3 posts from 2009

I just got back from the LISA '09 conference in Baltimore. For those who do not know what that is, it originally meant Large Installation System Administration. There are heated debates on what comprises a large system now, so the expanded name is a bit of a misnomer. If you support customers, have servers to manage, possibly some infrastructure thrown in and there are "business needs" involved, then you qualify.

There is really no adequate way to explain LISA. You need to be there and absorb it. I have missed seven of these in a row and I'm not sure why, as this is where the ideas are. If you maintain (production, quality assurance, development, sandbox, etc.) systems, this is where you will hear about the issues, the problems, the solutions and be able to tap into the best minds in this section of Information Technology.

The number of attendees varies quite a bit depending on the economy - a large number of academic institutions attend and they don't have the budgets of private business or government agencies, so that is one factor. This year was near a thousand attendees if I remember the numbers correctly. There have been much bigger ones, but this is still a respectable showing.

The conference typically goes on for 6 days of mixed training and technical sessions. In addition, there is a mini trade show, evening events and informal Birds of a Feather (BOFs) sessions where people with an idea or a problem get together to brainstorm.

I'm not going to go into the week I was there in any detail, as it would be a small novel (non-fiction) and this is just a short posting. I'll be posting much more info later on my more technical site/blog which is currently low volume and really low readership.

I do have this to say. LISA is attended by the best and friendliest group of technology geeks I have ever met and the community is amazing. If you have the chance, visit the USENIX site LISA '09 and view some of the talks or the keynote.

If you are a system administrator and are looking to be a member of a professional community, feel free to visit the League of Professional System Administrator's site and find out all about it. You may also wish to visit USENIX's SAGE Special Interest Group. This is where LISA was conceived and implemented.  

The real reason for this post is one of the BOFs I attended... all about blogging, specifically system administration and technology in general. It was a lively discussion and part of it was a short discussion on comment spam and managing it. My other site is locked down due to a rather large amount of comment spam which took ages to clean up and as a result, I felt it necessary to lock it down. Post discussion, I have decided to open it up again. This will happen after I upgrade the software, and fix up the legacy data and include it. It doesn't have a lot of technical merit, but it does have history and at least shows how long we have been at it.
 

The conference is over, and it's time to return to the mundane. It was a good time - formal talks, social activity and lots of idea exchanges. Actually a very good time. If I was independently wealthy, I'd probably spend most of my time attending conferences. I hear BSDCan 2010 will be on for next year, so at the very least I have that to look forward to.

I did not attend any of the highly technical presentations, as I'm effectively a BSD newbie (well, I used it for years in the 80's), but I don't really have much experience with the modern versions. That is a task for this year. I have the iso images, vmware, enough physical machines to brown out the neighborhood and time to learn.

I've been lurking for ages and not really gotten involved except at the periphery, so it's time to jump in and help out. I guess I should play up my strengths first and get involved on the sysadmin side and see where that leads me. Could be fun, might be more work, but I will not know until I get started. Cat and Leslie's talk on open source involvement was enough to get the desire woken up, so it's time to see if I can contribute something other than the occasional blog post.

Not too much to say beyond that. I spent a lot more time talking with the attendees than I normally do, so I never managed to take my plethora of photos. I think I only have 13 that were even worth posting and some of them are a little out of focus. Next year I'll do better.

It appears that I only blog here around BSDCan. I'll have to do something about that someday.

As of Monday, it's back to freelance consulting. I've left the corporate world behind again and I am going back into the trenches. It was a good year and a bit, but the security work never managed to be the real focus of the job.

Enough of that noise. BSDCan 2009 - a little smaller this year, might be something to do with the economic downturn or whatever buzzword meets your requirement for defining the rather "interesting" situation we all find ourselves in these days.

Today was the second day of tutorials, and official registration day for the conference. Dan managed to do an excellent job again of getting this set up and running, I don't know where he finds the time.

I managed to attend Michael Lucas' netflow session and it was very informative. I could have used the info about 3 months ago - better late than never.

Tomorrow should be a full day and there are lots of sessions. Even if you don't attend, the list of events is pretty impressive. Check it out at http://www.bsdcan.org