LISA '11: Opening Remarks, Awards, and Announcements

During this morning's open remarks, Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes, LISA'11 program co-chairs, announced the dates and location for LISA '12. Next year's LISA will be held December 9-14, in San Diego, California, and Carolyn Rowland will be the program chair.

Then the LISA '11 co-chairs presented cash awards for the best papers. The award for the Best Student Paper went to Herry Herry, Paul Anderson, and Gerhard Wickler for Automated Planning for Configuration Changes. Deploying IPv6 in the Google Enterprise Network: Lessons Learned, by Haythum Babiker, Irena Nikolova, and Kiran Kumar Chittimaneni (Google) won for Best Practice & Experience Report. Best Paper went to Local System Security via SSHD Instrumentation, by Scott Campbell.

The 2011 Chuck Yerkes Award, which is sponsored by LOPSA and presented to an admin who has been exceptionally active on mailing lists, at conferences, and with local groups and new forums, went to USENIX LISA'11 blogger Matt Simmons.

The SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award was presented to Ethan Galstad, Nagios creator and maintainer. When he accepted the award, Galstad said that he originally created Nagios, an open source infrastructure monitoring tool, to give back to the community, and he expected that only about a dozen admins would use it. According to Galstad, now there are more than a million Nagios users worldwide, and more than 600 new projects were developed for or around Nagios in 2011.

Event Updates

The LISA Game Show is back! Qualifying quizzes are now available at the Membership Booth. Attendees should turn them back in at the booth by the 10a.m. break on Thursday. The names of the selected players will be announced at 5pm Thursday.

The Vendor Exhibition opens at noon today. Oracle is sponsoring the Exhibit Hall Happy Hour today, from 5:30p.m. to 6:30p.m. After that, check out the poster session in the Ballroom Foyer.

Tomorrow the reception for the 25th LISA will be held from 6:30pm to 8pm in the Grand Ballroom, and the LISA Game Show goes from 8-9pm in the Constitution Ballroom.

Best wishes for a fun and fabulous LISA '11!