Workshop Program

The LISA Configuration Management Workshop is a gathering place for configuration management users and developers to get together and talk about the past, present, and future of configuration management. This full-day workshop is a tool-agnostic discussion of practical issues and includes large-group discussion, small-group breakouts, and plenty of opportunity to discuss best practices in the field. Attendees should be sysadmins with a deployed configuration management system in place who want to talk with and learn from others on the subject. Tool developers interested in hearing the needs of their users and/or offering suggestions are also welcome, but they are not the primary intended participants.

Information security is an integral part of the practice of systems administration. Today’s system administrator has no choice but to embrace information security as part of their system development lifecycle and their day-to-day operations. This workshop aims to get attendees talking and discussing current security trends and best practices as they apply to the business of managing large-scale information systems.

Bring your wildest projects to this workshop, facilitated by an experienced technical project manager, and let’s wrangle them together!

Some basic project management techniques can quickly allow IT teams to be more efficient and effective. The big question is “What are we trying to do?” and a short list of the most useful follow-up questions can help all involved to better understand and define a project’s scope, time, cost, stakeholders, governance, and communications needs.

This collaborative session will allow participants to speedily apply appropriate and effective management techniques to their own real-world projects.

Want to do something when you see casual sexism at work, but aren't sure what? Tired of feeling helpless when you read a sexist email to your community's mailing list, but have no idea how to respond? Worried that you might be unknowingly offending women in your organization? The Ally Skills Workshop is for you! This Ada Initiative workshop teaches simple, everyday ways to support women in your workplace and community. Participants learn techniques that work at the office, at conferences, and online.

This will be a half-day fast-paced, hackathon-style intensive effort to develop a series of modern system administration job skill tiers. The outcome will be the foundation of a flexible set of skills that map to more general system administration job functions (e.g. skills required for user support, server operations, server deployment, service architecture, etc). Progress from this workshop will carry over into an online community where work will continue to define a flexible set of skill tiers for system administrators. Attendees should have some familiarity with prior discussions on the topic, e.g. “Job Descriptions for System Administrators” from the USENIX LISA SIG Short Topics in System Administration series.

Administering a compute cluster in a production environment is a niche area of system administration. In addition to the common issues involved in administering *NIX computers, additional challenges related to cluster management, customer usage, and specialized software present themselves. In this workshop, we will discuss these specialized problems and potential solutions, as well as offering suggestions based on our experiences in HPC cluster management. The topics will be based on the attendees' interest but may include OS deployment, software deployment, management tools, schedulers and resource managers, and customer issues.

Attendees should be admins of a compute cluster or interested in adminning this type of cluster. They should come prepared to discuss openly, in a round table setting, their admin experiences with this class of machine and the pros and cons of their existing cluster management tools.

This workshop is for sysadmins who have primary responsibility for computing systems owned by government or military agencies and for sysadmins who work in secure environments, deal with classified data, provide GOTS support, or deploy to remote locations in support of government and military requirements. Contractors, government civilians, vendors and suppliers, uniformed members, and anyone who has a direct hands-on IT support role in the government and military sectors are welcome to attend. This workshop is a great opportunity for sysadmins to compare notes between diverse agencies like DoD, DoE, DoC, NASA, and local governments. All conversations are strictly unclassified.

This workshop will be an open discussion about DevOps in practice. Potential topics may include:

• How DevOps is being applied in different organizations.
• Coping with new demands and requirements presented by DevOps-style projects.
• Finding or building a toolchain to meet your DevOps goals.
• Sifting through DevOps fact and fiction.

Like it or not, sysadmins have to work with other people. And people are much more challenging than software. But what if you could learn how to play well with others, brainstorm better, and have more fun doing it? Shockingly enough, there's a way!

In this workshop, you'll learn the basics of applied improvisational thinking from someone who has spent equal time as a sysadmin and improv performer. No drum circles, fire walks, or touchy-feely buzzwords, just real techniques that you can take back to your job, open source project, or home.

Give the right side of your brain some love this week and learn a new way of thinking in a fun and safe setting!

NOTE: This workshop includes lunch served in the workshop room starting at 12:30 pm.

This workshop, intended for very senior administrators, provides an informal roundtable discussion of the problems facing system administrators today. Attendance is limited and based on acceptance of a position paper (plain ASCII, three paragraphs maximum); a typical paper covers what the author thinks is the most difficult or important issue facing system administrators today, why this is a problem, and why this problem is important. A more complete description of the workshop and information about position papers is available at atw.menlo.com/. Position papers should be sent to lisa14ws-atw@usenix.org. Attendees are required to bring a laptop computer.