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LOPSA Sysadmin Days Program
Professional Training for Professional System Administrators
August 6-7, 2007
Cherry Hill, NJ (just outside Philadelphia)
Training Program Information
| Disaster Recovery: Will you survive? |
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Every IT operation eventually faces a disaster on some scale. Despite most disaster based damage being avoidable, the result is usually catastrophic in some way or another. In this class you will learn how to mitigate risk of disaster through a variety of methods. This class covers Disaster Recovery (DR) as a discipline and the low level mechanics of evaluating risks and developing mitigation or reactive disaster plans. All system administrators, regardless of the size or scope of their operation, will benefit from a more in depth understanding of DR taught in this class. The goal is to provide skills and knowledge that allows immediate changes to the disaster readiness of your own operations back at the office.
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Jesse Trucks
In his ten years as a system administrator, Jesse Trucks has worked in a startup, at an ISP in the late 90's, as the single IT guy at a publishing company, and as part of an organization with nearly 250 system administrators maintaining more than 5,000 enterprise servers. Most recently, he managed a team of systems administrators. He has extensive security experience in policy development, monitoring, and implementation management, and he is well versed in Disaster Recovery planning and testing. Trucks advocates for extensive documentation, strong security, change control, and professionalism. In addition, he volunteers for the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) on the Tech Team assisting in the maintenance of the http://lopsa.org site infrastructure and the Crossbow committee organizing the Sysadmin Days training events. Trucks taught four of the 16 classes at the inaugural Sysadmin Days in Phoenix and plans to teach four more classes at the next event. He has served as a Local Mentor in the GCUX course for the SANS Institute, and he currently holds GCIH and GCUX certifications. Jesse Trucks founded the second LOPSA Local Chapter in Madison, WI, USA and is a LOPSA Founding Member.
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| Essentials of Solaris 10 Troubleshooting |
Troubleshooting is where the rubber meets the road for system administrators. Our employers need us to identify and fix the root cause of our problems with a minimum of disruption and cost. Our technical chops are important, but we also need to work collaboratively with our coworkers and customers to resolve the problem for once and for all. This course covers several techniques and tools for organizing a successful, collaborative troubleshooting process.
But this is not just a touchy-feely class! Solaris 10 includes a raft of tools for getting to the bottom of performance, hardware and software environments. We'll review several key tools for looking at different aspects of system and application functioning. Some of the tools and techniques we'll look at include:
- Error messages--how to collect and interpret them
- Fault profiles--handy rules of thumb
- Getting at the system's guts with DTrace
- Examining a crash dump
- Using the p-tools and the /proc pseudo-filesystem
- Cool free tools from the Web
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Scott Cromar
Scott Cromar has been a fan of Solaris since using a Sun workstation to investigate the sex life of sea grasses while an undergraduate. He is currently a Unix Technical Lead with more than a dozen years of experience supporting Solaris and Linux systems in academic and financial services production environments. Along the way, he created Princeton University's Solaris Troubleshooting web site and the companion Solaris Troubleshooting Blog. Besides technical articles exposing the seamy side of life on the seabed, he has published articles for SANs and SysAdmin Magazine.
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| Time Management for System Administrators: Work smarter, get more done (part I) |
Tom Limoncelli is on a mission. He wants to see System Administrators work 40 hours a week (not 70), be more relaxed (not stressed), and still get all their work done. It isn't easy.
Most time management talks are useless for people with hundreds of screaming users.
His first tip will save you an hour each week. Seven more like it and you have gained a day each week!
Some of his tips will include:
- How not to get interrupted by users
- What to do when users interrupt you anyway
- Avoid the "Todo List Of Doom"
- How to go home at 5pm every day
- Places to find "hidden" free time
- Precompiled routines are better than ad hoc
- When automating is a waste of time
- How do you get more "face time" with your boss? (or less, if you prefer)
Note: This is an all-day class, which takes two class sessions.
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Thomas Limoncelli
Thomas Limoncelli is a internationally respected author and speaker on many topics including system administration, networking, and security. A system administrator since 1988, he now speaks at conferences around the world on topics ranging from firewall security to time management. He has worked for Cibernet, Dean For America, Lumeta, Bell Labs / Lucent, AT&T and Mentor Graphics. He shared the 2005 SAGE/LOPSA Outstanding Achievement Award along with Christine Hogan for the creation of the book The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley. His new book, Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly has been published recently. He holds a B.A. in C.S. from Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, USA. He publishes a blog on EverythingSysadmin.com. He now works as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, Inc in New York City, USA.
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| Get Ready for Perl 6 |
Perl 6, the completely revamped version of the most popular scripting language among system administrators, has been in development for over five years now, so you'll be excused for thinking it's vaporware. But development has continued, and greatly accelerated over the past year. It's now possible to download tools that let you run Perl 6 programs today; an official beta release is likely in 2007.
Perl 6 is a complete rewrite of the language, with hundreds of exciting new features. Your Perl 5 scripts and programs will continue to run under Perl 6, but to make use of the new features, you'll need to learn the new language. This tutorial will give you a head start so you'll be ready when Perl 6 is.
Topics covered will include:
- An overview of Perl 6's design
- Its compilers and runtimes (yes, plural)
- Language changes:
- New/changed syntax
- Junctions
- Subroutines
- The MAIN subroutine and command-line arguments
- Objects, classes, roles and traits
- Modules and packages
- Regexes, rules, and grammars
- Downloading and installing Perl 6 tools so you can experiment with Perl 6 today, including backports of Perl 6 features to Perl 5
Live demos will be run, too, so you can see Perl 6 in action!>
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Trey Harris, LOPSA
Trey Harris is a programmer and system administrator with 15 years of experience in Perl. He has worked as a senior system administrator and system automation programmer in university, financial-services, technology and Internet sectors, most recently at Amazon.com, and has worked as a Perl trainer. He was a technical reviewer for Damian Conway's "Perl Best Practices" (2005, O'Reilly). He presented his CPAN module Commands::Guarded at LISA in 2004, and is a contributor to the Pugs Perl 6 compiler project. He is a member of the LOPSA Board of Directors.
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| Change Management: Why suffer the paperwork? |
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This class covers both the conceptual and practical aspects of Change Management. In this class you will learn what Change Management is within the context of System Administration and IT operations. You will learn how to take the concepts of Change Management back to your own operations to improve change control and documentation procedures. The goal of Change Management and this class is to improve IT service by reducing surprises, reducing Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), establishing and improving documentation standards and incorporating practical change management methods into the daily practice of IT groups.
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Jesse Trucks
In his ten years as a system administrator, Jesse Trucks has worked in a startup, at an ISP in the late 90's, as the single IT guy at a publishing company, and as part of an organization with nearly 250 system administrators maintaining more than 5,000 enterprise servers. Most recently, he managed a team of systems administrators. He has extensive security experience in policy development, monitoring, and implementation management, and he is well versed in Disaster Recovery planning and testing. Trucks advocates for extensive documentation, strong security, change control, and professionalism. In addition, he volunteers for the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) on the Tech Team assisting in the maintenance of the http://lopsa.org site infrastructure and the Crossbow committee organizing the Sysadmin Days training events. Trucks taught four of the 16 classes at the inaugural Sysadmin Days in Phoenix and plans to teach four more classes at the next event. He has served as a Local Mentor in the GCUX course for the SANS Institute, and he currently holds GCIH and GCUX certifications. Jesse Trucks founded the second LOPSA Local Chapter in Madison, WI, USA and is a LOPSA Founding Member.
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| Linux System Administration: Black Magic, Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning |
This class will cover several aspects of administering a Linux system, including:
- An overview of the popular Linux distributions from a Sysadmin's perspective
- Installation techniques
- Linux configuration management
- Troubleshooting hardware and software problems
- Poking around in the guts of the kernel
- Fine-tuning Linux performance
- Techniques for making your job easier
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Jonathan Billings
Jonathan Billings is a High Performance Computing Specialist for Princeton University's Office of Information Technology, where he administers several supercomputing clusters running Linux. Jonathan has worked a variety of environments, from small shops with only a dozen Linux servers to supporting Linux on hundreds of desktops and servers. Before Princeton, Jonathan worked as a UNIX/Linux system administrator at Carnegie Mellon University and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He lives in New Jersey with his very supportive fiancée and
three indifferent cats.
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| Time Management for System Administrators: Work smarter, get more done (part II) |
Tom Limoncelli is on a mission. He wants to see System Administrators work 40 hours a week (not 70), be more relaxed (not stressed), and still get all their work done. It isn't easy.
Most time management talks are useless for people with hundreds of screaming users.
His first tip will save you an hour each week. Seven more like it and you have gained a day each week!
Some of his tips will include:
- How not to get interrupted by users
- What to do when users interrupt you anyway
- Avoid the "Todo List Of Doom"
- How to go home at 5pm every day
- Places to find "hidden" free time
- Precompiled routines are better than ad hoc
- When automating is a waste of time
- How do you get more "face time" with your boss? (or less, if you prefer)
Note: This is an all-day class, which takes two class sessions.
|
Thomas Limoncelli
Thomas Limoncelli is a internationally respected author and speaker on many topics including system administration, networking, and security. A system administrator since 1988, he now speaks at conferences around the world on topics ranging from firewall security to time management. He has worked for Cibernet, Dean For America, Lumeta, Bell Labs / Lucent, AT&T and Mentor Graphics. He shared the 2005 SAGE/LOPSA Outstanding Achievement Award along with Christine Hogan for the creation of the book The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley. His new book, Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly has been published recently. He holds a B.A. in C.S. from Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, USA. He publishes a blog on EverythingSysadmin.com. He now works as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, Inc in New York City, USA.
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| With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Ethics & The System Administrator |
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The profession of System Administration frequently requires ethical decisions with which to deal with our day to day situations -- accessing others files, email, and other confidential data, as well as longer term issues, such as retention policies and vendor biases. How we deal with these decisions affects our profession as a whole.
We'll discuss the System Administrators' Code Of Ethics, and along the way various scenarios of possible ethical quandaries will be presented. Feel free to bring your own issues to share and explore, and be prepared to argue and discuss various ideas. Ethical decisions are not always simple and you may find yourself exploring the many shades of gray that these issues can raise.
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Esther Filderman
Esther Filderman was one of the original members of the group commissioned to create and ratify the current System Administrators' Code of Ethics and has encouraged System Administrators in her home city of Pittsburgh, PA, to adopt the Code. She is an active member of LOPSA, the local group (SNAPgh), and of the OpenAFS project, for which she helps run a yearly conference and otherwise nags the Board of Elders.
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| Advanced Security: A self-assessment study |
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This class takes an unconventional approach to advanced security for system administrators. The approach is based on the idea that we can usually figure out how to secure something once we know what needs securing, but the difficulty is usually in enumerating the things that require security. In this class, you will learn how to perform a comprehensive evaluation of your workplace security. This encompasses any organizational policies, applicable government regulations effecting system administration, network topology, personnel involved, systems, and other areas requiring evaluation to understand the full spectrum of security issues at a particular workplace. The goal is for you to take home a detailed list of questions to answer and risks to evaluate, as well as the tools to answer those questions, evaluate those risks, and propose solutions to meet the security needs of your organization.
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Jesse Trucks
In his ten years as a system administrator, Jesse Trucks has worked in a startup, at an ISP in the late 90's, as the single IT guy at a publishing company, and as part of an organization with nearly 250 system administrators maintaining more than 5,000 enterprise servers. Most recently, he managed a team of systems administrators. He has extensive security experience in policy development, monitoring, and implementation management, and he is well versed in Disaster Recovery planning and testing. Trucks advocates for extensive documentation, strong security, change control, and professionalism. In addition, he volunteers for the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) on the Tech Team assisting in the maintenance of the http://lopsa.org site infrastructure and the Crossbow committee organizing the Sysadmin Days training events. Trucks taught four of the 16 classes at the inaugural Sysadmin Days in Phoenix and plans to teach four more classes at the next event. He has served as a Local Mentor in the GCUX course for the SANS Institute, and he currently holds GCIH and GCUX certifications. Jesse Trucks founded the second LOPSA Local Chapter in Madison, WI, USA and is a LOPSA Founding Member.
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| Administering a Mac OS X Environment |
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The Mac OS X operating system is a huge advance of what came before, but many IT shops and IT professionals still regard Macs as toys, not serious computing platforms for a total installation. This course will cover concepts needed to either create an entire network of Mac clients and servers, and also how to integrate Mac OS X clients into existing networks securely and safely. Topics include binding to NIS/LDAP and NFS, Active Directory support, software updates and management, security, Mac OS X Server and OpenDirectory, command line tips and tricks, and more.
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Jim Foraker, Carnegie Mellon University
Jim Foraker is a developer and system adminstrator and a member of the Mac OS X Project Group in Computing Services, Carnegie Mellon's central computing department. Since 2000, he has been responsible for the design and implementation of several generations of architectures used in the deployment and maintenance of the 125 Macs used in Carnegie Mellon's public computing labs. He has also been active in the MacEnterprise.org and radmind open source communities.
Jim leverages his skills as a Unix system adminstrator with the features of Mac OS X to create secure and reliable enterprise-class systems that tightly integrate into heterogenous computing environments.
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| Internal Documentation for System Administrators |
In the highly technical field of system administration, it's easy to forget that one of an our most important skills is nontechnical: our ability to document how our site works. Whether it's for business continuity, so we can duplicate our work later, or just so we can remember what we did at 3 in the morning, internal documentation keeps
a site flowing smoothly.
This class will serve as an introduction to getting internal documentation written. Topics will range from introductory to intermediate:
- Why documentation is necessary, and why people don't document
- What needs to be documented, and how to get it documented
- A whirlwind discussion of wiki software
- Tips for getting other team members to write documentation
- How to avoid (or harness) politics to get documentation written
- How to make documentation an integral part of your site
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Chris St. Pierre, Nebraska Wesleyan University
Chris St. Pierre is the system administrator at Nebraska Wesleyan University, a small but growing liberal arts university. In his three years there, he has lead a charge to document and modernize the computing infrastructure. He has considerable experience and interest in issues of scalability, business continuity, and automation, and enjoys fighting spam in his spare time.
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| Developing IT Policies |
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Policy is critical for the evaluation and even survival of any IT organization; it provides critical protection and guidance to users, managers, and most of all the sysadmins themselves. However, the process for drafting IT policies is often difficult and murky. This class will focus on the process from beginning to end. We'll look at identifying what policies are needed, how to include everyone who should be involved in drafting policy, getting approval from management, crafting sensible policies in difficult environments both political and technical, and finally implementing policies once they have been drafted and approved.
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David Parter, University of Wisconsin and LOPSA
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. At the Lab he has worked as a manager; been involved in campus committees; and collaborated with other groups on campus. In the CS Department he works with faculty, staff and graduate students to support and contribute to their research projects. He also trains, manages and work with undergraduate students who work in the lab. Areas of responsibility and experience include policy development, security, network administration, liaison with the research projects, and a technical leadership role for the lab staff overall. At various times he have been part-time staff to specific research projects. In his free time, he flys single engine prop planes and plays hockey.
David is currently on the LOPSA Board of Directors.
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| Communication for IT: A broad spectrum analysis |
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This class covers all manner of communication techniques for IT professionals, with an emphasis on the particular struggles facing system administrators today. The class covers the wide range of communication styles and how to more effectively utilize those styles. You will learn how to use the different forms of ancient and modern communication methods, such as face to face meetings, email, instant messaging, and teleconferencing (audio and video). The goal is to provide better understanding and more effective tools for communicating with management, peers, and clients in the workplace.
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Jesse Trucks
In his ten years as a system administrator, Jesse Trucks has worked in a startup, at an ISP in the late 90's, as the single IT guy at a publishing company, and as part of an organization with nearly 250 system administrators maintaining more than 5,000 enterprise servers. Most recently, he managed a team of systems administrators. He has extensive security experience in policy development, monitoring, and implementation management, and he is well versed in Disaster Recovery planning and testing. Trucks advocates for extensive documentation, strong security, change control, and professionalism. In addition, he volunteers for the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) on the Tech Team assisting in the maintenance of the http://lopsa.org site infrastructure and the Crossbow committee organizing the Sysadmin Days training events. Trucks taught four of the 16 classes at the inaugural Sysadmin Days in Phoenix and plans to teach four more classes at the next event. He has served as a Local Mentor in the GCUX course for the SANS Institute, and he currently holds GCIH and GCUX certifications. Jesse Trucks founded the second LOPSA Local Chapter in Madison, WI, USA and is a LOPSA Founding Member.
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| Automate Windows Administration |
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Learn how to use the Windows Script Host and Windows Management Instrumentation (focus on VBScript, with a Jscript and Perl example as well) to make better login scripts, and automate some of your administrative chores.
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David Lundell, Mutually Beneficial Inc.
David Lundell started his career in IT in 1991 as a Net Admin and QA tester with a software development firm that was trying to help Network Administrators have an easier life, by helping them improve their login scripts, automate repetitive tasks and add intelligence to their automated processes. Throughout his career, and now as the Principal Consultant of Mutually Beneficial Inc, David has continued to make use of automation.
David has a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona, an MBA from Eller College of Business (University of Arizona), and has also earned the following certifications: CCNA, CNA, Sun Certified Programmer Java 2, MCSE (NT4, Windows 2000, Windows 2003), MCSA, MCSD, MCDBA, MCTS: SQL 2005, MCITP: Database Developer, and MCITP: Database Administrator. Additionally, David is the author of 70-291 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure Project Lab Manual published by Prentice Hall.
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| Practical Paranoia (or how I learned to stop worrying, and love the bomb) |
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Much of the widely available material about security either focuses on specific technical details, or high level policy and compliance. Practical Paranoia aims towards the middle ground, helping you to define what you're trying to protect, figure out where your strong and weak points are, and put together a coherent action plan that makes so much sense that the business people will sign the cheques.
Everybody's environment is different, so we're expecting that you'll be active participants in the tutorial - and we'll be using your environments as examples in our discussions.
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Cat Okita
Cat Okita has more than 10 years of experience as a senior systems, security and network professional in the Financial, Internet, Manufacturing and Telecom sectors. She has designed, managed and contributed to a variety of geographically diverse projects and installations. Her assignments have included proposing and seeing to completion a wide variety of security, Internet, enterprise and monitoring projects, including highly available, redundant fault tolerant systems for security, web services, logging, monitoring, statistics gathering and analysis.
Cat has spoken at LISA and Defcon about identity and reputation, co-chairs the 'Managing Sysadmins' workshop at LISA, and programs for fun, in her spare time. |
| Compliance for System Adminstrators |
HIPAA, GLBA, FACTA, PCI, Oh My!
This class will cover a lot of topics that System Administrators need to be aware of to comply with various external requirements, including:
- Just what are the various regulatory and psuedo-regulatory compliance requirements?
- Common Business Errors
- What System Administrators need to know about compliance requirements
- Requirements For Business
- Risk Analysis
- Information Security Plans
- Testing of Controls
- Requirements for Support Personnel / Service Providers
- HIPAA
- GLBA
- PCI
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Joe Klein
A 25 year veteran of the IT and IA industry, Mr Klein is well respected in DoD and Commercial sectors for his Information Assurance and network security expertise. He is routinely requested to speak at professional security venues and is routinely invited to participate in high-level government working groups, as an expert on secure implementation of IPV6. His current research and analysis is focused on applying Information Assurance and security practices to IPv6.
Mr. Klein currently works for Command Information as the Senior IPv6 Security Consultant and IA Practice Lead focused on secure deployment of IPv6 network.
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