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18th Large
Installation System Administration Conference, November 14-19, Atlanta,
GA
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Technical Sessions: Wednesday, November 17 | Thursday, November 18 | Friday, November 19 | All in one file

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.

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Last changed: 19 Oct. 2007 ac