Keynote: Scaling the Web: An Overview of Google (A Linux Cluster for Fun and Profit)
Jim Reese, Chief Operations Engineer, Google

Want to know how to build an Internet search engine that indexes several terabytes of data—over 3 billion Web documents—and serves it up at a rate of thousands of requests per second? (Hint: Start with a farm of 10,000+ Linux servers.) This talk will cover the technology behind Google: company overview, search parameters and results, hardware and query load balancing, Linux cluster topology, scalability, fault tolerance, and more.

Working Smarter

Chair: Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Awarded Best Paper!
Work-Augmented Laziness with the Los Task Request System
Thomas Stepleton, Swarthmore College Computer Society

Spam Blocking with a Dynamically Updated Firewall Ruleset
Deeann M.M. Mikula, Chris Tracy, and Mike Holling, Telerama Public Access Internet

Holistic Quota Management: The Natural Path to a Better, More Efficient Quota System
Michael Gilfix, Tufts University

Domain Name Server Comparison: BIND 8 vs. BIND 9 vs. djbdns vs. ???

Brad Knowles, Snow BV

Name server administration is getting harder. With "black hats" trying to break in or use your machine for attacks elsewhere, 5kr1pt-k1dd135 DoS-ing it, and misconfigured clients burying it, you still have to serve your clients. We'll look at DNS server programs for RFC compliance, performance, ease of use, and security. We'll also survey the root and various TLD name servers. Finally, we'll recommend improvements, with particular attention paid to the default installation.

Security on Macintosh OS X

John Hurley, Apple, Inc.

Leveraging the power of UNIX, many security features have been integrated into Apple's new operating system. The security architecture will be presented, along with ideas on how to configure and use the security features of OS X.

As the Security Policy Architect for Apple, John Hurley works with the Data Security team and other groups at Apple to define the security policies for Mac OS X.

SAMBA Guru

Gerald Carter, SAMBA Team/
Hewlett-Packard

Gerald has been a member of the SAMBA Team since 1998. At Hewlett-Packard, he works on Samba-based print appliances and acts as the release coordinator for the SAMBA project. He is currently working on a guide to LDAP for system administrators with O'Reilly Publishing and is the author of Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours for Sams Publishing.

Service, Risk, and Scale

Chair: Alex Keller, IBM Research

Application Aware Management
of Internet Data Center Software
Alain Mayer, CenterRun, Inc.

Geographically Distributed System for Catastrophic Recovery
Kevin Adams, NSWCDD

Embracing and Extending
Windows 2000
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Load Balancers

Tony Bourke

Tony Bourke will inspect the changing landscape of server load balancing
technology, including the integration of SSL acceleration, persistence issues, and performance metrics. This talk will go into both problems and solutions for today's site administrator, offering advice on challenges ranging from technical issues to office politics.

The Evolving Ethics of System Administration

Lee Damon, University of Washington, & Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director

We'll start with a discussion of the ethics canons of various SAGE organizations and continue on to an interactive, bi-mediated debate on some practical ethical situations from the workplace. Raise your awareness of real-world ethical dilemmas and how to avoid them (or cope with them once they're upon you!).

AFS Gurus

Esther Filderman, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and
Garry Zacheiss, MIT

Having worked for Carnegie Mellon University since 1988, Esther has been working with AFS since its toddlerhood. She is currently a Senior Systems Mangler and AFS administrator for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. As a member of the Athena Server Operations team, Garry maintains and expands the AFS cells used by Athena.

Practical Theory

Chair: Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

Stem: The System Administration Enabler
Uri Guttman, Stem Systems, Inc.

Pan: A High-Level Configuration Language
Lionel Cons and Piotr Poznanski, CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research

Why Order Matters: Turing Equivalence in Automated Systems Administration
Steve Traugott, TerraLuna LLC, and Lance Brown, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Large-Scale 802.11 Deployment

Tim Pozar, Late Night Software

802.11 technology has significantly reduced the cost and technical knowledge needed to deploy wireless networking, making 802.11 radios attractive not only for the office and home user but to ISPs for last-mile, to educational institutions and corporations for campus networking, and to the Internet activist working on full neighborhood connectivity. This presentation will address what the technology can and can't do, available equipment, security, and the regulatory issues in deploying networks.

The Constitutional & Financial Argument Against Spam

Daniel V. Klein, LoneWolf Systems

Spam: you either loathe it or you hate it. It consumes bandwidth, disk space, and, perhaps most important, your time. It is, however, defended by the spammers themselves as an exercise of free speech. We will look at how spammers avoid detection and payment, and how you can defend against spam. The ultimate thrust of the talk will be to show the economic impact of spam and to examine the
constitutional arguments against it.

Consulting Guru

Nick Stoughton, MSB Associates

Nick is a principal with MSB Associates. He has been working as a
consultant since 1984, with both small and large consulting firms, and has undertaken projects ranging from one day to over one year in duration. Nick
is well known as a specialist in International Standards and in help desk systems and has a wealth of experience in Open Systems development and administration.