1 post tagged “usenix”

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.