Please email board@lopsa.org with any questions, comments, or ideas.
We always want to hear from our membership.
------------------ ------------------ ------------------ ------------------
In this memo:
01. Election Results (Warner)
02. SysAdmin Day Contest
03. SysAdmin Day Coming Soon
04. Conference Speakers
05. Job Openings
06. From the Mailing Lists
07. A Lesson Learned (Ski)
08. Chapter News
09. Thank you to our sponsors!
10. Comments or suggestions?
------------------ ------------------ ------------------ ------------------
01. Election Results (Warner)
I'm pleased to announce our new board members! Our independent monitor
Andrew Hume compiled the results of the election and the report.
Welcome our new and returning board members:
William Bilancio
Paul English
Chris 'Ski' Kacoroski
Atom Powers
The new board members will assume their positions at the next annual
in-person board meeting, which will be scheduled within the next few
months.
This is also when the officers will be elected. Until then, Dan Rich and
Mark Honomichl will be serving the remainder of their terms.
I want to thank our board members who are leaving for their time and
contribution to LOPSA. Dan Rich, our exiting President, has been a board
member since 2009. Mark Honomichl stepped up earlier this year after a
board member resigned. I also want to thank Nicholas Brenckle and other
candidates for running.
The elections were conducted by the Leadership Committee. Without their
hard work, we would not have an election this year. Thank you Andrew Hume,
Lee Damon, Matt Okeson-Harlow, and Scott Murphy!
Meanwhile, if anyone would like to nominate a candidate for the 2016
election or volunteer for LOPSA in any capacity, please contact the
Leadership Committee.
02. SysAdmin Day Contest
This year LOPSA is having a SysAdmin Day Content to celebrate SysAdmin
Day on July 31st. The contest rules are:
"Describe what being a sysadmin means to you. What do you do that makes
your job a profession and a career and not just a job. How do sysadmins
help their companies in unseen ways everyday. What are some of the
things that sets sysadmins apart from other technology roles.
Alternatively,
send us your description of what a sysadmin is in haiku form. "
The contest runs from now until July 25th with winners announced on
July 31st. Prizes for the contest are:
$100 Apple gift card and TShirt from OpenGear.
Raspberry PI 2 Ultimate Kit from Silicon Mechanics.
Anisble Prize Pack and Tshirt from Ansible.
For more on SysAdmin day check out SysAdminDay.com. Many
thanks to our sponsors for the prizes.
03. SysAdmin Day Coming Soon
SysAdmin will be held on July 31st this year so start planning your party
now. If you set up a meetup and 10 or more people sign up, send an email
to communications@lopsa.org with the meetup link and LOPSA will send you
(3) t-shirts to help celebrate SysAdmin day.
04. Conference Speakers
Brian Vianzon gave a talk at Cal Poly Swift Tech Symposium about
scaling Docker on May 16th.
Thomas Uphill gave a talk at PuppetCamp Seattle on June 4th.
If you are speaking at a conference and would like to help spread the word
about LOPSA, send an email to communications@lopsa.org with a link to your
talk and LOPSA will send you a t-shirt you can wear at the conference.
05. Job Openings
These are a few of the recent postings to our sajobs mail list...
WAN Technician - Philadelphia
Sr Linux Admin - Los Angeles
Puppet/DevOps - New York City
For details on these jobs please check out the jobs list archives.
06. From the Mailing Lists
Tim Kirby started off a discussion on IT Roles within a company that
touched on IT and how to relate to the business and executive mgmt
of the company. Some good ideas in this thread if you are trying to
make IT more than just a cost center at your organization. There were
also good discussions on the professionalization of system admins
and the future of LOPSA.
07. A Lesson Learned (Ski)
I recently moved from an 10 year old DNS/DHCP/IPAM roll my own setup to a
new integrated vendor supported product. The old system was a non-split
master-slave setup for DNS while the new system was a split multi-master
with views. We cut over the the internal DNS/DHCP with no problems, but
when we tried to cut over the external DNS (different view) nothing
worked.
In the course of debugging the problem we went back and forth a few times
between the old and new setups and somehow our one of our old servers
ended up serving internal IPs to external users which took several of our
external sites off the internet for 24 hours.
What happened was that the multimaster setup was missing an ACL on the
external view that was blocking access from any IP to it. While we
were debugging this, we accidentally brought up the old external slave
server before the old external master server. The external slave did a
query for its zones and because it was on the internal network, it got
the internal zones from the new system. It then proceeded to serve up
internal IPs to external users.
Lessons Learned:
* As usual it is a chain of events that causes the problem. In this case
it was changing from non-split to split DNS where the servers are
operating under different assumptions, the ACL problem, not having a
good rollback process, and having all servers on the same network.
* Once you get bad DNS data on the internet, there is very little you can
do about it. OpenDNS and Google have ways to flush their server caches
but no one else did. Figure at least 24 hours for it to get corrected.
* Bad DNS data can seem to be random because people use pools of servers.
When I hit 8.8.8.8, I would get 25% correct data, 75% bad data. If folks
hit the servers from other parts of the country they would get almost
all good data. It was totally dependent if a person had tried ot access
our external sites while we were serving up bad data.
* The above item makes testing very difficult. We initially tested with
two different ISPs and they worked ok as they had previously cached good
data. It was only a few hours later that people started complaining
and I started testing other DNS servers and found the problem.
08. Chapter News
On July 9th, Seattle LOPSA members will be hearing from Jason Gifford
of Fortinet on "Breaking the Kill Chain: Prevent, Detect, and Mitigate
Threats to your Organization".
LOPSA Columbus met on June 25 and CJ Estel presented about the database
change and tracking tool that he's about to open source. The presentation
was titled Managing and Tracking Database Deployments. What's even cooler
is that his presentation was a preview of the presentation that he's
giving at LISA later this year!
Watch LOPSA Columbus for an announcement soon for the July event. LOPSA
Columbus, DevOps Columbus, and the Central Ohio Linux User Group will be
holding a joint social on July 31 for System Administrator's Appreciation Day at CoverMyMeds.
09. Thank you to our sponsors!
We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their
continuing support of LOPSA. More information is available on how
to become a sponsor.
Thanks to our individual sponsors:
Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich, Ski Kacoroski
Gold: Steve VanDevender
Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
Bronze: Gary Studwell
Sponsor: John Boris
Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators
through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since
1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge
development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and
spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha
geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the
technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy,
meme-making, and evangelism.
LOPSA's website is hosted by ServerBeach.
10. Comments or suggestions?
As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're
giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or
suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org
