February 2017 LOPSAgram

1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017: Register NOW for Early Bird

1. Price/value - most other conferences cost much more, and at Cascadia, you can hear speakers who give Training/Talks at much larger more expensive conferences. Give a summary of your expected expenses - no hotel or flight if you're local!
   
2. Look at the schedule, and list key Training & Talks that apply directly to your work and will produce immediate and longer term results: https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/schedule/
3. Connections with local IT experts means they indirectly support from a more diverse group
4. Friday and Saturday - only one day away from the office, and one day of personal time.
   
5. Promise to give a post-conference report to other technical staff - particularly developers to facilitate DevOps. Perhaps even suggest that a developer attend?

Register by February 15 to get the Early Bird discount, though of course the conference is still a bargain at full price:

https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/register-now/

2. Mentorship Program Chair Needed

The mentorship program is one of our most exciting and successful programs. Over the years it has brought many new (often student) members to LOPSA for this program alone, and has provided us all with valuable teaching, learning and technical experience.

We are currently looking for someone to chair the mentorship committee. If anyone is very passionate about helping other system administrators, and wants to help us get the Mentorship program back up and running please contact volunteers@lopsa.org

3. LOPSA-East Cancellation

4. Free T-Shirt from Sponsor Datadog

With Datadog all your infrastructure is in one place.

Track & alert on the health and performance of every server, container, and app. Free t-shirt for LOPSA members. Click here:

5. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/register-now/

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 II
  

• Tuesday, February 21
  

  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

LOPSA-NJ needs speakers. Contact the organizers through Meetup:

https://www.meetup.com/LOPSA-NJ/

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 

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 

December 2016 LOPSAgram

1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 CfP and Call for Sponsors

LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation is open, but only until January 1! We invite you to present a talk or Training at the 2017 LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle

LOPSA Cascadia is gathering of professionals from the diverse IT community in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. We gather to learn from each other, share ideas and meet new friends and peers. Whether you are paid to work with computers or just like to experiment with technology, your time is well spent at LOPSA Cascadia.

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.

2. 25% Discount with AC&NC Jetstor

3. LOPSA at LISA 2016

For the first time, LOPSA's booth was on the expo floor during LISA. We registered 19 new members and had great conversations with future members, sponsors, collaborators and volunteers. Thank you to everyone who stopped by!

See you in San Francisco at LISA 2017!

LISA 2017:

The Call for Participation will be available in January 2017.

Early proposals deadline: Monday, February 27, 2017
Standard proposals deadline: Monday, April 24, 2017

4. LISA 2016 - Ski's Report

I felt that LISA this year was rich with content that I could bring back to work and immediately use.  For me a few of the highlights were:

• A VMware Infrastructure Design tutorial that has several great ideas for optimizing your vmware infrastructure.  This was much easier than digging through reams of documentation to find the information.
•  A systemd tutorial that was very useful for getting me up to speed on the basics so I can not experiment with it on my own.
•  A talk on the new features in Windows 2016 such as containers, native ssh, and Powershell V5.
• A talk on the basic principles of DevOps and how they can be applied in non-dev environments.
  

Finally there were several talks that stressed the future will be changing even more rapidly due to new technologies such as persistent memory, IoT security issues, and
increasing complexity in all our systems.  As system admins, we will need to spend more time learning in order to keep up with the changing systems.

cheers,

ski

5. LOPSA Members LISA 2016 Reports

 http://everythingsysadmin.com/2016/12/lisa16-success.html

Aleksey Tsalolikhin, who won our first issued LOPSA Challenge coin! Congratulations Aleksey.

http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/what-i-learned-at-lisa-2016-conference/

6. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

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

SASAG needs a regular place to meet. We've had generous hosts over the years, but now we need a new location. Ideally:

• Downtown, or easy access from downtown and transit
  
• Available nearby parking on a weeknight at ~6:30pm
• Free!
• Projector and meeting room for up to ~30 people

On December 16  we had our LISA Wrapup and Holiday Party at the offices of Qumulo.

• https://SASAG.org
• https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Area-Systems-Administrators-Guild-SASAG/
  

Our next meeting is location & speaker TBA on Thursday January 12.

Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

LOPSA-LA in December was one of those fantastic nights with tasty food and free-flowing and stimulating conversation. Thank you to everyone who attended and special thanks to our guest of honor, DevOps Handbook co-author John Willis @botchagalupe

LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

7. 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 .

8. 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 

August 2016 LOPSAgram: Specialization

1. President's Corner: The Specialization of System Administration

Like many careers, system administration has become a collection of specialized jobs all under the umbrella of system administration.  Back when I started in the career many years ago, a system admin was the person who did everything in support of computer systems.  This included understanding the requirements, choosing all the parts of the system, ordering, unpacking, installing, configuring, and maintaining the computers, networks, applications and their supporting power and cooling systems.  We were the folks that 'got things done'.

While some of us still are generalists like this, many of us have specialized into one aspect of system administration.  This is an ongoing trend that was noted by Thomas Malone, et. al. in their article "The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization" (https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-the-age-of-hyperspecialization).  For system admins this mean you may end up as a storage, network, configuration, monitoring, virtualization, forensic, security, Windows, UNIX, etc. and rarely if ever do any other kind of system admin work.

Some of the advantages to specialization is that you become an expert in your area of specialization which will tend to increase your value and pay.  You will be more productive and may have more job security.  For example, Cobol programmers are in high demand now because there are very few people willing to work maintaining these legacy systems.

However, there are many downsides to specialization that you need to be aware of.  You may become bored doing the same thing day after day.  You career opportunities may be less because companies are paying you for your existing knowledge, not to learn something else.  Your job may disappear as technology changes or be replaced by a computer (this happened to my cousin when Microsoft implemented network switch configuration management).  After years of doing one thing very well, you may have problems learning something else.

So while specialization will probably make you more valuable in the workplace and increase your pay, be careful to make sure you are not trapped.  Make sure you keep earning new technologies even though they may not directly apply to your area.

2.Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

The Chuck Yerkes Award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding individual contributions in online forums over the past year. It was created after Chuck Yerkes' untimely death in 2004 to memorialize the mentorship he provided countless system administrators through his helpful and accurate posts to system administration mailing lists. Each year, an awards committee selects someone who followed Chuck's example in the prior year in their contributions to system administration online forums—whether mailing lists, web forums, or chat rooms. From 2005–2008, the USENIX Association presented this award. Beginning in 2009, the Chuck Yerkes Award is presented by LOPSA.

Help us find individuals deserving of this award by sending your submissions to:

board@lopsa.org

Please share the name, nick/handle and the forum(s) in which the individual has made their contributions.

3. Start and Run a Local Chapter

1. Meeting Location: Find a reliable, recurring meeting location, ideally for free, ideally with someone-not-you (delgation!) who is the point person responsible for ensure it is booked, available etc every month. By far the easiest solution is a member's workplace with a sufficiently large conference room, but other options include libraries and community centers, which can be free if the meeting is open to the public.
2. Speakers: Speakers are by far the biggest draw for attendance. There are other options such as watching LISA videos, or round table discussions but attendance is always better with a scheduled speaker. A queue of people willing to speak, and scheduled for some months out, and listed on a website in advance boosts attendance a great deal. Coordinating speakers is another job that can be smoothly delegated to spread the work.
3. Food Sponsor: With a free venue, food is the only thing that costs money, and a regular food sponsor can make coordination easy, and managing money can be avoided if the sponsor actually places the order themselves. Of course, food isn't a requirement but it is a big draw for attendance, particularly for a weeknight meeting starting approximately at dinner time! The best candidate for a food sponsor is a local technology vendor from which attendees are likely to make purchases. A mutually beneficial arrangement like this is quite affordable under the sponsor's marketing budget.
   

4. Upcoming Events of Interest

• FOSSCON August 20, Philadelphia, PA, US https://fosscon.us/
• LinuxCon August 22 - 24, Toronto, CA http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america
•  USENIX Security Symposium, August 10 - 12, Austin, TX, US https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity16
• DevOps Days Boston August 24 - 26, Boston, MA, US http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-boston/welcome
• DevOps Days Chicago August 30 - 31, Chicago, IL, US http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-chicago/welcome/
• DevOps Days Oslo September 5 - 6, Oslo, Norway http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-oslo/welcome/
  

And it is never too early to mention USENIX LISA, December 4 - 9, Boston, MA. Early bird registration ends Thursday, November 10.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/attend

5. Member Tech Blog Highlight - John Boris

WOW! RAID REALLY WORKS

To some of you this may be a trivial thing but for me it is like finding that extra money in your wallet or even hitting the lottery. Some of you may know I am a single sysadmin shop. I do have other sysdmins in my Department but I am actually on my own to handle my legacy SCO Boxes as well as my LINUX boxes. My experience with RAID systems has not been favorable. The first one I ever dealt with was a RAID 5 system that had a drive go bad and when I replaced the drive (after a long search to find an exact replacement) found that it was never setup properly and did not automatically repair itself. So the next system I setup came in with the RAID system setup and two weeks after it was setup I had a Drive go south. I got a replacement the next morning, did the Hot Swap and the rebuild process kicked off. WOOT! that was great. Until recently when a Synology NAS unit decided to go belly up. I was struggling to quickly find a replacement as this device was not under any major support contract. The unit drove me nuts and I figured all was lost. It gave all signs the Motherboard was gone. Anyway I found a replacement drive and installed it. I expected the system to see it and kick off the repair but that wasn’t happening. All I saw was a Degraded notification and a constant beeping sound. If anyone has used a Synology they will know that documentation is not this company’s strong point. So as i fumbled through the many screens in the Manager I find that one little button that says to repair. I clicked it and it started doing its thing. Sad part it took almost 20 hours to rebuild a 2TB Raid system under Synology’s SHR Raid system. I wasn’t sure if I was going to even see my data. I was like a kid on Christmas that got that BB gun when I logged in this morning and saw all of my data restored.

As a lesson learned I made sure I ordered a spare drive for a new system we spun up which means that by the time I need that drive as a replacement I will be replacing the unit due to age.

I guess the moral to this story is that RAID will work but with the large amount of Data we store today you have to be very patient when rebuilding a system

6. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

• https://SASAG.org
• https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Area-Systems-Administrators-Guild-SASAG/
  

Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

LOPSA-NJ: New Jerseyjboris@lopsanj.org if you have a topic for the meeting.\n"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">

jboris@lopsanj.org if you have a topic for the meeting.\n"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">LOPSA-NJ will be coming back from vacation on September 1st.

Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 Brunswick Pike
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132

Meeting time is 7 PM (Social time) 7:30 pm (discussion)

The talk should be 45 -60 minutes in length which will allow time for discussion. The meeting ends at 9 PM.

Please reply to jboris@lopsanj.org if you have a topic for the meeting.

7. Thank You To Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

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.

Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

8. 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 

July 2016 LOPSAgram: Happy Sysadmin Day!

1. President's Corner: Vendor Relations

As system admins one of our joys is dealing with vendors. I am sure each of you have war stories about untrained support people, products that do not perform as advertised, and don't get me started on documentation. While it can be cathartic to share war stories over a few pints, we also need vendors as they enable us to provide services to our customers.  This column is about how we can improve our interactions with vendors.

First, you when you talk with a vendor, let them know the what you like and dislike about their product/service.  The better vendors will take this feedback and improve their products/services to better meet your needs.  Take the time to find out how to submit enhancement requests and include in the request the business impact of the changes you request.  For problems with their product/service, let know what is the time and dollar cost of the problem to you and your business.  I find it very useful to mention how my users perceive the company and their product/service in order to increase their interest in fixing a problem.

Second, take time to interact with vendors at conferences, via professional associations like LOPSA, and even attend a marketing presentation now and then to let them know what you need and do not need. I know some folks do not like to do this, but if we cannot tell the vendors what is working and what is not, how will we ever get the products that we need?  The vendors are subsidizing your tickets to the conferences and your membership at the professional associations so take a few minutes and stop by the booth or click the link to see what they have to offer.  Then take a few more minutes to let them know what you think about their product or service.  If you do not do this, then the price of conference attendance and professional association membership will increase.  

Finally, take time to foster a professional relationship with the vendors and their VARs as this will encourage them to go the extra mile for you when you really need it. They are much more likely to fix a problem quicker and in your favor if you have that relationship.  So take time to talk with them when they call, at a marketing event, or at a conference.  The time you invest in the vendor will most likely pay off later on down the road when you need help.

2. Happy Sysadmin Day - LOPSA Contest & Meetups

Friday, July 29, 2016, is the 17th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. If you're a sysadmin, your boss might need a reminder that there is a special day to celebrate your often quiet accomplishments. Get this day on your boss's calendar and ensure that you and all future sysadmin hires get properly acknowledged each year. And if you manage system administrators, now is a time to show them your appreciation.

Help us celebrate #sysadminday on the last Friday in July, July 29th 2016. Show us your top 10 pictures that showcase your day as a sysadmin, tweet to @lopsa with #SAtop10.  Contest closes at midnight July 27 (EDT).  Winners to be determined by retweets and favorites.

Don't feel like posting pictures? Big brother won't let you? Tweet us your favorite Sysadmin tool or Online resource with #SAfaveTool.  Winners of the Favorite tool will be decided by a vote of the board.  Same deadline.  Good luck to all.

Let us know if you are having a #sysadminday celebration and how you are celebrating. If you set up a meetup and 6 or more people sign up, send an email to communications@lopsa.org with the meetup link and LOPSA will send you 6 t-shirts to help celebrate SysAdmin day.

LOPSA will maintain a list of System Administrator Appreciation Day meetups:

https://lopsa.org/event-2275321

3. Welcome New Sponsor DataDog

See metrics from all your apps, tools, and services in one place. Begin your trial today, install the agent, and Datadog will send you a free t-shirt!

4. Leadership Committee Update & Election Results

5. Member Tech Blog Highlight - Standalone Sysadmin

http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/sysadmin-calendar/

6. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

• https://SASAG.org
• https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Area-Systems-Administrators-Guild-SASAG/
  

Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

The next LOPSA LA meetup will feature Brian Bennett of Joyent presenting "Running Containers in Production, no really" Thursday, August 4, 2016 at Q.  

LOPSA Columbus

LOPSA Columbus met on June 21 and Bill Sempf presented about Why the Web is Broken. LOPSA Columbus is partnering with DevOpsDays Ohio for a Sysadmin Day celebration on July 29.

RSVP here: https://sysadminday2016.eventbrite.com

7. Thank You To Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

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.

Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

8. 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 

May 2016 LOPSAgram: Community

1. President's Corner: Community

This month I would like to talk about community.  Over the last several months
I have mentioned the LOPSA community several times, but never really defined it
or what community means to me. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a
community has these definitions that apply to LOPSA:

1. "a group of people who live in the same area"
2. "a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattere through a larger society
   

LOPSA is a community of system admins through its locals (definition #1) and
through the common interests of its members (definition #2).  LOPSA has core of
around 450 paying members and another 200+ student members along with 5 - 8
active locals.

So what makes for a successful, healthy community?  Some of the characteristics
of successful communities are:

• A clear and realistic set of community goals.  LOPSA has a clear mission statement, but I feel that in the past has tried to do too much given our limited resources. We are changing that to focus on a more realistic set of goals going forward - professional development for existing system admins and helping new system administrators enter the field.
• A definable and sustainable set of reasons for your community to participate. LOPSA's member participation right now is limited.  We have a few members who work on the board, running locals and conferences, and giving talks; but many folks have chosen to not participate with their time.  On the plus side we have the core group of members who believe in LOPSA mission through their memberships, but on the downside we need to figure out ways to get more people involved to avoid burning out the members who are giving time.  If you have any ideas, please let me know.
• A solid and accessible set of community tools.  This has been a problem in the past, but I hope with the new website we have solved many of these issues.  We are still working to consolidate our social media accounts and improve our support of members who do give time to the community.  One way we plan to accomplish this is by hiring a part time staffer to help out.
• A staff who are supported and understand their role in the community. LOPSA needs to do a better job of recognizing and support its members who give time to the community.  We recognize people who give money as individual sponsors, but not people who give time. Please contact the board anytime you see a member giving time to the community so we can recognize them.
  
• A supportable economic model if the community needs to provide revenue to sustain itself.  This is difficult for all membership based communities as with all the options these days, most membership based communities are seeing their member numbers drop.  Many communities are evolving into conference communities (e.g.  https://www.usenix.org/blog/refocusing-lisa-community). The Board is very aware of this problem and looking at options for LOPSA. Please send any ideas, thoughts you may have to board@lopsa.org.
• Listen and be flexible - be ready to change should your community require it. LOPSA needs to evolve to survive and we need to hear from you on how you would like to see LOPSA evolve.
  

So please email board@lopsa.org with your ideas for how LOPSA can evolve to better support you, the system administrator.

2. LOPSA Board Elections - Candidate Slate & LOPSA Live

Your Leadership Committee (LC) has been hard at work preparing our candidates for the upcoming election. Incumbent Board Members John Boris and Matt Disney will not be running for re-election. 

For this election, we have five seats to be filled and six candidates running. Our candidate slate follows:

• Brian Globerman - Candidate Statement
  
• George Beech (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
  
• Scott Suehle - Candidate Statement
  
• Steven VanDevender (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
  
• Thomas Uphill (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
  
• Trevor Thorpe - Candidate Statement
  

The LC actively sought candidates who have management and leadership experience as well as who bring new skills and experience to the team. We hope that you are as pleased with our candidates as we are!

Please mark your calendars for our first LOPSA Live session on May 17 at 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST. We will hold a second session before the ballots open, watch for a later announcement.

The ballots will open on June 9.

3. Call for Volunteers: Conference Organizers & Assistants

4. William Bilancio Board Resignation

5. Member Tech Blog Highlight

6. Looking for Information on Sysadmin Education

The Education committee maintains the  Education and Training portion of the LOPSA Website.

https://lopsa.org/System-Admin-Colleges

If you know of a College/University that offers such a program send the information to educators@lopsa.org so we can add it to our list.

We are also building a new page that we hope can be built into a one stop place for you to find the latest information on conferences and local training events. Again if you know of any send the info to educators@lopsa.org and we will add it to the page.

7. LISA Conversations

Every month Lee Damon and Tom Limoncelli chat with a LISA conference presenter in LISA Conversations. In May they will be chatting with Clay Caviness & Edward Eigerman from Google about Managing Macs at Google Scale.

Are you responsible for making more than one computer work? Join us as we chat with Clay and Edward about how Google manages their fleet of Macs. This will not, by any means, be a Mac-centric conversation. Things done here will apply to any OS you might encounter in this kind of situation.

The conversation will be live at:

https://plus.google.com/events/cdiueoaaie266ejkv53jdtu818s

on Tuesday, 31 MAY at 3:30pm PDT, 6:30PM EDT.

Past LISA Conversations can be found at:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/lisa-conversations

8. Locals

SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

Officer elections for SASAG will be held next at our June meeting on Thursday June 8. Watch our website for a speaker and talk topic announcement: https://sasag.org

Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

CBUS: Columbus

9. Thank You To Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

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
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.

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.

Some of LOPSA's web content 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