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.
When he's not busy demystifying RRDtool, Tobi Oetiker is a language evangelist. On Monday afternoon, he brought Perl 6 to the masses. Brian Sebby joked on Twitter: "Perl 6 has a lot of cool features that I'd really like to use.
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.
Earlier this year, Tom Limoncelli wrote a blog post about how to rank and improve your sysadmin team.
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.
These days, there are either fewer DBAs or more, depending on how you look at it. According to John Sellens, as the number of applications that are powered by databases increases, there's more and more of a requirement for systems administrators to have some database experience.
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.
This year, I showed up to the LISA hotel a bit earlier than usual - partly because I felt like I missed out on things the last few times, and also because I've never really been to Boston, and I wanted to be able to take a little time to see the city, if at all possible.
It's the Friday before LISA, and I'm sure hundreds of you are getting ready for next week. I know that I'm busy getting things in order for a week in my absence.
Because you're going to be hearing a lot from the USENIX LISA Blog Team over the next week, you should really get to know us first.
Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes are the LISA’11 program co-chairs, and it was my pleasure to interview them for the USENIX Blog readers: