It's the way of any power user: the network is never fast enough. Given the chance, I’m sure we could do better. So when we get to a conference with a thousand or so other people, and the wireless network stinks (or so we think), it's not the Way of the Sysadmin to just let it go.
LISA16 is in Boston this year, and that presents a different set of challenges for me. Most years, I plan to be away from home for the whole week. I have to arrange flights and a hotel and transportation. I spend some time researching the city to see what cultural sites or events are there.
For 24 years, the LISA Special Interest Group for Sysadmins (LISA SIG, formerly known as SAGE) has been a resource and virtual meeting ground for the sysadmin community at USENIX.
What started as an experiment in 2015 has now been unleashed as an ongoing project in 2016. In order to keep momentum building between annual LISA conferences, USENIX has launched monthly "LISA Conversations." The LISA conference has hosted numerous exciting and thought-provoking speakers and presentations since its inauguration in 1986.
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.
Who would have expected having plenty of idle time due to the Great Recession would lead to an award? Not Jamie Riedesel, this year's Chuck Yerkes Award winner. The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) established the award to recognize oustanding community contributions via online fora.
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.
The benefits of moving computing infrastructure to the cloud are widely, if not universally, accepted. That doesn't mean it's always easy. In particular, user management can be tough. You don't want to open your Active Directory server to the whole world, but you want to be able to seamlessly manage users. And small startups might not have the resources to stand up and securely maintain their own directory service.
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.
The Wednesday and Thursday morning keynotes provided an excellent contrast. One could call them "government: for better or for worse." On Wednesday, Mikey Dickerson gave attendees an update on what has changed in government IT in the year since the United Stats Digital Service (USDS) was established. ACLU Principal Technologist Christopher Soghoian spoke on Thursday about the role of sysadmins in the age of cyberwar and digital spying.