Workshops

This workshop will cover configuration management processes in real-world settings. The focus will be on practical tactics that attendees can apply directly. Attendees will discuss the issues they face in their deployments and will compare their experiences and tactics with each other.

The workshop will have two major components. The first will be a series of discussions on current topics of interest. These will be separated by two or three presentations by attendees of their configuration management environments, highlighting useful techniques and potential problem areas.

This workshop is a tool-agnostic discussion of practical issues; the discussion will be widely applicable, regardless of the configuration tool used. The focus will be on practical tactics that attendees can apply directly. Attendees should be sysadmins with a deployed configuration management system in place who want to talk with and learn from others on the subject. Tool developers interested in hearing the needs of their users and/or offering suggestions are also welcome, but they are not the primary intended participants.

In this workshop, we will explore some of the more common biases that appear today in the technology industry—and in our wider societal conversations. Participants will engage in activities that will leave them with concrete knowledge of how to handle situations that occur to them in everyday life.

We’re all good people, but we are also products of our environment and socialization. There are myriad ways in which we have been taught to not value those whose experience is not like ours, whose experience and background is different from our own, and whose physical characteristics are not like ours. While we would never think of ourselves as prejudiced, we nonetheless may engage in behaviors that reflect how these biases have become lodged in our thinking, often subconsciously.

So, what can we do to ensure that we are treating our colleagues, bosses, and acquaintances fairly? What are concrete steps we can take to ensure that we receive the same treatment from them? How can we level up personally and professionally?

After an initial presentation, we will ask participants to break into smaller groups for discussion on how these biases may present themselves in their day to day life. We will examine how we ourselves manifest bias and how bias operates in our work environments, with a specific eye to understanding how we participate in these structures of bias, however unknowingly. Our conversations may range from societal expectations of gender, race, and sexual orientation; through social class and education levels; to experience and family life differences.

The organizers also will present the basics of Negotiation Theory to the workshop participants. They will discuss how these tools can be useful both in our work to overcome our own biases and to influence conversations and decisions in the workplace, creating a platform of mutual respect, better understanding, and more productive dialogue and collaboration. The workshop will then segue into 1:1 role-playing exercises from the Harvard Negotiation Project to give participants an opportunity to practice these new modes of dialog, concluding with a report-back session about what these role playing exercises illustrated to each of us about our own biases.

Within a broad context of emergency response, emergency operations, business continuity planning/resiliency, disaster recovery, and information technology architecture, this workshop will provide participants with hands-on experience to design and execute IT emergency drills.

Participants will collaboratively identify critical business functions and continuity/resiliency objectives for a fictional organization, and catalog IT services involved in supporting those business functions. We will then design an emergency operations center or incident headquarters for that fictional organization. Along the way, we will discuss and brainstorm methods of introducing such concepts to participants’ actual organizations.

During the latter part of this workshop, participants will split into groups to accomplish first a basic life-safety and IT emergency operations drill, and then an advanced IT emergency operations drill. As workshop participants execute each of these drill plans, we will evaluate quantifiable success factors of each drill, collect lessons learned, and discuss guru-level additions to advanced drill design.

Keeping IT folks engaged in a drill simulation can be very challenging. The skills necessary to design, execute, and facilitate IT emergency drills are practical, perfectly suited to the hands-on, participatory environment of a technical workshop.

Become a gamemaster worthy of designing and executing drills on likely emergency scenarios and realistic function failures for your organization. You are hereby summoned to actively (with good humor) learn to engage your team in emergency operations planning and drill facilitation! Hard hats and D10’s included.

Clouds have become a popular architecture for system design and resource consumption by applications. This workshop is intended for attendees who design and support private clouds, or support the use of clouds for services in their organizations. The goal is to share experiences and best practices in this quickly changing space. We will have discussions on a range of topics, from open source cloud software stacks, through deployment strategies, to tools that help in the design and operation of cloud-hosted services. Anyone who cares about cloud technologies is welcome to attend.

This workshop is for sysadmins who have primary responsibility for computing systems owned by government or military agencies and for sysadmins who work in secure environments, deal with classified data, provide GOTS support, or deploy to remote locations in support of government and military requirements. This includes contractors, government civilians, vendors and suppliers, uniformed members, and anyone who has a direct hands-on IT support role in the government and military sectors are welcome to attend. Discussions will include topics like lessons learned from implementation of cloud technologies, data analytics in the government sector, and responding to policy and regulation requirements for IT and information security. This workshop is a great opportunity for sysadmins to compare notes between diverse agencies like DoD, DoE, DoC, NASA, and local governments. All workshop discussions will be strictly unclassified.

This workshop will provide a forum for HPC compute cluster admins, and those interested in this topic, to meet and discuss the challenges of administering this particular class of machine. Though this workshop will also be applicable to general *NIX admins, there are many specific topics related to management, customer usage, and special software (such as schedulers and resource managers) to warrant a half-day workshop for the benefit of this niche community. Topics that could be discussed include cluster setup, day-to-day management strategies, common problems and possible solutions, user issues, and any other topics of interest to the attendees.

This workshop, intended for very senior administrators, provides an informal roundtable discussion of the problems facing system administrators today. Attendance is limited and based on acceptance of a position paper (plain ASCII, three paragraphs maximum); a typical paper covers what the author thinks is the most difficult or important issue facing system administrators today, why this is a problem, and why this problem is important. A more complete description of the workshop and information about position papers is available at atw.menlo.com. Position papers should be sent to lisa13ws-atw@usenix.org. Attendees are required to bring a laptop computer.

System, network, and security senior engineers manage intricate relationships ensuring that everything from simple tasks to complex projects gets completed in a timely manner. In this workshop, we will talk about using agile processes to identify, visualize, and improve work. Topics covered could include current use within the group, agile adoption process, tools, metrics, and cross-team interactions. The outcome of this workshop will be to establish a set of common problems, potential solutions, recommended tools, and best practices for establishing and visualizing a systems workflow that can be shared with the broader community.

While current use of agile methodologies is not required, basic knowledge of kanban and agile in systems is recommended.