This refereed paper was presented by Michael Wei, Laura Grupp, Frederick E. Spada, and Steven Swanson of the University of California, San Diego at the 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '11).
This refereed paper was presented by Dutch T. Meyer of Microsoft Research and the University of British Columbia and William J. Bolosky of Microsoft Research at the 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '11).
Today is the last day of LISA '10. It brings to a close a long week for everyone who made the conference happen. As a first-time LISA attendee, I've found that there's just not enough time to take everything in. The quality of the training and the technical sessions are amazing. I feel like I need to repeat the week just to catch everything I missed. One attendee called it a "firehose" conference and that's certainly an apt description. It's easy to tell why there are so many regular attendees: there's so much to learn and so many friends to make.
Wietse Venema is best known for writing the Postfix email system; he also wrote TCP Wrapper, and SATAN that probably many system administrators have used for many years.
One of the great things about LISA are the Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions in the evenings. BoFs are either vendor- or attendee-led discussions on topics of professional or social interest. Since, like most sysadmins, I enjoy talking about my work, I decided to schedule a BoF for users of Condor. Condor is an open-source package for distributed, high-throughput computing developed at the University of Wisconsin and used in academia, the financial sector, and by major motion picture studios.
"We have to do better ... The bad guys are pros, they're just as good as you are and maybe better." That's Bill Cheswick's message to the audience in his talk "Rethinking Passwords." Comparing the password policies of various companies and educational institutions yields a confusing and sometimes contradictory set of requirements. This makes managing passwords difficult for users. Perhaps the solution doesn't lie in stronger passwords, but in better authentication?
Dictionary attacks are not the major the major threat anymore. The common threats now are
Sysadmins famously come up with excuses to avoid writing documentation. "The system should be self-documenting," they say; or "I don't have the time to write documentation." There's even the "a lack of documentation gives me job security" line. None of these arguments have any merit, according to Mike Ciavarella. His Tuesday afternoon "Documentation Techniques for Sysadmins" focused not just on countering those excuses ("
Blog Team Fearless Leader Matt Simmons told me Tuesday afternoon that I'm not contractually bound to write two blog posts per day. I can only take that to mean that I need to write three posts. Not really, but I did want to sneak in a few extra thoughts. So far, the posts have mostly been about the training sessions that have been offered at LISA '10. What can get overlooked is the informal interaction that goes on, even (especially) during training sessions.
Every sysadmin has to deal with shell scripts sometimes. Besides being a great way to automate tasks, shell scripts are an integral part of the boot/shutdown process. Unfortunately, too many sysadmins tend to write their shell scripts quick and dirty. The goal of the "Advanced shell programming" training taught by Mike Ciavarella is to teach admins to write advanced scripts. In the context of this training, "advanced" doe
Networking is a fundamental part of systems administration and maintaining a reliable, secure network is key. On Monday morning, Jason Faulkner of Rackspace taught a new training session all about maintaining a secure network, primarily by focusing on firewall rules. Of course, we started out with a review of basic networking concepts like the OSI model and some differences between IPv4 and IPv6.
