TECHNICAL SESSIONS

Wednesday, November 12 | Thursday, November 13 | Friday, November 14 | Invited Talk Speakers

Paul Anderson, Programming the Virtual Infrastructure
Paul Anderson has been a practicing system administrator for over 20 years. Nowadays, he is mostly involved in configuration-related research projects at the University of Edinburgh, and he is currently interested in dynamic reconfiguration of virtual infrastructures. Paul is the author of the LCFG configuration tool and the SAGE booklets System Configuration and LCFG: A Practical Tool for System Configuration. He was the program chair for LISA '08.

Sheeri K. Cabral, How to Stop Hating MySQL: Fixing Common Mistakes and Myths
Sheeri K. Cabral has a master's degree from Brandeis University in computer science, specializing in databases. She has background as a systems administrator. Cabral is a MySQL expert and has also worked with Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Solaris, RedHat/Fedora, AIX, and HP-UX. Unstoppable as a volunteer and activist since age 14, Cabral founded and organizes the Boston, Massachusetts, USA, MySQL user group, and the not-for-profit www.technocation.org to help IT professionals. She won the MySQL Community Advocate of the Year Award in 2007 and 2008. Cabral currently works as a MySQL DBA for The Pythian Group in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Alva L. Couch, "Standard Deviations" and the "Average" System Administrator
Alva L. Couch is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tufts. Prof. Couch is the author of many LISA papers and received LISA Best Paper awards in both 1996 and 2005. In 2003 he received the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his contributions to the theory of system administration. He currently serves as Secretary of the USENIX Board of Directors.

Mike Cutler, Inside DreamWorks Animation Studios: A Look at Past, Present, and Future Challanges
Mike Cutler is a System Architect for PDI/DreamWorks, based in Redwood City, CA. He joined DreamWorks in 1993 and is responsible for networking, storage, and backups there. Mike has worked in the entertainment industry since 1985, specializing in networks and storage of CG data. He has a unique understanding of workflow and data representation.

Sean Dennehy, Implementing Intellipedia Within a "Need to Know" Culture
Sean Dennehy was the pilot customer for Intellipedia and has since become a leading change agent for incorporating Enterprise 2.0 solutions into the intelligence community's business practices. He has developed an innovative "sabbatical" program that introduces intelligence community officers to the numerous Web 2.0 applications that are being deployed across the intelligence community. The focus of his efforts is encouraging a viral adoption whereby officers replace existing processes to take advantage of network effects encountered when individuals move projects out of "channels" and onto "platforms."

Janice Gelb, WTFM: Documentation and the System Administrator
Janice Gelb is a Senior Developmental Editor at Sun Microsystems, where she is responsible for editing print and online documentation for numerous software products. She is a certified trainer for Sun's SGML/XML authoring tool. Janice also worked as a technical editor at Ashton-Tate and at Scitex Corporation. She has presented papers at several technical communication conferences and was the project lead for the popular editorial style guide Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry.

Ian Grigg, An Open Audit of an Open CA
Ian Grigg is currently the Auditor for CAcert. He has spent the past decade designing and building systems of financial cryptography, including payment systems and digital rights and trading systems, with a strong emphasis on secure, open, and self-governing systems. Before 1995, he spent a decade as a systems programmer in a wide variety of businesses and roles. He is a frequent commentator on security and financial cryptography issues on the financialcryptography.com blog. He has an MBA from London Business School and a BSc (Hons, Computer Science) from UNSW (Australia).

Jordan Hubbard, Mac OS X: From the Server Room to Your Pocket
Jordan Hubbard is an engineering director for Apple, Inc., working on a number of UNIX technologies in Mac OS X. Mac OS X also uses a good deal of code from the FreeBSD Project, for which he is also one of the founders and past core team member.

Doug Hughes, Designing, Building, and Populating a 10 Megawatt Datacenter
Doug Hughes is technical lead for the systems group at D.E. Shaw Research, LLC, in New York City. Among his chief responsibilities have been evaluating cluster hardware and interconnect; architecting, designing, and building storage, network, and infrastructure components for commodity networks to grow in excess of thousands of machines; and leading a team that supports research scientists and hardware designers. Doug previously worked for 6 years at Global Crossing supporting network engineering, at Auburn University, and at Martin Marietta when it absorbed G.E. Aerospace.

James Hughes, OpenSolaris and the Direction of Future Operating Systems
James is a Sun Fellow and VP of Sun Microsystems. Currently the Chief Technologist of the Solaris Operating System, he has influence over the future direction of one of the most deployed operating systems in enterprises today. A recognized expert in the area of storage security, he is also the chair of the IEEE Security in Storage working group, defining storage encryption, and is a past and the current chair of the IEEE Security in Storage Workshop. Formerly with StorageTek, Network Systems, and Control Data Corp, he has over 32 years in the OS, storage, and networking industry.

Andrew Hume, Deterministic System Administration
Andrew Hume is a Lead Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs—Research in the software systems research department. He has worked in the areas of software tools, pattern matching and string searching, processing massive datasets, marshalling millions of data feed files, and cajoling high availability and performance from clusters of UNIX PCs. Currently, he is investigating how best to use small disk caches (say, 200TB) in front of large amounts of data on tape. He served 8 years on the USENIX Board of Directors, including 4 years as President, and on the Board of LOPSA. His main email address has remained unchanged since 1981.

Sean Kamath, Inside DreamWorks Animation Studios: A Look at Past, Present, and Future Challanges
Sean Kamath is a System Architect for PDI/DreamWorks based in Redwood City, CA. He joined DreamWorks in 2006 and is responsible for operating systems, hardware, and data centers. He cut his teeth on 4.2BSD on a VAX 11/785 in 1984 and has been a system administrator since 1986. He has attended every LISA since 1992.

Rafi Khardalian, Spine: Automating Systems Configuration and Management
Rafi Khardalian is the chief architect and original developer of Ticketmaster's Spine. He currently manages the Web Systems Engineering team at Ticketmaster, which is responsible for the company's high-volume, consumer-facing Web infrastructure. Rafi has worked at Ticketmaster for 5 years and has 12+ years of experience running large systems infrastructure.

Prior to joining Varonis, she held various senior roles in marketing, product management, and engineering with start-up companies Neoteris (acquired by Juniper) and RedSeal Systems, as well as industry leaders Check Point Software, Juniper Networks, and Motorola.

Ms. Konstantas has been a popular speaker at shows such as Vanguard Conference, Interop New York, Interop Tokyo, SecureWorld Expo, and CNET Radio and has been quoted in trade and business press, including BusinessWeek online and The Wall Street Journal online. She holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland.

Monica Lam, Beyond VDI: Why Thin Client Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Aren't Cutting It
Monica Lam is co-founder and chief scientist at MokaFive and professor of computer science at Stanford University. She has written over a hundred articles on computer architecture, compilers, languages, and operating systems. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computer Machinery, an award given to the top 1% of its members. She is an author of the popular compiler textbook Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. She received her Doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor's in computer science from the University of British Columbia.

Dan Langille, Fighting Spam with pf
Dan Langille is a database administrator for Afilias USA, Inc., and has been heavily involved with several open source projects since 1998. The founder of several Web sites and a couple of conferences, he tends to spend much of his spare time mountain biking. He's been fighting spam since shortly after setting up his first mail server back in 1998.

Tom Limoncelli, System Administration and the Economics of Plenty
Tom is an internationally recognized author and speaker. His books include the new second edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley), Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly), and The Complete April Fools' RFCs (Peer-To-Peer). Tom works for Google in NYC. He is the joint recipient of USENIX/SAGE's 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He blogs at www.EverythingSysadmin.com.

Tobias Oetiker, How to Proceed When 1000 Call Agents Tell You, "My Computer Is Slow": Creating a User Experience Monitoring System
Tobias Oetiker is an electrical engineer by education and a system administrator by vocation. For ten years he has been working for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, providing students and staff with a deluxe UNIX workstation environment. In 2006 he started his own company, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, running UNIX servers for industry customers, improving his pet open source projects MRTG, RRDtool, and SmokePing, and applying these tools to solve customers' problems. These days, Tobias uses a SunRay appliance running off a diskless, Ubuntu-based SunRay server as his personal workstation environment. In 2006, Tobias received the prestigious SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on MRTG and RRDtool.

Mike Patnode, Integrating Linux (and UNIX and Mac) Identity Management in Microsoft Active Directory
Mike Patnode is Vice President of Technology for Centrify, applying his 20 years of solution architecture and product development experience to creating advanced product features for Centrify solutions and extending Centrify technology into new channels, including OEMs and strategic partners. Mike Patnode has been Director of Engineering and Senior Architect at Centrify for over four years. Previously he was Vice President of System Architecture at Wells Fargo and has held management and architect roles at Netscape and SCO. Mike received his Bachelor's degree in computer science from Cal Poly and spent a year at the MIT X Consortium developing multimedia network protocols.

Raphael Reich, Auditing UNIX File Systems
Mr. Reich is responsible for all Varonis product marketing. Raphael brings nearly fifteen years of product marketing and management experience to Varonis. Prior to joining Varonis, Raphael held product marketing and management roles at Cisco, Check Point, Echelon, and Network General. Prior to his roles in marketing, he was a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation. Raphael holds a bachelors degree in computer science from UC Santa Cruz and an MBA from UCLA.

Bruce Schneier, Reconceptualizing Security
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a "security guru," he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

His first bestseller, Applied Cryptography, explained how the arcane science of secret codes actually works. It was described by Wired as "the book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published." His book on computer and network security, Secrets and Lies, was called by Fortune "[a] jewel box of little surprises you can actually use." His current book, Beyond Fear, tackles the problems of security from the small to the large: personal safety, crime, corporate security, national security.

Regularly quoted in the media, he has testified on security before the United States Congress on several occasions and has written articles and op eds for many major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Wired, Nature, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post.

Schneier also publishes a free monthly newsletter, Crypto-Gram, with over 130,000 readers. In its seven years of regular publication, Crypto-Gram has become one of the most widely read forums for free-wheeling discussions, pointed critiques, and serious debate about security. As head curmudgeon at the table, Schneier explains, debunks, and draws lessons from security stories that make the news.

Marcel Simon, Does Your House Have Lions? Controlling for the Risk from Trusted Insiders
With over 21 years in information technology, Marcel Simon has seen our profession evolve from something considered a fallback for failed software developers to a broad-based discipline requiring expertise not just in technology but also in project, financial, and risk management. After many years at technology companies Bell Labs, UNIX System Labs, Novell, and HP, and the requisite (for technologists in the New York City metropolitan area) stint on Wall Street, he is now "enjoying" the heavily regulated health-care sector as Director of Security Engineering at Medco Health Solutions, a mail-order pharmacy and pharmacy-benefits management market leader. He also continues to geek out over jazz music.

David Wagner, The State of Electronic Voting, 2008
David Wagner is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley, working in the areas of computer security and electronic voting. He and his Berkeley colleagues are known for discovering a wide variety of security vulnerabilities in various cell phone standards, 802.11 wireless networks, electronic voting systems, and other widely deployed systems. Last year, he helped lead a comprehensive review commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to examine three California e-voting systems. David is a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidance Development Committee, the Federal advisory board charged with helping to draft future voting standards.