LISA '99 - 13th Systems Administration Conference

Technical Sessions - Nov. 10-12, 1999
Seattle Conference Center
Seattle, Washington, USA

Wednesday, November 10

Getting the Space Shuttle Ready to Fly
Joe Ruga, IBM Global Services Division at Boeing North American

Joe is the lead of the engineering computing center for design, analysis, and support of each shuttle flight. He will discuss the ins and outs of system administration for the space shuttle--a very large production environment.

Using Electronic Mail
Session Chair: Josh Simon, Collective Technologies

ssmail: Opportunistic Encryption in Sendmail
Damian Bentley, Defense Science and Technology Organisation, Australia; Greg Rose, QUALCOMM Australia; Tara Whalen, Communications Research Centre, Canada

MJDLM: Majordomo-based Distribution List Management
Vince Skahan and Robert Katz, Boeing

RedAlert: A Scalable System for Email Health Monitoring
Strata Rose Chalup, VirtualNet; Eric Sorenson, Explosive Networking

Deep Space BIND
Paul Vixie, Internet Software Consortium

After having been relatively stable and reliable
for about fifteen years, DNS is undergoing its inevitable rototilling, and BIND with it. It's time for the world to learn what to expect from BIND-9 and EDNS.

Look, Ma, No Hands! Coping with RSI
Trey Harris, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) is an occupational hazard faced by many people who work long hours at a keyboard. Most RSI sufferers either ignore symptoms until they cannot work, or attempt to self-treat in ineffective or even harmful ways. This talk will address effective strategies for living and working with RSI, including the pros and cons of voice recognition technology for technical work, how to evaluate ergonomic products, and tips for work and living habits that can help prevent the occurrence, or reoccurrence, of RSI.

The Way We Work
Session Chair: Cat Okita, Earthworks

Deconstructing User Requests and the 9-Step Model
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Lucent Technologies/
Bell Labs

Adverse Termination Procedures, or, How to Fire a System Administrator
Matthew F. Ringel, Navisite, Inc.; Thomas A. Limoncelli, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs

Organizing the Chaos: Managing Request Tickets in a Large Environment
Steve Willoughby, Intel Corporation

The Four-Star Approach to Network Management
Jeff R. Allen, WebTV Networks, Inc.
David Williamson, Global Networking and Computing, Inc.

Experience shows that large network-management platforms that promise to be all things to all people usually don't solve the problems we need them to. An alternative to using one big tool is to assemble a collection of smaller tools that do precisely what you need. In this talk, I'll explain how WebTV chooses and uses tools, giving particular attention to Cricket, a tool which has given us great visibility into the behavior of our systems.

Hot Topics/Buzzword Bingo
Moderator: Daniel V. Klein, Consultant

What's the buzz? Come hear our panel of "experts" comment on current technology buzzwords--what they're about, and whether you should care. Next time your boss sends you on a hunt, know whether you're chasing something good or just pointy-haired vaporware.

Tools
Session Chair: Adam Moskowitz, LION Biosciences Research, Inc.

Gtrace--A Graphical Traceroute Tool
Ram Periakaruppan and Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado at Boulder and Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

Rat: A Secure Archiving Program with Fast Retrieval
Willem A. Schreuder and Maria Murillo, University of Colorado at Boulder

Cro-Magnon: A Patch Hunter-Gatherer
Seth Taplin and Jeremy Bargen, University of Colorado at Boulder and Raytheon Systems Company

Microsoft's Internal Deployment of Windows 2000
Curt Cummings, Microsoft, Information Technology Group

The Information Technology Group (ITG) at Microsoft has aggressively planned and implemented Windows 2000 on a global scale. Microsoft's IT group will share its deployment process, problems, and concerns with others in the industry. Discussion of deployment topics includes best practices for global infrastructure deployment, namespace design, domain hierarchies for a global environment, Active Directory utilization and planning, schema management, and custom application integration as an active directory component.

A Couple of Web Servers, a Small Staff, Thousands of Users, and Millions of Web Pages...How We Manage (Sort of)
Anne Salemme and Jag Patel, MIT

The Web has become an essential part of day-to-day life at MIT, and supporting the rapidly changing needs of the Web publishers at MIT is a challenge, given the staff and funding resources of MIT Information Systems. We have been able to provide Web service for static content for thousands of users and millions of Web pages by supporting Web servers as basically an add-on to the necessary underlying services we already provided. This model is challenged by potential future needs, such as dynamically generated content and authenticated access for publishers to their content via the Web. We will discuss day-to-day problems solved and lessons learned, and make some guesses about what we might be learning in the future.

Thinking on the Job
Session Chair: Thomas A. Limoncelli, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs

A Retrospective on Twelve Years of LISA Proceedings
Eric Anderson and Dave Patterson, University of California at Berkeley

Managing Security in Dynamic Networks
Sandeep Bhatt and S. Raj Rajagopalan, Telcordia Technologies

It's Elementary, Dear Watson: Applying Logic Programming to Convergent System Management Processes
Dr. Alva Couch and Michael Gilfix, Tufts University

Managing Your Network(s): Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions, or, You Got Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter
Eliot Lear, Cisco Systems

Is your company growing by purchasing other companies or by being purchased? What do you need to do to your network to prepare for a merger? What do you need to do to complete a merger? What tools will help you? We'll discuss routing systems, addressing, firewalls, and network management tools and processes. And of course there will be war stories!

Budgeting for SysAdmins
Adam Moskowitz, LION Biosciences Research, Inc., and Gregory H. Hamm, GPC USA, Inc.

This session will present the nuts and bolts--and pitfalls--of preparing a budget for the systems department: what to include in a budget, what you're likely to forget to include, how to justify the money you're asking for, what kinds of questions senior management is likely to ask when you present your budget, and what to do when they don't give you as much money as you wanted.

Network Infrastructure
Session Chair: Greg Rose, QUALCOMM Australia

NetReg: An Automated DHCP Network Registration System
Peter Valian and Todd K. Watson, Southwestern University

Dealing with Public Ethernet Jacks--Switches, Gateways, and Authentication
Bob Beck, University of Alberta

NetMapper: Hostname Resolution Based on Client Network Location
Josh Goldenhar, Cisco Systems, Inc.

The System Administrator's Body of Knowledge
Geoff Halprin, The SysAdmin Group

The maturing field of systems administration to date lacks a formal understanding of the profession which organizations can use to assess their maturity and individuals can consult to plan their career development. The Systems Administration Body Of Knowledge (a.k.a. Taxonomy of Best Practices) project is working toward defining the duties and responsibilities of the profession and capturing industry best practices. This talk provides an overview of the project, the progress made to date, and the projected path toward the SA-BOK's goals.

The Year in Review: Conference Roundup

Highlights from some of the year's USENIX- and SAGE-sponsored conferences: Network Administration, Intrusion Detection, LISA-NT, Security, and the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

File Systems
Session Chair: Doug Kingston, Deutsche Bank

Enhancements to the Autofs Automounter
Ricardo Labiaga, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The Advancement of NFS Benchmarking:
SFS 2.0
David Robinson, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Moving Large Filesystems On-Line, Including Exiting H.S.M. Systems
Vincent Cordrey, Doug Freyburger, Jordan Schwartz, and Liza Weissler, Collective Technologies

Building Internet Datacenters
Jay Yu and Bryan McDonald, GNAC, Inc.

How to plan and build datacenters from an IT perspective. Topics include:

• Basic and advanced requirements
• Trade-offs among wants, needs, and budget
• Working with construction contractors
• Building your own datacenter vs. co-location or other alternatives
• Building or campuswide infrastructure requirements and recommendations

Ethics
Lee Damon, Qualcomm, and Rob Kolstad, SANS Institute

We'll start with a discussion of the ethics canons of various SAGE organizations and continue to an interactive bimediated debate on some practical ethical situations from the workplace. Raise your awareness of real-world ethical dilemmas and how to avoid them (or cope with them once they're upon you!).

Systems
Session Chair: Eric Anderson, University of California at Berkeley

ServiceTrak Meets NLOG/NMAP
Jon Finke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Burt: The Backup and Recovery Tool
Eric Melski, Scriptics

Design and Implementation of a Failsafe
Print System
Giray Pultar, Coubros Consulting LLC

Approaching a Petabyte
Hal Miller, University of Washington

We know how to grow computing sites incrementally, aiming into the terabytes of storage. This talk discusses some issues involved in massive growth of online storage needs--to a petabyte and beyond.What questions need to be answered before designing significant expansion or a very large new site? What can be learned from others' experiences?

Tcl/Perl/Python Bakeoff

Join us as we compare and contrast scripting languages in a trial by combat! Gurus in Tcl, in Perl, and in Python will battle to write the most efficient, stylish, and/or functional code in their preferred language to answer several challenges. Audience participation is encouraged! The winner will be chosen by acclamation.

Network Security
Session Chair: Jeffrey A. Uphoff, Transmeta Corp.

Snort--Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Networks
Martin Roesch, Stanford Telecommunications, Inc.

Internet Routing and DNS Voodoo in the Enterprise
D. Brian Larkins, Lucent Technologies

Moat: A Virtual Private Network Appliance and Services Platform
John S. Denker and Steven M. Bellovin, AT&T; Hugh Daniel, FreeS/WAN Project; Nancy L. Mintz and Mark A. Plotnick, AT&T

NT Without Domain Controllers
Chris Stradtman, SYSNET Inc.

Four people set up and support 50+ NT 4.0 client sites using an NT domain served by SAMBA on a Linux box. Result: Low cost, low on-site support time, reasonable remote management.

Providing Reliable NT Desktop Services by Avoiding NT Server
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs

How does Bell Labs integrate NT and UNIX? We use open protocols to build a rich and reliable user environment. We'll give you the technical underpinnings--and how to sell the idea to management.

University Issues Panel

In this highly interactive session, a panel of university sysadmins and the audience will discuss problems common to the realm of academia.

Work in Progress Reports
Session Chair: Peg Schafer, Harvard University

Real World Intrusion Detection
Mark K. Mellis, Consultant, SystemExperts Corp.

As e-commerce and extranet applications introduce riskier Internet protocols, sysadmins need intrusion detection techniques in order to distribute security countermeasures on increasingly open networks.

Results!

Summaries of the Topic Workshops (held earlier in the week), the Terminal Room InstallFest, Day in the Life of a SysAdmin, and the salary survey.

Installations
Session Chair: Evi Nemeth, University of Colorado and Cooperative Ass'n for Internet Data Analysis

Automated Installation of Linux Systems Using YaST
Dirk Hohndel, SuSE

Enterprise Rollouts with Jumpstart
Jason Heiss, Collective Technologies, Inc.

Automated Client-side Integration of Distributed Application Servers
Conrad Kimball, Vince Skahan, and David Kasik, Boeing; Roger Droz, Analysts International

Join Rob and the LISA gang for the revival of one of your favorite TV shows--the way sysadmins do it!