly grew to become the dominant protocol on the Internet, but its maturation as a protocol design hasn't been as speedy.  The HTTP/1.0 specification was written only after the protocol had been deployed, and the IETF working group chartered to design HTTP/1.1 took 4 years to produce a Draft Standard.  What we have now is a useful but still seriously flawed protocol. Jeffrey Mogul was one of the primary authors of HTTP/1.1.  In this talk, he will give his personal view of what is still wrong with HTTP, and what we can learn from these mistakes. These include fundamental conceptual errors (the lack of true extensibility, the inappropriate analogy to MIME, and the confusion around caching) and some other problems with the standardization effort. He will explain why he doesn't think these errors matter all that much and how HTTP, flawed as it is, still solves enough problems well enough.  He will also describe why  various efforts to extend or replace HTTP may not pay off.	Kernel Session Chair: Jason Thorpe, NetBSD  Improving Application Performance through Swap Compression Raul Cervera, Toni Cortes and Yolanda Becerra, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya New Tricks for an Old Terminal Driver Eric Fischer, University of Chicago   DENTS - A server for the DNS Protocol Todd Graham Lewis, MindSpring Enterprises, Inc.
12:00pm - 2:00pm    LUNCH
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Works-in-Progress Session  Session Chair:  Keith Smith, Harvard University WORKS-IN-PROGRESS REPORTS (WIPS) Do you have interesting work you would like to share, or a cool idea that is not yet ready to be published?  The USENIX audience provides valuable discussion and feedback.  Short, pithy, and fun, Works-in-Progress Reports (WIPs) introduce interesting new or ongoing work.  We are particularly interested in presentation of student work.  Prospective speakers should send a short one or two paragraph report, to Keith Smith at wips99@usenix.org.  A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference and the speakers will be notified in advance.  WIPs are five-minute presentations; the time  limit will be strictly enforced. There are a limited number of slots available for work-in-progress presentations.  Proposals for WIP presentations will be accepted at the discretion of the WIP chair, with a preference given to those that are received earliest.	UNIX to Linux in Perspective Peter Salus, UNIX Historian Born in 1969, UNIX grew, matured, morphed and was even cloned. Its maturation cycle created international standards as well as multiple for-profit and not-for-profit companies.  It became the lingua franca of the computer research and development community.  Today, the many variants of UNIX claim 30 million users worldwide. UNIX was 22 when Linus Torvalds created Linux, a UNIX clone. By 1998, this clone had 5 million users in its own right. Earlier decades had seen successful UNIX strains arise, but  as of today less than 5 major variants survive. Peter  will briefly recap 1969-89, but will concentrate on the exfoliation of UNIX and its clones over the past 10 years.
3:30pm - 4:00pm    BREAK
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Joint Closing Session USENIX Quiz Show -- Hosted by Rob Kolstad

Need help? Use our Contacts page. Last changed: 7 March 2005 ch

USENIX '99 Index Events Index USENIX home