USENIX Blog

I wasn't able to attend last year's LISA Conference, so when I started planning out my sessions for this year, I was surprised to see that the tutorials ended on Tuesday instead of going all week. That wasn't entirely true, though. The half- and full-day tutorials stop once the technical program starts, but the technical program is interspersed with mini-tutorials.

Kyle Neumann had never attended LISA before, but when his employer encouraged him to go to a conference, he started looking around. A Reddit comment and his own research lead him to LISA. Although his primarily role is a Windows administrator, he didn't necessarily want to go to a Microsoft-specific conference. He told me he likes that LISA content focuses on the domain, not a specific technology. "Even the technology-specific stuff," he said, "is technologies instead of technology."

Conferences have a tough time keeping the wireless network up, sysadmin conferences even more so. With the LISA Build team planning to expand the network from just the keynote area to the entire conference, serious network gear was needed. Fortunately, Xirrus stepped in to donate 10 high-density access points. For the past 10 years, Xirrus equipment has focused on density, allowing for greater coverage and capacity with fewer units. In fact, they told me that for conferences like LISA, they can use four times fewer APs than competitors.

IT infrastructure often moves to the cloud for increased flexibility and decreased provisioning time. Midfin wants to provide the same thing to internal resources. By provisioning networking, storage, and compute together, machines can go from zero-to-ready for configuration in a matter of seconds. Midfin recently exited stealth and LISA is their first conference appearance. Co-founder Ajith Jayamohan told me they chose LISA because they "believe in being open. LISA is the perfect venue. There are a lot of like-minded people here."