BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS

Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic.

Attending BoFs Is Free!
Admission to the evening BoFs is included in every LISA '08 registration. Also, registration for the BoFs and LISA '08 Vendor Exhibition only is FREE. Online pre-registration is now closed. Register on-site at the dates and times listed here.

Vendor BoFs
Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your company's latest technologies with LISA attendees? Host a Vendor BoF! These sponsored one-hour sessions give companies a chance to talk about products and proprietary technology—and they include promotional benefits. Email sponsorship@usenix.org if you're interested in sponsoring a Vendor BoF. Click here for more information about sponsorship opportunities.

Scheduling a BoF
To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on one of the BoF Boards located in the registration area. If you have a description of our BoF you'd like posted on this Web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send its title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "LISA '08 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule (as of November 13, 2008, 5:00 p.m. PST)

BoF Descriptions

Amazon AWS Q/A: EC2, S3, SQS, etc.
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Brittany

Annual Backup and Data Protection Technology BoF — Bring your problems and solutions
Jacob Farmer, CTO, Cambridge Computer
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Sheffield

Barbershop Quartet
Joel Huddleston
Thursday, November 13, 10:30 p.m.–11:30 p.m., Ascot

Bcfg2 BoF
Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory
Thursday, November 13, 9:30 p.m.–11:30 p.m., Crescent

Come and learn about Bcfg2, meet the Bcfg2 development team, and hear about the roadmap for the next release. We will also be signing and selling—at a bargain rate!—copies of the SAGE Bcfg2 book. Finally, we will demonstrate some interesting ways that Bcfg2 can be used to automate configuration management in chaotic environments.

Better Virtualization Management through Standards
Distributed Management Task Force, Inc.
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Brittany

Management standards from the DMTF go beyond traditional server management and extend to interoperable deployment and management of virtualized environments. This session will explore the virtualization standards being supported by vendors in their products now and how these solutions allow you to better manage a heterogeneous virtual environment. Meet some of the DMTF member companies, and learn about standards being implemented in their virtualization and management products.

*BSD
Garrett Wolman
Thursday, November 13, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Clarendon

CACert+PGP Signing Party
Riku Itapuro, TAMK Univ. of Applied Sciences, Finland
Thursday, November 13, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Ascot

Want to get assured?
Want to enlarge your PGP web of trust?
Need CACert points?

Place to exchange PGP-fingerprints and check ID's. Also availabe: CACert assurers, who will check your governmental issued IDs and later add points to your CACert acccount.

If you are not already registered, do it now. Join at http://cacert.org. Community Empty CAP forms for assurance available at BoF. You need one for each assurer in which you want to get assurance. Bring with you at least one government-issued ID.

Email me if you want:
a) CACert points
b) Enlarge your PGP trust
Or both so I can bring the right amount of papers.

CACert assurers also welcome!

Centralized Logging
Leon Towns-von Stauber, Intelius
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Clarendon

Let's talk about what you're using to aggregate and analyze the logs from your systems. Or if you're not already doing that, come find out how. Trade tips, proud moments, or horror stories about centralized logging.

Cfengine BoF
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Hampton

Come and meet the author of Cfengine, field questions, and learn about the release of Cfengine 3. Finally a real next-generation configuration management tool with some surprising features. Meet some of the newly formed Cfengine company, and learn about support and services for ubiquitous configuration management.

This year we are celebrating not only Cfengine 3's release but the formation of a new international Cfengine company—with a birthday cake and prizes for those who bring us or send us the best stories about how Cfengine helped them.

DNS and Network Traffic Analysis with TreeTop
David Plonka, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Crescent

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a one of the most widely used services in the Internet. In this session, we consider the question of how DNS traffic monitoring can provide an important and useful perspective on network traffic in an enterprise. We approach this problem by considering three classes of DNS traffic: canonical (i.e., RFC-intended behaviors), overloaded (e.g., black-list services), and unwanted (i.e., queries that will never succeed). We describe a context-aware clustering methodology that is applied to DNS query-responses to generate the desired aggregates. Our method enables the analysis to be scaled to expose the desired level of detail of each traffic type, and to expose their time varying characteristics.

We implement our method in a tool we call TreeTop, which can be used to analyze and visualize DNS traffic in real-time. We demonstrate the capabilities of our methodology and the utility of TreeTop using a set of DNS traces that we collected from our campus network over a period of three months. Our evaluation highlights both the coarse and fine level of detail that can be revealed by our method. Finally, we show preliminary results on how DNS analysis can be coupled with general network traffic monitoring to provide a useful perspective for network management and operations.

DNSSEC in 6 Minutes
Alan Clegg, ISC
Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Eaton

Fedora BoF
David Nalley, $dayjob = KeyMark Inc.; contributor to Fedoraproject.org
Monday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Fairfield

Come talk about the upcoming Fedora 10 releases, happenings in the fedora community, or learn how to get involved with Fedora.

Ganglia BoF
Bernard Li, Ganglia Project
Wednesday, November 12, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Hampton

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing clusters and grids as well as large server farms.  Come find out what's new with the latest 3.1.1 release and see what's in store for future releases.  Tell us what you are using Ganglia for and bring real-life experiences to share with other Ganglia users.

Getting Started with Configuration Management
Cory Lueninghoener
Wednesday, November 12, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Fairfield

Going Green: Interested? Green IT/Power/HVAC
Alva Couch, USENIX
Wednesday, November 12, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Crescent

Google Vendor BoF
Thursday, November 13, 9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Sheffield

Join Google for dessert and refreshments at their vendor BoF.

.GOV BoF
Tuesday, November 11, 10:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., Eaton

Work for the government? Just curious?

Hadoop Apache OSS: Distributed File System and MapReduce Framework
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Clarendon

Intrusion Detection
Matt Disney, ORNL
Monday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Fairfield

Issue/Request Tracking
Jessica Greer, UVA
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Fairfield

Juggling
Perry Rivera
Monday, November 10, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Windsor

An open discussion on anything juggling related. Beginners, passers, and interested folks all welcome.

Juggling
Perry Rivera
Thursday, November 13, 10:30 p.m.–11:15 p.m., Windsor

Back by popular demand, here's a BoF about anything juggling related. Discussion also on ergonomic benefits. Beginners, passers, and interested folks all welcome.

J2EE/JAVA Administration
Matthew Sacks
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Hampton

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Friends BoF
Trey Harris, LOPSA
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Clarendon

It's the "Alphabet BoF!" Meet other Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer or whatever letter you want to pick (and friends) LISA attendees. Talk about workplace diversity issues, plan social events for the conference, or just come to meet friendly folks at LISA.

Lightning Talks Roundtable—Best and Worst Practices, Funny Stories, Script Hints, Tips, Etc.
Perry Rivera
Wednesday, November 12, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Sheffield

Five-minute talks on a variety of topics. Make it as formal or informal as you want. See http://tinyurl.com/lightningtalk for some general guidelines. If bringing slides, have laptop set up and ready to go.

Linux Distros: Which is the Best for Mass Administration?
Randall, UPenn
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Eaton

From servers to clusters to end user desktops, is there a Linux distro best suited for deploying and managing in a diverse environment?  If you're not satisfied with your current install base, this session is for you!  If you're happy with it, come tell us why it's so great!  There are so many Linux flavors, but BSD and OpenSolaris enthusiasts are more than welcome.  I'd like to focus more on the systems administration aspect rather then the charm of the gui.  What are the features that make it more manageable, and what are the gotchas?  In the spirit of the mutt email client, which one(s) suck less?

About the BoF Organizer
Randall Sindlinger is a systems administrator in the School of Engineering at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania.  I share in the responsibility of managing scores of desktops, dozens of servers, and hundreds of cluster and grid nodes.  We currently run OpenSuSE 10.3, but there are enough changes in 11.x that this is an ideal time to consider alternatives.

LOPSA Annual Community BOF
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Sheffield

Join the League of Professional System Administrators' Board of Directors for a presentation of the past year's activities, followed by a Q & A. This meeting is open to all, members and non-members of LOPSA alike.

LVS/IPVS Keepalived
Jay Faulkner, Rackspace
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Clarendon

Meet the USENIX Board and Staff
Tuesday, November 11, 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Windsor

Members of the USENIX Board and staff want to hear from you on how we are doing. Find out what's new, and tell us how we can improve LISA, SAGE, and USENIX. Refreshments provided.

MRTG, RRDtool and Routers2 Users
Steve Shipway, The University of Auckland
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Hampton

A general meeting for people who use, or want to use, the popular MRTG and RRDtool software. MRTG can be used stand-alone, or with the RRDtool database backend and Routers2 frontend. RRDtool also has far more features enabling it to be used by many other applications. Learn new tips or techniques to get the most out of these from the authors of the software.

This is the place to go for:

• Installing MRTG and getting the best performance
• Using RRDtool in other applications
• Using Routers2 to create custom MRTG graphs
• Configure your MRTG to monitor unusual things
• Monitoring virtualised hosts
• Show off what you've achieved with your installation
• Obtain a copy of the MRTG/RRD/Routers2 manual and software

NoMachine NX/Desktop Virtualization
Paul Krizak, AMD
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Crescent

OpenSolaris
Peter Galvin
Thursday, November 13, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Hampton

Open Source for Large Enterprise Problems Vendor BoF
Mark Hinkle, Zenoss
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Windsor

Discussion of open source tools and integration of systems. Participants will be discussing tools including open source tools for management and collaboration. Attendees will include members of the open source Zenoss Core Monitoring and MindTouch Deki(wiki) collaboration projects.

Puppet BoF
Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Windsor

Come meet the author of Puppet, and chat about Puppet with other users or prospective users. Luke will come prepared to talk about the feature roadmap, the developer community, and more. Now's your chance to ask everything you want to know about Puppet, including why it's so awesome.

Real World IPSec
Mark Allen
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Ascot

This BoF is to discuss real world implementations of IPSec between computers, not networks. Topics will include securing legacy protocols like telnet and FTP for regulatory compliance, lessons learned from past experiences, cross-platform compatibility issues, and how to roll out IPSec without causing major network service outages.

RRDtool Project in Residence Vendor BoF
Tobi Oetiker, GroundWork Open Source
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Hampton

GroundWork Open Source is proud to sponsor Tobi Oetiker's work on RRDtool. It provides key underlying functionality for GroundWork Monitor's fully-featured, highly capable IT monitoring solution. Join us in celebrating RRDtool and Tobi Oetiker at the RRDtool Project in Residence Vendor BoF.

SNIA Green Storage: Measuring Energy/Power for Storage
Erik Riedel, SNIA & Seagate
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m., Ascot

The SNIA Green Storage Technical Work Group is working on metrics for assessing and evaluating the power used by storage systems. This session will introduce the issues of power and energy-efficiency in storage - arrays, disks, and related devices. We welcome input and interest from storage and system administrators looking to reduce their electric bills and increase the density of their data centers.

Solid State Storage — Fact and Fiction, Future and Fantasy
SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Brittany

Solid state storage based on flash memory and other technologies has received a lot of attention recently. But, what is the reality? Is there a place in the storage hierarchy for solid state storage, and if so, where? Is it enterprise ready? This is a great opportunity to get up to date information and dispel the FUD surrounding this solid state storage. Come join a lively discussion with industry experts supporting distinct points of view.

The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) will provide a brief introduction to the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative and Solid State Storage Technical Work Group.

An Update On Standards
Nick Stoughton, USENIX Standards Liaison
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Crescent

Nick will talk about the latest developments in the standards world, including a discussion on the Microsoft Office Open XML disaster, and the world of programming languages and operating system standards.

What areas of Sys Admin deserve standardization? Your chance to help direct the future of this project.

2008's Hot Topics in System Administration
Sergey Sridov, AC&NC
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Ascot

The following hot topics will be discussed:

• Key storage trends in 2008 and upcoming technology
• Managing storage in virtual environments (VMware, VI, Xen)
• ISCSI SAN implementation tips
• Data protection features: snapshots, replications multipathing
• FAQ

Sun Microsystems Vendor BoF
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Windsor

BigAdmin is a repository of content and resources for system administrators, by system administrators. It helps Sun system, network, database, and storage administrators do their jobs better in a heterogeneous computing environment. Keeping in the tradition of bulletin boards, the BigAdmin hub and wiki enable sysadmins to both receive and post useful information, resources, and tips. In addition, the BigAdmin team continually posts content from Sun engineering and links to content we think sysadmins will find interesting.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds of the BigAdmin hub, or to the BigAdmin newsletter. You can participate by submitting content to the BigAdmin hub, or by submitting comments or content to the BigAdmin wiki.

System and Network Monitoring
John Sellens, SYONEX
Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m., Hampton

Share tips, tricks, tools, experiences, and questions related to system and network monitoring.

Test-Driven Sysadmin
Geoff Halprin
Thursday, November 13, 9:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m., Windsor

Toastmasters: Practice Your Lightning Talks & Table Topics Skills
Wednesday, November 12, 10:30 p.m.–11:30 p.m., Sheffield

Web/Internet SysAdmins (large & small sites)
Matthew Barr, InteractiveOne (BlackPlanet.com)
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Ascot

Do you work with web server farms? Deal with CDN's? Love/Hate your load balancer? This is for you. We're not the corporate folks with 1 server per project, but we're not high performance computing. We may have a few or 100's of webservers. Come, sit, chat. Argue about what works, doesn't work. How do we deal with scrapers, spammers... We welcome folks from both large & small sites.

What is the Future of Forges?
Ross Turk
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Fairfield

Community is a cornerstone of open source, and forges, as collaborative platforms for project development and hosting, have traditionally served as a place for code and committers to come together. In this Birds of a Feather, we'll be discussing code.google.com, SourceForge.net, BerliOS, RubyForge, java.net and others as we explore the nature of open source project hosting.

More developers are bringing code to the table, but the number of tables is increasing as well. With many projects choosing to create their own forges, is the open source community hurt by these divisions or strengthened by specialization?

Join Ross Turk of SourceForge to talk about where you're hosted, why you like it there, and what you think about the future of open source hosting.

Zimbra Admins
Steve Hillman, Simon Fraser University
Wednesday, November 12, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Fairfield

Zimbra is an open source mail and collaboration server suite. If you're running it, or thinking about it, come meet with other email administrators to discuss implementations, experiences, and issues.