"What's the biggest problem in system administration?"

Date: Thursday March 4 2010
Time: 7:00 PM - 7:20 PM - Social Time
7:20 PM - 7:25 PM - LOPSA-NJ Business and Announcements
7:25 PM - 7:30 PM - LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference (PICC) News
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM - Main Presentation

This month's meeting will be less technical, more philosophical.

What's the biggest problem facing system administrators? Is it the vendors? The managers? The tools? Is it us? (nah, it couldn't be us! Must be the tools). Scaling? The inconsistant syntax of Perl? It probably isn't any one thing.

As sysadmin I worked in state of continuous disaster recovery for three years; I did this in countries that I had never before visited, and in situations that could be extremely stressful. I'd like to pass on what I've learned from my mistakes and my successes to a wider audience.

When I first started working as a sysadmin, I had enlisted in the United States Air Force as a Computer Systems Operator (3C0X1). It happened that I was assigned to the 1st Combat Communications Squadron (1CBCS) in Germany. Over the next three years I would participate in 30 exercises and several real-world missions. What a way to start a career.

LOPSA-NJ: December Meeting Pre-holiday post-LISA party, and earth-shattering announcement! With special invited guests.

Date: Thursday Dec 3rd 2009
Time: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Agenda:
7:00 - 8:00: Pre-holiday Party! Bring a simple not-messy food/snack to share, talk about what you learned at LISA, or what you missed f you didn't go. If you'd like to geek out, bring your favorite screen saver on a thumb drive.

8:00 - 8:15: Earth-shattering ANNOUNCEMENT
8:15 - 8:45: Participatory Activity with Special Guests
8:45 - 9:00: Summary and Future Plans
9:00 - ?: Departure for LOPSA After Dark optional session

Your UMI is back with his first meeting announcement:

Scalable Internet Architectures
Theo Schlossnagle, OmniTI
7:00 p.m., Wednesday, November 11
Math Building, Room 3206
University of Maryland, College Park

-==-
This will be an abbreviated version of Theo's Velocity 2009 talk:

We will dive into traditional web architectures and discuss what
makes them go. Looking at real-life architectures, we'll analyze
weak points and discuss what will happen to them under the intense
pressure of a prolonged exposure on Digg, the NYTimes or even MSN
(or when traffic jumps from 15Mbits/second to over 1Gbit/second
inside 30 seconds).

Subject: Automating Network Configuration
Speaker: Brent Chapman

You've been using tools like Puppet and cfengine to corral the complexity on your servers. You revel in the scalability, reliability, and ease of maintenance of doing it The Right Way. You don't fear the next change because you know the tools will just get it Right. But you still tremble at an "enable" prompt, hoping you remembered all the bits that need to be twiddled, on all the networking devices everywhere. Is your DNS tied on straight - both ways? Is it all *really* being monitored by Nagios? As your network's complexity increases, so do the errors, inconsistencies, and omissions caused by manual configuration, and brokenness abounds. But wait - there's a way out of the swamp! Come hear world-renowned networking expert and popular BayLISA speaker Brent Chapman as he reveals methods and tools for automating the mind-numbing task of configuring network devices and services. Among other things, he'll talk about his cool new open source "Netomata Config Generator", which addresses some of these problems.

Tom will give a preview to a new tutorial he'll be doing at LISA 2009 (Baltimore, MD, November 1–6, 2009). "Design Patterns" are "successful patterns of behavior and system administration technique that can be repeated". Topics will include technical issues like "making big changes without tearing down the world", "making ACLs more sustainable", and "avoiding having to support too many OS releases" as well as strategic patterns such as "organize your help desk for maximum performance", "ensure that project managers work well with SAs" and "three policies your boss should write that save your sanity."

Subject: Cfengine 2: An Introductory Overview
Presenter: Scott Lackey

Cfengine is probably the most widely deployed configuration management
software and is widely considered to be the defacto standard. Since
Cfengine is a highly customizable framework, it’s implementations can
vary widely. This talk will be an overview of how cfengine works, and
how to implement a basic setup. This talk will not cover Cfengine 3 or
promise theory.

_____

Scott Lackey is a unix systems automation engineer who has ten years of
consulting work for NASA, IBM, Caterpillar and other Fortune 500
companies. He is currently a systems engineer at Clearwire.

Arizona's Premiere Conference on Open Source Software Offers Insight on Leveraging Open Source Tools to Reduce IT Costs and Increase Flexibility in the Midst of Economic Uncertainty.

Phoenix, AZ - July 29, 2009 - Building on the success of its first run last September, the Arizona Business & Liberty Experience Conference (ABLEconf) is set to return to the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) on the 24th of October, 2009.

With businesses, schools, governments, non-profits and individuals all looking to cut costs wherever they can, open-source software can help leverage the advantage of using software in their infrastructure that delivers enterprise-ready results without the entanglements of costly licensing.

Have you ever wondered to yourself how all of this technology has really made your life better or worse? You can track your package in an instant, and your inbox is a constant battle. Overall, how have the changes in human communications affected the quality of our lives?

This talk will take a philosophical approach to evaluating the question. Criteria of communication will be established with examples. The philosophy of Plato, James, Royce, Heidegger, and Dreyfus will be considered as a reference points for analysis. In the end, the disruption of latency will be acknowledged along with the reality of the virtual.

Presenter: Brian Rowe

Come discuss the legal and technical aspects of sharing, reusing and remixing content online with a focus on Creative Commons licenses, User-Generated Content and the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor. Bring you questions! There will be time for Q&A.

—–
Brian Rowe is the founder of Freedom for IP, a volunteer organization started in 2005 focusing on the intersection of human rights and intellectual property. He interned at Creative Commons last summer working on public domain and noncommercial use in copyright. Brian serves on the Washington State Bar Association’s Access to Justice Technology Committee and is an active member of Students for Free Culture. Last Fall Brian wrote a mock trial for the Future of the Law Institute that was used by high school students learning about fair use of music and bloggers rights. Most recently Brian helped plan and spoke at the Seattle Law of the Commons Conference held March 13th, 2009 at Seattle University Law.