January 2017 LOPSAgram

1. Tribute to John Boris

I was notified by John's son that he passed away on Jan 14th. John was not only a very active member of LOPSA, its board, and the system admin community, but he was also an incredible friend and a mentor to me. John was always optimistic, kind, considerate, and willing to help anyone who asked. 

John passed on his knowledge via his stories of working both as a system admin and in his previous career as a machinist and by posting at http://blogs.lopsa.org. He was a typical system admin of his era with no formal training, just a fascination of computers and a talent for troubleshooting their problems. He was as master at making systems work long past their EOL date as evidenced by his work on keeping SCO systems running at his job. 

Even though John had health issues, I was constantly amazed how he never let them slow him down. At the age most of us would be happy to retire he was still on the board, actively coaching football, and working. Many of you saw him at LISA in Boston. A few days after the conference he had open heart surgery to replace a blocked artery. I talked with John last week and he was so happy as he had more energy than he had in years and was looking forward to attending more conferences and keeping his "little hacker" of a granddaughter out of trouble. 

John, I miss you very much. Peace be with you. 

Ski

2. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 - Managers & Vendors

Cascadia IT Conferece schedule will be posted soon as we work out the last remaining details. We've got some fantastic talks and tutorials this year, including repeats of some well received content from previous years as well as an interesting variety of new talks. 

Now is the time to start talking with your manager about attending. Cascadia IT conference is always excellent value for the money, and travel expenses are minimal if you are anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. We haven't made one for Cascadia IT conference yet, but here's a great template for an email to your boss from our LOPSA-East conference:

http://lopsaeast.org/2016/convince-your-boss/

We also need sponsors - and the best sponsors are your vendors. Ask your vendor to sponsor Cascadia IT Conference, and cc: casitconf-sponsorship@casitconf.org. You may need to talk to someone in Marketing, rather than Sales - but your salesperson has a good incentive to connect you to the right person! Your vendor will want to be convinced as well - and the sort of information they need is in our Sponsor Prospectus:

https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/sponsorships/

3. LISA 2017 Preliminary Call for Participation

From the LISA 2017 Chairs: 

We are excited to announce that the Preliminary Call for Participation (https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/call-for-participation) for LISA17 (https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17) is now available. LISA17 will take place October 29-November 3, 2017, in San Francisco, CA. 

LISA is the premier conference for operations professionals, where systems engineers, IT operations, SRE practitioners, and academic researchers share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world. 

We invite both industry leaders and people on the front lines to propose topics that demonstrate the present and future of operations. LISA submissions should inspire and motivate attendees toward action that improves their day-to-day work as well as the tech industry as a whole. We are seeking proposals in the following topics: 

• Architecture
• • Scalability and resiliency
  • Infrastructure design
  • Machine learning
  • Performance planning
  • Strategic vision
  • On the horizon 
• Culture
• • Building DevOps relationships
  • Business communication
  • Standards and regulatory compliance
  • On-call challenges
  • Workplace diversity
  • Mentorship, education, and training
• Engineering
• • Dynamic service implementation
  • Continuous delivery
  • Monitoring and instrumentation
  • Machine and service hardening
  • Analytics of system data
  • Release engineering

LISA encourages submissions from people from a wide range of backgrounds. Our early proposal program allows first-time submitters and/or submitters of controversial topics to receive feedback and improve their chances for acceptance. Submit your early proposals by Monday, February 27, 2017. Standard proposals are due by Monday, April 24, 2017. 

Please view the complete Preliminary Call for Participation (https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/call-for-participation) for additional details and submission instructions. We look forward to receiving your proposals. 

On behalf of the LISA17 Organizers,

Caskey Dickson, Microsoft Azure 

Connie-Lynne Villani, Grilled Cheese Invitational 

LISA17 Program Co-Chairs lisa17chairs@usenix.org 

4. 25% Discount with AC&NC Jetstor

5. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

SASAG needs speakers. If you are interested in speaking, or have a vendor contact that can give a good technical presentation (no marketing please), contact the organizers through Meetup.com or the email list:  members@lists.sasag.org

LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

• Next Meeting: Shell Basics: Under the Hood

• Tuesday, January 17, 2017 (today!)
  

  7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• 4th Floor
  Burbank, CA

• Coding Dojo

  175 E Olive Ave 
  4th Floor
  Burbank, CA (map)

• Consulting sysadmin Mike Weilgart returns to LOPSA LA with a presentation on UNIX/Linux Shell Basics.

  Description:

  We've all heard of the shell, and we've all used it at least a little bit. But what IS a shell, really? What makes shell scripting fundamentally different from any other programming language? What really happens when you type a command into your shell--and how does this relate to the mistake found in over 50% of Production shell scripts? Attend this talk, demystify the shell and learn to use it right!

LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

The February meeting will be held at Montclair State University. Please note that it will be held on Wednesday, not Thursday. More details will be coming for directions and parking.

Topic: Stealing the Best Ideas from DevOps: A Guide for Sysadmins without Developers Speaker: Tom Limoncelli 

Date: February 1st, 2017 

Description: DevOps is not a set of tools, nor is it just automating deployments. It is a set of principles that benefit anyone trying to improve a complex process. This talk will present the DevOps principles in terms that apply to all system administrators, and use case studies to explore their use in non-developer environments. 

Bio: Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. His latest book is the 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He is also known for The Practice of Cloud System Administration (Addison-Wesley) and Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). He works in New York City at StackOverflow.com. He's previously worked at Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, AT&T, and others. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom. He lives in New Jersey.

Please RSVP either to the Meetup page that will be updated soon or via email to younj@montclair.edu so we know how much pizza to get.

Location: The Center for Environmental and Life Sciences CELS 110 1 Normal Ave Montclair, NJ 07043

Announce mailing list Announce@lists.lopsanj.org http://lists.lopsanj.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

6. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

Thanks to our Lifetime Members: Benjamin Carrell, Philip Kizer, Greg Rose, Todd Taft, Jennine Townsend

Thanks to our individual sponsors:

Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
Gold: Ski Kacoroski
Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
Bronze: Gary Studwell

Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

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. Check them out.

Sponsor DataDog helps you monitor your entire stack. Graphing, alerting and correlatoin for all your systems. Sign up for a free 14-day trial.

LOPSA's web content is hosted by DreamHost .

7. 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