LISA17 Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs)

BoF Descriptions

USENIX Board Game Night
Sunday, October 29, 8:00 pm–11:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room

Join us for some good old-fashioned board games. We’ll have some on hand, but bring your own games, too!

USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) BoF
Monday, October 30, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room

Let’s talk about women in advanced computing. All registered attendees—of all genders—are welcome to attend these BoFs.

Students and Young Professionals Meetup
Monday, October 30, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room

Join students and young professionals to network, discuss issues in the field, and the latest happenings in the community.

Gov/Mil BoF
Monday, October 30, 8:00 pm–10:00 pm, Marina Room
Brian Sebby, Argonne National Laboratory

LISA is a great venue to meet fellow government and military employees to discuss issues that we are facing, such as addressing new requirements and directives. We welcome contractors, government civilian employees, vendors and suppliers, uniformed military members, and anyone who has a direct hands-on IT support role in the federal, state, and local government and military sectors. All discussions will be strictly unclassified.

GitLab User BoF
Tuesday, October 31, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Marina Room
Scott Murphy, Arrow-Eye Consulting

Using GitLab (or GitHub, etc.)? Come out and discuss what you are doing with it and any portion of the feature set that you consider to be compelling. Self-hosted, commercial, free, it doesn't matter. Share the knowledge!

Cambridge Computer Beer and Ice Cream Social Vendor BoF
Tuesday, October 31, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room

Join us for beer, ice cream, and conversation as we get ready to start LISA17!

Improv for Teambuilding and Collaboration
Tuesday, October 31, 8:00 pm–10:00 pm, Marina Room
Brian Sebby, Argonne National Laboratory

Improv isn't just for performing on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"—it's a great tool for reacting to new situations without being thrown, recognizing personal dynamics, putting aside ego instead of rehashing the same Chef vs. Ansible vs. Puppet arguments again, and coming up with great ideas while minimizing ego and baggage.

Participants will move, laugh, and get to know each other while learning the basics of applied improvisation. The “yes and” philosophy of improv is valuable for managers, team members, or anyone needing to simply get their group on the same page. No need to take notes—all participants will receive a link to the entire curriculum, as well as additional exercises and information they can take back to their own companies.

LGBT* Issues
Tuesday, October 31, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room
Tom Limoncelli, StackOverflow, Inc.

For members of the LGBTQA* community and our friends to meet, network, discuss workplace and benefits issues, current politics affecting the community, and chat. New attendees welcome!

OpenZFS: Ask an Expert
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Bayview Room

Bring your questions for Allan Jude, author and expert on the OpenZFS port found in FreeBSD, and share your experiences with others using ZFS in production.

Red Hat Vendor BoF: Migrating to Containers, Atomic Host & OpenShift
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Garden Room

ComplianceOps: Surviving the SOC/HIPAA/PCI Changes to Your Company Culture
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Grand Ballroom A
Jamie Riedesel, HelloSign

USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) Open Community BoF
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Marina Room

Squarespace Vendor BoF: War Story Swap
Kevin Lynch, Staff SRE at Squarespace
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room

Whether you’re an SRE, a systems administrator, or a developer – we all have war stories. Join the Squarespace SRE team to share and discuss what it takes to run a large-scale platform that has evolved with the years to support millions of customers. Kevin Lynch will also share some of the challenges we faced while rolling out Kubernetes in our private cloud data centers.

Computer Security and Privacy Explained to Mom&Pop™
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm, Grand Ballroom BC

It used to be that security was locking the door when you went home at night, and Privacy was pulling the curtains closed in your bedroom, but things are not that simple anymore. This BoF will discuss what the issues are, and what (if anything) Mom&Pop™ should know about it, and why.

Lock Picking: You Will Pick a Lock
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Seacliff Room
Branson Matheson, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Docker Orchestration Using Rancher
Wednesday, November 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Bayview Room
Paul Krizak, Chris Chapin, and Michael Griffith, Qualcomm

Are you currently using, or interested in using, Rancher for orchestrating the deployment of your Docker-based applications? We think Rancher is awesome and use it for deploying many of our IT-internal applications. We want to talk to other Docker users (developers, sysadmins, SREs, devops, whatever) to share notes on how to best utilize the Rancher platform.

AuriStor Vendor BoF: The Original Cloud File System from AFS to AuriStor and Beyond
Wednesday, November 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Garden Room
Jeffrey Altman, AuriStor CEO

The Andrew File System (AFS) was the first and is still the only true Cloud File System and it was developed 30 years ago! At the core of AFS was Security, LAN/WAN, a true global namespace, local cache coherency and distributed administration. AuriStor extends upon that AFS vision with AuriStorFS providing significant functional, performance, stability, scalability and security enhancements.

Come join us to learn how AuriStorFS can help breaking down silos with a Global Namespace and a Security Model that can span your data centers, DMZ, multiple cloud providers and beyond; Location Transparency; No Maintenance Downtime; Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity; Distributed Administration; Multi-Layer Security; Cache Coherency; Atomic Publication; End-User self-service with online-backups & group and ACL control; and there's more...

Containers and container orchestration such as Kubernetes is the future of deploying applications and AuriStor is there too.

US Digital Service BoF
Wednesday, November 1, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Grand Ballroom A
Matt Cutts, Acting Administrator, US Digital Service

Learn what it’s like to work in the US Digital Service, the group of geeks that helped rescue healthcare.gov. The USDS offers a chance to improve government services for patients, veterans, small businesses, and many other parts of the public.

CFEngine Users BoF
Wednesday, November 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Marina Room
Aleksey Tsalolikhin, Consultant/Trainer at Vertical Sysadmin, Inc.

Meet other CFEngine users and share how you are using CFEngine to automate system administration at scale and sleep better at night. Aleksey Tsalolikhin will present on his "superhub" implementation (consolidating inventory and compliance detail from multiple hubs in one Mission Portal UI).

We'll have a special guest, Eystein Stenberg, the product manager for CFEngine from Northern Tech (the maker of CFEngine), to talk to us about the development roadmap for CFEngine.

Building Ad Hoc Networks with Ad Hoc People
Wednesday, November 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Seaciff Room
Brett Thorson, BCG Platinion

Opengear Vendor BoF: ZTP War Stories—Share Your Experiences with Zero Touch Provisioning
Wednesday, November 1, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room
Marcio Saito, CTO, Opengear

Zero Touch Provisioning makes supporting a dispersed network easier…..at least, it does once you’ve implemented it correctly! We’ll tell you about some recent cases we’ve seen, and discuss a few considerations to get things started. Come and share stories of how you’ve made it work in your enterprise, and the hurdles you had to jump. Or perhaps you just want to know more about it? Either way, stop by, grab a drink with us, and let’s talk about ZTP.

GPG Key Signing BoF
Wednesday, November 1, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Marina Room
Nick Bebout, University of Southern Indiana

For more information on Key Signing Parties, I recommend the "GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO" document. Our format will follow the suggestions there, specifically the List Based party format. I will bring a printout of the submitted keys. Please submit your keys *at least* 24 hours (preferably 48 hours) in advance of the party to ensure your key fingerprint is on the list.

Please bring multiple forms of ID, at least one being a photo ID, preferably government issued. Other attendees (such as those coming from over seas) may not be familiar with the format of your ID. By having multiple IDs, you should have at least one that others will find acceptable. I'm bringing my passport, passport card, Global Entry card, and Indiana Drivers License.

PLEASE NOTE: If you don't submit your key in advance, we will have to go through the awkward process of you reading your key aloud so that everyone attending can write down your fingerprint. This can be a bother and not everyone may be willing to go to that extra effort. Please submit your key in advance or bring some handout with your Key ID and the key fingerprint. Printing this info on the back of business cards is probably acceptable. We will complete authentication of the keys that were submitted in advance before we do any "walk-in" keys.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me email at nick.bebout@usi.edu

Facebook Vendor BoF: Upgrading a Fleet's OS at Scale
Thursday, November 2, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Garden Room
Peter Blair, Production Engineer—OS Team, Facebook

The challenges faced with upgrading an entire fleet's Operating System and how to win the support and aid of the many service owners affected. Ways to demonstrate value and impact while delivering new tools and technology to make the effort worthwhile for other teams.

DNS as Code: What dnscontrol Can Do for You
Thursday, November 2, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Grand Ballroom A
Tom Limoncelli, StackOverflow, Inc.

https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol

Performance Monitoring/Capacity Planning/Latency Metrics
Thursday, November 2, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Grand Ballroom BC

EFF BoF
Thursday, November 2, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Marina Room
Maggie Kazmierczak and Kurt Opsahl, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Join us for an hour of diceware how-to, generating passphrases, and chatting about digital rights with some of the EFF tech team.

LOPSA Annual Community Meeting
Thursday, November 2, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Bayview Room

How Do We Scale MYSQL Without Losing Our Minds?
Thursday, November 2, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Marina Room
John Looney, Intercom

Distributed, Software Defined Security in the Modern Data Center
Thursday, November 2, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Garden Room
Nils Christian Roscher-Nielsen, Product Owner, Zener

Many companies have all started to build new scalable data center architectures, with a distributed, host-based approach to security; we want to make these learnings available as easily as possible for anyone. Join the Zener team to discuss the needs and challenges of security in modern network architecture, and how we can learn from the experience of bleeding edge companies that are changing their data center architecture. How can we benefit from these learnings and apply these principles in other organizations. Nils Christian and Ole Herman from Zener will share our vision of a structured approach to a new distributed security model.

We will be joined by Mike Svoboda from LinkedIn, who will share his experiences with transforming LinkedIn's network architecture and their new approach to distributed security.

Ole Herman Schumacher Elgesem, architect of Zener, a simple to manage, host-based, distributed firewall solution for the modern data center.

DevOps Poetry Slam
Thursday, November 2, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Grand Ballroom A
Amye Scavarda, gluster.org

The DevOps Poetry Slam returns! Please come prepared with your favorite prose, dramatic readings of release notes, outage statuses and other found poetry from the world of system administration.

Google Beer and Ice Cream Vendor BoF
Thursday, November 2, 9:00 pm–11:00 pm, Waterfront AB Room