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18th Large
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Technical Sessions: Wednesday, November 17 | Thursday, November 18 | Friday, November 19 | All in one file

Wednesday, November 17, 2004
8:45 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Wednesday
Opening Remarks, Awards, Keynote
Marquis I & II

Keynote Address
Going Digital at CNN

Howard Ginsberg, CNN

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

CNN has long utilized digital non-linear editing of video on a large scale in post-production. In the late 90's, as part of a technology plan for the new century, the decision was made to bring the advantages of digital video to the production process by replacing most of the videotape-based operations with server-based video storage.

In advance of new technologies that would enhance news gathering and transmission to CNN Center in Atlanta, the technology plan included server-based recording, editing, and playback. File-based, faster-than-realtime video transfer significantly reduces time-to-air for CNN's newsgathering operations around the world and substantially improves access to archived footage.

CNN is currently deploying large-scale systems in Atlanta and New York that will support its very large recording and editing operations. Ultimately, these will replace most of the videotape-based operations in both cities. There are some significant technical challenges these systems must meet, especially in the areas of capacity, bandwidth, and reliability.

In Atlanta, CNN is installing a fully redundant 2 x 20TB system to host approximately 2,000 hours of MPEG-2 broadcast quality video & audio and MPEG-1 proxy/desktop-quality video & audio.

The New York bureau has just begun using a fully redundant 2 x 14TB system to host approximately 1,500 hours of MPEG-2 broadcast-quality video & audio and MPEG-1 proxy/desktop-quality video & audio.

The Atlanta video archive currently consists of a huge collection of videotapes, some of which have deteriorated so badly that they can only be played one more time. The digital successor for this archive will consist of a large hierarchical storage installation. It needs to be capable of ingesting 200 hours of video per day and transferring an estimated 280 gigabytes of data every hour. Storage requirements for this archive are in excess of a petabyte.

This presentation will discuss the new digital installation and the task of migrating from existing systems.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break  
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Wednesday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

SPAM/Email

Session Chair: Rudi Van Drunen, Leiden Pathology and Cytology Labs, Leiden, The Netherlands


Awarded Best Paper!
Scalable Centralized Bayesian Spam Mitigation with Bogofilter

Jeremy Blosser and David Josephsen, VHA Inc.

DIGIMIMIR: A Tool for Rapid Situation Analysis of Helpdesk and Support Email
Nils Einar Eide, Andreas N. Blaafadt, Baard H. Rehn Johansen, and Frode Eika Sandnes, Oslo University College

Gatekeeper: Monitoring Auto-Start Extensibility Points (ASEPs) for Spyware Management
Yi-Min Wang, Roussi Roussev, Chad Verbowski, and Aaron Johnson, Microsoft Research; Ming-Wei Wu, Yennun Huang, and Sy-Yen Kuo, National Taiwan University

INVITED TALKS
Marquis I

Session Chair: Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

What Is This Thing Called System Configuration?
Speaker: Alva Couch, Tufts University

View Presentation Slides: HTML | PDF

Over the last few years, there has been considerable development in theoretical work on system configuration, but no mainstream production tools have incorporated the results of this work. This talk will show how an understanding of some basic principles of system configuration can help to insure the best possible practices and utilization of current technologies. It will also indicate how some current research areas may influence the next generation of tools.

Anomaly Detection: Whatever Happened to Computer Immunology?
Speaker: Mark Burgess, Oslo University College

Anomaly detection is about finding behavior in systems that is unusual by some criterion. It has been applied to spam detection, security breach monitoring, and resource management amongst other things. In 1998, Mark suggested a generic form of anomaly detection and repair as a model of system administration, called Computer Immunology.

Detecting anomalies is easy—actually too easy. The problem lies in finding out which of them are interesting. How do we find signal in the noise? How do we formulate a policy for which are interesting?

In this talk Mark explains some of the state-of-the-art principles of anomaly detection—how events can be observed and patterned for machine analysis. Should we centralize anomaly detection? Can we define a language for anomalies (and is it just grep)?

In Mark's usual style, this talk is about understanding core principles and looking toward future technologies that employ them.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project

What Information Security Laws Mean For You
Speaker: John Nicholson, Shaw Pittman

View Presentation Slides

The good is also the bad news—people (including the government) are realizing how important information security is. The purpose of this presentation is to give you an overview of the laws impacting security, both in general and on a daily basis. The presentation will cover laws such as FISA, HIPAA, GLBA, the Patriot Act, and laws related to monitoring and searches. In addition, we will discuss searches, incident response, and current theories regarding liability for failure to implement security.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

Samba
Gerald Carter, Samba Team/Hewlett-Packard

Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Development Team since 1998 and is now helping to coordinate the project's release process. He has published articles with various Web-based magazines and teaches instructional courses as a consultant for multiple companies. Currently employed by Hewlett-Packard as a Samba developer, Gerald has also written books for both SAMS and O'Reilly Publishing.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Wednesday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

Intrusion and Vulnerability Detection
Session Chair: Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research

A Machine-Oriented Vulnerability Database for Automated Vulnerability Detection and Processing
Sufatrio, Temasek Laboratories, National University of Singapore; Roland H. C. Yap, School of Computing, National University of Singapore; Liming Zhong, Quantiq International

DigSig: Runtime Authentication of Binaries at Kernel Level
Axelle Apvrille, Trusted Logic; David Gordon, Ericsson; Serge Hallyn, IBM LTC; Makan Pourzandi and Vincent Roy, Ericsson

I3FS: An In-Kernel Integrity Checker and Intrusion Detection File System
Swapnil Patil, Anand Kashyap, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University

INVITED TALKS
Marquis I

Session Chair: Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project

LiveJournal's Backend and memcached: Past, Present, and Future
Speakers: Lisa Phillips, Brad Fitzpatrick

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

Blogging before blogging was a word, LiveJournal.com started off as a hobby project for Fitzpatrick and some friends and is now home to well over 4,000,000 accounts, over half of which are in active use.

With a built-in social networking system, per-journal-entry security, message boards, a LJ/RSS/Atom news aggregator, support for 20+ languages, a technical support system, and more, LiveJournal.com is a beast of an open source project, addictive to both users and developers. What's just as interesting, however, is how it all runs.

Come learn about LiveJournal.com's backend, past, present, and future. Discussion will include:

The site's history: how it's gone from one server to over sixty, adapting both its code and architecture to fit each other as the site grows.

Load balancing: commercial vs. open source vs. home-grown open source. When to use each, and how to use them effectively together.

MySQL tricks and replication: when and how to use MyISAM, when to use InnoDB, partitioning your data across clusters, moving users around clusters, replication topologies, for high-availability and easy maintenance, the DBI::Role library for load balancing and role-based handle acquisition.

Memcached, the site's distributed caching daemon and client libraries, originally built for LiveJournal, but in the last year now in use by Slashdot, Wikipedia, and others. Learn how memcached was used to make things really fast and avoid hitting the database. Learn why memcached works so well with lots of machines compared to local caching, and what been done to make the protocol, server, and memory allocator so fast.

And, of course, audience questions and comments will round out this session.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Lee Damon, University of Washington

NFS, Its Applications and Future
Speaker: Brian Pawlowski, Network Appliance

View Presentation Slides:
HTML | PDF

NFS has evolved since its inception at Sun in 1984 to provide a robust, heterogeneous, and scalable storage networking solution for many applications.

Its evolution is now managed within the NFS Version 4 working group in the IETF, with initial versions of the latest protocol available from a few vendors now.

This talk will take a deep and detailed plunge into the current state of NFS, the new features of Version 4, and the work facing the community in the future. Technology directions of iWARP (RDMA), hardware accelerations, exploiting high performance networks, and addressing security concerns are on the agenda for this segment.

A special highlight will be a focus on the relationship of Linux and NFS. Scalable compute clusters based on Linux have been a driving force in a lot of the performance work and future direction of NFS, where it provides a matching scalable storage infrastructure to match the emerging application architectures. This section will be framed in terms of a template for deployment and a description of best practices.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

Mac OS X
Michael Bartosh, Consultant

Michael Bartosh is an author, consultant, and trainer specializing in Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server in the context of cross-platform directory services and server infrastructures. A frequent speaker at technical conferences, Michael focuses on solutions that minimize impact on existing infrastructures. His Essential Mac OS X Server Administration (O'Reilly) is due out in February of 2005. Originally from Texas, he now resides in downtown Denver, CO, with his wife, Amber.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Wednesday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

Configuration Management
Session Chair: Jon Finke, RPI

Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment
Eelco Dolstra, Merijn de Jonge, and Eelco Visser, Utrecht University

Auto-configuration by File Construction: Configuration Management with newfig
William LeFebvre and David Snyder, CNN Internet Technologies

AIS: A Fast, Disk Space Efficient "Adaptable Installation System" Supporting Multitudes of Diverse Software Configurations
Sergei Mikhailov and Jonathan Stanton, George Washington University

INVITED TALKS
Marquis I

Session Chair: Esther Filderman, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Documentation
Speaker: Mike Ciavarella, University of Melbourne

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Adam S. Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

The Security Role of Linguistic Content Analysis
Speaker: Jim Nisbet, President & CEO, Tablus, Inc.

View Presentation Slides:
HTML | PDF

Computational linguistics is not a technology usually associated with networking devices such as firewalls and packet monitors, but this technology offers some powerful new capabilities. The premise is that if we want to look for high-value information leaving the company, then we need to look to the same kind of linguistic categorization technologies software companies have historically used. This talk principally explores content analysis techniques, ranging from regular expression pattern matching to latent semantic analysis, that can be used to identify content characteristics reliably enough that policies can be defined based on the content itself.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

Linux
Bdale Garbee, HP Linux CTO/Debian

Bdale, a former Debian Project Leader, currently works at HP helping to make sure Linux will work well on future HP systems. His background includes many years on both UNIX internals and embedded systems. He helped jump-start ports of Debian GNU/Linux to 5 architectures other than i386. When Bdale isn't busy keeping his basement computer farm full of oddball systems running Linux, working, he's busy with amateur radio, most likely building amateur satellites.

Thursday, November 18, 2004
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

Networking
Session Chair: Jon Finke, RPI

autoMAC: A Tool for Automating Network Moves, Adds, and Changes
Christopher J. Tengi, Princeton University; James M. Roberts, Tufts University; Joseph R. Crouthamel, Chris M. Miller, and Christopher M. Sanchez, Princeton University

More Netflow Tools for Performance and Security
Carrie Gates, Michael Collins, Michael Duggan, Andrew Kompanek, and Mark Thomas, Carnegie Mellon University

SPAM MINI-SYMPOSIUM
Marquis I

Session Chair: Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director

Filtering, Stamping, Blocking, Anti-Spoofing: How to Stop the Spam
Speaker: Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research

We can stop spam, and here are some of the techniques we'll use to do it: machine learning filters, stamping, blackhole lists, and anti-spoofing techniques such as Sender-ID. Stamping includes Turing Tests, computational puzzles, and real money. I'll also tell you where all that spam comes from, what it's selling, and why laws won't work.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: John Sechrest, Public Electronic Access to Knowledge

Grid Computing: Just What Is It and Why Should I Care?
Speakers: Esther Filderman and Ken McInnis, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

View presentation slides (PDF)

The Grid, a popular term today, can be a frightening and nebulous concept to system administrators tasked to provide "it" to their users. The additional challenges of supporting the distributed, multi-site Grid environment entail new architectural, political, and administrative responsibilities. We'll talk about the differences from the "traditional" computing environments and from clustering; new security models and procedures; implementation considerations; and what exactly the big deal is here, anyway. We will present some of the more common Grid scenarios and teach you to keep your head above water when you start using Grid technologies of your own.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

Backups
W. Curtis Preston, Glasshouse Technologies

W. Curtis Preston, President/CEO of The Storage Group, wrote Using SANs and NAS and UNIX Backup and Recovery, the seminal O'Reilly book on backup, as well as co-authoring SAGE's own Backups and Recovery Short Topics booklet. He has been designing and implementing storage systems for over 10 years. Realizing the demand for those who can understand storage technology on an implementation level and communicate it in plain language, Preston has extended his services to the vendor community, assisting in designing, developing, and marketing new products.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Thursday
EXPERIENCE TALK & REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

Monitoring and Troubleshooting
Session Chair: Lee Damon, University of Washington

Experience Talk:
FDR: A Flight Data Recorder Using Black-BoxAnalysis of Persistent State Changes for Managing Change and Configuration

Chad Verbowski, John Dunagan, Brad Daniels, and Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research

Refereed Papers:
Real-time Log File Analysis Using the Simple Event Correlator (SEC)

John P. Rouillard, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Combining High Level Symptom Descriptions and Low Level State Information for Configuration Fault Diagnosis
Ni Lao, Tsinghua University; Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying Ma, Microsoft Research Asia; Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research

SPAM MINI-SYMPOSIUM
Marquis I

Session Chair: Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director

Lessons Learned Reimplementing an ISP Mail Service Infrastructure to Cope with Spam
Speaker: Doug Hughes, Global Crossing

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

Spam is a problem for all organizations, large and small. Global Crossing's ISP platform found that spam volume was doubling every 2 months. You could see it in CPU processing, in disk I/O, in DNS lookups—even the compressed log files were growing visibly by the week. This talk discusses some of the techniques we used to identify spam, lessons learned, tools applied, and interesting statistics gathered along the way. Graphs of various metrics, black lists, DNSBLs, white lists, automated handling, SPF, and Bayesian filters are all approached from a practical standpoint.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

A New Approach to Scripting
Speaker: Trey Harris, Amazon.com

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

Scripts are easy to write but hard to write well. Practicing system administrators know that they ought to check all errors and take corrective or abortive action, but such minutiae usually serve as a distraction from the real work the script is supposed to solve, making automation less attractive. Worse, loading up a script with such checks can obscure the flow of the code and lead to spaghetti-script.

It has generally been assumed that accepted programming methodologies for general programming apply to scripting as well. This talk argues that this is not necessarily the case, and will introduce Procedural Test-Oriented Scripting (PTOS), a programming methodology designed to make scripts more readable, resilient, and easier to write by encapsulating a script as a series of conditions that much be reached and steps for bringing them about. An open-source Perl module implementing this methodology, useful for both beginning and advanced system programmers, will be demonstrated.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

AFS
Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project

Having worked for Carnegie Mellon University since 1988, Esther "Moose" Filderman has been working with AFS since its toddlerhood, before it was called AFS. She is currently Senior Systems Mangler and AFS administrator for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Esther Filderman has been working to bring AFS content to LISA conferences since 1999 and is also coordinating documentation efforts for the OpenAFS project.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

System Integrity
Session Chair: John Sechrest, Public Electronic Access to Knowledge

LifeBoat: An Autonomic Backup and Restore Solution
Ted Bonkenburg, Dejan Diklic, Benjamin Reed, and Mark Smith, IBM Almaden Research Center; Michael Vanover, IBM PCD; Steve Welch and Roger Williams, IBM Almaden Research Center

PatchMaker: A Physical Network Patch Manager Tool
Joseph R. Crouthamel, James M. Roberts, Christopher M. Sanchez, and Christopher J. Tengi, Princeton University

Who Moved My Data? A Backup Tracking System for Dynamic Workstation Environments
Gregory Pluta, Larry Brumbaugh, William Yurcik, and Joseph Tucek, NCSA/University of Illinois

SPAM MINI-SYMPOSIUM
Marquis I

Session Chair: Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director

What Spammers Are Doing to Get Around Bayesian Filtering & What We Can Expect for the Future
Speaker: John Graham-Cumming, Electric Cloud

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

Spammers keep on spamming, and they keep innovating to get through spam filters. In this talk you'll hear about the latest spammer tricks, the latest bugs in Internet Explorer that they're using, and what to expect from spammers in 2005.

The talk will also cover ten tough questions to ask your spam filter vendor to make sure that you get the best product (or use the best open source product) available.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Mario Obejas, Raytheon

Flying Linux
Speaker: Dan Klein, USENIX

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

We all know that "Linux is better than Windows." Few intelligent people would board a fly-by-wire airplane that was controlled by Microsoft Windows. So how about Linux? When your life is at stake, your attitudes change considerably. Better than Windows, yes—but better enough? This talk will look at what it takes to make software truly mission-critical and man-rated. We'll go back to the earliest fly-by-wire systems—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and look at such diverse (but critical!) issues such as compartmentalization, trojans and terrorism, auditing and accountability, bugs and boundary conditions, distributed authoring, and revision control. At the end of this talk, what you thought might be an easy answer will be seen to be not so easy.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

VoIP and IETF Standards
Robert Sparks, CTO, Xten Networks

Robert Sparks has been working in the computer and communications industry since 1982. He has spent the last 5 years designing and developing SIP-based IP communications infrastructure. Recently he has been an active contributor to IETF protocol development, with a strong focus on improving interoperability of SIP and SIMPLE implementations.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Thursday
Plenary Session
Marquis I & II

A System Administrator's Introduction to Bioinformatics
Bill Van Etten, The BioTeam

View presentation slides (PDF)

Bioinformatics research requires domain expertise in biology, software/algorithm development, and UNIX system administration. In rare cases, a single individual possesses sufficient domain knowledge in all three of these areas, but, more often, bioinformatics research is conducted through the collaborative efforts of two or three people who are knowledgeable in one or perhaps two of these disciplines. To be successful, this cross-discipline, collaborative effort requires that each participant become familiar with the others' vernacular.

In this session, William Van Etten, geneticist and founding partner of The BioTeam (bioteam.net) will offer an introduction to genetics and bioinformatics algorithms tailored for the UNIX system administrator.

Friday, November 19, 2004
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Friday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

Security
Session Chair: David Hoffman, Stanford University

Making a Game of Network Security
Marc Dougherty, Northeastern University

Securing the PlanetLab Distributed Testbed: How to Manage Security in an Environment with No Firewalls, with All Users Having Root, and No Direct Physical Control of Any System
Paul Brett, Mic Bowman, Jeff Sedayao, Robert Adams, Rob Knauerhause, and Aaron Klingaman, Intel Corporation

Secure Automation: Achieving Least Privilege with SSH, Sudo, and Suid
Robert A. Napier, Cisco Systems

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Lee Damon, University of Washington

System Administration and Sex Therapy: The Gentle Art of Debugging
Speaker: David Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

Already debugged three things today and it's not even breakfast? You must be a sysadmin. Our life is chock full of debugging "opportunities." Not only do we have to fix problems in complex systems, we often find ourselves debugging the interactions between complex systems designed by other people.

To understand this process better and to get better at it, we're going to turn to an unlikely source of information: sex therapists, counselors, and educators. With their help, we'll explore why improving the interactions between complex systems when they go awry is so hard and what techniques and craft can be used to make the process easier. Come to this talk not for its mature subject matter, but for the chance to learn to be a better sysadmin through better debugging.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

RAID/HA/SAN (with a Heavy Dose of Veritas)
Doug Hughes, Global Crossing; Darren Dunham, TAOS

Doug Hughes and Darren Dunham have 13+ years of Veritas between them. They have years of experience working on Volume Manager, Veritas File System, Database Edition, Volume Replicator, Cluster Server, and NetBackup. Whether you have a SAN or direct-attach storage, a database or a fileystem, a single system or a cluster, or a perplexing backup or disaster recovery issue, this session will cover it all. Generic questions about technology components (RAID, SAN, HA, backup, disaster recovery) are welcome.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Friday
REFEREED PAPERS
Marquis III

Theory
Session Chair: John Sechrest, Public Electronic Access to Knowledge

Experience in Implementing an HTTP Service Closure
Steven Schwartzberg, BBN Technologies; Alva Couch, Tufts University

Meta Change Queue: Tracking Changes to People, Places, and Things
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads
Daniel Price and Andrew Tucker, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

INVITED TALKS
Marquis I

Session Chair: Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

The Administrator, Then and Now
Speaker: Peter H. Salus, UNIX Historian

50 years ago, enormous, isolated machines were tended by priests in white coats called operators. 40 years ago, people carried large boxes of cards and presented them to operators, who (if one was lucky) returned work product 24 hours later.

By 30 years ago, many "terminals" were connected to more central "mainframes"; 20 years ago, "workstations" and "personal computers" had come into being.

As storage and connectivity waxed, the role of the operator transformed into that of the system administrator. This talk will trace that transformation.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis II

Session Chair: Rudi Van Drunen, Leiden Pathology and Cytology Labs, Leiden, The Netherlands

Used Disk Drives
Speaker: Simson Garfinkel, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

Between 1998 and 2002, Simson Garfinkel purchased 200 used hard drives on eBay. Analyzing these hard drives with a simple UNIX-based system, he found a treasure trove of personal and business confidential information—information he never should have seen.

In this talk, Garfinkel will discuss the information he found and why it was findable. He'll give a brief survey of how filesystems lay information on the hard drive, how and when that information is overwritten, and what tools you can use to perform forensic analysis and properly sanitize media. Finally, he'll show how the results of this research are applicable to digital cameras, flash memory, MP3 players, Palm Pilots, and a wide variety of other systems.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

Professional Growth
David Parter, University of Wisconsin

David has been a system administrator at the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Department since 1991, serving as Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab since 1995. David has been the senior system administrator, guiding a staff of 8 full-time sysadmins and supervising up to 12 student sysadmins at a time. His experiences in this capacity include working with other groups on campus; providing technical leadership to the group; managing the budget; dealing with vendors; dealing with faculty; and training students. As a consultant, he has dealt with a variety of technical and management challenges. He has sat on the SAGE executive committee since December 1999, serving as SAGE President in 2001–2002.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Friday
Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs)
Marquis I

Session Chair: Esther Filderman, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting new or ongoing work. If you have work you would like to share or a cool idea that's not quite ready for publication, send a one- or two-paragraph summary to lisa04wips@usenix.org. We are particularly interested in presenting students' work. A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference, and the speakers will be notified in advance. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations; the time limit will be strictly enforced.

Click here for a current WiPs schedule

INVITED TALKS
Marquis II

Session Chair: David Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

Lessons Learned from Howard Dean's Digital Campaign
Speakers: Keri Carpenter, UC Irvine; Tom Limoncelli, Consultant

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

View Keri Carpenter's Presentation Slides (PDF)

View Tom Limoncelli's Presentation Slides (PDF)

Howard Dean's campaign use of Web technology has had a lasting effect on politics. Their Internet-based tools had 2 goals: raise funds and raise the level of participation. They broke all fundraising records ($50 million during the campaign) and invigorated a volunteer base the like of which had not been seen before. The talk will describe tools including the Web site, the blog, fundraising tools, and online meet-up tools. The culture and the tools employed during the campaign offer important lessons on how the Internet can be used by any campaign and any political party to organize distributed masses of people to collaborate for active participation in the democratic process. Campaigns from local races to national campaigns have adopted the techniques developed by Dean for America.

NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK
Marquis III

Session Chair: David Hoffman, Stanford University

Storage Security: You're Fooling Yourself
Speaker: W. Curtis Preston, Glasshouse Technologies

Those of us who design and administer networked storage must now begin to apply security principles and techniques to our storage networks. This talk will start with brief explanations of security for storage administrators, and storage for security administrators. It will then cover the vulnerabilities and exploits of SAN and NAS networks. Once these issues are on the table, we will discuss techniques to overcome these vulnerabilities, from readily available configuration choices to future industry directions.

GURU SESSIONS
Marquis IV

Configuration Management
Gene Kim, Tripwire, Inc.

So you need to build a change management process: either you were nailed by an IT audit, an industry regulation, or Sarbanes-Oxley, or you just need a better way to integrate security into your IT operational processes. How are you identifying the gaps and bootstrapping the necessary controls, with each step having a beginning and a clearly defined goal? Join our guru session to discuss and explore how to build auditable change and configuration management processes, not only to achieve sustainable security and auditable processes, but also to build a high-performing IT ops team with the best service levels (MTTR, MTBF, low amounts of unplanned work) and efficiencies (improved server to system administrator ratios).

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Friday
LISA Game Show
Marquis II

Closing this year's conference, the LISA Game Show will once again pit attendees against each other in a test of technical knowledge and cultural trivia. Host Rob Kolstad and sidekick Dan Klein will provide the questions and color commentary for this always memorable event.

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Last changed: 19 Oct. 2007 ac