USENIX Blog

Adam Moskowitz has been around LISA for a while...long enough, even, that he actually chaired my first LISA conference, back in '09 (yes, I'm that new here). He's been in IT for even longer, and over that time period, he has made a study of public speaking in a professional capacity.

The Workplace Presentations class isn't designed to make the attendees the next Winston Churchill - great public speaking only comes with practice - but to help the sysadmins come to grips with speaking in front of their peers and coworkers.

As noted sysadmin B. Knowles said, "if you liked it then you shoulda put a [monito]ring on it." John Sellens was back on Monday with another morning session -- this one focused on using Nagios to monitor just about anything. Nagios is a host and service monitor with a long history, and a longer list of uses.

On Sunday afternoon, David Nalley presented a training session entitled "RPM Packaging for Sysadmins". Although it's technically a new course for LISA '11, it's actually a retooling of a more general packaging class that was offered several years ago. The old course covered Debian and Solaris packaging, but the attendee feedback indicated that the vast majority were only interested in learning RPM.

The course starts with explaining why bother packaging. The traditional autoconf command chain of

In order to manage something, you must be able to measure it. Metrics are absolutely vital to everything we do in our professional lives. If we didn't use metrics to determine functionality, we might as well cast dice to diagnose problems. We thrive on information, and we use it to make important decisions that have very tangible ramifications.