SAGE-AU '99

Hal Miller is president of the SAGE STG Executive Committee.



I had the honor to attend the 1999 annual SAGE-AU conference in July. The format is very similar to LISA, the quality is extremely high, and I'll be quite honest—I'm very proud of the fact that a SAGE organization outside of SAGE in the US is able to put on such a show. This was the seventh consecutive annual event in Australia, which says something too.

This year's conference took place at the Novotel Brighton Beach hotel, in Sydney. There were more than 150 attendees and three days of tutorials, followed by two "conference" session days. A very small vendor exhibit took place in the lobby outside the main session room.

SAGE-AU is an independent, not-for-profit agency. Its members are the shareholders, and the group is thus required to put on an annual general meeting, elect officers, and do other corporate-type business. That meeting took place at the end of the first conference day. The chair of each of the state "regional groups" (roughly equivalent to US "local groups") presented a status report, all of which pointed at the strength of the overall organization.

Recently, the Australian federal government undertook to legislate away bad things on the Internet, much as the US Congress did with the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Parliament passed into law a set of rules, which provide lots of penalties, that prohibit the hosting of pornography on Australian machines. The computing societies are, quite understandably when you read the legislation, up in arms, especially as none was consulted. SAGE-AU sponsored a panel session at this conference, attended by the public, including some news media (the largest national paper and others). The panel consisted of one senator, representatives of other senators, ministers, and various agencies, all from both sides of the question. The session was too short really to accomplish much, but it did establish in the eyes of some high-ranking government officials the fact that a professional body of system administrators exists right there in Australia that is available to them as unpaid consultants for this type of activity. One can only hope that much good will result from that notice, and the indications are that this may be realized.

Tutorials included:

Geoff Halprin and Elizabeth Zwicky (count on seeing this one at LISA — it went over big-time!) on Management 101, covering "soft skills"

Richard Sharpe on SAMBA implementation

Greg Rose (in his home city) on Real World Applications of Cryptography

Geoff Halprin again, on Auditing, the Unexpected Ally

Peter Galvin (the third Yank at the conference) on Basics of UNIX Security

Peter Samuel, Q-Mail implementation

Anthony Baxter, Python introduction

Mike Ciavarella with another one I'd really like to see come to LISA, Documentation Techniques for System Administrators

Peter Galvin again, Advanced Solaris System Administration Topics (no surprise there)

Elizabeth Zwicky with more soft skills, Evaluating a Site's System Administration Maturity

Andrew van der Stock, Securing BackOffice for E-Commerce Applications

The invited talks:

Peter Elford, of Cisco Australia and one of the two or three most key individuals in the design and implementation of AARNet, the Australian Academic and Research Network (Internet) while I lived there, gave the keynote. He spoke about the recent history of telco carrier development, voice versus data growth rates, and anticipated growth directions. He says that the trend is changing from carriage of data on voice-designed networks to carriage of voice on data-designed networks. While it was a very entertaining and enlightening talk, the one line I think most of us will remember longest was: "ATM is like a duck — it can fly, it can swim, it can walk, but it can't do any of them particularly well."

Duane Schultz reported on a new large-scale, scalable Web-server design, using an NFS back end and front-end processor machines.

Luke Mewburne gave an introduction to CVS, including explanations of the results you get from commands, and tips on what the man pages really mean.

David Burren described his low-budget virtual network, consisting of a PC at each end, that runs ssh over PPP over IP rather than a modem.

Catherine Allen gave a series of tips for how to prepare your site for a security audit.

Andrew van der Stock presented a list covering how to secure an NT Back Office box for e-commerce. He made the interesting point that, regardless of the operating system you use, it pays to use NTP to ensure your log entries are synchronized, just in case you end up in court.

Peter Galvin gave the second keynote, explaining "firefighting" and why it happens to us, and giving some tips for controlling it.

William Shipway and Christian Kraus reviewed the design and development history of a 1,600-lawyer national firm's migration from Mac/UNIX to NT.

Chris Miles gave a follow-on from last year's paper, discussing implementation of a toolkit for monitoring, messaging, and notification.

Jeff Alexander of Microsoft Australia discussed Windows 2000 security.

I gave a paper on the problems of growing a site to petabytes of storage.

Elizabeth Zwicky returned with a discussion of use of NT in a firewall environment.

Rex Walters of Network Appliance discussed where they're going in the area of metadata issues.

Gordon Rowell gave a how-to on DNS implementation.

Richard Sharpe wrapped it up with a discussion on network debugging.

I hope to see more people traveling back and forth between the various SAGE-* conferences in the future. The quality is top-notch, and it gives each of us an opportunity for more venues to present papers and to listen to more. Perhaps we will some day be able to better coordinate "themes" among the various conferences, and all of us will be able to select the one(s) that best suit our personal needs. In any event, the sum total of benefit to our profession continues to climb.