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

• Keynote: Greg Bear (Wednesday morning)
• Keynote: Ernest Prabhakar (Thursday afternoon)
• Invited Talk: CNN.com: Facing a World Crisis (Thursday afternoon)
• Refereed Paper Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Invited Talks 1 Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Invited Talks 2 Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Network/Security Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• Guru Is In Track (Wednesday - Friday)
• LISA Quiz Show (Friday afternoon)

Keynote Address: Slime vs. Silicon
Greg Bear, Science Fiction Author

The computer-savvy engineer dreams of being relieved of the burden of being encased in an expendable and fragile carbon-based unit, of uncertain but limited lifespan, and with an irritating propensity to fail at unexpected moments. The alternative: a silicon-brained metallic or polyalloy® ("Liquid Metal") body unit with a 1000-year rechargeable powerpack, unlimited warranty, and infinite upgrade capability. Into this unit the engineer will be ported with high speed and complete efficiency, to live a long, long uptime of adventure and discovery, while retaining or perhaps enhancing the ability to attract members of the opposite sex. Greg Bear will discuss the philosophical, biological, and practical aspects of this vision, and try to guess whether the U.S.'s current Republican administration will fund research into such endeavors.

Stirring the Matrix: Organizational System Administration
Session Chair: Eric Anderson, University of California, Berkeley

Defining the Role of Service Manager: Sanity Through Organizational Evolution
Mark Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Remote Outsourcing Services for Multiple Branch Offices and Small Businesses via the Internet
Dejan Diklic, Venkatesh Velayutham, Steve Welch, and Roger Williams, IBM Almaden Research Center

Security for E-Voting in Public Elections
Avi Rubin, AT&T Labs-Research

In this talk Avi will discuss the security considerations pertaining to remote electronic voting in public elections. In particular, he'll examine the feasibility of running national federal elections over the Internet. The focus of this talk is on the limitations of the currently deployed infrastructure in terms of the security of the hosts and the Internet itself.

Zope
Michel Pelletier, Digital Creations

Zope is an open-source Web application server written in Python and C and published by Digital Creations. Michel is a software developer and documentation writer for DC who has worked with Zope for over two years and is co-author of the New Riders publication The Zope Book. He will be presenting some of the cooler features Zope has to offer to the presentation designer, content manager, programmer, and system administrator.

Illuminating the Dark Side: Short Topics on Security Issues (1 Talk, 3 Papers)
Session Chair: Tom Perrine, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Where Has All the Crypto Gone? Long Time Coming: A Speculative and Historical Talk
Greg Rose, Qualcomm Australia
View the slide presentation in HTML.

IPSECvalidate: A Tool to Validate IPSEC Configurations
Reiner Sailer, Arup Acharya, Mandis Beigi, Raymond Jennings, and Dinesh Verma, IBM

ScanSSH: Scanning the Internet for SSH Servers
Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman, CITI, University of Michigan

LDAP
Gerald Carter, Hewlett-Packard

Gerald Carter has been a member of the SAMBA Team since 1998 and is employed by VA Linux Systems. He is currently working on a guide to LDAP for system administrator's with O'Reilly Publishing. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Auburn University where he was also previously employed as a network and systems administrator. Gerald has published articles with various web based magazines such as Linuxworld, and has authored instructional course for companies such as Linuxcare. In addition to this, he acted as the lead author of "Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours" by Sams Publishing.

Technologies Indistinguishable from Magic: Analytical System Administration
Session Chair: Mark Burgess, Oslo University College

Awarded Best Theory Paper!
A Probabilistic Approach to Estimating Computer System Reliability
Robert Apthorpe, Excite@Home, Inc.

Scheduling Partially Ordered Events in a Randomised Framework: Empirical Results and Implications for Automatic Configuration Management
Frode Eika Sandnes, Oslo University College

The Maelstrom: Network Service Debugging via "Ineffective Procedures"
Alva Couch, Tufts University; Noah Daniels, Analog Devices

2001: A Communications Anniversary
Peter Salus, Matrix.Net

We are at the end of a year that provided a flood of important anniversaries important to LISA attendees. Peter will discuss the anniversaries and the significance of this confluence. Among them:

1676: Leibnitz's mechanical calculator
1876: Bell's telephone
1901: Marconi's trans-Atlantic message
1951: The junction transistor
1951: UNIVAC, first commercial computer
1976: John Lions and students install UNIX
1976: 63 hosts on the ARPAnet
1991: Phil Zimmerman posts PGP
1991: Tim Berners-Lee posts what we now call www
1991: Linus Torvalds posts Linux .01

What a ride!

If I Could Talk to the Animals--What Sysadmins Can Learn About Diagnostic Skills from Another Profession
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University

Who, outside system administration, really understands our diagnostic processes and how to teach them to others?

Of all of the professionals in the world, a veterinarian must command diagnostic skills closest to those of a system administrator. After explaining this premise, this talk presents some of the concrete wisdom the much older veterinary profession has gained with an eye toward its application to our field. It concludes with an exploration of how vets are taught diagnostic skills and how we can apply those teaching techniques.

Whither End-to-End: Placing Bandwidth and Trust at the Edge
Gordon Cook, The Cook Report

Gordon will look at what went wrong with our infrastructure builds. Why the distinction between bellhead and nethead has become blurred in a race for consolidated control over infrastructure and content. An examination of the Canadian way: light waves for end users, customer-owned networks, mandated open access at carrier-neutral co-los, an outline for cost-effective fiber to the business and neighborhood through municipalities using control over rights of way. Suggestions for the USA's policy that would create a community-owned sanctuary, an edge-controlled Internet.

AFS
Esther Filderman, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Garry Zacheiss, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Having worked for Carnegie Mellon University since 1988 Esther has been working with AFS since it's toddlerhood, and is currently a Senior Systems Mangler and AFS administrator for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Esther has been helping to bring AFS content to LISA conferences for four years. Garry Zacheiss has spent three years working for MIT Information Systems doing both development and systems administration. As a member of the Athena Server Operations team, he works on maintaining and expanding the AFS cells used by Athena, MIT's Academic Computing Environment, as well as enhancing Moira, MIT's host and user account management system.

Monte LISA Overdrive: Empirical System Administration
Session Chair: William Annis, University of Wisconsin

Performance Evaluation of Linux Virtual Server
Patrick O'Rourke and Mike Keefe, MCLX

Measuring Real-World Data Availability
Larry Lancaster and Alan Rowe, Network Appliance

Simulation of User-Driven Computer Behaviour
Hårek Haugerud and Sigmund Straumsnes, Oslo University College

Internet Measurement: Myths About Internet Data
kc claffy, Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

Current papers that propose new techniques and protocols often make assumptions about traffic characteristics that are simply not validated by real data. Hypotheses about the level of fragmented traffic, encrypted traffic, topology characteristics, traffic favoritism, path symmetry, DOS attack prevalence, address space utilization and consumption, directional balance of traffic volume, routing protocol behavior and policy, and distribution statistics of path lengths, flow sizes, packet sizes, prefix lengths, and routing announcements therefore yield questionable analytical results. Even in cases where analysis is based on data attainable by a researcher on his or her local campus, attempts to generalize typically lose integrity in the face of more complete or representative data sets.

This talk will show several examples of measurements that shed doubt on several commonly assumed Internet myths. The implication is that the community could make much better use of its collective intellectual resources if we could validate ideas against a larger variety of empirical data sets before investing research and development time and energy on certain studies.

You'll also see pretty pictures of network data stuff, as always.

Crypto Blunders
Steve Burnett, RSA

Cryptography has emerged as an enormously important component of the networked world. People are hesitant to trust the Web and e-commerce without the protections crypto provides. More and more applications are now built with crypto core components. Many cryptographic algorithms are almost unbreakable . . . if used properly.

This presentation will describe some blunders, famous and not so famous. Some may be a little humorous--to those not involved. If nothing else, the audience will learn what not to do in their products.

Infrastructure Architecture
Steve Traugott, TerraLuna, LLC

Steve helped pioneer the term "Infrastructure Architecture", and has worked towards industry acceptance of this "SysAdmin++" career track for the last several years. He is a consulting Infrastructure Architect, and publishes tools and techniques for automated systems administration. His deployments have ranged from financial trading floors and NASA supercomputers to web farms and growing startups.

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?

View the video

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.

Human Interface: Timely Solutions
Session Chair: Ozan S. Yigit, Sun Microsystems

Awarded Best Applied Paper!
LEXIS: An EXam Invigilation System
Mike Wyer and Susan Eisenbach, Imperial College

Dynamic Sublists: Scaling Unmoderated Mailing Lists
Ellen Spertus, Mills College, and Robin Jeffries, Sun Microsystems; Kiem Sie, Mills College

GEORDI: A Handheld Tool for Remote System Administration
Stephen J. Okay, Road Knight Labs, and Gale E. Pedowitz, Protura, Inc.

JINI Networking Technology and Ad-Hoc Networks
Jim Waldo, Sun Microsystems

The Jini Networking Technology is an attempt to change the rules of network organization. By utilizing the ability to move objects, including the code that implements the object, around the network in a safe fashion, the Jini technology allows networks to spontaneously form, heal, and change without the need for explicit administration. Jim will describe the Jini technology and how it is being used. Wild speculation on other possible uses and its impact on networking in general will fill in any time remaining.

To Teraflops and Beyond!

Panel: An Overview of Terascale Computing
Esther Filderman and Kevin Sullivan, Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, and Victor Hazlewood, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Invited Talk: San Diego Supercomputer Center's Blue Horizon
Victor Hazlewood, SDSC

Managing the Terascale: Lessons from a 750-Node Supercomputer
Esther Filderman and Kevin Sullivan, PSC

Wrap-Up and Q & A
Esther Filderman and Kevin Sullivan, PSC; Victor Hazlewood, SDSC

The Network from Orbit:
A Global Perspective
Session Chair: John Sellens, Certainty Solutions

Macroscopic Internet Topology and Performance Measurements from the DNS Root Name Servers
Marina Fomenkov, kc claffy, Bradley Huffaker, and David Moore, CAIDA/SDSC/UCSD

DNS Root/g TLD Server Measurements
Nevil Brownlee, The University of Auckland, New Zealand and CAIDA, SDSC, UC San Diego; kc claffy, CAIDA, SDSC UC San Diego; Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado and CAIDA, SDSC, UC San Diego

Sysadmin for Suits
Bill Labrie, American Express

Bill has spent 5 years at American Express as both a sysadmin and a lead of sysadmins. He is currently the lead over a group of 8 NT, AIX and Solaris admins. In the last 18 months he has managed to help his group rise from a beaten-down overworked and almost discarded group to one that is virtually setting policy as well as driving major changes in the management of systems throughout the company.

Adapting the Collective: Short Topics on Configuration Management
Session Chair: Sigmund Straumsnes, Oslo University College

Pelican DHCP Automated Self-Registration System: Distributed Registration and Centralized Management
Robin Garner, Tufts University

A Management System for Network-Shareable Locally Installed Software: Merging RPM and the Depot Scheme Under Solaris
R. P. C. Rodgers and Ziying Sherwin, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications

File Distribution Efficiencies: cfengine Versus rsync
Andrew Mayhew, Logictier, Inc.

CfAdmin: A User Interface for cfengine
Charles Beadnall, WR Hambrecht; Andrew Mayhew, Logictier,Inc.

Reducing System Complexity:
A Case Study in Converging Environments
Ruth Milner, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Many organizations are tackling the problem of simplifying their computing environments, by minimizing unnecessary diversity, setting standards for hardware and software, or developing global procedures for system administration. This talk will describe one organization's ongoing project to develop a solution suitable for all its locations. It will cover the scope, decision points and processes, trade-offs, and the application of project management techniques. It will also discuss the obstacles encountered and lessons learned on the road to an environment where users can move comfortably across sites and system administrators can leverage each other's work instead of duplicating it.

Panel: Written Any Good Books Lately?
Moderator: Rik Farrow, Consultant Panelists: Randal Schwartz, Dwight McKay, Mark Burgess, Tom Limoncelli, and Aeleen Frisch, authors;
Karen Gettman, editor

Ever wondered what it's like to write a technical book? Here's your chance to hear five authors and an Addison-Wesley editor share their insights into and experiences of the process and the end result--seeing your name on the book's cover and collecting those royalties. Writing is never a simple task, and book-length projects increase the difficulty exponentially. The manuscript doesn't appear in print by magic, but demands a new set of skills. Finally, the publisher has to reach the people who need to read your book, to let them know it exists. Come to this talk to hear just what it took to make that book.

Inspection, Detection & Deflection: Armoring the Next Wave of Security Technology
John S. Flowers, nCircle Network Security

Efforts to solve existing network security problems are failing. There exists a need for a new, more proactive approach to the issues of insertion, evasion, and denial of service against network security technologies. This talk will describe an approach to solving the problem of network security, with particular attention to the reduction of false positives and the concept of target awareness.

Email MTAs
Eric Allman, Sendmail, Inc.

Eric is the original author of sendmail. He is the author of syslog, tset, the -me nroff macros, and trek. He was the chief programmer on the INGRESS database management project, designed database user and application interfaces at Britton Lee, and contributed to the Ring Array Processor project at the International Computer Science Institute. He is a former member of the USENIX Board of Directors.

Work-in-Progress Reports
Session Chair: Emmett Hogan, Certainty Solutions

Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting new or on-going work, and the LISA audience provides valuable discussion and feedback.

A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference.

See page 29 for complete information on how to submit presentations.

SANs and NAS
Curtis Preston, Storage Designs

As little as two years ago, SANs and NAS were not considered by most people to be competing technologies. Today, each type of network offers a unique solution, with its own pros and cons. Yes, they are now competing technologies. This talk will explain the similarities, differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each of these types of storage network, so that you can decide which one is right for you. (The answer may be, Both.)

Panel: Scripting Languages Bake-Off
Moderator: Doug Hughes, Global Crossing, Ltd.
Panelists: David N. Blank-Edelman (Perl), Michel Pelletier (Python), Eric Melski (Tcl), Shane Caraveo (PHP)

Join our panel of language experts as we explore the features sysadmins want most in scripting languages. Find out the strengths and weaknesses of some of the most popular languages: Perl, Tcl, Python, and PHP. Listen, participate, enjoy.

Panel: The Future of Computer Security
Moderator: Marcus Ranum, Network Flight Recorder

Marcus and a panel of experts will discuss where computer security is headed and what can be done about it.

Computer Room Design/Layout
Adam Moskowitz, Menlo Computing

Adam Moskowitz has designed, built, and overhauled computer rooms ("data centers") for such companies as Open Market, Genome Therapeutics, and LION Bioscience Research; he has also designed and built high-density compute clusters for companies including Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Biogen. Adam has over 20 years experience as a programmer and systems architect, has sat on several LISA and USENIX program committees, and is the coordinator of the LISA Advanced Topics Workshop.

Back by popular demand, Rob Kolstad and Dan Klein host this challenging test of wits for LISA attendees. Watch contestants wither under the dual spotlights of difficult questions and special attention from the hosts.