USENIX Blog

Ceph briefing

December 12, 2012 - 4:13 pm by sysadmin1138

Wednesday at 2pm Sage Weil spent an hour+ talking about Ceph, the distributed storage system. This is the first time I’ve had a serious look at it, and this was one informative session. The Ceph project’s goals are to provide a pure open-source storage framework that can run on anything, and be resilient while doing 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.

Sysadmins CAN write documentation!

December 11, 2012 - 6:54 pm by sysadmin1138

Documentation is something that sysadmins are famous for hating to start. Mike Ciavarella is now in year 10 (or 11) of his effort to teach sysadmins that, well...

Workshop Review: The State of the Profession

December 11, 2012 - 5:11 pm by Matt Simmons

I was scheduled to attend a tutorial today, but I pulled a last minute audible so that I could jump into a workshop on a topic that I spend a lot of time thinking about: The State of the Profession: What Are the Unresolved Issues in System Administration

Navigating the Business World for Sysadmins

December 11, 2012 - 3:20 pm by sysadmin1138
Carolyn Rowland and Mark Burgess gave their tutorial on A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World this Tuesday morning. Sysadmins generally got into this gig because we like to improve the world through our mad technical skills, as you do, and that path doesn’t always include the completion certificate for “how to convince people that you know what you’re doing and you should be listened to.”

Mark and Carolyn gave a solid road-map for getting to that place.

Time Management for System Administrators

December 11, 2012 - 12:30 am by Ben Cotton

Ever since I interviewed Tom Limoncelli before LISA '10, I've wanted to take his time management training. Ironically, I never seemed to find the time, until this year. I was pleased to see that the local attendees already had sufficient time management skills to be in the room on time. We have no way of knowing if the remote attendees were similarly prepared, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

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