Workshop Program

Join Your Peers for Three Days of Focused Discussion

Senior sysadmins will want to participate in one or more of these workshops. Attendance is limited for each workshop, which ensures a seminar-like atmosphere.

Each half-day workshop costs $95 and the full-day workshop costs $190. Please make sure you do not select another session whose timing conflicts with that of your workshop.

Questions? Contact conference@usenix.org.

SUNDAY:
WS1: Government and Military Computer System Administration | WS2: Incident Analysis: Maximizing Learning from your Darkest Hours
WS3: Advancing the Practice of System Administration | WS4: "Plays Well With Others"—Improv For Sysadmins

MONDAY:
WS5: Being the Bridge Builder: Mentoring for Individuals, Communities, and Organizations | WS6: HPC Compute Cluster Workshop
WS7: Explicit Invitation: Mentoring and Community Building for Inclusion | WS8: Lean IT

TUESDAY:
WS9: Career Skills Workshop: It's Not the Tech That Makes Senior Admins, It's the Experience | WS10: Security Workshop | WS11: Working with Openstack
WS12: System Administration in Higher Education

Sunday, November 8

Workshop 1: Government and Military Computer System Administration

9:00 am-12:30 pm
Workshop

Jackson

Andrew Seely, University of Maryland University College

Andy Seely is the Chief Engineer and division manager for an IT enterprise services contract, an adjunct instructor in the Information and Technology department at the University of Tampa, and a regular contributor to ;login: magazine. His wife Heather is his PXE Boot and his sons Marek and Ivo are always challenging his thin-provisioning strategy.

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. This includes 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. Discussions will include topics like lessons learned from implementation of cloud technologies, data analytics in the government sector, and responding to policy and regulation requirements for IT and information security. This workshop is a great opportunity for sysadmins to compare notes among diverse agencies like DoD, DoE, DoC, NASA, and local governments. All workshop discussions will be strictly unclassified.

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. This includes 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. Discussions will include topics like lessons learned from implementation of cloud technologies, data analytics in the government sector, and responding to policy and regulation requirements for IT and information security. This workshop is a great opportunity for sysadmins to compare notes among diverse agencies like DoD, DoE, DoC, NASA, and local governments. All workshop discussions will be strictly unclassified.

Workshop 2: Incident Analysis: Maximizing Learning from Your Darkest Hours

9:00 am-12:30 pm
Workshop

Jefferson

Sue Lueder and Nile Geisinger, Google, Inc.

Sue Lueder joined Google as a Site Reliability Program Manager in 2014 and is on the team responsible for disaster testing and readiness, incident management processes and tools, and incident analysis. Previous to Google, Sue was a technical program manager and a systems, software, and quality engineer in wireless and smart energy industries (OnRamp Wireless, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm). She has a M.S. in Organization Development from Pepperdine University and a B.S in Physics from UCSD.

Nile Geisinger joined Google as a Site Reliability Engineer in 2015 and is also on the team responsible for disaster testing and readiness, incident management processes and tools, and incident analysis. Prior to Google, Nile worked for Amazon in AWS and the supply chain and founded a startup in Silicon Valley. Nile has a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Philosophy from U.C. Davis.

@macmceniry

Outages and incidents are inevitable in large scale and complex systems. Fixing the underlying technical problems is a challenge, but even more challenging is identifying and fixing any underlying systemic technical or organizational issues that are making incidents more frequent, more severe, or more costly to resolve. 

This hands-on workshop will explore techniques for analyzing and learning from a set of incident postmortems to learn about what types of insights are waiting to be discovered. Postmortems and incident reports for analysis will be provided, but attendees are encouraged to bring some of their own.

Outages and incidents are inevitable in large scale and complex systems. Fixing the underlying technical problems is a challenge, but even more challenging is identifying and fixing any underlying systemic technical or organizational issues that are making incidents more frequent, more severe, or more costly to resolve. 

This hands-on workshop will explore techniques for analyzing and learning from a set of incident postmortems to learn about what types of insights are waiting to be discovered. Postmortems and incident reports for analysis will be provided, but attendees are encouraged to bring some of their own.

Workshop 3: Advancing the Practice of System Administration

1:30 pm-5:00 pm
Workshop

Jackson

George Beech, LOPSA

George has been an SRE generalist at Stack Exchange since October, 2011. Before that, he worked for a multinational CRM company running their IVR infrastructure. He has worked on every part of the stack from Windows, to Linux, to the network infrastructure. He is currently serving his first term as a LOPSA Director

His experience working in the IT field over more than a decade has led him to love working with multiple technologies, and allowed him to experience everything from running a small network as a consultant to being part of a large team running very large scale infrastructure.

LOPSA invites you to help move the practice of system administration forward. We will be running a workshop to discuss the state of system administration and what can be done to move it forward.

We are going to limit the attendance at the workshop to 15 people. Each person will be asked to provide a topic brief on a subject that they feel is important to the field of system administration. This will not be required; however, people who submit a topic brief will be given priority for acceptance to the workshop. If we have fewer than 15 briefs submitted, we will fill the remaining slots on a first-come, first-serve basis from those who did not submit briefs. Please email your briefs to george_beech@lopsa.org.

Each brief should be no more than three paragraphs, stating why the person feels this is a subject that needs to be talked about, where we are today, and how they see the topic growing in the future. Basically, it should be a primer for discussion. Discussion will be moderated by the organizer, but will be guided by the participants.

LOPSA invites you to help move the practice of system administration forward. We will be running a workshop to discuss the state of system administration and what can be done to move it forward.

We are going to limit the attendance at the workshop to 15 people. Each person will be asked to provide a topic brief on a subject that they feel is important to the field of system administration. This will not be required; however, people who submit a topic brief will be given priority for acceptance to the workshop. If we have fewer than 15 briefs submitted, we will fill the remaining slots on a first-come, first-serve basis from those who did not submit briefs. Please email your briefs to george_beech@lopsa.org.

Each brief should be no more than three paragraphs, stating why the person feels this is a subject that needs to be talked about, where we are today, and how they see the topic growing in the future. Basically, it should be a primer for discussion. Discussion will be moderated by the organizer, but will be guided by the participants.

Workshop 4: "Plays Well With Others"—Improv for Sysadmins

1:30 pm-5:00 pm
Workshop

Lincoln 6

H. Wade Minter, AdWerx

H. Wade Minter is the CTO of AdWerx, which is bringing big-company advertising access to the very small business. He is also the ring announcer for a professional wrestling federation. The two jobs may or may not be related.

Getting everyone in your company or development team on the same page can be a challenge. This on-your-feet workshop will teach fast, fun improv techniques for helping your group to bond, generate quality ideas and make quick decisions. Learn the secrets of applied improv for business from a sysadmin/CTO who has 15+ years of experience working in open source, Internet startups and corporate training. Even sysadmins can play well with others—this workshop will show you how!

Getting everyone in your company or development team on the same page can be a challenge. This on-your-feet workshop will teach fast, fun improv techniques for helping your group to bond, generate quality ideas and make quick decisions. Learn the secrets of applied improv for business from a sysadmin/CTO who has 15+ years of experience working in open source, Internet startups and corporate training. Even sysadmins can play well with others—this workshop will show you how!

Monday, November 9

Workshop 5: Being the Bridge Builder: Mentoring for Individuals, Communities, and Organizations

9:00 am-12:30 pm
Workshop

Jackson

Larissa Brown Shapiro, Senior Engineering Program Manager, Mozilla

Larissa works at the Mozilla project, program managing Firefox feature development, and was formerly Head of Contributor Development, where she led contributor development. Prior to joining Mozilla, Larissa was the first (and only) Product Manager at Internet Systems Consortium, an open source public benefit organization which is the creator and maintainer of BIND, as well as hosting one of the 13 root name servers of the internet. Larissa has worked in tech since the early 1990s. She has been a mentor for four years for women through the TechWomen project, is the leader of the Open Source Opportunities for Women mentoring program at Mozilla, developed an implementing partnership with the WeTech program for web literacy for girls and women in India, and travels worldwide supporting mentorship and women and girls in open source/open culture.

"Being the Bridge Builder: Mentoring for Individuals, Communities, and Organizations" is a workshop for anyone who wants to be a mentor, is a mentor and wants to share their experience/learn from others, or folks who want to start a mentoring program in their workplace, project, or community. This workshop will start with the role of individual technical contributors who want to mentor, and move on to more structural/organizational approaches. Something for everyone!

"Being the Bridge Builder: Mentoring for Individuals, Communities, and Organizations" is a workshop for anyone who wants to be a mentor, is a mentor and wants to share their experience/learn from others, or folks who want to start a mentoring program in their workplace, project, or community. This workshop will start with the role of individual technical contributors who want to mentor, and move on to more structural/organizational approaches. Something for everyone!

Workshop 6: HPC Compute Cluster Workshop

9:00 am-12:30 pm
Workshop

Jefferson

Clay England, Oak Ridge National Lab

Clay England earned his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee in 2003. He currently is the Team Lead of the Linux clusters team in the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and responsible for all the production compute clusters that support the petascale supercomputers at ORNL. Prior to joining ORNL, he was a systems administrator for the Computer Science department at the University of Tennessee. He has seventeen years of experience building and administering production computing resources in both research and academic environments.

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.

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.

Workshop 7: Explicit Invitation: Mentoring and Community Building for Inclusion

1:30 pm-5:00 pm
Workshop

Jackson

Larissa Brown Shapiro, Senior Engineering Program Manager, Mozilla

Larissa works at the Mozilla project, program managing Firefox feature development, and was formerly Head of Contributor Development, where she led contributor development. Prior to joining Mozilla, Larissa was the first (and only) Product Manager at Internet Systems Consortium, an open source public benefit organization which is the creator and maintainer of BIND, as well as hosting one of the 13 root name servers of the internet. Larissa has worked in tech since the early 1990s. She has been a mentor for four years for women through the TechWomen project, is the leader of the Open Source Opportunities for Women mentoring program at Mozilla, developed an implementing partnership with the WeTech program for web literacy for girls and women in India, and travels worldwide supporting mentorship and women and girls in open source/open culture.

"Explicit Invitation: Mentoring and Community Building for Inclusion" is a workshop for anyone who wants to create greater diversity and inclusivity in their workplace, community, LUG, or open source project. We will discuss how unconscious bias shapes groups and how we can break the cycle of unintentional exclusion, and then how we can mentor each other and do more outreach to include more awesome talented people.

"Explicit Invitation: Mentoring and Community Building for Inclusion" is a workshop for anyone who wants to create greater diversity and inclusivity in their workplace, community, LUG, or open source project. We will discuss how unconscious bias shapes groups and how we can break the cycle of unintentional exclusion, and then how we can mentor each other and do more outreach to include more awesome talented people.

Workshop 8: Lean IT

1:30 pm-5:00 pm
Workshop

Jefferson

Chris "Mac" McEniry, Sony Network Entertainment

Chris "Mac" McEniry is a practicing sysadmin responsible for running a large ecommerce and gaming service. He's been working and developing in an operational capacity for 15 years. In his free time, he builds tools and thinks about efficiency.

The LISA15 Lean IT Workshop is a gathering place for system administrators, operators, and developers to talk about the impact of Lean Manufacturing on IT practices. This half-day workshop is a discussion of the IT Manufacturing Plant analogy, approaches to applying methods therein, and success stories and lessons learned from attempts at those approaches. Attendees should be experienced individual contributors and managers who have examined some of the existing Lean literature. Attendees are expected to present or discuss on their experiences with this topic.

The LISA15 Lean IT Workshop is a gathering place for system administrators, operators, and developers to talk about the impact of Lean Manufacturing on IT practices. This half-day workshop is a discussion of the IT Manufacturing Plant analogy, approaches to applying methods therein, and success stories and lessons learned from attempts at those approaches. Attendees should be experienced individual contributors and managers who have examined some of the existing Lean literature. Attendees are expected to present or discuss on their experiences with this topic.

Tuesday, November 10

Workshop 9: Career Skills Workshop: It's Not the Tech That Makes Senior Admins, It's the Experience

9:00 am-12:30 pm
Workshop

Jackson

David Parter, University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences Department

David is the IT Director for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences Department, where he was a senior system administrator and Associate Director. In addition to IT leadership within the CS Department, he is an active participant in campus-level IT leadership and governance. David was Program Chair for LISA '99, and served on the SAGE Executive Committee and the LOPSA Board of Directors. He is also a hockey player and referee, and a private pilot.

This workshop will focus on career skills. Participants will engage in a number of exercises and share their experiences of situations and tools that work—and don't work—for different situations we encounter at work in our career. Topics may include:

  • Communication skills—in different formats and for different purposes and people
  • Effective and clear decision-making
  • Process improvement
  • Time management and setting priorities
  • Interviewing and being interviewed
  • Customer service
  • Teamwork and team roles
  • Other topics of interest to the participants

This workshop will focus on career skills. Participants will engage in a number of exercises and share their experiences of situations and tools that work—and don't work—for different situations we encounter at work in our career. Topics may include:

  • Communication skills—in different formats and for different purposes and people
  • Effective and clear decision-making
  • Process improvement
  • Time management and setting priorities
  • Interviewing and being interviewed
  • Customer service
  • Teamwork and team roles
  • Other topics of interest to the participants

Workshop 10: Security Workshop

9:00 am-5:00 pm
Workshop

Lincoln 3

Alex Malin, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Alex Malin has held positions as Network Security Engineer at Pacific Bell Corporation and Senior Systems Technician at the Department Of Energy Albuquerque Service Center. At Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2003, he has worked as Intrusion Detection Analyst, Senior Cyber Security Advisor, and has been Cyber Architect and Information System Security Officer for the High Performance Computing Division since 2010.

Cyber security is an integral part of the practice of systems administration. This workshop provides a forum for security-minded system administrators and researchers to discuss current issues surrounding how systems management and security intersect. Participants select workshop topics in an open format. Learn from colleagues’ successes and get insights into security challenges you’re currently engaged in.

Potential Topics:

  1. High-profile break-ins the past year: implications and impacts
  2. Protecting critical digital assets, and the servers that represent single points of compromise
  3. Security, privacy and the bottom line
  4. Advanced persistent threat
  5. Cloud security
  6. Authentication best practices
  7. Compliance and regulation
  8. Many others as selected by workshop participants

Cyber security is an integral part of the practice of systems administration. This workshop provides a forum for security-minded system administrators and researchers to discuss current issues surrounding how systems management and security intersect. Participants select workshop topics in an open format. Learn from colleagues’ successes and get insights into security challenges you’re currently engaged in.

Potential Topics:

  1. High-profile break-ins the past year: implications and impacts
  2. Protecting critical digital assets, and the servers that represent single points of compromise
  3. Security, privacy and the bottom line
  4. Advanced persistent threat
  5. Cloud security
  6. Authentication best practices
  7. Compliance and regulation
  8. Many others as selected by workshop participants

Workshop 11: Working with Openstack

9:00 am-12:30 pm
Workshop

Jefferson

Chris St. Pierre, Cisco Systems

Chris St. Pierre is serving the twelfth year of a life sentence of hard labor at the command line. Currently he works as an OpenStack developer at Cisco Systems, with upstream contributions to a variety of OpenStack and StackForge projects including Nova, Glance, Horizon, and Rally. He is a Rally core reviewer.

Before escaping to software engineering, Chris spent over a decade as a systems administrator. He is one of the primary contributors to Bcfg2, the best configuration management system you've never used.

OpenStack is a spectacularly useful cloud computing platform that's also spectacularly complex. With an upstream community that at times can seem insular and dominated by developers, it can be a hard world for someone trying to do actual work with or on OpenStack. This workshop will be an opportunity to share experiences, concerns, tips, insights, and horror stories from working with OpenStack.

OpenStack is a spectacularly useful cloud computing platform that's also spectacularly complex. With an upstream community that at times can seem insular and dominated by developers, it can be a hard world for someone trying to do actual work with or on OpenStack. This workshop will be an opportunity to share experiences, concerns, tips, insights, and horror stories from working with OpenStack.

Workshop 12: System Administration in Higher Education

1:30 pm-5:00 pm
Workshop

Jackson

David Parter, University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences Department

David is the IT Director for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences Department, where he was a senior system administrator and Associate Director. In addition to IT leadership within the CS Department, he is an active participant in campus-level IT leadership and governance. David was Program Chair for LISA '99, and served on the SAGE Executive Committee and the LOPSA Board of Directors. He is also a hockey player and referee, and a private pilot.

This workshop will provide a forum for IT staff from higher education institutions to share ideas, concerns and experiences with peers from other institutions. Workshop leaders will have a number of topics prepared, but the bulk of the agenda will be set by the participants.

Topics and situations that are of particular concern to system administrators in higher education include:

  • The Higher Ed and Higher Ed IT cultures
  • Working with both centralized and distributed/independent IT organizations
  • Skills to deal with the diverse and competing forces in the Higher Ed setting
  • Practical ideas to improve the service and support we provide
  • IT decision-making in Higher Ed
  • Being effective and when the outcomes are difficult to measure; our product is the mission of the institution, accomplished by our students,
    faculty and staff
  • Career advancement and moving into or out of Higher Ed
  • Working with research projects, students, instructors and faculty
  • Keeping tech current and relevant while maintaining significant infrastructure used by diverse and possibly unknown or unidentified user bases.

This workshop will provide a forum for IT staff from higher education institutions to share ideas, concerns and experiences with peers from other institutions. Workshop leaders will have a number of topics prepared, but the bulk of the agenda will be set by the participants.

Topics and situations that are of particular concern to system administrators in higher education include:

  • The Higher Ed and Higher Ed IT cultures
  • Working with both centralized and distributed/independent IT organizations
  • Skills to deal with the diverse and competing forces in the Higher Ed setting
  • Practical ideas to improve the service and support we provide
  • IT decision-making in Higher Ed
  • Being effective and when the outcomes are difficult to measure; our product is the mission of the institution, accomplished by our students,
    faculty and staff
  • Career advancement and moving into or out of Higher Ed
  • Working with research projects, students, instructors and faculty
  • Keeping tech current and relevant while maintaining significant infrastructure used by diverse and possibly unknown or unidentified user bases.