All Technical Sessions will be held in the San Diego Town and Country Resort Hotel.

Seeing How the LAN Lies: Network Monitoring
Session Chair: John Sellens, Certainty Solutions

Specific Simple Network Management Tools
Jürgen Schönwälder, Technical University of Braunschweig

Gossips: System and Service Monitor
Victor Götsch, Albert Wuersch, and Tobias Oetiker, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

The CoralReef Software Suite as a Tool for System and Network Administrators
David Moore, Ken Keys, Ryan Koga, Edouard Lagache, and kc claffy, CAIDA/SDSC/UCSD

150/5,000 Years of (E-)Commerce: History Repeats Itself Again
Dan Klein, LoneWolf Systems

Commerce has been around for at least 5,000 years, and e-commerce has arguably existed for nearly 150 years. Amazingly, the evolution of e-commerce has closely paralleled the evolution of "real" commerce. But it's in Internet time: 5,000 years of mistakes, failures, and successes in commerce have been repeated in less than 1% of the time.

This talk will look at that parallel evolution, with numerous amusing examples. Then we'll see how people actually make money on the Net. We'll wind up with some speculations on the future (you should bring your own grains of salt).

The Problem with Developers
Geoff Halprin, e-smith, inc.

There is a problem out there: developers (still) don't develop maintainable, production-ready, manageable code. This failure must then be handled by system administrators who must second-guess the developers, both as to their intent and on the behavior of the implemented system. This is not acceptable!

This talk examines the area of production operations requirements. It then looks at how we can engage and educate the development community, working with them to ensure that their results are more manageable and maintainable.

Control Central: Three Talks on New Approaches to Security Management
Session Chair: Tom Perrine, San Diego Supercomputer Center

A Non-Traditional Approach to Network Security Control
Mark Epstein, Ponte Communications, Inc.

Beyond File Permissions: Controlling User Actions
Aeleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting
View this talk in PDF.

Are Baseline Computer Security Standards the Answer?
Hal Pomeranz, The Center for Internet Security

PKI/Cryptography
Greg Rose, QUALCOMM, Inc.

Greg Rose is a Principal Engineer for QUALCOMM International, based in Australia, where he works on cryptographic security and authentication for third-generation mobile phones and other technologies. He holds a number of patents for cryptographic methods and has successfully cryptanalyzed widely deployed ciphers.

Level 1 Diagnostics: Short Topics on Host Management
Session Chair: Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

Global Impact Analysis of Dynamic Library Dependencies
Yizhan Sun and Alva Couch, Tufts University

Tools to Administer Domain and Type Enforcement
Serge Hallyn and Phil Kearns, The College of William and Mary

Solaris Bare-Metal Recovery from a Specialized CD and Your Enterprise Backup Solution
Lee Amatangelo, Collective Technologies; W. Curtis Preston, The Storage Group, Inc.

Accessing Files on Unmounted Filesystems
Willem A. (Vlakkies) Schreuder, University of Colorado, Boulder

Rules of Thumb of System Administration
Steve Simmons and Elizabeth Zwicky

Every profession accumulates some condensed wisdom, whether it's in the form of Zen koans or laws of engineering. This presentation is a tour through the condensed wisdom of system administration, in the form of pithy sayings supported by educational stories (some of them, of course, stolen from other professions, including Zen koans and laws of engineering).

PHP for System Administration
Shane Caraveo, ActiveState

PHP is a popular scripting language for developing Web applications. Unlike Perl, PHP is not widely regarded as a scripting language for system administration. Yet its Web-oriented functionality is ideally suited to provide HTML interfaces for performing administrative tasks and monitoring systems and networks remotely over HTTPS. This talk will discuss using PHP to provide Web-based remote administrative access to system services such as email, SQL, and LDAP servers. We'll also discuss monitoring network services via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol).

The Packet Crackdown: Talks on TCP Performance Tuning and Packet Capture
Session Chair: Tom Perrine, San Diego Supercomputer Center

TCP Performance Tuning
Tom Hacker, Center for Parallel Computing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

BPF Meets UVM
Michael Stolarchuk, Arbor Networks
View this slide presentation in HTML.

Writing Papers for Usenix Refereed Track
Tom Limoncelli, Lumeta

Thomas A. Limoncelli is a Unix sysadmin and network administrator, author, and activist. He has had many papers accepted by LISA and has presented many Invited Talks and recently co-authored a book with Christine Hogan titled "The Practice of System and Network Administration", which is now in stores. He has served on the LISA Program Committee many times, including two years as Invited Talks Co-Chair. He is currently the Director of Operations at Lumeta Corporation in Somerset, New Jersey USA.

To Your Scattered PCs Go! Distributed Configuration Management
Session Chair: Jon Stearley, University of New Mexico

Automating Infrastructure Composition for Internet Services
Todd Poynor, HP Labs Palo Alto

TemplateTree II: The Post-Installation Setup Tool
Tobias Oetiker, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

The Arusha Project: A Framework for Collaborative UNIX System Administration
Matt Holgate, Glasgow University, and Will Partain, Arusha Project

What Sysadmins Need to Know About the New Intellectual Property Laws
Lee Tien, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Suddenly, intellectual property laws are directly affecting millions of people, and one of the emerging chokepoints for intellectual property holders are sysadmins. Often, IP holders attempt to convince the sysadmin or ISP to take down their Web site, threatening liability suits against them for "contributing" to infringement or circumvention. How valid is this threat? What is society's risk if sysadmins comply? If we don't like the answers, what can be done?

Hardening Windows 2000
Phil Cox, SystemExperts Corporation

This session will cover the steps necessary to harden Windows 2000 systems. Phil will step through the entire hardening process, showing the actual tools and steps (as appropriate). In particular, he will cover the use of IPSec filters and security configuration files. This talk is based on the "Hardening Windows 2000" document that Phil released in early 2001.

How Not to Configure Your Firewall: A Field Guide to Common Firewall Configurations
Avishai Wool, Lumeta Corp.

Evidence from policy configuration files analyzed by the Lumeta Firewall Analyzer indicate that corporate firewalls are often enforcing poorly written rule-sets. Moreover, typical configuration mistakes are not very subtle or complex. Misconfigurations can be attributed to a combination of firewall vendor product design, conflicts between security and usability, and inexperienced users. The purpose of this talk is to identify the most common firewall misconfigurations, to discuss their causes, and to suggest fixes for them.

Backups
Preston, W. Curtis, Storage Designs

Curtis is the owner of Storage Designs, a consulting company dedicated entirely to selecting, designing, implementing, auditing, and educating people about storage systems. Curtis has nine years experience designing storage systems for many environments, both large and small. He has developed a number of freely available tools, including ones that perform live backups of Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. Curtis is the administrator of the NetBackup, and NetWorker FAQs. He is also the author of O'Reilly's "UNIX Backup & Recovery," and "Using SANs & NAS," as well as a monthly column in UnixReview.com and SysAdmin magazines.

As we enter the twenty-first century, enterprise information systems are experiencing yet another wave of radical change. Last decade we moved from managing monolithic mainframes to networking numerous nodes; now we find ourselves configuring a continuum of countless components. The technology of the Internet--Java, XML, and Open Source--promises to bring order out of this computing chaos, without the lock-in of single-vendor solutions. By embracing heterogeneity through the use of open standards, information can flow upward to ever-larger datastores while functionality flows downward to ever-smaller devices. But will this really create a Brave New World where users change applications and devices as often as they change clothes, and only data endures?

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Listen in MP3 format

September 11 of 2001 saw heinous events of such magnitude that the entire world was transfixed by disbelief. In the understandable hunger for news, Net users flocked to news sites. The unexpected and unprecedented demand quickly drove nearly every news site into the ground, and CNN.com was no exception. What brought our site back up was a tremendous effort of teamwork, fast thinking, and troubleshooting, all happening in the face of a terrible tragedy.

In the span of 15 minutes the demand for our site increased by an order of magnitude. On September 11, with only 85% availability, we still served over 132 million pages, nearly equaling our site's all-time high. On September 12, we shattered any previous site records with 304 million page views. This talk will tell the story of CNN.com and the team that worked so hard to meet the unbelievable user demand. One of the biggest challenges faced by the team was induced by cascading failures, so that increasing capacity alone was not sufficient to resurrect the site. The talk will conclude with a discussion about the relevance of this experience to anyone who runs a Web site.