USENIX Blog

DNS and DNSSEC

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

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

Submitted by sysadmin1138 on December 12, 2012 - 9:06 am

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

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

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!

Submitted by sysadmin1138 on December 11, 2012 - 6:54 pm

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

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

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

Submitted by sysadmin1138 on December 11, 2012 - 3:20 pm
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

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

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.

Introduction to Provisioning

Submitted by Ben Cotton on December 11, 2012 - 12:29 am

On Sunday afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting in another of Geoff Halprin's training courses: the new "Introduction to Provisioning" tutorial. Provisioning seems like something we all already know how to do -- something Geoff will readily admit to. His stated goal is to get system administrators to think more deeply about the things they already know, and deep he went in this course. By his own admission, a fair amount of time was spent down rabbit holes. This, of course, doesn't imply that the content was unhelpful.

Agile Software Development: Getting It Out the Door Successfully

Submitted by Ben Cotton on December 10, 2012 - 11:17 pm

"Agile" is a very popular term in the software development industry and beyond. Dozens of systems administrators started LISA '12 by attending Geoff Halprin's tutorial on the Agile methodology. Agile has developed from improvements to the original "waterfall" methodology for the software design life cycle (SDLC). In the waterfall model, projects moved from one highly-prescribed phase to the next. Waterfall works well for projects where the requirements are well-known and static, a rare case for most IT projects.

Time Management: Team Efficiency

Submitted by sysadmin1138 on December 10, 2012 - 6:14 pm

Tom Limoncelli taught the second half of his Time Management series this afternoon, Advanced Time Management: Team Efficiency. This session focused less on organizing yourself, and more on keeping teams efficient. There are ways of making sysadmin or other technical teams work more efficiently, and Tom let us in on those.

Tom opened the session with a question: what team problems do you want to see addressed? There were a lot of things called out, but many of them familiar:

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