Dan Anderson (M2)
John Arrasjid (S2) has 20 years of experience in the computer science field. His experience
includes work with companies such as AT&T, Amdahl, 3Dfx Interactive, Kubota Graphics, Roxio, and his own company, WebNexus Communications, where he developed consulting practices and built a cross-platform IT team. John is currently a senior member of the VMware Professional Services Organization as a Consulting Architect. John has developed a number of PSO engagements, including Performance, Security, and Disaster Recovery and Backup.
David Beazley (F4) is the author of the Python Essential Reference and has been an active member of the Python community since 1996.
He is most widely known for creating several Python-related open source packages, including SWIG (a tool for building C/C++ extension modules to Python) and PLY (a Python version of the lex/yacc parsing tools). In the 1990s, he helped pioneer the use of Python on massively parallel supercomputers while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1998 through 2005, he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he taught courses in operating systems, networks, and compilers. Dave is currently a freelance software developer, Python trainer, and jazz musician living in Chicago.
Kyrre Begnum (T8) is currently completing his Ph.D. in Network and System
Administration at Oslo University College in Norway.
Part of his
research focuses on managing virtual infrastructures, and he is the
author of the Manage Large Networks (MLN) VM administrative tool.
David N. Blank-Edelman (M6, M10) is the Director of Technology
at the Northeastern University College of 
Computer and Information Science
and the author of the O'Reilly book Perl for System Administration. He has spent the past 20+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of LISA '05 and was one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs.
Mark Burgess (S9,
S13) is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, Norway
(a member of the EMANICS
Network of Excellence). He is the author of the configuration
management system cfengine and of several books and many papers on the
topic.
Gerald Carter (T12, W5, F1) has been a member of the Samba Development Team
since 1998. He has been developing, writing about, and
teaching on open source since the late 1990s. Currently
employed by Centeris as a Samba and open source developer,
Gerald has written books for SAMS Publishing and for
O'Reilly Publishing.
Strata Rose Chalup (M8, M12)
has been leading and managing complex IT projects for many years, serving in roles ranging from 
Project Manager to Director of Network Operations. She has written a number of articles on management and working with teams and has applied her management skills on various volunteer boards, including BayLISA and SAGE. Strata has a keen interest in network information systems and new publishing technologies and built a successful consulting practice around being an avid early adopter of new tools, starting with ncsa_httpd and C-based CGI libraries in 1993 and moving on to wikis, RSS readers, and blogging. Another MIT dropout, Strata founded VirtualNet Consulting in 1993.
Mike Ciavarella (T6, T10, W1) has been producing and editing technical documentation since
he naively agreed to write application manuals for his first
employer in the early 1980s. He has been a technical editor for
MacMillan Press and has been teaching system administrators about
documentation for the past eight years. Mike has an Honours Degree in
Science from the University of Melbourne. After a number
of years working as Senior Partner and head of the Security Practice
for Cybersource Pty Ltd, Mike returned to his alma mater, the University
of Melbourne. He now divides his time between teaching software
engineering, providing expert testimony in computer security matters,
and trying to complete a Doctorate. In his ever-diminishing spare time,
Mike is a caffeine addict and photographer.
Lee Damon (M3, W1) has a B.S. in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He has been 
a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE since its inception. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of LISA '04.
Jacob Farmer (T9, T13) is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has written numerous papers and articles and is a regular
speaker at trade shows and conferences. In addition to his regular expert advice column in the "Reader I/O" section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade magazine of the data storage industry, Jacob also serves as the publication's senior technical advisor. Jacob has over 18 years of experience with storage technologies and is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a national integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.
Æleen Frisch (M1, T8, R6) has been a system administrator for over 20 years. She currently looks 
after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential System Administration (now in its 3rd edition). Æleen was the
program committee chair for LISA '03 and is a frequent presenter at USENIX and SAGE events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.
Peter Baer Galvin (M5, T5) is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR,
and was the Systems Manager for Brown University's Computer Science Department. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines. He wrote the "Pete's Wicked World" and "Pete's Super Systems" columns in SunWorld. Until its demise, he was contributing editor for Sys Admin, where he wrote the "Solaris Corner" column. Peter is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter has taught tutorials on security and system administration and has given talks at many conferences and institutions on such topics as Web services, performance tuning, security, system administration, and high availability.
Simson L. Garfinkel (S1) is an Associate Professor at
the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and a fellow at 
the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that
develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and
governments to audit their systems. Garfinkel has research interests in computer forensics, the
emerging field of usability and security, information policy, and
terrorism. He has actively researched and published in these areas
for more than two decades. He writes a monthly column for CSO Magazine, for which he has
been awarded four national journalism awards, and is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century and for Practical UNIX and Internet Security.
Geoff Halprin (S3, T7, T11) has spent over 30 years as a software developer, system administrator, consultant, 
and troubleshooter. He has written software from system management tools to mission-critical billing systems, has built and run networks for enterprises of all sizes, and has been called upon to diagnose problems in every aspect of computing infrastructure and software. He is the author of the System Administration Body of Knowledge (SA-BOK), the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Administrator's Guide to Auditing, and the recipient of the 2002 SAGE-AU award for outstanding contribution to the system administration profession. Geoff has served on the boards of SAGE, SAGE-AU, USENIX, and LOPSA. He has spoken at over 20 conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, and the U.S.
David Hankins (S8) is a software engineer at ISC who has in the past
worked in the trenches as a sysadmin
and a network administrator.
He is the engineering lead on the ISC DHCP project and knows more
about it than anyone.
Ralf Hildebrandt (T4, W3, W6) has studied computer science at the University of Braunschweig. He is now working for T-Systems 
Business Services GmbH as a Manager Technik at the Charite hospital in Berlin. Co-author of The Book of Postfix, he is also author of Postfix: Einrichtung, Betrieb und Wartung and various magazine articles.
Faisal N. Jawdat (T1) has been developing in Ruby and Rails since before
the release of Rails 1.0. In 
a past life he has been a sysadmin,
engineer, and product manager, working on projects from an early B2B
exchange to the first carrier-scale 3g phone/Internet gateway. He
has contributed to multiple books on programming for the Internet
and maintains the FAQ for the Rails mailing list.
Patrick Ben Koetter (T4, W3, W6) is the Chief Technologist for state of mind, Partnerschaft Koetter, Schmidt,
& Schosser, a systems integrator, and was Information Architect at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, Germany. He has written articles for Germany's c't magazine, Linuxmagazin, and other magazines. Patrick is co-author of The Book of Postfix. As a consultant and trainer, Patrick regularly teaches classes on email, anti-virus, and spam measurements and application-level Web interfaces. He has given talks at many conferences on these and similiar topics.
Tom Limoncelli (S7, W4), author of O'Reilly's The Art of Time Management for System Administrators
and co-author of The Practice of System and Network
Administration
from Addison-Wesley (second edition to be premiered at this conference), is a system administrator at Google in NYC. He received the SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement award. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he has worked at Cibernet, Dean for America, Lumeta, Bell Labs/Lucent, AT&T, Mentor Graphics, and Drew University. He is a frequent presenter at LISA conferences.
Michael W. Lucas (S12)
(https://www.blackhelicopters.org/~mwlucas) is a
network engineer whose UNIX 
experience is old enough to drink. He's
worked on networks that span the planet, networks with three people on
them, and just about everything in between. Lucas's latest book is
Absolute FreeBSD, joining several other books by him on UNIX, networking, and cryptography. He has a slew of certifications for assorted security vendor products, as well as a CISSP. Lucas has spent the past few years eliminating the guesswork from network management and replacing it with fact-based troubleshooting.
Evan Marcus (R5, F3) joined QD Technology in 2006 as a the Director of Technical Sales.
QD Technology is a premier provider of next generation database technology that
compresses databases by 90%, puts them on a desktop or laptop, and speeds up
their access by 10 times or more. Evan has nearly 20 years of experience in UNIX systems. Before joining QD, he spent 8 years at VERITAS Software as a systems engineer, speaker, and author. He also spent 5 years at Sun Microsystems and 2+ years at Fusion Systems, where he worked to bring the first high availability software applications for SunOS and Solaris to market. He also spent two years as a system administrator on the equities trading floor of a multinational trading institution. He is the co-author of Blueprints for High Availability (2nd edition John Wiley & Sons, 2003) and co-author and co-editor of The Resilient Enterprise (VERITAS Publications, 2002). He is a well-regarded and popular speaker on the design of highly available and disaster-resilient systems, and on fixed-content storage archives.
Hunter Matthews (W7) is the senior UNIX system administrator at the Duke University Department of Biology, where he is responsible
for two small
server rooms and one small data-center, having built two of them. He
consults with other departments across the university on server room
planning and operation. He has been involved in UNIX system
administration for 15 years, including acting as lead system administrator for an FAA project.
James Mauro (W2) is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance and Availability Engineering group at Sun Microsystems.
Jim's current interests and activities are centered on benchmarking Solaris 10 performance, workload analysis, and tool development. This work includes Sun's new Opteron-based systems and multicore performance on Sun's Chip Multithreading (CMT) Niagara processor. Jim resides in Green Brook, New Jersey, with his wife and two sons. He spent most of his spare time in the past year working on the second edition of Solaris Internals. Jim co-authored the first edition of Solaris Internals with Richard McDougall and has been writing about Solaris in various forums for the past eight years.
Adam Moskowitz (M9) in his roles as IT manager and senior system administrator, and on
behalf of several of his consulting clients, has interviewed more candidates for system administration positions than he can remember. By virtue of having worked for a lot of companies that are no longer in business, he has been a candidate for almost that many system administration positions. Over the years he's been asked good questions, bad questions, and horrible questions, and has seen candidates become flummoxed when asked what seemed like rather simple questions. All this plus his almost 30 years of experience in the field (not to mention a darned good ratio of interviews to job offers) have given Adam considerable field experience to draw on for this tutorial.
When he's not in an interview, Adam works as a system administrator—but only to support his hobby of judging barbecue contests and to keep food in his puppy's bowl.
Tobias Oetiker (M7, M11) is an electrical engineer by education and a system
administrator by
vocation. For ten years he has been working for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, providing students and staff with a deluxe UNIX workstation environment. Last year he started his own company, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, running UNIX servers for industry customers, improving his pet open source projects MRTG, RRDtool, and SmokePing, and applying these tools to solve the customers' problems.
Chris Page (S11)
is a Principal Engineer at Corporate Technologies, Inc., where
he is also the 
technical lead for Oracle database–related technologies. He was previously IT Director at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for global UNIX system, database, and network management.
Bruce Potter (R2, F2) is the chief technologist and founder of Ponte Technologies. Before founding Ponte Technologies, Mr. Potter served as a Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton for almost four years, where he led a team focusing on emerging technologies such as wireless security, software assurance, trusted computing, and advanced computer network defense capabilities. At Booz Allen, Mr. Potter oversaw a variety of client engagements, as well as managing the day-to-day operations and logistics of his team. Prior to joining Booz Allen, Mr. Potter held several jobs focused on security and network operations, including managing network and security operations for Network Solutions and acting as CTO for a transaction-processing startup in Anchorage, Alaska. Mr. Potter has co-authored a number of books, including 802.11 Security and Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security. He regularly writes articles and presents at a wide variety of security conferences and is the founder of The Shmoo Group of security, crypto, and privacy professionals. Through The Shmoo Group, Mr. Potter assists with a number of open source projects and the yearly ShmooCon security conference held in Washington, DC.
Marcus Ranum (T3) has been building and designing security and security
systems since 1989. 
He is the author of several books on security,
and has been, variously: network manager, C programmer, development
team leader, VP of engineering, CSO, CEO, and consultant. He is
currently the CSO of Tenable Network Security.
Alan Robertson (T2) founded the High-Availability Linux (Linux-HA) project in 1998 and has been project 
leader for it since then.
He worked for SuSE for a year, then in March 2001 joined IBM's Linux Technology Center, where he works on it full time. Before joining SuSE, he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. He worked for Bell Labs for 21 years in a variety of roles. These included providing leading-edge computing support, writing software tools and developing voicemail systems. Alan is a frequent speaker at international open source and Linux conferences.
John Sellens (M13, R4, R7)
has been involved in system and network administration
since 1986 and is the author of several 
related USENIX papers, a
number of ;login: articles, and the SAGE Short Topics in System Administration booklet #7, System and Network Administration for Higher Reliability. He holds an M.Math. in computer science from the University of Waterloo and is a Chartered Accountant. He is the proprietor of SYONEX, a systems and networks consultancy, and is currently a member of the systems team at Magna International. From 1999 to 2004, he was the General Manager for Certainty Solutions in Toronto. Prior to joining Certainty, John was the Director of Network Engineering at UUNET Canada and was a staff member in computing and information technology at the University of Waterloo for 11 years.
Stephen Sorota (S2, M2) has over ten years of experience architecting solutions while working for several service providers and ISVs.
He is currently a senior member of the VMware Professional Services Organization, where he is responsible for delivering a variety of custom engagements and workshops, including virtualization-based disaster recovery, VMware SDK development, and chargeback.
Marc Staveley (S5, M5) now works with Soma Networks, where he is applying his many years of experience with UNIX 
development and administration in leading their IT group. Previously Marc had been an independent consultant and also held positions at Sun Microsystems, NCR, Princeton University, and the University of Waterloo. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of standards-based development, multi-threaded programming, system administration, and performance tuning.
Steve VanDevender (M4), by once not knowing to be afraid of Sendmail, has ended up specializing in email system administration for much of his system 
administration career. At efn.org between 1994 and 2002, he ended up managing a mail system that grew to 10,000 users; at the University of Oregon since 1996, he has helped manage a mail system that has grown from 20,000 to 30,000 users and, more important, has grown even more in message volume and user activity, with many corresponding changes to cope with that growth. Since 2000, he has taught a popular course in system administration for the University of Oregon's Department of Computer and Information Science.
Rudi van Drunen (R3) studied electronics engineering and met the UNIX OS and friends about 25 years ago on a DEC VAX at the University of Groningen (NL).
Apparently the two got along pretty well, as nowadays he is employed as CTO and senior UNIX infrastructure consultant at Competa IT in the Netherlands. Before that, he was head of IT for a medical lab, where he did a.o. UNIX system administration and applied research in image analysis and neural networks. He is one of the tech gurus and a founding board member of Wireless Leiden, the leading wireless community in the Netherlands. Rudi has his own small open source and hardware design company, Xlexit. He has taught a number of classes and given invited talks on wireless and other topics at events such as LISA and SANE and to the Dutch UNIX community.
Jeff Victor (R1) as been using UNIX systems since 1984. His two-decade career has included software 
design and development, network and telecomm administration, and ten years as a Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Jeff wrote the Sun BluePrint "Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide" and the "How to Move a Container" guide, both available at https://www.sun.com. He also maintains the Solaris Zones and Containers FAQ at https://opensolaris.org.
Elizabeth Zwicky (T7, T11) has been managing system administrators off and on since her first job. Recently, she's been
hanging out with educational theorists and testing ways of teaching problem solving to system administrators, high-school graduates who may or may not have any interest in system administration but are being paid to listen, and a three-year-old.
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
