Technical Sessions: Wednesday, November 17 | Thursday, November 18 | Friday, November 19 | All in one file

Thursday, November 18, 2004
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.			Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS Marquis III Networking Session Chair: Jon Finke, RPI autoMAC: A Tool for Automating Network Moves, Adds, and Changes Christopher J. Tengi, Princeton University; James M. Roberts, Tufts University; Joseph R. Crouthamel, Chris M. Miller, and Christopher M. Sanchez, Princeton University More Netflow Tools for Performance and Security Carrie Gates, Michael Collins, Michael Duggan, Andrew Kompanek, and Mark Thomas, Carnegie Mellon University	SPAM MINI-SYMPOSIUM Marquis I Session Chair: Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director Filtering, Stamping, Blocking, Anti-Spoofing: How to Stop the Spam Speaker: Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research We can stop spam, and here are some of the techniques we'll use to do it: machine learning filters, stamping, blackhole lists, and anti-spoofing techniques such as Sender-ID. Stamping includes Turing Tests, computational puzzles, and real money. I'll also tell you where all that spam comes from, what it's selling, and why laws won't work.	NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK Marquis II Session Chair: John Sechrest, Public Electronic Access to Knowledge Grid Computing: Just What Is It and Why Should I Care? Speakers: Esther Filderman and Ken McInnis, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center View presentation slides (PDF) The Grid, a popular term today, can be a frightening and nebulous concept to system administrators tasked to provide "it" to their users. The additional challenges of supporting the distributed, multi-site Grid environment entail new architectural, political, and administrative responsibilities. We'll talk about the differences from the "traditional" computing environments and from clustering; new security models and procedures; implementation considerations; and what exactly the big deal is here, anyway. We will present some of the more common Grid scenarios and teach you to keep your head above water when you start using Grid technologies of your own.	GURU SESSIONS Marquis IV Backups W. Curtis Preston, Glasshouse Technologies W. Curtis Preston, President/CEO of The Storage Group, wrote Using SANs and NAS and UNIX Backup and Recovery, the seminal O'Reilly book on backup, as well as co-authoring SAGE's own Backups and Recovery Short Topics booklet. He has been designing and implementing storage systems for over 10 years. Realizing the demand for those who can understand storage technology on an implementation level and communicate it in plain language, Preston has extended his services to the vendor community, assisting in designing, developing, and marketing new products.
10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.			Thursday
EXPERIENCE TALK & REFEREED PAPERS Marquis III Monitoring and Troubleshooting Session Chair: Lee Damon, University of Washington Experience Talk: FDR: A Flight Data Recorder Using Black-BoxAnalysis of Persistent State Changes for Managing Change and Configuration Chad Verbowski, John Dunagan, Brad Daniels, and Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research Refereed Papers: Real-time Log File Analysis Using the Simple Event Correlator (SEC) John P. Rouillard, University of Massachusetts at Boston Combining High Level Symptom Descriptions and Low Level State Information for Configuration Fault Diagnosis Ni Lao, Tsinghua University; Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying Ma, Microsoft Research Asia; Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research	SPAM MINI-SYMPOSIUM Marquis I Session Chair: Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director Lessons Learned Reimplementing an ISP Mail Service Infrastructure to Cope with Spam Speaker: Doug Hughes, Global Crossing View Presentation Slides (PDF) Spam is a problem for all organizations, large and small. Global Crossing's ISP platform found that spam volume was doubling every 2 months. You could see it in CPU processing, in disk I/O, in DNS lookups—even the compressed log files were growing visibly by the week. This talk discusses some of the techniques we used to identify spam, lessons learned, tools applied, and interesting statistics gathered along the way. Graphs of various metrics, black lists, DNSBLs, white lists, automated handling, SPF, and Bayesian filters are all approached from a practical standpoint.	NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK Marquis II Session Chair: Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing A New Approach to Scripting Speaker: Trey Harris, Amazon.com Listen in MP3 format Scripts are easy to write but hard to write well. Practicing system administrators know that they ought to check all errors and take corrective or abortive action, but such minutiae usually serve as a distraction from the real work the script is supposed to solve, making automation less attractive. Worse, loading up a script with such checks can obscure the flow of the code and lead to spaghetti-script. It has generally been assumed that accepted programming methodologies for general programming apply to scripting as well. This talk argues that this is not necessarily the case, and will introduce Procedural Test-Oriented Scripting (PTOS), a programming methodology designed to make scripts more readable, resilient, and easier to write by encapsulating a script as a series of conditions that much be reached and steps for bringing them about. An open-source Perl module implementing this methodology, useful for both beginning and advanced system programmers, will be demonstrated.	GURU SESSIONS Marquis IV AFS Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project Having worked for Carnegie Mellon University since 1988, Esther "Moose" Filderman has been working with AFS since its toddlerhood, before it was called AFS. She is currently Senior Systems Mangler and AFS administrator for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Esther Filderman has been working to bring AFS content to LISA conferences since 1999 and is also coordinating documentation efforts for the OpenAFS project.
12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.			Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS Marquis III System Integrity Session Chair: John Sechrest, Public Electronic Access to Knowledge LifeBoat: An Autonomic Backup and Restore Solution Ted Bonkenburg, Dejan Diklic, Benjamin Reed, and Mark Smith, IBM Almaden Research Center; Michael Vanover, IBM PCD; Steve Welch and Roger Williams, IBM Almaden Research Center PatchMaker: A Physical Network Patch Manager Tool Joseph R. Crouthamel, James M. Roberts, Christopher M. Sanchez, and Christopher J. Tengi, Princeton University Who Moved My Data? A Backup Tracking System for Dynamic Workstation Environments Gregory Pluta, Larry Brumbaugh, William Yurcik, and Joseph Tucek, NCSA/University of Illinois	SPAM MINI-SYMPOSIUM Marquis I Session Chair: Rob Kolstad, SAGE Executive Director What Spammers Are Doing to Get Around Bayesian Filtering & What We Can Expect for the Future Speaker: John Graham-Cumming, Electric Cloud Listen in MP3 format View Presentation Slides (PDF) Spammers keep on spamming, and they keep innovating to get through spam filters. In this talk you'll hear about the latest spammer tricks, the latest bugs in Internet Explorer that they're using, and what to expect from spammers in 2005. The talk will also cover ten tough questions to ask your spam filter vendor to make sure that you get the best product (or use the best open source product) available.	NETWORK/SECURITY/ PROFESSIONAL TRACK Marquis II Session Chair: Mario Obejas, Raytheon Flying Linux Speaker: Dan Klein, USENIX View Presentation Slides (PDF) We all know that "Linux is better than Windows." Few intelligent people would board a fly-by-wire airplane that was controlled by Microsoft Windows. So how about Linux? When your life is at stake, your attitudes change considerably. Better than Windows, yes—but better enough? This talk will look at what it takes to make software truly mission-critical and man-rated. We'll go back to the earliest fly-by-wire systems—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and look at such diverse (but critical!) issues such as compartmentalization, trojans and terrorism, auditing and accountability, bugs and boundary conditions, distributed authoring, and revision control. At the end of this talk, what you thought might be an easy answer will be seen to be not so easy.	GURU SESSIONS Marquis IV VoIP and IETF Standards Robert Sparks, CTO, Xten Networks Robert Sparks has been working in the computer and communications industry since 1982. He has spent the last 5 years designing and developing SIP-based IP communications infrastructure. Recently he has been an active contributor to IETF protocol development, with a strong focus on improving interoperability of SIP and SIMPLE implementations.
3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.			Thursday
Plenary Session Marquis I & II A System Administrator's Introduction to Bioinformatics Bill Van Etten, The BioTeam View presentation slides (PDF) Bioinformatics research requires domain expertise in biology, software/algorithm development, and UNIX system administration. In rare cases, a single individual possesses sufficient domain knowledge in all three of these areas, but, more often, bioinformatics research is conducted through the collaborative efforts of two or three people who are knowledgeable in one or perhaps two of these disciplines. To be successful, this cross-discipline, collaborative effort requires that each participant become familiar with the others' vernacular. In this session, William Van Etten, geneticist and founding partner of The BioTeam (bioteam.net) will offer an introduction to genetics and bioinformatics algorithms tailored for the UNIX system administrator.