Friday, October 31, 2003   Back to top
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.
PAPERS California Room Configuration Management: Tools and Techniques Session Chair: Michael Gilfix, IBM STRIDER: A Black-box, State-based Approach to Change and Configuration Management and Support Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, John Dunagan, Yu Chen, Helen J. Wang, Chun Yuan, and Zheng Zhang, Microsoft Research CDSS: Secure Distribution of Software Installation Media Images in a Heterogeneous Environment Ted Cabeen, Impulse Internet Services; Job Bogan, Consultant Virtual Appliances for Deploying and Maintaining Software Constantine Sapuntzakis, David Brumley, Ramesh Chandra, Nickolai Zeldovich, Jim Chow, Monica S. Lam, and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford University	INVITED TALKS 1 San Diego Room Through the Lens Geekly: How Sysadmins Are Portrayed in Pop Culture Speaker: David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University Session Chair: Pat Wilson, University of California, San Diego People outside our profession think they know who we are and what we do for a living. They've formed assumptions about us and how we work even before they've met us, which in turn color their perceptions and shape their interactions with us. To be effective we need to understand this context and its origins. A good portion of it comes from popular culture: movies, television, and other mass media. Movie clips and other source material will entertain you, and more important, give you new insight into just what ways much of the world views our profession.	INVITED TALKS 2 Golden West Room How to Get Your Papers Accepted at LISA (PDF) (Combined with the concurrent Guru-Is-In Session) Speakers: Tom Limoncelli, Lumeta Corporation, Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing Session Chair: Lee Damon, University of Washington This presentation will help you write a successful proposal for a LISA paper. We'll help you identify good paper topics, teach you how to present your ideas, and explain the submission process so there will be no surprises. We will present time-saving techniques and other advice that we've learned from being authors as well as from sitting on the program committee itself. We'll also discuss the many pitfalls that potential authors can fall into before the first word is ever written. View presentation as QuickTime video	GURU SESSIONS   See the "INVITED TALKS 2" session scheduled at this time.
10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break (Grand Foyer)
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
PAPERS California Room Configuration Management: Analysis and Theory Session Chair: Michael Gilfix, IBM Generating Configuration Files: The Director's Cut Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Preventing Wheel Reinvention: The psgconf System Configuration Framework Mark D. Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign SmartFrog Meets LCFG: Autonomous Reconfiguration with Central Policy Control Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh; Patrick Goldsack, HP Research Laboratories; Jim Paterson, University of Edinburgh	INVITED TALKS 1 San Diego Room Security Lessons from "Best in Class" Organizations Speaker: Gene Kim, Tripwire, Inc. Session Chair: Deeann Mikula, Consultant A few organizations have somehow figured out how to get Operations, Security, Audit, and Management to work together to meet common objectives, resulting in the highest service levels (e.g., lowest MTBF), earliest integration of security into the ops lifecycle, and the highest spans of controls (best automation allows assigning more servers per sysadmin). What makes these "best in class" organizations so different from the rest of the herd, quantitatively, qualitatively, and behaviorally? In this talk, I will present some of my research results and their surprising conclusions. I'll also talk about the passions I've developed as a result of this work, including repeatable and verifiable processes and process improvement.	INVITED TALKS 2 Golden West Room What Washington Still Doesn't Get Speaker: Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com Session Chair: Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project A realistic firsthand view of today's legislative attempts to outlaw unsolicited email, ban piracy, restrict politically unpopular technology, and generally make the Internet a much less interesting place. Declan McCullagh is a longtime Washington denizen who has been running UNIX on the desktop since 1988 and maintains a Red Hat server for Politech, his technology and politics mailing list. For his day job as a correspondent for CNET News.com, he chronicles how Congress, the White House, and the judiciary wrestle with technology—and rarely end up on top.	GURU SESSIONS Royal Palm Salon 1/2 Professional Growth and Development David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison David has been a system administrator at the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Department since 1991, serving as Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab since 1995. David has been the senior system administrator, guiding a staff of 8 full-time sysadmins and supervising up to 12 student sysadmins at a time. His experiences in this capacity include working with other groups on campus; providing technical leadership to the group; managing the budget; dealing with vendors; dealing with faculty; and training students. As a consultant, he has dealt with a variety of technical and management challenges. He has sat on the SAGE executive committee since December 1999, serving as SAGE President in 2001-2002.
12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
PAPERS California Room Network Administration Session Chair: David Williamson, Certainty Solutions Distributed Tarpitting: Impeding Spam Across Multiple Servers Tim Hunter, Paul Terry, and Alan Judge, eircom.net Using Service Grammar to Diagnose BGP Configuration Errors Xiaohu Qie, Princeton University; Sanjai Narain, Telcordia Technologies Splat: A Network Switch/Port Configuration Management Tool Cary Abrahamson, Michael Blodgett, Adam Kunen, Nathan Mueller, and David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison	INVITED TALKS 1 San Diego Room Stick, Rudder, and Keyboard: How Flying My Airplane Makes Me a Better Sysadmin Speaker: Ross Oliver, Tech Mavens, Inc. Session Chair: David Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University The airport may seem a long way from the machine room, but sysadmins can still benefit from aviators. Ross Oliver, a licensed pilot and 15-year sysadmin veteran, will describe how his sysadmin abilities have been enhanced by aviation skills and techniques, and how you can apply them without actually taking to the air.	INVITED TALKS 2 Golden West Room Security Without Firewalls Speaker: Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer Center Session Chair: Alva Couch, Tufts University SDSC does not use firewalls, yet we have managed to go almost 4 years without an intrusion. Our success raises to the issue that there are no good empirical data to show us which protection methods are effective and which are not. SDSC's approach defies some common beliefs, but we suggest that our approach may be more successful. This talk will touch on our experiences, our threat/risk model, our implementation, some of the mistakes we've made, and why we need better data for effective risk quantification and analysis.	WORK-IN-PROGRESS REPORTS Town & Country Room Chair: David Hoffman, Stanford University Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting new or ongoing work. If you have work you would like to share or a cool idea that's not quite ready for publication, send a one- or two-paragraph summary to lisa03wips@usenix.org. We are particularly interested in presenting students' work. A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference, and the speakers will be notified in advance. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations; the time limit will be strictly enforced.
3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break (Grand Foyer)
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
The LISA Game Show (Town & Country Room) Closing out this year's conference, the LISA Game Show will once again pit attendees against each other in a test of technical knowledge and cultural trivia. Host Rob Kolstad and sidekick Dan Klein will provide the questions and color commentary for this always memorable event.