Thursday morning Keynote: Educations vs Training

December 13, 2012 - 2:02 pm by sysadmin1138

Selena Deckelmann (@selenamarie) gave the Thursday keynote address at LISA this morning. Her topic: Educations vs Training. We’ve had a Workshop on this earlier, and a BoF session last night so we’ve been talking about it all week.
 
Unfortunately, we’ve been talking about it here at LISA since 1997 and the fundamentals of that talk haven’t changed. This is bad, and we need to stop that and actually change how we’re talking about it.

OpenStack briefing

December 12, 2012 - 1:49 pm by sysadmin1138

Vish Ishaya gave a talk on OpenStack this morning at LISA. He opened up with a history of how OpenStack came to be, then moved into a summary of each of the components.

Recovering from Linux Hard Drive Failures

December 12, 2012 - 9:11 am by Ben Cotton

Uh oh! Your hard drive just failed. What do you do? Theodore Ts'o offered a training workshop on Tuesday afternoon to help admins answer just that question. Data loss happens for a variety of reasons, including human error, software failures, and hardware failures. The first thing to do regardless of the cause of loss is to remember the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

DNS and DNSSEC

December 12, 2012 - 9:08 am by Ben Cotton

It's a well-known system administration aphorism that everything is a DNS problem. It should come as no surprise that many people came to Tuesday morning's tutorial on DNS and DNSSEC presented by Shumon Huque. Shumon began with an introduction to the basic components and architecture of DNS, including the hierarchical structure of domain names and the differences between authoritative servers, resolvers, and clients.

Birds of a Feather: Women in Advanced Computing

December 12, 2012 - 9:06 am by sysadmin1138

Last night I went to the Advanced Women in Computing birds-of-a-feather session (Guys welcome). Carolyn Rowland (the LISA conference chair this year) and Nicole Forsgren Velasquez lead the discussion. They saw this as an extension of the discussion started at the Women in Advanced Computing federated conference earlier this year, and put the "guys welcome!" on the BoF announcement because they wanted to expand the audience.

The room was about half men, which is a marked difference from last year's Advancing Women in Computing panel which had maybe seven men in the audience. They need allies, and that's what Nichole and Carolyn were here to help create.

The First Hundred Days

December 11, 2012 - 11:39 pm by Ben Cotton

Geoff Halprin's third tutorial session of LISA '12 was titled "The First Hundred Days." New this year, this tutorial provided guidance for senior system administrators and managers beginning a new role. Geoff ran this tutorial almost like a workshop, engaging the audience throughout. We started with a discussion of situational leadership. Four types of situational leadership are defined on two axes: task behavior and relationship behavior.

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