Monday, November 4, 2002

Full-Day Tutorials M1 Exploring the Potential of LDAP Gerald Carter, Hewlett Packard M2 Topics in UNIX and Linux Administration, Part 2 NEW Trent Hein and Ned McClain, Applied Trust Engineering; Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado Emeritus M3 Administering Linux in Production Environments Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting M4 Issues in UNIX Infrastructure Design Lee Damon, University of Washington M5 Practical Wireless IP: Concepts, Administration, and Security Philip Cox and Brad C. Johnson, SystemExperts Corp. M6 Building a syslog Infrastructure Tina Bird, Counterpane Internet Security M7 Technical Tools for Creating Happy Users NEW Tom Limoncelli, Lumeta, Inc., and Christine Hogan, Consultant

Half-Day Tutorials, AM M8 SAN-Enable Your Backup System NEW Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services M9 Regular Expression Mastery NEW Mark-Jason Dominus, Plover Systems Co. M10 Building a Disaster Recovery Plan NEW Evan Marcus, VERITAS Software Corp. Half-Day Tutorials, PM M11 Next-Generation Storage Architectures: Beyond Conventional SAN and NAS NEW Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services M12 Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags NEW Mark-Jason Dominus, Plover Systems Co. M13 Practical Project Management Strata Rose Chalup, VirtualNet Consulting

M1 Exploring the Potential of LDAP
Gerald Carter, Hewlett Packard

Who should attend: Administrators and programmers interested in the potential of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and in exploring issues related to deploying an LDAP infrastructure. This tutorial is not a how-to for a specific LDAP server, nor is it an LDAP developers' course. Rather, it is an evaluation of the potential of LDAP to allow the consolidation of existing deployed directories. No familiarity with LDAP or other Directory Access Protocols will be assumed.

System administrators today run many directory services, though they may be called by such names as DNS and NIS. LDAP, the up-and-coming successor to the X500 directory, promises to allow administrators to consolidate multiple existing directories into one. Vendors across operating-system platforms are lending support.

Topics include:

• The basics of LDAP
• Current technologies employing LDAP services
• Replacing NIS using LDAP
• Integrating authentication mechanisms for other services (e.g., Apache, Sendmail, Samba) with LDAP
• LDAP interoperability with other proprietary directory services, such as Novell's NDS and Microsoft's Active Directory
• Programming tools and languages available for implementing LDAP support in applications

Gerald Carter (M1, T4), a member of the SAMBA Team since 1998, is employed by Hewlett Packard as a Software Engineer, working on SAMBA-based print appliances. He is writing a guide to LDAP for system administrators, to be published by O'Reilly. Jerry holds an M.S. in computer science from Auburn University, where he also served as a network and system administrator. He has published articles with Web-based magazines such as Linuxworld and has authored courses for companies such as Linuxcare. He recently completed the second edition of Teach Yourself SAMBA in 24 Hours (Sams Publishing).

M2 Topics in UNIX and Linux Administration, Part 2 NEW
Trent Hein and Ned McClain, Applied Trust Engineering; Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado Emeritus

Who should attend: System and network administrators who are interested in picking up several new technologies in an accelerated manner. The format consists of six topics. Part 1 is not a prerequisite to this class.

Topics include:

• Efficient Server Log Management: Server and network device logs are one of the most useful sources of performance and security information. Unfortunately, system logs are often overlooked by organizations, out of either a lack of time or a preference for information from fancier intrusion detection systems. We present a set of open source tools and a unified strategy for securely managing centralized system logs.
• What's New with Sendmail: Newer versions of sendmail ship with a wealth of features every system administrator should know about. From advanced virus and spam filtering (Milter), to IPv6, to improved LDAP and mailbox abstraction support, we discuss sendmail's hot new features, quirks, and tricks.
• Performance Crisis Case Studies: Trying to squeeze more performance out of your existing environment? We'll walk you through the pathology of actual performance crisis situations we've encountered, and talk not only about how to fix them but also how to avoid them altogether. There's nothing like learning from real-world situations!
• Security Tools: A new generation's worth of security management tools are on the loose. We'll help you understand how to use them to your advantage. We'll examine network scanning tools such as Nessus and nmap, as well as new tools to facilitate security forensics.
• Site Localization and Management: Wouldn't it be nice if new system arrivals meant pushing a button and watching the localization work happen magically before your eyes? Imagine if systems at your site all shared a consistent configuration! We'll talk about modern tools for localization and mass deployment of systems, and how to keep systems up-to-date on a going forward basis.
• Security Incident Recovery: You've been vigilant about your site's security, but the day still comes when you detect an intruder. How do you handle the situation, analyze the intrusion, and restore both security and confidence to your environment? This crash course in incident handling will give you the skills you need to deal with the unthinkable.

Trent Hein (S2, M2) is co-founder of Applied Trust Engineering. Trent worked on the 4.4 BSD port to the MIPS architecture at Berkeley, is co-author of both the UNIX Systems Administration Handbook and the Linux Administration Handbook, and holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado.

Ned McClain (S2, M2), co-founder and CTO of Applied Trust Engineering, lectures around the globe on applying cutting-edge technology in production computing environments. Ned holds a B.S. in computer science from Cornell University and is a contributing author to both the UNIX System Administration Handbook and the Linux Administration Handbook.

M3 Administering Linux in Production Environments
Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Who should attend: Current Linux system administrators and administrators from sites considering converting to or adding Linux systems.

This course will cover configuring and managing Linux computer systems in production environments. We will be focusing on the administrative issues that arise when Linux systems are deployed to address a variety of real-world tasks and problems arising in commercial and research-and-development contexts.

Topics include:

• Recent kernel developments
• High-performance I/O
  • Advanced filesystems and logical volumes
  • Disk striping
  • Optimizing I/O performance
• Advanced compute-server environments
  • Beowulf
  • Clustering
  • Parallelization environments/facilities
  • CPU performance optimization
• High-availability Linux: fault-tolerance options
• Enterprise-wide authentication
• Fixing the security problems you didn't know you had (or, what's good enough for the researcher/hobbyist won't do for you)
• Automating installations and other mass operations
• Linux in the office environment

Aeleen Frisch (S6, M3, T11) has been a system administrator for over 20 years. She currently looks after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential System Administration (now in its 3rd edition).

M4 Issues in UNIX Infrastructure Design
Lee Damon, University of Washington

Who should attend: Anyone who is designing, implementing, or maintaining a UNIX environment with 2 to 20,000+ hosts. System administrators, architects, and managers who need to maintain multiple hosts with few admins.

This tutorial won't propose one "perfect solution." Instead, it will try to raise all the questions you should ask in order to design the right solution for your needs.

Topics include:

• Administrative domains: Who is responsible for what? What can users do for themselves?
• Desktop services vs. farming
• Disk layout
• Free vs. purchased solutions: Do you write your own, or do you outsource?
• Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous
• Master database: What do you need to track, and how?
• Policies to make your life easier
• Push vs. pull: Do you force data to each host, or wait for a client request?
• Quick replacement techniques: How to get the user back up in 5 minutes
• Remote install/upgrade/patching: How can you implement lights-out operation? Handle remote user sites? Keep up with vendor patches?
• Scaling and sizing: How do you plan?
• Security vs. sharing
• Single sign-on: Can one-password access to multiple services be secure?
• Single system images: Should each user see everything the same way, or should each user's access to each service be consistent with his/her own environment?
• Tools: What's free? What should you buy? What can you write yourself?

Lee Damon (M4) holds a B.S. in speech communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX Systems Administrator since 1985, and has been active in SAGE since its inception. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research, and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. He is a member of the SAGE Ethics Working Group, and was one of the commentators on the SAGE Ethics document. He has championed awareness of Ethics in the Systems Administration community, including writing it into policy documents.

M5 Practical Wireless IP: Concepts, Administration, and Security
Philip Cox and Brad C. Johnson, SystemExperts Corp.

Who should attend: Users, administrators, managers, and others interested in learning about some of the fundamental security and usage issues around wireless
IP services. This tutorial assumes some knowledge of TCP/IP networking and client/server computing, the ability or willingness to use administrative GUIs to set up a device, and a general knowledge of common laptop environments.

Whether you like it or not, wireless services are popping up everywhere. And you and your organization will be responsible for understanding and managing the devices you possess. Since the purpose of wireless is to share data when you aren't directly attached to a wired resource, you need to understand the fundamental security and usage options. In this tutorial we will cover a number of topics that affect you in managing and using wireless services. Some of the topics will be demonstrated live using popular wireless devices.

Topics include:

• Cellular services basics
  • What's out there?
  • Who's using what?
  • What really matters?
• Wireless LAN fundamentals
  • Architecture
  • Threats
  • 802.11b
  • Configuration examples
  • Antennas
• Access points
  • Channels, placement
  • Bandwidth, aggregation
  • Congestion
  • Roaming, signals
  • General issues
  • Sniffers
  • Building your own access point
  • 802.11a

Philip Cox (M5) is a consultant for SystemExperts Corporation, a consulting firm that specializes in system security and management. Phil frequently writes and lectures on issues bridging the gap between UNIX and Windows NT and on information security. He is the lead author of Windows 2000 Security Handbook 2nd edition from Osborne McGraw-Hill and contributing author to Windows NT/2000 Network Security from Macmillan Technical Publishing. Phil is also a featured columnist in the USENIX Association Magazine ;login:, and serves on the SANS NT Digest editorial board.

Brad C. Johnson (M5, T6) is vice president of SystemExperts Corporation. He has participated in seminal industry initiatives such as the Open Software Foundation, X/Open, and the IETF, and has published often about open systems. Brad has served as a technical advisor to organizations such as Dateline NBC and CNN on security matters. He is a regular tutorial instructor and conference speaker on topics related to practical network security, penetration analysis, middleware, and distributed systems. Brad holds a B.A. in computer science from Rutgers University and an M.S. in applied management from Lesley University.

M6 Building a syslog Infrastructure
Tina Bird, Counterpane Internet Security

Who should attend: System administrators and network managers responsible for monitoring and maintaining the health and well-being of computers and network devices in an enterprise environment. Although some review is provided, participants should be familiar with the UNIX and Windows operating systems and basic network security.

The purpose of this tutorial is to illustrate the importance of a network-wide centralized logging infrastructure, to introduce several approaches to monitoring audit logs, and to explain the types of information and forensics that can be obtained with well-managed logging systems.

Every device on your network--routers, servers, firewalls, application software--spits out millions of lines of audit information a day. Hidden within the data that indicate normal day-to-day operation (and known problems) are the first clues that systems are breaking down, attackers are breaking in, and end users are breaking up. If you manage that data flow, you can run your networks more effectively.

Topics include:

• The extent of the audit problem: How much data are you generating every day, and how useful is it?
• Logfile content: Improving the quality of the data in your logs
• Logfile generation: syslog and its relatives, including building a central loghost, and integrating MS Windows systems into your UNIX log system
• Log management: Centralization, parsing, and storing all that data
• Legal issues: What you can do to be sure you can use your logfiles for human resources issues and for legal prosecutions

This class won't teach you how to write Perl scripts to simplify your logfiles. It will teach you how to build a log management infrastructure, how to figure out what your log data means, and what in the world you do with it once you've acquired it.

Tina Bird (M6) is a network security architect at Counterpane Internet Security. She has implemented and managed a variety of wide-area-network security technologies and has developed, implemented and enforced corporate IS security policies. She is the moderator of the Virtual Private Networks mailing list, and the owner of "VPN Resources on the World Wide Web." Tina has a B.S. in physics from Notre Dame and an M.S. and Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Minnesota.

M7 Technical Tools for Creating Happy Users NEW
Tom Limoncelli, Lumeta, Inc., and Christine Hogan, Consultant

Who should attend: Anyone seeking to increase user happiness though better technology; especially those whose environments contain large numbers of users and/or desktops. If you are considering creating a helpdesk or find yourself being pushed to manage or create helpdesk-like functions, you'll find this tutorial especially useful.

This workshop will present technical solutions that contribute to making a good first impression on users and maintaining that relationship.

Topics include:

• The importance of making a good first impression
• Perception vs. visibility: "customers" vs. "users"
• The secret to making users feel they are the center of the universe: an algorithm for ordering request priorities
• How to make a good first impression always
  • The employee's first day
  • Every day
• Technology that helps make a good first impression
  • The first-day checklist
  • Rapid PC deployment techniques (Ghost, JumpStart, AutoLoad, etc.)
  • Tools to improve homogeneity (cfengine, etc.)
• Helpdesks (both real and virtual)
  • Pros and cons of formal helpdesks
  • How to create and manage a helpdesk
  • Survey of request and ticket systems
• Customer care: the 9-step process for handling customer requests
• Catching what's wrong before they do
  • Monitoring services
  • Historical trend analysis
  • Should you have a NOC?
• Training every customer-facing person needs

Tom Limoncelli (M7, T8), co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley, is Director of Operations at Lumeta Corporation, where he is responsible for building and scaling the deployment systems. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he has worked at Bell Labs/Lucent, Mentor Graphics, and Drew University. He is a frequent presenter at LISA conferences.

Christine Hogan (M7, T8), co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley, is an independent consultant, currently studying for a Ph.D. at Imperial College, London. Previously employed by Synopsys and Global Networking and Computing (GNAC, Inc.), she serves as consultant to start-ups, e-commerce sites, bio-tech companies, and large multi-national hardware and software companies. Her system administration career began at the Department of Mathematics in Trinity College Dublin.

Who should attend: Anyone who is struggling with backup and restore, and anyone who anticipates growing his/her backup system in the next year.

Backup/restore is the killer app for storage area networks, and you do not need to have a SAN disk system in order to SAN-enable your backup system. This class takes an under-the-hood look at the surprisingly affordable SAN backup technology.

We focus on the conservative use of new technologies and how to get the best results from your budget. The course covers architectures and principles that will be relevant to any backup software.

Topics include:

• Blocks, files, storage objects, and metadata
• Block-level vs. file-level backups
• 4 ways to take a snapshot
• Storage interfaces and protocols in relation to backup
• Tape-library sharing (a.k.a. LAN-free backup)
  • Specifying an affordable SAN infrastructure
  • Connecting existing tape devices on the SAN
• Sizing and configuring SAN bridges and routers
• Challenges of device addressing
• Fibre-channel tape devices
• Fail-over for backup connections
• Directing backup traffic flow on the SAN
• Tape-drive technology: AIT, LTO, DLT, STK
• Disk-enabled backup
• Disk-to-disk backup
• Virtual tape and disk staging
• "Serverless" backup and alternatives
• High-performance NAS backup
  • Parallel file systems
  • NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol)

Jacob Farmer (M8, M11) is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, an integrator and training provider specializing in storage management. He has more than 15 year's experience with data storage technologies and is an accomplished author and lecturer. He writes the expert advice column for InfoStor magazine (the leading trade publication of the data storage industry) and is currently is currently working on a book on storage networking technologies.

M9 Regular Expression Mastery NEW
Mark-Jason Dominus, Plover Systems Co.

Who should attend: System administrators and users who use Perl, grep, sed, awk, procmail, vi, or emacs.

Almost everyone has written a regex that produced unexpected results. Sometimes regexes appear to hang forever, and it's not clear what has gone wrong. Sometimes they behave differently in different utilities, and you can't tell why. This class will fix all these problems.

The first section of the class will explore the matching algorithms used internally by common utilities such as grep and Perl. Understanding these algorithms will allow us to predict whether a regex will match, which of several matches will be found, and which regexes are likely to be faster than others, and to understand why all of these behaviors occur. We'll learn why commonly used regex symbols such as ".," "$." and "\1" may not mean what you thought they did.

In the second section, we'll look at common matching disasters, a few practical parsing applications, and some advanced Perl features. We'll finish with a discussion of optimizations that were added to Perl 5.6, and why you should avoid using "/i."

Topics include:

• Inside the regex engine
  • Regular expressions are programs
  • Backtracking
  • NFA vs. DFA
  • POSIX and Perl
  • Quantifiers
  • Greed and anti-greed
  • Anchors and assertions
  • Backreferences
• Disasters and optimizations
  • Where machines come from
  • Disaster examples
  • Tokenizing
  • New optimizations
  • Matching strings with balanced parentheses

Mark-Jason Dominus (M9, M12) has been programming in Perl since 1992. He is a moderator of the comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroup, the author of the Text::Template, Tie::File, and Memoize modules, a contributor to the Perl core, and author of the perlreftut man page. Last year his work on the Rx regular expression debugger won the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and several plush octopuses.

Who should attend: Anyone who needs to develop a disaster recovery plan.

We'll identify the key parts of a plan, how to test it, and some of the technology that can speed recovery, with an eye toward balancing costs and benefit.

Topics include:

• What a DR plan should contain
• The costs of developing a DR plan
• Do you need a DR plan at all?
• Downtime and data loss: two sides of the same coin
• Four different methods for testing your DR plan
• DR as a subset of high availability
• Methods and technologies for protecting data through a disaster
• How disasters may affect the people who are responsible for recovery
• Building and staffing DR teams
• The role of senior management in DR
• A real-life case study of a company that survived a major disaster

Evan Marcus (S7, M10) is a Senior Systems Engineer and High Availability Specialist with VERITAS Software Corporation. Evan has more than 14 years of experience in UNIX system administration. While working at Fusion Systems and OpenVision Software, Evan worked to bring to market the first high-availability software application for SunOS and Solaris. He is the author of several articles and talks on the design of high-availability systems and is the co-author, with Hal Stern, of Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

Who should attend: System architects, storage administrators, and disaster-recovery planners who are interested in cutting-edge storage technologies and/or whose needs have not been satisfied by the big vendors. Some familiarity with storage networking and/or SCSI and network file systems would be useful.

Proprietary monolithic SAN and NAS subsystems are giving way to open-system and distributed architectures. Data-transfer protocols such as SCSI, NFS, and CIFS are facing competition from VI and DAFS. Fibre-channel and parallel SCSI interfaces are challenged by Gigabit Ethernet and serial ATA. Bottlenecks imposed by PCI and SBUS stand to be eliminated by Infiniband with RDMA. This class identifies solutions available today and hints at what to expect for tomorrow.

Students will leave with ideas for leveraging existing hardware investments and for planning future migration strategies.

Topics include:

• Fundamentals of storage system architectures
• Shortcomings of conventional SAN and NAS architectures
• Performance bottlenecks
• Cost-reducing strategies
• Comparison of storage interfaces: fibre channel, SCSI, serial ATA, Infiniband, Ethernet
• Comparison of storage protocols: CIFS, NFS, SCSI, VI, DAFS
• Open systems storage virtualization
• The convergence of SAN and NAS
• High-performance file sharing (NAS on steroids)
  • Indirect file systems
  • SAN-enabled file systems
• Parallel file systems
• Distributed metadata
• Fixed content
• Content-addressable storage

Jacob Farmer (M8, M11) is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, an integrator and training provider specializing in storage management. He has more than 15 year's experience with data storage technologies and is an accomplished author and lecturer. He writes the expert advice column for InfoStor magazine (the leading trade publication of the data storage industry) and is currently is currently working on a book on storage networking technologies.

Who should attend: System administrators and others who write Perl programs or deal with Perl programs other people have written.

In the typical program, 30% to 50% is just fat, harboring bugs and wasting maintenance and execution time. It's easy to learn to recognize and remove this fat, leaving your code more robust, more reliable, more readable, and more modular.

All the bad Perl code in this class is guaranteed 100% genuine and typical--no fake examples. We will examine several typical system administration programs in detail and see how to improve them. The class will focus on "red flags," the obvious warning signs in your code. We concentrate on techniques that yield big benefits for little effort. Clever tricks are forbidden, because everyone has off days, and this class is about how to write good, clean code even on the off days.

Participants are encouraged to submit their own code for respectful, anonymous review in the class. (Send it to mjd-lisa-repair+@plover.com before July 22.)

Topics include:

• Families of variables
• Making relationships explicit
• Refactoring
• Programming by convention
• The Flesh Blanket
• Structural vs. functional code
• Conciseness
• Why you should avoid the "." operator
• Elimination of global variables
• Superstition
• The "use strict" zombies
• Repressed subconscious urges
• The cardinal rule of computer programming
• The psychology of repeated code
• Programs that are 10% backslashes
• What can go wrong with "if"and "else"
• The Condition that Ate Michigan
• Resisting Holy Doctrine
• How (and why) to let "undef" be the special value
• Trying it both ways

Mark-Jason Dominus (M9, M12) has been programming in Perl since 1992. He is a moderator of the comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroup, the author of the Text::Template, Tie::File, and Memoize modules, a contributor to the Perl core, and author of the perlreftut man page. Last year his work on the Rx regular expression debugger won the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and several plush octopuses.

M13 Practical Project Management NEW
Strata Rose Chalup, VirtualNet Consulting

Who should attend: Sysadmins who want to stay hands-on as team leads or system architects and need a new set of skills with which to tackle bigger, more complex challenges. No previous experience with project management is required. Participants will get a no-nonsense grounding in methods that work without adding significantly to one's workload. People who have been through traditional multi-day project management courses will be shocked, yet refreshed, by the practicality of our approach. To get the most out of this tutorial, participants should have some real-world project or complex task in mind for the lab sections.

This tutorial focuses on complementing your own organizational style (or lack thereof) with a toolbox of ways to organize and manage complex tasks without drowning in paperwork or clumsy, meeting-intensive methodologies. Also emphasized is how to bridge the gap between ad-hoc methods and the kinds of tracking and reporting that traditionally trained managers will understand.

Topics include:

• Quick basics of project management
• Skill sets
  • Defining success
  • Chunking and milestoning
  • Delegating
  • Tracking
  • Reporting
• Problem areas
• Project mangement tools
  • What tools should do for you
  • UNIX commands and scripts for 90+%
  • Freeware PM tool options
  • The only 15 minutes of MS Project you'll ever need
• Real-world lab
  • Applying skillsets to a sample project
  • Generating skeleton documents and notes as we go along
  • Project Fixit Q&A

Strata Rose Chalup (M13) began as a fledgling sysadmin in 1983, and has been leading and managing complex IT projects for many years, serving in roles ranging from Project Manager to Director of Network Operations. She has authored several articles on management and working with teams, and specializes in multi-vendor infrastructure rollouts. Another MIT dropout, Strata is founder and CEO of VirtualNet Consulting, and applies her management skills on various volunteer boards, including BayLISA and SAGE.