USENIX Blog

Conferences have a tough time keeping the wireless network up, sysadmin conferences even more so. With the LISA Build team planning to expand the network from just the keynote area to the entire conference, serious network gear was needed. Fortunately, Xirrus stepped in to donate 10 high-density access points. For the past 10 years, Xirrus equipment has focused on density, allowing for greater coverage and capacity with fewer units. In fact, they told me that for conferences like LISA, they can use four times fewer APs than competitors.

IT infrastructure often moves to the cloud for increased flexibility and decreased provisioning time. Midfin wants to provide the same thing to internal resources. By provisioning networking, storage, and compute together, machines can go from zero-to-ready for configuration in a matter of seconds. Midfin recently exited stealth and LISA is their first conference appearance. Co-founder Ajith Jayamohan told me they chose LISA because they "believe in being open. LISA is the perfect venue. There are a lot of like-minded people here."

When Matt Simmons recruited me to join the Blog Team for LISA10, I a young sysadmin who had recently outgrown the small department where I worked. I had scattershot experience and no real sense of connection to the community. That week in San Jose was a firehose of knowledge and networking. There was more content than I could possibly attend in a six-day span.

The 2015 Internet Defense Prize winner was announced earlier today at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium. Congratulations to Byoungyoung Lee, Chengyu Song, Taesoo Kim, and Wenke Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology, who were awarded $100,000 from Facebook for their paper "Type Casting Verification: Stopping an Emerging Attack Vector!"