Keynote Address
Autonomic Administration: HAL 9000 Meets Gene Roddenberry
John Strassner, Motorola Fellow and Vice President, Autonomic Networking and Communications, Motorola Research Labs

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How will we enhance network management so that the promise of future technologies and services can be realized? This talk will first provide an introduction to the problems that make network management difficult from the point of view of the practitioner. Then it will examine some exciting new technologies that, when combined, offer a holistic solution that could be used for system administration as well. The talk will conclude with examples from autonomic networking research being done in Motorola Labs that can be used in network and system administration.

John Strassner is a Motorola Fellow and Vice President, directing autonomic networking and communications at Motorola Research Labs. He is also responsible for directing policy management and knowledge engineering. Previously, John was the Chief Strategy Officer for Intelliden and a Cisco Fellow. John invented DEN (Directory Enabled Networks) and DEN-ng as a new paradigm for managing and provisioning networks and networked applications. Currently, he is the Chairman of the Autonomic Communications Forum. He also has authored two books, Directory Enabled Networks and Policy Based Network Management, has contributed chapters for three other books, and has over 160 refereed conference and journal publications. John is a TMF Distinguished Fellow, a member of the TMF Advisory Board, and a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the University of California, Davis. He is also an associate professor for the Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland.

Security via Firewalls
Session Chair: Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

PolicyVis: Firewall Security Policy Visualization and Inspection
Tung Tran, University of Waterloo; Ehab Al-Shaer, University of Waterloo and DePaul University; Raouf Boutaba, University of Waterloo, Canada

Inferring Higher Level Policies from Firewall Rules
Alok Tongaonkar, Niranjan Inamdar, and R. Sekar, Stony Brook University

Assisted Firewall Policy Repair Using Examples and History
Robert Marmorstein and Phil Kearns, The College of William & Mary

The Biggest Game of Clue® You Have Ever Played
Don Scelza, Director, CDS Outdoor School, Inc.

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It's 3:30 in the morning and your pager is going off. There's a new mystery to be solved and you're the one who's been picked to solve it. That mystery may be a server down or a lost hiker. While the problem spaces are different, the problem-solving techniques are similar. This talk will look at the methodology used in lost person search management: preplanning, event notification and mobilization, team dynamics, objectives, strategy, tactics, investigation, statistical analysis, paperwork, and demobilization. These are all puzzle pieces regardless of the problem space. Can you figure it out?

Deploying Nagios in a Large Enterprise Environment
Carson Gaspar, Goldman Sachs

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This talk will cover scalability issues, security issues, our design and how it has evolved, user acceptance issues, integrating monitoring of proprietary applications, monitoring "closed" devices, high availability/disaster recovery, and lessons learned.

Virtualization/VMware
Kenon Owens,VMware

Kenon Owens has worked in the computer industry for over 13 years as an email and virtualization specialist. Kenon has worked for VMware for over 8 years and is currently a Staff Systems Engineer specializing in industry research and competitive analysis. In this role, Kenon works with VMware executives and R&D to track the virtualization landscape for industry trends, new technologies, and product direction. Prior to this, Kenon worked with numerous customers developing and delivering successful VMware Infrastructure implementations. Kenon holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Marine Engineering Technology.

Performance
Session Chair: Melanie Rieback, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

NetADHICT: A Tool for Understanding Network Traffic
Hajime Inoue, ATC-NY, Ithaca, NY; Dana Jansens, Abdulrahman Hijazi, and Anil Somayaji, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

CAMP: A Common API for Measuring Performance
Mark Gabel and Michael Haungs, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Awarded Best Paper!
Application Buffer-Cache Management for Performance: Running the World’s Largest MRTG
David Plonka, Archit Gupta, and Dale Carder, University of Wisconsin—Madison

Scaling Production Repairs and QA Operations in a Live Environment
Shane Knapp and Avleen Vig, Google, Inc.

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Google has seen explosive growth over the years, and this has evidenced itself in the increase in size of the production fleet. As the fleet increases, so do the number of machines both being released and repaired. This talk will cover how, operationally and in many different locations, the methods in which data center work, and the systems that support it, were developed.

A Service-Oriented Data Grid: Beyond Storage Virtualization
Bruce Moxon, Senior Director of Strategic Technology and Grid Guru, Network Appliance, Inc.

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The storage industry talks about "virtualization" in static and device-specific contexts, while enterprise IT organizations are under pressure to deliver a range of data "services" to their customers, with a tiered pricing model and verifiable service levels. These disparate producer- and consumer-oriented views of storage leave an implementation gap that must be filled in order to realize the "virtual everything" vision of enterprise grid computing. We will identify key storage and data management trends that are evolving to deliver this service-oriented view of data.

Find out from the experts everything you need to know to get started on the following topics:

Databases: Hit the Ground, Running?
John Sellens, SYONEX

Everything You Need to Know About Spam (in 15 Minutes)
Chris St. Pierre, Nebraska Wesleyan University

Datacenter Design Issues
Doug Hughes, D.E. Shaw Research, LLC

Active Directory Group Policy for UNIX
Gerald Carter, SAMBA/Centeris

Autonomic Computing: Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears
Glenn Fink, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

For more information about the Hit the Ground Running track, click here.

Virtualization
Session Chair: Alva Couch, Tufts University

Stork: Package Management for Distributed VM Environments
Justin Cappos, Scott Baker, Jeremy Plichta, Duy Nyugen, Jason Hardies, Matt Borgard, Jeffry Johnston, and John H. Hartman, University of Arizona

Decision Support for Virtual Machine Re-Provisioning in Production Environments
Kyrre Begnum and Matthew Disney, Oslo University College, Norway; Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting; Ingard Mevåg, Oslo University College

OS Circular: Internet Client for Reference
Kuniyasu Suzaki, Toshiki Yagi, Kengo Iijima, and Nguyen Anh Quynh, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan

Secure Isolation of Untrusted Legacy Applications
Shaya Potter, Jason Nieh, and Matt Selsky, Columbia University

Who's the Boss? Autonomics and New-Fangled Security Gizmos with Minds of Their Own
Glenn Fink, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

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How do humans stay in the loop when autonomics seems to be pushing them out? What do you do with a system designed to have a mind of its own? Who's responsible when it makes agreements with other systems that may cost your company money? This talk will incorporate the results of interviews with sysadmins working with autonomic systems. I'll share their reflections and my own on the potential impacts of future autonomic systems.

No Terabyte Left Behind
Andrew Hume, AT&T Labs—Research

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Yes, disk is marvelous, getting inexorably cheaper and bigger. But here's the dark side: How do you attach, configure, and mount tens of TB on a PC? How do you manage the files and back up that data? Worst of all, vast amounts of cheap disk allow users to dream of projects requiring petabytes of disk and ask you to make it happen. This talk will identify most of the serious issues and will describe solutions.

Samba
Gerald Carter, Centeris/Samba Team

Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Development Team since 1998. He has been developing, writing about, and teaching on open source since the late 1990s. Currently employed by Centeris as a Samba and open source developer, Gerald has written books for SAMS Publishing and for O'Reilly Publishing.

Note: This session replaces Tom Limoncelli's "Time Management for System Administrators." Interested in the topic? Register to attend his half-day tutorial on the morning of Sunday, November 11.

The LHC Computing Challenge
Tony Cass, CERN

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CERN's Large Hadron Collider turns on next year, providing high-energy particle collisions for four experiments that, between them, are expected to generate up to 15PB of data per year. After giving a brief introduction to the accelerator and experiments, this talk will outline the associated computing challenges—in particular, cluster management, data storage and distribution, and grid computing—and describe how CERN and the worldwide particle physics community have been preparing to meet them.

UNIX and Microsoft Interoperability
Joseph Radin, Ricoh Company

Joseph Radin is currently working at the Ricoh Company as an Engineering Manager. For the past 6 years Joseph has served as a technical advisor to a number of major FORTUNE 500 companies, defining problems and implementing solutions, many of which involved UNIX-Microsoft interoperability. Mr. Radin has authored four books on UNIX system administration, UnixWare OS, the Mosaic Internet browser, and X Windows.

Miscellaneous Topics, I
Session Chair: Sanjai Narain, Telcordia Technologies

Policy-Driven Management of Data Sets
Jim Holl, Kostadis Roussos, and Jim Voll, Network Appliance, Inc.

ATLANTIDES: An Architecture for Alert Verification in Network Intrusion Detection Systems
Damiano Bolzoni, University of Twente, The Netherlands; Bruno Crispo, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands & University of Trento, Italy; Sandro Etalle, University of Twente, The Netherlands

PDA: A Tool for Automated Problem Determination
Hai Huang, Raymond Jennings III, Yaoping Ruan, Ramendra Sahoo, Sambit Sahu, and Anees Shaikh, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Experiences with Scalable Network Operations at Akamai
Erik Nygren, Chief Systems Architect, Akamai Technologies

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Akamai's platform for content delivery and application acceleration consists of over 20,000 servers in over 2,800 locations in 72 countries and over 1000 networks. Providing high levels of performance and reliability without requiring a large network operations team necessitates significant automation. Further challenges are introduced by the highly distributed nature of the Akamai system. We'll discuss some methodologies and systems we have developed for operating the Akamai network.

Ganeti: An Open Source Multi-Node HA Cluster Based on Xen
Guido Trotter, Google

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Ganeti is a cluster management tool we built at Google that leverages the power of Xen and other open source software in order to provide a seamless environment in which to manage highly available virtual instances. The talk will focus on what Ganeti provides, what audience it is targeted to, and what the plans for its future are.

AFS
11:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m.
Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project

Moose (Esther Filderman) has been working with AFS since before it was called AFS. She enjoys preaching and teaching about AFS and has been bringing AFS content to LISA for many years.

Data Center Design
11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Doug Hughes, D.E. Shaw Research, LLC

Doug Hughes is an officially titleless sysadmin for D.E. Shaw Research, LLC, where he goes about his day solving problems that need to be solved and designing things that need to be designed. One of his tasks is designing a data center to hold a customer purpose-specific supercomputer, a terabyte per day in storage growth per supercomputer segment, and a few thousand nodes of commodity computers for data analysis.

Managing Grids and Clusters
Session Chair: Chad Verbowski, Microsoft Research

Usher: An Extensible Framework for Managing Clusters of Virtual Machines
Marvin McNett, Diwaker Gupta, Amin Vahdat, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego

Remote Control: Distributed Application Configuration, Management, and Visualization with Plush
Jeannie Albrecht, Williams College; Ryan Braud, Darren Dao, Nikolay Topilski, Christopher Tuttle, Alex C. Snoeren, and Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego

Everlab: A Production Platform for Research in Network Experimentation and Computation
Elliot Jaffe, Danny Bickson, and Scott Kirkpatrick, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Using Throttling and Traffic Shaping to Combat Botnet Spam
Ken Simpson, Founder and CEO, MailChannels

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In this talk, Ken Simpson describes his research into spammer behavior and explains how spammers' impatience can be used for spam suppression. During this talk, you will learn about spammer economics and spammer behavior, get an introduction to connection management, and hear how we have used connection management in some real-world scenarios to reduce spam traffic.

Panel on Configuration Tools: LCFG, Cfengine, BCFG, and Puppet

Moderator: Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

Panelists: Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh; Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory; Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs

The authors of the major configuration tools will provide an enlightening overview and a balanced comparison that will help you decide how best to automate management of your systems.

Find out from the experts everything you need to know to get started on the following topics:

NetFlow; or, How to Know What Your Network Really Did Without Going Broke
Michael W. Lucas, GKN Driveline North America, Inc.

ZFS
Jeff Bonwick, Sun Microsystems

Jails, VMs, and Sandboxes
Bill Cheswick, AT&T Research

Big Nagios
Carson Gaspar, Goldman Sachs

Eco Computing: Improving Data Center Energy Efficiency
Lou Marchant, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

For more information about the Hit the Ground Running track, click here.

Miscellaneous Topics, II
Session Chair: Alva Couch, Tufts University

Master Education Programmes in Network and System Administration
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Karst Koymans, Universiteit van Amsterdam

On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
James Hamilton, Windows Live Services Platform

RepuScore: Collaborative Reputation Management Framework for Email Infrastructure
Gautam Singaraju and Brent ByungHoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Homeless Vikings: BGP Prefix Hijacking and the Spam Wars
David Josephsen, Senior Systems Engineer, DBG, Inc.

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BGP prefix hijacks take the IP addresses of others and make them your own. This talk provides a chilling account of the current use of prefix hijacks by spammers in a successful effort to defeat RBLs. Placed within the context of the history of the spam wars, this talk makes clear the grim future we face if we continue to escalate the spam wars into the network layer; namely, a future where every spammer on earth can arbitrarily choose and make routable an unallocated IPv4 address (one that the RBLs have never seen) once per day for the next few hundred years or so without ever using the same address twice or ever colliding with any other spammer.

Beyond NAC: What's Your Next Step?
Mark "Simple Nomad" Loveless, Security Architect, Vernier Networks, Inc.

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Now that you have adopted Network Access Control, what is your next step? With the NAC market maturing at a rapid rate, most companies have either already implemented NAC or are evaluating it for future deployment. However, there is still much confusion about what is and what isn't NAC. This presentation will clearly outline how NAC is an important security enhancement, and why it is not an end-all security solution. Attendees of this presentation will learn the technology that is required in today's world to ensure network security and effectively mitigate threats.

ZFS
Jeff Bonwick, Sun Microsystems

Jeff Bonwick, Storage CTO, Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems, is the chief architect of ZFS, a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability using commodity hardware. He invented the slab allocator, which has been adopted by most modern operating systems; created observability tools such as kstat and lockstat; and authored many core Solaris services, including mutexes and rwlocks, priority inheritance, callouts, task queues, file descriptor management, high-resolution timing, the LZJB compression algorithm, libkvm, and virtual address allocation. Not only that, but he roasts his own coffee.

The Economic Meltdown of Moore's Law and the Green Data Center
Kenneth G. Brill, Executive Director, Uptime Institute

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The net economic productivity of IT is threatened because server power consumption improvement is occurring at a slower rate than the increase in computer performance. As a result, the enterprise TCO per unit of computing has not been falling nearly as rapidly as senior executives might think. The one-time benefit of killing dead servers and virtualization will defer this new economic reality, but CFOs, CTOs, and CIOs need to change their economic decision models now or risk investing in new applications that can't pay back their real costs.

NTP
9:00 a.m.–9:45 a.m.
Brad Knowles, Consultant and Author

Since 2003, Brad Knowles has been a volunteer systems staff member (postmaster, listmaster, etc.) for the NTP Public Services Project (at ntp.org), as well as a frequent contributor to the NTP Community Supported Documentation at http://support.ntp.org/. He is also a member of the IETF NTP Working Group, helping to set the official standard for the NTPv4 protocol. He can frequently be found on the #ntp irc channel at irc.freenode.net. He is currently living in Austin, TX, setting up his own consulting company, has co-authored SAGE Short Topics Booklet #15 Internet Postmaster: Duties and Responsibilities, and is still trying to write his first book.

Legal Issues/Forensics
9:45 a.m.–10:30 a.m.
Jason Park, MD5Group

Configuration Management
Session Chair: Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

Moobi: A Thin Server Management System Using BitTorrent
Chris McEniry, Sony Computer Entertainment America

Awarded Best Paper!
PoDIM: A Language for High-Level Configuration Management
Thomas Delaet and Wouter Joosen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Network Patterns in Cfengine and Scalable Data Aggregation
Mark Burgess and Matt Disney, Oslo University College; Rolf Stadler, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Hardening Your Systems Against Litigation
Alexander Muentz, Esq.

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Recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require parties in litigation to make electronically stored information available to the opposing side. Unfortunately, legal and IT departments still don't communicate well with one another. The presentation will include an overview of the parts of the Federal Rules that are relevant to IT professionals and how IT staff should approach their legal department. Some examples of how not to handle a litigation hold will be given, as well as how to prepare one's systems for potential or pending litigation.

Data Center Growing Pains
Lou Marchant, Sun Microsystems

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Data centers can't be built fast enough to take care of the increases in power consumption and lack of available floor space for numerous companies. Companies are concerned over new environmental legislation being considered and how it will impact their business. If you aren't seeing these issues in your data centers now, you could in the next five years. Hear about what we at Sun have done in our own data centers and how we are trying to approach the problems with a fresh new perspective.

SIP/VoIP
11:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m.
Robert Sparks, Estacado Systems

Robert Sparks is the VP of Research and Development at Estacado Systems, providing solutions in real-time IP communications. He is a co-author of the core SIP specification, RFC3261, and several of its extensions. He is also co-author of the book SIP Beyond VoIP: The Next Step in the IP Communications Revolution. He co-chairs the IETF's SIMPLE working group, is currently on the board of the SIP Forum, coordinates the international SIP interoperability test events (SIPit), and is an active contributor to the reSIProcate project.

LDAP
11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Howard Chu, Chief Architect, Symas Corp.

Howard Chu has deep experience with system networking and security technologies. He started working with OpenLDAP in 1998 and has been one of the leading developers on the OpenLDAP core team since 1999.

Should the Root Prompt Require a Road Test?
Alva L. Couch, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Tufts University

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A lot of attention and energy have been put into certification programs, but exactly what do they certify? Written tests are no substitute for direct observation of an administrator performing a task. I explore the concept of a "road test" for system administrators, what it might entail, and what we can learn from experts about evaluating knowledge by observing behavior. I conjecture that current written tests only help us evaluate system administrators who already possess a set of core skills that no written test could measure. If a certification is like an endorsement on a driver's license, then what should obtaining the license itself entail?

Session Chair: Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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A Work-in-Progress report (WiP) is a very short presentation about current work. It is a great way to poll the LISA audience for feedback and interest. See the schedule of WiPs and available presentation slides here.

Prince Caspian on Location: Commodity Hardware and Gaffer Tape
Trey Darley, Technical Consultant

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View the Prince Caspian Movie Trailer

The as yet unreleased Walden/Disney production Prince Caspian was shot on location throughout Europe and New Zealand. While you might expect that a big-budget Hollywood production replete with thousands of SFX shots would have a tightly organized, well-financed, top-notch IT department, the truth might surprise you. Trey Darley saw it all first-hand and will talk about how the Prince Caspian IT department pulled it off using mainly commodity hardware, their wits, and lots of gaffer tape.

The Security Butterfly Effect
Cat Okita, Earthworks

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The butterfly effect is traditionally described as the almost imperceptible flap of a butterfly's wings causing changes that result in a tornado being formed (or not!). In information security, a change that seems simple may result in serious vulnerabilities—and as the complexity and interdependence of the environments we manage increase, predicting the effects of apparently innocent actions will become infinitely more challenging. This talk will discuss some notable examples of the butterfly effect in security, as well as giving a brief overview of future hot points to look toward.

Find out from the experts everything you need to know to get started on the following topics:

VoIP with NATs and Firewalls
Robert Sparks, Estacado Systems

OpenLDAP: Highlights for 2.4
Howard Chu, Symas Corp./OpenLDAP Project

Ruby: Productivity or Penance?
Andrew Hume, AT&T—Research

Ganeti: An Open Source High-Availability Cluster Based on Xen
Guido Trotter, Google Ganeti Team

How to Get Your LISA Paper Accepted
Tom Limoncelli, Google NYC; Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh; Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

For more information about the Hit the Ground Running track, click here.