Real world system

administration training
22ND LARGE INSTALLATION SYSTEM
ADMINISTRATION CONFERENCE

San Diego
CALIFORNIA

November 914, 2008

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Implementing Intellipedia Within
a Need to Know Culture by Sean
Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia
Development, Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency

PLENARY SESSIONS
Reconceptualizing Security, by
Bruce Schneier, Founder and CTO,
BT Counterpane
The State of Electronic Voting,
2008, by David Wagner, University
of California, Berkeley

6 DAYS OF TRAINING

New! Virtualization Track:

Xen Hypervisor, VMware
ESX 3i, and security taught
by Stephen Spector, John
Arrasjid, Phil Cox, and more
New! Solaris Track:
Debugging, administration,
and DTrace taught by James
Mauro, Peter Baer Galvin, and
Marc Staveley
Plus classes on Cfengine 3 by
Mark Burgess , RRDtool by
Tobias Oetiker, and more . . .

3-DAY TECHNICAL PROGRAM

2 tracks of Invited Talks by industry
leaders on timely topicslive
streaming available!
Refereed papers on topics such as
configuration management, parallel
systems deployment, virtualization,
and security
Workshops, Guru Is In sessions,
Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, Workin-Progress reports, posters, and
more!
Vendor Exhibition: A showcase of the
latest commercial innovations

SPONSORED BY

&

Register by October 17 and save! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

WHY I ATTEND LISA

There is always one thing that I learn that makes me want to

shout, That just paid for the entire conference!
Tom Limoncelli
Google NYC

lisa 08 at a glance
Saturday, November 8
5:00 p.m.8:00 p.m. On-Site Registration
Sunday, November 9
7:30 a.m.5:00 p.m. On-Site Registration
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Training Program
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: Fighting Spam
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: MicroLISA
9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m. Workshop: BusinessDriven IT Management
1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: Configuration
Management
Monday, November 10
7:30 a.m.5:00 p.m. On-Site Registration
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Training Program
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: University Issues
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: ZFS
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: Government
and Military System
Administration
7:00 p.m.11:00 p.m. Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs )
Tuesday, November 11
7:30 a.m.5:00 p.m. On-Site Registration
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Training Program
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: Advanced Topics
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: Best Practices in the
Server Room
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Workshop: Virtual Infrastructures
7:00 p.m.11:00 p.m. Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs )

Wednesday, November 12
7:30 a.m.5:00 p.m. On-Site Registration
8:45 a.m.10:30 a.m. Opening Remarks, Awards, and
Keynote
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Training Program
11:00 a.m.5:30 p.m. Technical Sessions
Noon7:00 p.m.
Vendor Exhibition
5:30 p.m.6:30 p.m. Exhibit Hall Happy Hour
6:30 p.m.7:30 p.m. Poster Session
7:30 p.m.11:30 p.m. Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs )
Thursday, November 13
7:30 a.m.5:00 p.m. On-Site Registration
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m. Training Program
9:00 a.m.5:30 p.m. Technical Sessions
10:00 a.m.2:00 p.m. Vendor Exhibition
5:30 p.m.6:30 p.m. Poster Session
6:30 p.m.8:30 p.m. Reception
8:30 p.m.11:30 p.m. Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs )
Friday, November 14
8:00 a.m.noon
9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.
9:00 a.m.3:30 p.m.
4:00 p.m.5:30 p.m.

On-Site Registration
Training Program
Technical Program
Closing Session

LISA 08 is still the meeting place of choice for system, network, database, and
other computer administrators and engineers from all over the world. Take
advantage of 6 days of top-notch training and return with the skills you need to
take your career to new heights.

Dear Colleague,
On behalf of all of the LISA 08 organizers, Id like to invite you to join us in San Diego, CA, for
the 22nd Large Installation System Administration Conference.
For the past 20 years LISA has been the focal point for the global community of system and
network administrators. This year LISA continues that tradition, featuring innovative tools
and techniques essential for your professional and technical development.
Take advantage of the popular 6 days of training. Select from over 50 tutorials taught by highly
expert instructors, including:
Mark Burgess on Integrating Cfengine into Organizational Service Management
Tom Christiansen on Advanced Perl
David N. Blank-Edelman on Over the Edge System Administration
Plus, new in 2008, were offering tracks on virtualization and on Solaris. These two 6-day
series include classes such as:
Peter Baer Galvin on Solaris 10 Administration
Jim Mauro on Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)
Richard McDougall on VMware ESX Performance and Tuning
In addition to the training, 3 days of technical sessions include top-notch refereed papers,
informative invited talks, expert Guru Is In sessions, and a poster sesson.
Our 20+ invited talks feature our most impressive slate of speakers to date. They include:
Keynote Address: Implementing Intellipedia Within a Need to Know Culture, by Sean
Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia Development, Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency
Plenary Session: Reconceptualizing Security, by Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer, BT
Plenary Session: The State of Electronic Voting, 2008, by David Wagner, University of
California, Berkeley
LISA is the premier forum for presenting new research in system administration. We selected
papers showcasing state-of-the-art work on topics including configuration management,
parallel systems deployment, virtualization, and security.
Bring your perplexing technical questions to experts at LISAs Guru Is In sessions.
Explore the latest commercial innovations at the Vendor Exhibition.
Benefit from opportunities for peer interaction (a.k.a. the Hallway Track).
Take advantage of the live streaming opportunities.
Early registration discounts for LISA 08, taking place November 914, 2008, in San Diego, are
now available. Register by Friday, October 17, and save up to $300!
Were pleased to bring LISA to San Diego and we look forward to seeing you there.
Mario Obejas, Raytheon
LISA 08 Program Chair

Program Chair
Mario Obejas, Raytheon
Program Committee
Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh
Derek Balling, Answers Corporation
Travis Campbell, AMD
Narayan Desai, Argonne National
Laboratory
leen Frisch, Exponential Consulting
Brent Hoon Kang, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte
Chris McEniry, Sony Computer
Entertainment America
Adam Moskowitz, Permabit Technology
Corporation
David Parter, University of Wisconsin
David Plonka, University of Wisconsin
Kent Skaar, BMC Software, Inc.
Invited Talks Coordinators
Rudi van Drunen, Competa IT/Xlexit
Philip Kizer, Tekelec
Workshops Coordinator
Lee Damon, University of Washington
Guru Is In Coordinator
John Rowan Littell, California College
of the Arts
Work-in-Progress Reports and Posters
Coordinators
Brent Hoon Kang, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte
Gautam Singaraju, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte
USENIX Board Liaison
Alva L. Couch, Tufts University
The USENIXAssociation Staff
discoun
t
bird
ly
r
r by

registe
ea

OCT 17 08

www

. use nix . o rg /

lisa

20

08

ird discount
yb
rl
a
er by

regist
e

Training AT A GLANCE

OCT 17 08

www

. use nix . o rg /

lisa

20

08

Sunday, November 9

Monday, November 10

Full Day: 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Full Day: 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

S1 Virtualization! Whats It Good For? New

leen Frisch and Kyrre Begnum

M1

Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor New

Stephen Spector, Wenjin Hu, and Zach Shepherd

S2

Solaris 10 Performance, Observability, and Debugging

James Mauro

M2

System and Network Performance Tuning

Marc Staveley

S3

Performance Tools, Metrics, and Tuning for Solaris/

Linux New
Adrian Cockcroft

M3

Computer Forensics: Disk Forensics and Lab (Hands-on) New

Simson L. Garfinkel

M4

S4

Computer Forensics (Hands-on)

Simson L. Garfinkel

Administering Linux in Production Environments

leen Frisch

M5

S5

Inside the Linux 2.6 Kernel

Theodore Tso

Seven Habits of the Highly Effective System Administrator:

Hints, Tricks, Techniques, and Tools of the Trade
Lee Damon and Mike Ciavarella

M6

Effective Change Management: Making System Integrity Easy

Geoff Halprin

Half Day Morning: 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

S6

Security Without Firewalls

Abe Singer

Half Day Morning: 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

S7

Advanced Perl, Part 1: Strings, Unicode, and Pattern

Matching New
Tom Christiansen

M7

Advanced Perl, Part 3: Multitasking via Processes and

Threads New
Tom Christiansen

S8

Management 101: Effective Communication Tools for

Sysadmins
Geoff Halprin and Elizabeth Zwicky

M8

Working with SELinux New

Rik Farrow

M9

RRDtool as a Communication Tool

Tobias Oetiker

Half Day Afternoon: 1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.

S9

Building a Logging Infrastructure and Log Analysis for

Security
Abe Singer

S10 Advanced Perl, Part 2: Packages, Modules, and

Classes New
Tom Christiansen
S11 Management 201: Effective Team Management of System
Administrators
Geoff Halprin and Elizabeth Zwicky

Half Day Afternoon: 1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.

M10 Performance Tracking with Cacti

John Sellens
M11 Wireshark (Ethereal) and the Art of Debugging Networks
Gerald Carter
M12 The Joy of Running Diskless Linux
Tobias Oetiker
Tuesday, November 11
Full Day: 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

NEW! training series on virtualization and solaris

LISA now offers two 6-day series of classes, focusing on some of the
most important topics youll encounter: virtualization and Solaris.
Follow the icons throughout the training section and complete the
series. See p. 14 for more information about these special tracks.
=

2 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

T1 Virtualization with VMware ESX 3i for UNIX Administrators:

The Fundamentals
John Arrasjid and Shridhar Deuskar
T2

Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) New

James Mauro

Half Day Morning: 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

T3

Databases: What You Need to Know

John Sellens

T4

RRDtool by Example New

Tobias Oetiker

T5

Advanced Shell Programming

Mike Ciavarella

Want more info? Please see www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for comprehensive

tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.
Tuesday, November 11 (continued)

Wednesday, November 12 (continued)

Half Day Morning: 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m. (continued)

Half Day Afternoon: 1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.

T6

Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System

Bottlenecks updated for 2008
Jacob Farmer

W6

Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 2: Virtualization

(Hands-on) New
Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley

T7

Recovering from Linux Hard Drive Disasters

Theodore Tso

W7

T8

Integrating Cfengine into Organizational Service

Management New
Mark Burgess

Disaster Preparedness (and Recovery): How to Keep Your

Company (and Your Job) Alive
Evan Marcus

W8

DNS and DHCP Considerations When Migrating to IPv6 New

Peter Losher

Reinventing Yourself New

Marcus Ranum

Thursday, November 13

Half Day Afternoon: 1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.

Full Day: 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

T10 Nagios: Advanced Topics

John Sellens

R1

Securing Virtual Servers: XenServer and VMware ESX

Server New
Phil Cox

R2

So You Have Active Directory: Now What? A Field Guide to AD

Integration for UNIX Sysadmins
Gerald Carter

T9

T11 Writing JavaScript Applications Running in the Browser with

Qooxdoo New
Tobias Oetiker
T12 Documentation Techniques for Sysadmins
Mike Ciavarella
T13 Next-Generation Storage Networking updated for 2008
Jacob Farmer
T14 An Introduction to SystemTap New
Theodore Tso
T15 Cfengine 3 New
Mark Burgess
T16 Incident Response New
Abe Singer
Wednesday, November 12
Full Day: 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

W1 Virtualization with VMware ESX 3i for UNIX Administrators:

Advanced Topics
John Arrasjid and Shridhar Deuskar
W2

Building Web Interfaces with PHP and SQL New

Marcus Ranum

Half Day Morning: 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

R3

Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 3: File Systems (Handson) New

Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley

R4

Over the Edge System Administration, Volume 1

David N. Blank-Edelman

Half Day Afternoon: 1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.

R5

Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 4: Security (Handson) New

Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley

R6

Over the Edge System Administration, Volume 2

David N. Blank-Edelman

Friday, November 14
Full Day: 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Half Day Morning: 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

F1 VMware ESX Performance and

Tuning New
Richard McDougall

W3

Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 1: Administration

(Hands-on) New
Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley

F2

Resource Management with Solaris Containers

Jeff Victor

W4

Achieving High Availability (in Your Lifetime)

Evan Marcus

F3

Implementing [Open]LDAP Directories

Gerald Carter

W5

Beyond Shell Scripts: 21st-Century Automation Tools and

Techniques
leen Frisch

F4

Practical Python for System Administrators New

Steve Holden

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 3

ird discount
yb
rl
a
er by

regist
e

Training PROGRAM
Full Day (9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.)

S1 Virtualization! Whats It Good

For? New
leen Frisch, Exponential Consulting;
Kyrre Begnum, Oslo University College
Who should attend: Sysadmins who are
curious about the benefits of virtualization or who need to deploy it in their
environment.
Take back to work: The ability to begin
deploying virtualization in your environment, along with an understanding of
the many tradeoffs you will need to
address.
Topics include:
What virtualization is and what it
can and cannot do for you
Available software and management options
Typical deployment scenarios and
special-purpose solutions
Administrative challenges of
integrating virtualization into your
existing environment
Security issues with virtualization
S2

Solaris 10 Performance, Observability,

and Debugging
James Mauro, Sun Microsystems;
Richard McDougall, VMware
Who should attend: Anyone who
supports or may support Solaris 10
machines.
Take back to work: How to apply the
tools and utilities available in Solaris
10 to resolve performance issues and
pathological behavior and to understand the system and workload better.
Topics include:
Solaris 10 features overview
Solaris 10 tools and utilities
Understanding memory use and
performance
Understanding thread execution
flow and profiling
Understanding I/O flow and
performance
Looking at network traffic and
performance

4 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

Application and kernel interaction

Putting it all together

www

S5

S3 Performance Tools, Metrics, and

Tuning for Solaris/Linux New
Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix, Inc.

S4 Computer Forensics (Hands-on)

Simson L. Garfinkel, Naval Postgraduate
School
Who should attend: Anyone interested
in recovering lost or deleted data, hunting for clues, and tracking information.
Take back to work: An in-depth under
standing of why forensic tools are
possible, what they can do, their limits,
and the legal environment that governs
U.S. forensics.
Topics include:
Memory forensics and file carving
Forensics and policy
Disk, network, document, and Web
forensics
Anti-forensics

lisa

20

08

Inside the Linux 2.6 Kernel

Theodore Tso, IBM Linux Technology
Center
Who should attend: Application
programmers, sysadmins interested
in performance tuning their Linux systems, and kernel developers.
Take back to work: An overview and
roadmap of the kernels design and
functionality: its structure, the basic
features it provides, and the most
important algorithms it employs.

Who should attend: Capacity planning

engineers and sysadmins with an interest in performance optimization and
who work with Solaris or Linux.
Take back to work: A vendor- and
OS-independent understanding of
capacity planning techniques and tools,
an understanding of the meaning and
behavior of metrics, and knowledge of
the common fallacies, misleading indicators, sources of measurement error,
and other traps for the unwary.
Topics include:
Computer system and network
performance data collection, analysis, modeling, and capacity planning on any platform using bundled
utilities and freely available tools
such as Orca, BigBrother, OpenNMS, Nagios, Ganglia, SE Toolkit,
R, Ethereal/Wireshark, Ntop,
MySQL and PDQ
TCP/IP measurement and tuning
Complex storage subsystems
Virtualization
Advanced Solaris metrics

OCT 17 08

. use nix . o rg /

Topics include:
How the kernel is organized
Ground rules of kernel
programming
Implementation and properties of
the most important algorithms
Comparison between Linux and
UNIX kernels, with emphasis on
differences in algorithms
Details of the Linux scheduler
The virtual memory subsystem
Linuxs virtual file system layer
A quick tour through Linuxs networking stack
Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.)

S6

Security Without Firewalls

Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer
Center
Who should attend: Administrators
who want or need to explore strong,
low-cost, scalable security without
firewalls.
Take back to work: How to build effective, scalable, host-based security
without firewalls.
Topics include:
The threat perspective from a datacentric point of view
How to implement and maintain
centralized configuration management using Cfengine and how to
build reference systems for fast
and consistent (re)installation of
hosts
Secure configuration and management of core network services
such as NFS, DNS, and SSH

Want more info? Please see www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for comprehensive

tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.
Good system administration
practices
Implementing strong authentication and eliminating use of plaintext
passwords for services such as
POP/IMAP
A sound patching strategy
An overview of the compromise,
how we recovered, and what we
learned
S7

S8

Who should attend: Sysadmins who

wish to become more proactive in managing their duties and to learn tools
and tips that will assist them to communicate more effectively with their
managers, users, and other important
constituents of their services.
Take back to work: Improved communication skills that will make you a
more effective system administrator.

Advanced Perl, Part 1: Strings,

Unicode, and Pattern Matching New
Tom Christiansen, Perl Consultant
Who should attend: Perl programmers
who handle international or legacy
datasets or who need to output in
UTF-8 (like most Web pages).
Take back to work: How to use the
powerful new matching facilities in
Perl 5.10 and how to write, debug, and
maintain regexes even when the patterns grow ever more complex.
Topics include:
Opening filehandles to in-memory
strings
Constant and/or read-only strings
String functions from Scalar::Util
Perl Unicode support
Encodings and I/O layers
Possessive quantifiers
New backtracking control verbs
New match variables and pattern
switches
Context and scoping issues
Case-conversions and quoting
Capture buffers (backreferences)
Dynamic regexes using qr//
New relative and named capture
buffers
New dynamic and recursive
patterns
Security concerns in pattern
matching

Management 101: Effective

Communication Tools for Sysadmins
Geoff Halprin and Elizabeth Zwicky,
Consultants

Topics include:
Oral and written communication
Understanding others
Time, risk, and project management
Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.)

S9

Building a Logging Infrastructure and

Log Analysis for Security
Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer
Center
Who should attend: System, network,
and security administrators who want
to be able to separate the wheat of
warning information from the chaff of
normal activity in their log files.
Take back to work: How to get a handle
on your log files, which can help you
run your systems and networks more
effectively and can provide forensic
information for post-incident investigation.
Topics include:
Problems, issues, and scale of
handing log information
Generating useful log information:
improving the quality of your logs
Collecting and storing log
information
Log analysis
How to handle and preserve log
files for human resources issues
and legal matters

Sunday, NOVEMBER 9

S10 Advanced Perl, Part 2: Packages,

Modules, and Classes New
Tom Christiansen, Perl Consultant
Who should attend: Perl programmers, those needing complex data
structure or object facilities, and those
interested in the higher-level object
facilities of tying and overloading or in
building their own lexical pragmas.
Take back to work: Knowledge of Perls
package mechanism, as well as the
basis for modules and classes.
Topics include:
Typeglobs
Per-package symbol-table hashes
Symbolic references
Overriding built-in functions
Saving complex data structures
New and improved pragmas and
modules
Numbers as objects
Conditional module loading
New object facilities
Overloading operations and
constants
Packaging up modules for distros
S11 Management 201: Effective
Team Management of System
Administrators
Geoff Halprin and Elizabeth Zwicky,
Consultants
Who should attend: Sysadmins who
have found themselves being given (or
are hoping to be given, or are anticipating with apprehension) responsibilities
for other people.
Take back to work: The techniques you
need to be effective in your organization-facing duties.
Topics include:
Sysadmin workflow
Personal and workgroup productivity
Progress reporting and journals
Financial management

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 5

Training PROGRAM
Full Day (9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.)

M1 Introduction to the Open Source Xen

Hypervisor New
Stephen Spector, Citrix; Wenjin Hu and
Zach Shepherd, Clarkson University
Who should attend: Sysadmins and architects who are interested in deploying the open source Xen hypervisor in a
production environment.
Take back to work: How to build and
deploy the Xen hypervisor.
Topics include:
Xen architecture overview
Building a Xen hypervisor from
Xen.org
Installation and configuration
Virtual machine creation and
operation
Performance: tools and
methodology
Best practices using Xen
M2 System and Network Performance
Tuning
Marc Staveley, Soma Networks
Who should attend: Novice and
advanced UNIX system and network
administrators, and UNIX developers
concerned about network performance
impacts. A basic understanding of UNIX
system facilities and network environments is assumed.
Take back to work: Procedures and
techniques for tuning your systems,
networks, and application code, along
with guidelines for capacity planning
and customized monitoring.
Topics include:
Performance tuning strategies
Server tuning
NFS performance tuning
Network performance, design, and
capacity planning
Application tuning

6 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

M3 Computer Forensics: Disk Forensics

and Lab (Hands-on) New
Simson L. Garfinkel, Naval Postgraduate
School
Who should attend: Anyone interested
in forensics or data recovery. Note:
S3 is not a prerequisite to this class.
Please see the Web site for what hardware and software are required.
Take back to work: A deeper understanding of modern disk forensic tools,
including both open source and commercial; drill-down familiarity with disk
forensics, including specific tools and
techniques; enough information about
operating systems to understand why
forensic tools are possible, what they
can do, and their limits.
Topics include:
Searches of hard drives and recovery of deleted files with commercial and open source tools: Sleuth
Kit, EnCase, and FTK
File carving
Anti-forensics
M4 Administering Linux in Production
Environments
leen Frisch, Exponential Consulting
Who should attend: Both current Linux
system administrators and administrators from sites considering converting
to Linux or adding Linux systems to
their current computing resources.
Take back to work: The knowledge
necessary to add reliability and availability to your systems and to assess
and implement tools needed for
production-quality Linux systems
Topics include:
Recent kernel developments
High-performance I/O
Advanced compute-server
environments
Enterprise-wide security features,
including centralized authentication
Automation techniques and
facilities
Linux performance tuning

ird discount
yb
rl
a
er by

regist
e

www

OCT 17 08

. use nix . o rg /

lisa

20

08

M5 Seven Habits of the Highly Effective

System Administrator: Hints, Tricks,
Techniques, and Tools of the Trade
Lee Damon, University of Washington;
Mike Ciavarella, Consultant
Who should attend: Junior sysadmins
who want to do it right the first time.
Take back to work: Ideas about how
to streamline your systems and your
workload and, just as important, where
to look to find more answers.
Topics include:
Why your computers should all
agree on the time
Why not to back up everything
Budgeting
Books that can help you and your
users
M6 Effective Change Management: Making
System Integrity Easy
Geoff Halprin, Consultant
Who should attend: Sysadmins who
wish to learn how to better manage
change and risk, those who are responsible for developing or managing their
organizations change management
process, and those who are hoping to
improve their organizations process.
Take back to work: A grasp of the many
aspects of effective change management and how you can improve the
process.
Topics include:
Building a change plan
Regression planning and risk management strategies
Change execution tools and techniques
Emergency changes and downtime
conferences

Want more info? Please see www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for comprehensive

tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.

Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.)

M7 Advanced Perl, Part 3: Multitasking via

Processes and Threads New
Tom Christiansen, Perl Consultant
Who should attend: Perl programmers and sysadmins who need to write
programs that do more than one thing
at a time.
Take back to work: A deep understanding of process management facilities,
I/O redirection and control, the accept/
connect client-server model, and
threads.
Topics include:
Multitasking: Full-process forking
vs. threading
Signals: safe and otherwise
Accessing POSIX signal facilities
Signals, system(), and backticks
Stderr redirection
Security concerns in external
commands
Safe pipe opens
Deadlock issues in pipe handling
IPC::Open2 and IPC::Open3
Low-level primitives: fork, pipe,
waitpid, exec
Forking servers and client-server
hybrids
Sharing data across forks
The ithread model: use threads
Thread management: creation,
joining, detaching
Retrieving data from a thread
Working with threads objects
Sharing data among threads
Yielding the processor
Locking protocols and deadlock
avoidance
Locking variables, subroutines, and
methods
The Thread::Queue module
Thread-queues vs. process-pipes
Using Semaphores from
Thread::Semaphore
Process pools vs. thread pools
Useful threading modules from
CPAN

M8 Working with SELinux New

Rik Farrow, Security Consultant
Who should attend: Sysadmins and security managers of Linux systems who
want or are required to use SELinux.
Take back to work: An awareness of
new tools and techniques for debugging problems with SELinux configuration and applications.
Topics include:
SELinux uncloaked
Using the audit file
Adjusting file/directory context
Using Booleans to adjust policy
Editing and rebuilding policy
M9 RRDtool as a Communication Tool
Tobias Oetiker, Consultant and Author of
RRDTool
Who should attend: Scripters and
programmers who would like to create
a custom monitoring application with
great presentation tools.
Take back to work: Ideas for building the monitoring application of your
dreams.
Topics include:
RRDtool overview
Programming with RRDtool
In-depth graphing
Scaling RRDtool
Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.)

M10 Performance Tracking with Cacti

John Sellens, SYONEX
Who should attend: Network and
system administrators ready to implement a graphical performance and
activity monitoring tool, who prefer an
integrated, Web-based interface.
Take back to work: The information
needed to immediately implement
and use Cacti to monitor systems and
devices on your networks.
Topics include:
Installations
Configuration, setup options, and
how to manage larger and nontrivial configurations

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10

User management and access

control
Special cases: how to deal with
interesting problems
Extending Cacti: how to write
scripts or programs to extend the
functionality of the basic package
Security concerns and access
control
Ongoing operations
M11 Wireshark (Ethereal) and the Art of
Debugging Networks
Gerald Carter, Likewise Software
Who should attend: System and network administrators who are interested in learning how network traffic
monitoring and analysis can be used
as a debugging, auditing, and security
tool.
Take back to work: How to use the
Ethereal protocol analyzer as a debugging and auditing tool for TCP/IP
networks.
Topics include:
Wireshark for network tracing
TCP/IP protocol basics
Analysis of popular application
protocols
How some kinds of TCP/IP network
attacks can be recognized
M12 The Joy of Running Diskless Linux
Tobias Oetiker, Consultant
Who should attend: Linux/UNIX sysadmins who manage several networked
UNIX workstations or cluster nodes.
Take back to work: The ability to slash
your installation times and downtime.
Topics include:
Installing Linux without a work
station
Providing a homogeneous application environment
How to make the automounter sit
up and beg
Managing mixed 32- and 64-bit
environments

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 7

ird discount
yb
rl
a
er by

regist
e

Training PROGRAM
Topics include:
Introduction to DTrace
DTrace components
Using DTrace
DTrace in open source software
Advanced topics

Full Day (9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.)

T1 Virtualization with VMware

ESX 3i for UNIX Administrators:
The Fundamentals
John Arrasjid and Shridhar Deuskar,
VMware
Who should attend: Sysadmins and architects who are interested in deploying a VMware Virtual Infrastructure,
including ESX Server and VirtualCenter, in a production environment.
Take back to work: An understanding
of ESXi 3.5 and VirtualCenter installation, configuration, and basic design
architectures around networking and
storage.
Topics include:
Virtualization overview
ESX 3i installation and configuration
Networking overview and configuring vSwitches
Storage overview and configuring
datastores
RCLI for the UNIX administrator
VMI 101
Virtual machines, virtual appliances, and the OVF
Clusters, Resource Pools and
VMware HA, VMware DRS
T2

Solaris Dynamic Tracing

(DTrace) New
James Mauro, Sun Microsystems
Who should attend: Sysadmins and
other production support staff that
need to look at systems and figure out
what theyre doing or why theyre running slowly on a regular basis.
Take back to work: How to use Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology
to understand the behavior of your
systems and the workloads they run,
whether youre chasing a performance
problem or pathological behavior or
you simply wish to better understand
how applications are using the under
lying system.

8 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

www

T5

Databases: What You Need to Know

John Sellens, SYONEX
Who should attend: System and application administrators who need to support databases and database-backed
applications.
Take back to work: A better understanding of databases and how to
deploy and support common database software and database-backed
applications.
Topics include:
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Berkeley DB
Security, user management, and
access controls
Ad hoc queries with standard
interfaces
Database access from other tools
(Perl, PHP, sqsh, etc.)

T4

RRDtool by Example New

Tobias Oetiker, Consultant and Author of
RRDTool
Who should attend: Sysadmins who
may only have accessed RRDtool
through some front-end application
such as Cacti or Cricket and would like
to get a look under the hood.
Take back to work: How to use RRDtool
directly to handle time-series data in
the networking area.
Topics include:
RRDtool overview
The RRD database format
How to set up an RRD performance
test
RRD graphing
Putting it together

lisa

20

08

Advanced Shell Programming

Mike Ciavarella, Consultant
Who should attend: Junior or intermediate sysadmins or anyone with a basic
knowledge of programming, preferably
with some experience in Bourne/Korn
shells (or their derivatives).
Take back to work: The information
needed to immediately implement, extend, and manage popular monitoring
tools on your systems and networks.

Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.)

T3

OCT 17 08

. use nix . o rg /

Topics include:
Modular shell script programming
Writing secure shell scripts
Performance tuning
Addressing portability at the design
stage
T6

Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating

Backup System Bottlenecks

updated for 2008

Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer
Services
Who should attend: Sysadmins involved in the design and management
of backup systems and policymakers responsible for protecting their
organizations data. The class focuses
on architectures and core technologies and is relevant regardless of what
backup hardware and software you
currently use.
Take back to work: Ideas for immediate, effective, inexpensive improvements to your backup systems.
Topics include:
Conventional disk staging
Virtual tape libraries, removable
disk media, iSCSI
Information lifecycle management
and nearline archiving
Data replication
CDP (Continuous Data Protection)
Capacity Optimization (SingleInstance File Systems)
Minimizing or eliminating tape
drives

Want more info? Please see www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for comprehensive

tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.
T7

Recovering from Linux Hard Drive

Disasters
Theodore Tso, IBM/Linux Foundation
Who should attend: Linux system
administrators and users.
Take back to work: How to recover
from storage disasters caused by
failures somewhere in the hardware or
software stack.
Topics include:
How data is stored on hard drives
Recovering from a corrupted partition table
Recovering from failed software
RAID systems
Low-level techniques to recover
data from a corrupted ext2/ext3
filesystem when backups arent
available
Using e2image to back up critical
ext2/3 filesystem metadata
Using e2fsck and debugfs to sift
through a corrupted filesystem
Preventive measures to avoid
needing to use heroic measures

T8

Integrating Cfengine into

Organizational Service
Management New
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College
Who should attend: Those wanting
an overview of Cfengine concepts for
business issues, with implementation
examples.
Take back to work: How to evaluate
the principles used in configuring
hosts and devices, relate them to
standards, and apply them to your
own environments.
Topics include:
Cfengine policy management
Incident management
Change management
Release management
Availability and capacity management
Security management
Role-based access control

T9

Reinventing Yourself New

Marcus Ranum, Consultant
Who should attend: Anyone who feels
stuck in their career slot, who is contemplating a jump to something new,
who wants to grow to the next level,
and who needs a little help figuring out
how to get from here to there.
Take back to work: Effective techniques
to make a career transition and help in
finding the path to becoming notable in
your own (and your bosss) eyes!
Topics include:
Reinventing yourself: why and
wherefore?
Defining success and making a
roadmap
Finding mentors
Broadening your horizons
Jumping out of planes without
parachutes

Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.)

T10 Nagios: Advanced Topics

John Sellens, SYONEX
Who should attend: Network and
system administrators ready to implement or extend their use of the Nagios
system and network monitoring tool.
Take back to work: The information
you need to immediately implement
and use Nagios and related tools for
monitoring systems and devices on
your networks.
Topics include:
Functionality, features, use, and
application
Installation
Theory of operation
Plug-ins, extensions, and add-ons

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

T11 Writing JavaScript Applications

Running in the Browser with
Qooxdoo New
Tobias Oetiker, Consultant
Who should attend: People with a good
grasp of programming who would
like to put the fun back into writing
Web applications with fully interactive
interfaces.
Take back to work: How to use Qooxdoo
to write a Web application where the
server part is only a few lines of Perl or
PHP code, essentially grabbing data off
your database without having to care
about presentation or the front end in
general.
Topics include:
Setting up a Qooxdoo programming
environment on your laptop
Building a Qooxdoo Hello World
application
Talking to the server
Creating your own widgets
Writing new and complex widgets
Code walkthrough of a real-world
Qooxdoo application
T12 Documentation Techniques for
Sysadmins
Mike Ciavarella, Consultant
Who should attend: Sysadmins who
need to produce documention for the
systems they manage or who want to
improve their documentation skills.
Take back to work: The ability to make
immediate, practical use of the techniques presented in this tutorial in your
day-to-day tasks.
Topics include:
The document life cycle
Targeting your audience
An adaptable document framework
Tools to assist in documentation
TUESDAY continues on p. 10

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 9

Training PROGRAM
Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.)
continued from p. 9

T13 Next-Generation Storage

Networking updated for 2008
Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer
Services
Who should attend: Sysadmins running
day-to-day operations and those who
set or enforce budgets.
Take back to work: An understanding of general architectures, various
approaches to scaling in both perfor
mance and capacity, relative costs of
different technologies, and strategies
for achieving results on a budget.
Topics include:
The latest storage interfaces
Content-Addressable Storage
(CAS)
Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
High-performance file sharing
T14 An Introduction to SystemTap New
Theodore Tso, IBM/Linux Foundation
Who should attend: Linux Kernel developers and advanced system administrators. Familiarity with Linux kernel
internals is extremely helpful.
Take back to work: How to install and
run SystemTap on your Linux systems
and write basic SystemTap scripts and
tapsets.
Topics include:
How to get the latest version of
SystemTap
Managing kernel debuginfo files
Programming SystemTap scripts
How to create tapsets
Examples of SystemTap in action
T15 Cfengine 3 New
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College
Who should attend: Anyone with a
basic knowledge of configuration management who is interested in learning
the next-generation tool.
Take back to work: An understanding
of the new features of the completely
10 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

rewritten Cfengine 3, including its new

syntax and benefits.
Topics include:
The promise model
Bundles and templates
Quickstart configuration
Creating configuration libraries
Upgrading from Cfengine 2
T16 Incident Response New
Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer
Center
Who should attend: Security folks,
sysadmins, and operations staff (e.g.,
help desk). Examples are primarily
from UNIX systems, but most of what
is discussed will be OS neutral. Note
that this is not a forensics class (for
those, see S4 and M3). Although some
forensic analysis will be discussed, it is
only a small portion of the class.
Take back to work: How to put together
a comprehensive incident response
program, from identifying the policies
and tools you need to assessing the
situation and determining an effective,
measured response.
Topics include:
Goals: What results do you want?
Policies: Having the authority to do
the job
Tools: Having the stuff to do the job
Intelligence: Having the information
to do the job
Initial suspicion: Complaints,
alarms, anomalies
The Oh, sh*t moment: When you
realize its a compromise
Gathering information on your
attacker
Assessing the extent of the compromise
Communicating: Inquiring minds
want to know
Recovery: Kicking em out and fixing the damage
Evidence handling
The law: Dealing with law enforcement, lawyers, and HR

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11 (continued)

Attention managers:
why you should send your
employees to LISA 08
Hiring the best and the brightest is the
ultimate goal for any employer. However,
keeping current employees up to par is
just as important. Technology continues
to evolve. To stay ahead of the game, your
employees must continue to enhance
their skills.
The training program at LISA 08 offers a
cost-effective, one-stop shop for training
current IT and development employees. Over 55 full- and half-day tutorials
taught by the most respected leaders in
the field provide an unparalleled opportunity to learn from the best. Tutorials
cover a multitude of system administration topics including open source technologies, security, and defeating spam.
New in 2008, the two training series on
Solaris and virtualization provide your
employees with the opportunity for more
focused training on two of todays most
important topics.
Combining days of training with days of
technical sessions on groundbreaking
research related to system and network
administration makes the LISA 08 experience even more valuable. Additionally,
the evening receptions and BoF sessions provide your staff with a chance to
network with peers and industry leaders
to gain that all-important insider IT
knowledge that will keep your company
current and running smoothly.
Keeping up with technology can be costly
and time-consuming in this unforgiving economy: take full advantage of this
opportunity to have your staff learn from
the top researchers, practitioners, and
authors all in one place, at one time.

Want more info? Please see www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for comprehensive

tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.

Full Day (9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.)

W1 Virtualization with VMware ESX 3i for

UNIX Administrators: Advanced Topics
John Arrasjid and Shridhar Deuskar,
VMware
Who should attend: System administrators and architects who are interested in advanced topics on deploying a
VMware infrastructure.
Take back to work: How to build on your
experience with VMware Infrastructure
to better support a VI3 environment.
Topics include:
Best practices with ESX
New and/or advanced concepts
with networking
New and/or advanced concepts
with storage
Storage VMotion
VMware Site Recovery Manager
W2 Building Web Interfaces with PHP and
SQL New
Marcus Ranum, Consultant
Who should attend: System and network administrators who are interested
in using Web-based interfaces to automate reporting or command/control
systems; site designers and managers.
Take back to work: The basics of PHP
scripting, forms, connecting to databases, and outputting results.
Topics include:
PHP programming constructs
Outputting pages
Input fields
Protecting logins and sessions
Graphics
Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.)

W3 Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 1:

Administration (Hands-on) New
Peter Baer Galvin, Corporate
Technologies; Marc Staveley, Soma
Networks
Who should attend: Solaris systems
managers and administrators interested in learning the new administration
features in Solaris 10.

Take back to work: Intimate knowledge

of the new features and best practices
surrounding Solaris 10 administration.
Topics include:
Solaris versions and features
SMF and FMA
Booting and installing
Patching
Important administration tools
Whats next for Solaris
Quick performance overview
W4 Achieving High Availability (in Your
Lifetime)
Evan Marcus, GDCM
Who should attend: Sysadmins and
data center managers, developers and
their managers, and IT managers.
Take back to work: Simple and practical tools you can use right away to
persuade the bean counters in your
organization of the value of putting high
availability techniques and practices
into place.
Topics include, in reference to high
availability:
Backups and restores
Security
Networking
WANs and replication
W5 Beyond Shell Scripts: 21st-Century
Automation Tools and Techniques
leen Frisch, Exponential Consulting
Who should attend: Sysadmins who
want to explore new ways of automating administrative tasks.
Take back to work: The ability to monitor and maintain more information on
more systems without drastically
increasing your workload.
Topics include:
Automating interactive processes
Open source enterprise backup
tools: Bacula and Amanda
Network and system monitoring
tools
Proactive security monitoring

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12

Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.)

W6 Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 2:

Virtualization (Hands-on) New
Peter Baer Galvin, Corporate
Technologies; Marc Staveley, Soma
Networks
Who should attend: Solaris systems
managers and administrators interested in learning the new virtualization
features in Solaris 10.
Take back to work: Knowledge of the
Solaris 10 virtualization choices.
Topics include:
Zones/containers
LDOMS and domains
Virtualbox
xvm (a.k.a. Xen)
W7 Disaster Preparedness (and
Recovery): How to Keep Your Company
(and Your Job) Alive
Evan Marcus, GDCM
Who should attend: Data center
managers, IT directors, and anyone
who needs to avoid extended downtime
after an outage.
Take back to work: The ability to put
together a plan that fits your company.
Topics include:
What a plan should contain, how
much it costs, and how to test it
Building and staffing DR teams
Senior managements role
W8 DNS and DHCP Considerations When
Migrating to IPv6 New
Peter Losher, Internet Systems
Consortium
Who should attend: System and/or network administrators who need to add
IPv6 to their enterprise networks.
Take back to work: The ability to
acquire an IPv6 prefix, get it routed,
and configure your DNS and DHCP
infrastructure to use IPv6.
Topics include:
Making addressing plans for IPv6
Assigning IPv6 addresses
Coordinating DNS and DHCP
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 11

Training PROGRAM
Full Day (9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.)

R1 Securing Virtual Servers: XenServer

and VMware ESX Server New
Phil Cox, SystemExperts Corporation
Who should attend: Site managers
charged with selecting and setting
virtual server security requirements,
general users who want to know more
about the security features of popular
virtual environments, and sysadmins
who are tasked with implementing
or maintaining the security of virtual
servers.
Take back to work: Familiarity with
current virtualization and popular
technical implementations of it, as
well as an understanding of how to
secure virtual servers that use these
technologies.
Topics include:
Virtualization 101
Threats
Popular technologies
Whats coming next
R2 So You Have Active Directory:
Now What? A Field Guide to AD
Integration for UNIX Sysadmins
Gerald Carter, Likewise Software
Who should attend: Sysadmins who are
tasked with integrating authentication,
file, print, and Web services on Linux/
UNIX/Mac hosts into an AD domain.
Take back to work: In-depth understanding of the best approaches to
managing your system services with
Active Directory.
Topics include:
How to utilize standard protocols
and open source tools to integrate
Linux, UNIX, and Mac clients/
servers into AD domains for
authentication
Restricting logon access based on
AD domain group membership
Providing roaming, offline logons
for Linux laptops using cached AD
credentials

12 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

Configuring Samba file and print

servers to authenticate AD domain
users
Defining access control lists on
files and directories using AD
domain accounts and groups
Configuring Apache Web servers
to provide seamless access to intranet Web content using common
authentication protocols such as
NTLM and Kerberos
Writing Perl scripts to automate
daily AD administrative tasks from
non-Microsoft desktops
Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.)

R3 Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 3:

File Systems (Hands-on) New
Peter Baer Galvin, Corporate
Technologies; Marc Staveley, Soma
Networks
Who should attend: Solaris systems
managers and administrators interested in learning the new file system
features in Solaris 10.
Take back to work: Knowledge of the
Solaris 10 file system choices and
best practices surrounding Solaris 10
administration.
Topics include:
Root disk layout
Mirroring et al.
ZFS
Choosing the most appropriate file
system
R4 Over the Edge System Administration,
Volume 1
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern
University
Who should attend: Old-timers who
think theyve seen it all, and those who
want to develop inventive thinking.
Take back to work: New approaches to
old problems, along with some ways to
solve the insolubles.
Topics include:
How to increase user satisfaction
during downtimes, with 6 lines of
Perl

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13

How to improve your network services by throwing away data

How to drive annoying Web-only
applications without lifting a finger
How to use ordinary objects, such
as Silly Putty, to make your life
easier
Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.)

R5 Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 4:

Security (Hands-on) New
Peter Baer Galvin, Corporate
Technologies; Marc Staveley, Soma
Networks
Who should attend: Solaris systems
managers and administrators interested in the new security features in
Solaris 10.
Take back to work: Knowledge of the
new features in Solaris 10 for addressing the entire security infrastructure,
as well as new issues to consider when
deploying, implementing, and managing Solaris 10.
Topics include:
RBAC: Role Based Access Control
Privileges
NFSv4
Flash archives and live upgrade
DTrace
Auditing enhancements
BSM: Basic Security Module
Solaris Cryptographic Framework
R6 Over the Edge System Administration,
Volume 2
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern
University
Who should attend: Old-timers who
think theyve seen it all, and those who
want to develop inventive thinking.
Take back to work: Approaches to system administration you never dreamed
ofbut you wish you had!
Topics include:
How to benefit from side effects
Arts and crafts for sysadmins
Web apps as sysadmin tools

Want more info? Please see www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for comprehensive

tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.

Full Day (9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.)

F3

F1 VMware ESX Performance and

Tuning New
Richard McDougall, VMware

Who should attend: Both LDAP directory administrators and architects.

Take back to work: Comfort with LDAP
terms and concepts and an understanding of how to extend that knowledge to integrate future applications
using LDAP into your network.

Who should attend: Anyone who is

involved in planning or deploying virtualization on VMware ESX and wants to
understand the performance characteristics of applications in a virtualized
environment.
Take back to work: How to plan, understand, characterize, diagnose, and tune
for best application performance on
VMware ESX.
Topics include:
Hardware acceleration techniques
Diagnosing performance using
VMware tools or guest OS tools in a
virtual environment
Practical limits and overheads
Storage performance
Network throughput and options
Using Virtual SMP
Guest operating system types
Characteristics of Oracle, MS
SQLserver, and MS Exchange
Capacity planning techniques
F2

Resource Management with Solaris

Containers
Jeff Victor, Sun Microsystems
Who should attend: System administrators who want to improve resource
utilization of their Solaris (SPARC, x64,
and x86) systems.
Take back to work: A solid understanding of the facilities and commands
available for maximizing usage of the
Solaris systems in your data center.
Topics include:
What are resources and why would
you want to manage them?
How do you use Solaris features
such as Dynamic Resource Pools,
Resource Capping and Memory
Sets, IPQoS, Schedulers, and
Zones?
Projects and Tasks

Implementing [Open]LDAP Directories

Gerald Carter, Likewise Software

Topics include:
Replacing an NIS domain with an
LDAP directory
Integrating Samba domain file and
print servers
Integrating MTAs such as Sendmail
and Postfix
Creating customized LDAP schema
items
Examining scripting solutions for
developing your own directory
administration tools
F4

Practical Python for System

Administrators New
Steve Holden, Holden Web
Who should attend: System administrators looking for scripting tools to assist them in performing more complex
system administration tasks. Python
experience is not necessary, but familiarity with scripting would be useful.
Take back to work: Familiarity with
Pythons features; how to solve practical administration problems and how
to adapt existing scripts and write your
own.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14

Continuing Education Units

(CEUs)
USENIX provides Continuing Education
Units for a small additional administrative fee. The CEU is a nationally
recognized standard unit of measure for
continuing education and training and is
used by thousands of organizations.
Each full-day tutorial qualifies for 0.6
CEUs. You can request CEU credit by
completing the CEU section on the
registration form. USENIX provides a
certificate for each attendee taking a
tutorial for CEU credit and maintains
transcripts for all CEU students. CEUs
are not the same as college credits.
Consult your employer or school to
determine their applicability.

Our Guarantee
If youre not happy, were not happy. If
you feel a tutorial does not meet the
high standards you have come to expect
from USENIX, let us know by the first
break and we will change you to any
other available tutorial immediately.

want more info?

See www.usenix.org/lisa08/training for
comprehensive tutorial descriptions, including full topics lists and prerequisites.

Topics include:
Generator functions
Iteration protocol and properties
Database API
Graphical capabilities
ird discount
yb
rl
a
er by

regist
e

www

OCT 17 08

. use nix . o rg /

lisa

20

08

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 13

training series: virtualization and solaris

New in 2008! Training Series on Virtualization and Solaris
LISA now offers two 6-day series of classes, focusing on some of the most
important topics youll encounter. Is the latest virtualization information
key to your job success? Looking for in-depth training on Solaris? Enroll
and learn all you need to get the job done. Youll save time by getting your specialized training in one
place and youll save money$100 off the regular 6-day training package price! The tutorials included in each series are listed below. See pp. 413 for descriptions of the tutorials in each series, which
are denoted by icons.
Virtualization Series

Solaris Series

Sunday, November 9
S1 Virtualization! Whats It Good For?
leen Frisch and Kyrre Begnum

Sunday, November 9
S2 Solaris 10 Performance, Observability, and Debugging
James Mauro

Monday, November 10
M1 Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor
Stephen Spector, Wenjin Hu, and Zach Shepherd

Monday, November 10
M2 System and Network Performance Tuning
Marc Staveley

Tuesday, November 11
T1 Virtualization with VMware ESX 3i for UNIX Administrators:
The Fundamentals
John Arrasjid and Shridhar Deuskar

Tuesday, November 11
T2 Solaris Dynamic Tracing: DTrace
James Mauro

Wednesday, November 12
W1 Virtualization with VMware ESX 3i for UNIX Administrators:
Advanced Topics
John Arrasjid and Shridhar Deuskar
Thursday, November 13
R1 Securing Virtual Servers: XenServer and VMware ESX Server
Phil Cox
Friday, November 14
F1 VMware ESX Performance and Tuning
Richard McDougall

Wednesday, November 12
W3 Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 1: Administration
(Hands-on)
Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley
W6

Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 2: Virtualization

(Hands-on)
Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley

Thursday, November 13
R3 Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 3: File Systems
(Hands-on)
Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley
R5

Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 4: Security

(Hands-on)
Peter Baer Galvin and Marc Staveley

Friday, November 14
F2 Resource Management with Solaris Containers
Jeff Victor

14 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

Training INSTRUCTORS
John Arrasjid

Mark Burgess

Mike Ciavarella

T1, W1

T8, T15

M5, T5, T12

John Arrasjid has 20

years of experience in the
computer science field.
His experience includes
work with companies such
as AT&T, Amdahl, 3Dfx Interactive, Kubota
Graphics, Roxio, and his own company,
WebNexus Communications, where he
developed consulting practices and built a
cross-platform IT team. John is currently
a senior member of the VMware Professional Services Organization as a Consulting
Architect. John has developed a number of
PSO engagements, including Performance,
Security, and Disaster Recovery and Backup.
John is the Worldwide BC/DR Practice lead
in VMwares Professional Services group. He
is co-author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Deploying the VMware Infrastructure.
Kyrre Begnum
S1
Kyrre Begnum is currently completing his Ph.D.
in Network and System
Administration at Oslo University College in Norway.
Part of his research focuses on managing
virtual infrastructures, and he is the author
of the Manage Large Networks (MLN) VM
administrative tool.
David N. Blank-Edelman
R4, R6
David N. Blank-Edelman
is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern
University College of
Computer and Information Science and the author of the OReilly
book Perl for System Administration. He has
spent the past 20+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform
environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the
MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program
chair of LISA 05 and was one of the LISA 06
Invited Talks co-chairs.

Mark Burgess is Professor of Network and System

Administration at Oslo
University College, Norway
(a member of the EMANICS
Network of Excellence). He is the author of
the configuration management system Cfengine and of several books and many papers
on the topic, including the SAGE Short Topics
booklet A System Engineers Guide to Host
Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine,
coauthored with leen Frisch.
Gerald Carter
M11, R2, F3
Gerald Carter has been
a member of the Samba
Development Team since
1998. He has been developing, writing about, and
teaching on open source since the late 1990s.
He authored LDAP System Administration and
the third edition of Using Samba for OReilly
Publishing. Currently Jerry is employed by
Likewise Software as a Samba and open
source developer.
Tom Christiansen
S7, S10, M7
Tom Christiansen has been
involved with Perl since
day zero of its initial public
release in 1987. Author
of several books on Perl,
including the Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl from OReilly, Tom is also a major
contributor to Perls online documentation.
He holds undergraduate degrees in computer science and Spanish and a Masters in
computer science. He now lives in Boulder,
Colorado.

Mike Ciavarella has been

producing and editing
technical documentation
since he naively agreed to
write application manuals
for his first employer in the early 1980s. He
has been a technical editor for Macmillan
Press and has been teaching system administrators about documentation for the past
eight years. Mike has an Honours Degree in
Science from the University of Melbourne.
After a number of years working as Senior
Partner and head of the Security Practice
for Cybersource Pty Ltd, Mike returned to
his alma mater, the University of Melbourne.
He is now an independent consultant. In his
ever-diminishing spare time, Mike is a caffeine addict and photographer.
Adrian Cockcroft
S3
Adrian Cockcroft is well
known as a Distinguished
Engineer at Sun Microsystems and eBay Research
Labs and is currently Director of Web Engineering at Netflix. Author
of four books on performance tuning and capacity planning, he has been inspired by his
involvement in the Homebrew Mobile Phone
club to invent the term Millicomputing and
apply ultra low power devices to enterprise
computing applications.

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 15

Training INSTRUCTORS
Phil Cox

Shridhar Deuskar

leen Frisch

R1

T1, W1

S1, M4, W5

Phil Cox is a Principal Consultant of SystemExperts

Corporation, a consulting
firm that specializes in
system security and management. He is a well-known authority in
the areas of system integration and security.
His experience includes Windows, UNIX,
and IP-based networks integration, firewall
design and implementation, and ISO 17799
and PCI compliance. He frequently writes
and lectures on issues dealing with heterogeneous system integration and compliance with PCI-DSS. He is the lead author of
Windows 2000 Security Handbook 2nd Edition
(Osborne McGraw-Hill) and contributing
author for Windows NT/2000 Network Security
(Macmillan Technical Publishing). He holds a
BS in Computer Science from the College of
Charleston.
Lee Damon
M5
Lee Damon has a BS in
Speech Communication from Oregon State
University. He has been a
UNIX system administrator
since 1985 and has been active in SAGE and
LOPSA since their inceptions. He assisted
in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
and has developed mixed environments for
Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He
is currently leading the development effort
for the Nikola project at the University of
Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other professional activities,
he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE
and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of
LISA 04.

16 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

Shridhar Deuskar is an
experienced professional
in the IT industry. He has
over 10 years of experience
in system administration of
UNIX and Windows servers. He has consulted with companies such as Caterpillar,
HP, and EMC. Currently he is a Consulting
Architect in VMwares Professional Services
organization and is responsible for delivering services tied to virtualization to clients
worldwide.
Jacob Farmer
T6, T13
Jacob Farmer is a wellknown figure in the data
storage industry. He has
written numerous papers
and articles and is a regular speaker at trade shows and conferences.
In addition to his regular expert advice
column in the Reader I/O section of InfoStor
Magazine, the leading trade magazine of the
data storage industry, Jacob also serves
as the publications senior technical advisor. Jacob has over 18 years of experience
with storage technologies and is the CTO of
Cambridge Computer Services, a national
integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.
Rik Farrow
M8
Rik Farrow has been teaching UNIX security classes
since 1987. He wrote the
second book on UNIX security, as well as hundreds
of security-related articles. His experience
with Linux security goes back over ten years
and has led him to believe that sandboxing
applications with SELinux is not just a good
idea, but necessary. Rik Farrow is also editor
of ;login:.

leen Frisch has been

working as a system
administrator for over 20
years. She currently looks
after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows
systems. She is the author of several books,
including Essential System Administration
(now in its 3rd edition) and the SAGE Short
Topics booklet A System Engineers Guide to
Host Configuration and Maintenance Using
Cfengine, coauthored with Mark Burgess.
leen was the program committee chair
for LISA 03 and is a frequent presenter at
USENIX and SAGE events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.
Peter Baer Galvin
W3, W6, R3, R5
Peter Baer Galvin is the
Chief Technologist for
Corporate Technologies,
Inc., a systems integrator
and VAR. Previously he was
the Systems Manager for Brown Universitys Computer Science Department. Peter
is currently a columnist for ;login:. He has
written articles for Byte and other magazines, as well as columns for SunWorld and
Sys Admin magazines. Peter is co-author of
the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied
Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a
consultant and trainer, Peter has taught tutorials on security and system administration
and has given talks at many conferences and
institutions on such topics as Web services,
performance tuning, security, system administration, and high availability.

Simson L. Garfinkel

Steve Holden

Peter Losher

S4, M3

F4

W8

Simson L. Garfinkel is
an Associate Professor
at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
CA, and a fellow at the
Center for Research on Computation and
Society at Harvard University. He is also the
founder of Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops advanced
computer forensic tools used by businesses
and governments to audit their systems.
Garfinkel has research interests in computer
forensics, the emerging field of usability and
security, information policy, and terrorism.
He has actively researched and published in
these areas for more than two decades. He
writes a monthly column for CSO Magazine,
for which he has been awarded four national
journalism awards, and is the author or coauthor of fourteen books on computing. He
is perhaps best known for Database Nation:
The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century and for
Practical UNIX and Internet Security.
Geoff Halprin
S8, S11, M6
Geoff Halprin has spent
over 30 years as a software developer, system
administrator, consultant,
and troubleshooter. He
has written software from system management tools to mission-critical billing
systems, has built and run networks for
enterprises of all sizes, and has been called
upon to diagnose problems in every aspect of
computing infrastructure and software. He
is the author of the System Administration
Body of Knowledge (SA-BOK) and the SAGE
Short Topics booklet A System Administrators Guide to Auditing, and was the recipient
of the 2002 SAGE-AU award for outstanding
contributions to the system administration
profession. Geoff has served on the boards
of SAGE, SAGE-AU, USENIX, and LOPSA.
He has spoken at over 20 conferences in
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe,
and the U.S.

Steve Holden is the author

of Python Web Programming
and the chairman of the
Python Software Foundation. His interest in objectoriented programming extends back to the
original SmallTalk implementation, but after
he discovered Python ten years ago he made
it his language of choice for most programming tasks. Steve has over twenty years of
experience as an instructor and teacher. He
consults for government agencies and private corporations and is a contributing editor
for Python Magazine.

Peter Losher is a Senior

System Administrator at Internet Systems Consortium
(ISC), which has run native
dual-stack IPv6 on its servers and networks for a long time. He is one
of the administrators of the F-Root servers
and had primary responsibility for converting
F-Root to be IPv6-compatible. He has more
than 5 years of experience operating IPv6 on
servers and networks. Try traceroute6 www.
isc.org and see whether you have connectivity to ISCs Web server.
Evan Marcus

Wenjin Hu
M1
Wenjin Hu is a graduate
student at Clarkson University. He is the author of
the network chapter in the
book Running Xen: A Handson Guide to the Art of Virtualization. While at
Clarkson, Wenjin has investigated a lot of different virtualization systems and coauthored
an academic paper entitled Quantifying the
Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems. For his PhD research,
he focuses on Xen virtualization and file systems, trying to apply the techniques in those
two fields to provide a more secure and reliable desktop enviroment for common users.
Currently, he is also tackling Solaris xVM and
writing an introductory article for ;login:.

W4, W7
Evan joined Global Data
Center Management
(GDCM) as the Lead Sales
Engineer for North America in 2007. He has more
than 20 years of experience on UNIX systems. Before joining GDCM, he spent 8 years
at VERITAS Software as a systems engineer,
speaker, and author. He also spent 5 years
at Sun Microsystems and 2+ years at Fusion
Systems, where he worked to bring the first
high availability software applications for
SunOS and Solaris to market. He also spent
two years as a system administrator on
the equities trading floor of a multinational
trading institution. He is the co-author of
Blueprints for High Availability, 2nd edition
(John Wiley & Sons, 2003) and coauthor and
co-editor of The Resilient Enterprise (VERITAS
Publications, 2002). He is a well-regarded
and popular speaker on the design of highly
available and disaster-resilient systems and
on fixed-content storage archives.

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 17

Training INSTRUCTORS
James Mauro

Tobias Oetiker

John Sellens

S2, T2

M9, M12, T4, T11

M10, T3, T10

James Mauro is a Senior Staff Engineer in the

Performance and Availability Engineering group
at Sun Microsystems. Jims
current interests and activities are centered
on benchmarking Solaris 10 performance,
workload analysis, and tool development.
This work includes Suns new Opteron-based
systems and multicore performance on
Suns Chip Multithreading (CMT) Niagara
processor. Jim resides in Green Brook, New
Jersey, with his wife and two sons. He spent
most of his spare time in the past year working on the second edition of Solaris Internals.
Jim coauthored the first edition of Solaris
Internals with Richard McDougall and has
been writing about Solaris in various forums
for the past nine years.

Tobias Oetiker is an electrical engineer by education

and a system administrator by vocation. For ten
years he has been working
for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, providing students and staff
with a deluxe UNIX workstation environment. In 2006 he started his own company,
OETIKER+PARTNER AG, running UNIX
servers for industry customers, improving
his pet open source projects MRTG, RRDtool,
and SmokePing, and applying these tools to
solve the customers problems. These days,
Tobias uses a SunRay appliance running off
a diskless, Ubuntu-based SunRay server as
his personal workstation environment. In
2006, Tobias received the prestigious SAGE
Outstanding Achievement Award for his
work on MRTG and RRDtool.

Richard McDougall
F1
Richard McDougall is a
Principal Engineer and the
Chief Performance Architect in the Office of the CTO
at VMware. A recognized
expert in operating systems, virtualization, performance, resource management,
and filesystem technologies, Richard is a
frequent speaker and has published several
papers and books on these topics. Prior
to VMware, most recently he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems,
where he wrote the authoritative books
Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and
Tools.

18 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

John Sellens has been

involved in system and
network administration
since 1986 and is the author
of several related USENIX
papers, a number of ;login: articles, and the
SAGE Short Topics booklet #7, System and
Network Administration for Higher Reliability.
He holds an MMath in computer science
from the University of Waterloo and is a
Chartered Accountant. He is the proprietor of
SYONEX, a systems and networks consultancy, and is currently a member of the
systems team at Magna International. From
1999 to 2004, he was the General Manager
for Certainty Solutions in Toronto. Prior to
joining Certainty, John was the Director of
Network Engineering at UUNET Canada
and was a staff member in computing and
information technology at the University of
Waterloo for 11 years.

Marcus Ranum
T9, W2
Marcus Ranum has been
building and designing
security and security
systems since 1989. He is
the author of several books
on security and has been, variously, network
manager, C programmer, development team
leader, VP of engineering, CSO, CEO, and
consultant. He is currently the CSO of Tenable Network Security.

Zach Shepherd
M1
Zach Shepherd is an
undergraduate student
studying computer science,
physics, and mathematics
at Clarkson University. At
Clarkson, he has collaborated with students
and professors on various Xen-related
projects, including the setup of a Xenbased infrastructure for the Clarkson Open
Source Institute and research in virtualization benchmarking. Zach was a technical
reviewer for Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to
the Art of Virtualization.

Abe Singer

Marc Staveley

Jeff Victor

S6, S9, T16

M2, W3, W6, R3, R5

F2

Abe Singer is a Computer

Security Researcher in
the Security Technologies
Group at the San Diego
Supercomputer Center.
In his operational security responsibilities,
he participates in incident response and
forensics and in improving the SDSC logging
infrastructure. His research is in pattern
analysis of syslog data for data mining. He
is also the author of the SAGE Short Topics
booklet Building a Logging Infrastructure, and
a soon to be released OReilly book on log
analysis.

Marc Staveley now works

with Soma Networks,
where he is applying his
many years of experience
with UNIX development
and administration to leading their IT group.
Previously Marc had been an independent
consultant and also held positions at Sun Microsystems, NCR, Princeton University, and
the University of Waterloo. He is a frequent
speaker on the topics of standards-based
development, multi-threaded programming,
system administration, and performance
tuning.

Stephen Spector

Theodore Tso

M1

S5, T7, T14

Stephen Spector brings

more than 15 years experience in software engineering, product marketing,
and developer and alliance
marketing programs to the Xen.org community as the current community program
manager. He has spent more than 10 years at
Citrix, founding the Citrix Developer Network and supporting the release of the first
Windows CE 1.0 client, as well as working on
various marketing and alliance programs.
He has previously held various positions at
Turbolinux, Racal Datacom, and Siemens.
Stephen holds an MBA from Florida Atlantic
University, an MS in computer science
from the University of Florida, and a BS in
computer engineering from The Ohio State
University.

Theodore Tso has been

a Linux kernel developer since almost the very
beginnings of Linux: he
implemented POSIX job
control in the 0.10 Linux kernel. He is the
maintainer and author of the Linux COM serial port driver and the Comtrol Rocketport
driver, and he architected and implemented
Linuxs tty layer. Outside of the kernel, he is
the maintainer of the e2fsck filesystem consistency checker. Ted is currently employed
by IBM Linux Technology Center.

Jeff Victor has been using

UNIX systems since 1984.
His two-decade career has
included software design
and development, network
and telecomm administration, and ten years
as a Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems.
Jeff wrote the Sun BluePrint Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide and
the How to Move a Container guide, both
available at http://www.sun.com. He also
maintains the Solaris Zones and Containers
FAQ at http://opensolaris.org. Jeff holds a
BS in computer science from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
Elizabeth Zwicky
S8, S11
Elizabeth Zwicky has been
managing system administrators off and on since
her first job. Recently, shes
been hanging out with
educational theorists and testing ways of
teaching problem solving to system administrators, high-school graduates who may or
may not have any interest in system administration but are being paid to listen, and a
four-year-old.

Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 19

TECHNICAL SESSIONS
8:45 a.m.10:30 a.m.

11:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

Opening Remarks, Awards, Keynote

Refereed Papers

Keynote Address

Think About It (Meta-Admin and Theory)

Implementing Intellipedia Within a Need to Know

Culture
Sean Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia Development,
Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency

Designing Tools for System Administrators: An Empirical Test of the

Integrated User Satisfaction Model
Nicole F. Velasquez, Suzanne Weisband, and Alexandra Durcikova,
University of Arizona

Sean will share the technical and cultural changes underway at the
CIA involving the adoption of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking
tools. In 2005, Dr. Calvin Andrus published The Wiki and The Blog:
Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Three years later,
a vibrant and rapidly growing community has transformed how the
CIA aggregates, communicates, and organizes intelligence information. These tools are being used to improve information sharing
across the U.S. intelligence community by moving information out of
traditional channels.
Sean Dennehy was the pilot customer for Intellipedia and has since
become a leading change agent for incorporating Enterprise 2.0
solutions into the intelligence communitys business practices. He
has developed an innovative sabbatical program that introduces
intelligence community officers to the numerous Web 2.0 applications that are being deployed across the intelligence community. The
focus of his efforts is encouraging a viral adoption where officers
replace existing processes to take advantage of network effects
encountered when individuals move projects out of channels and
onto platforms.

Dynamic Dependencies and Performance Improvement

Marc Chiarini and Alva Couch, Tufts University
Automatic Software Fault Diagnosis by Exploiting Application
Signatures
Xiaoning Ding, The Ohio State University; Hai Huang, Yaoping Ruan,
and Anees Shaikh, IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab; Xiaodong Zhang, The
Ohio State University
Invited Talks I

Integrating Linux (and UNIX and Mac) Identity Management in

Microsoft Active Directory
Mike Patnode, Centrify
If you have a mixed environment, some of these might be on your
must-do list: centralizing authentication, access control and policy
management in Microsoft AD, using the Group Policy features of Active Directory for Linux management, delivering SSO to your users,
and complying with government regulations. How can you pull it all
off? Well discuss the challenges, as well as explore the options both
in the public domain and from commercial providers. The questions
well answer include: Why would I want to integrate Linux with Active
Directory? What are the issues (e.g., compatibility and maintenance,
integration, organizational impediments, cost)? What are the choices
in terms of technology requirements and c omponents?
Invited Talks II

Programming the Virtual Infrastructure

Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh
With the use of virtualization, changes in a computing infrastructure
no longer require physical intervention: the capacity of the virtual
machines, their attached disks, and their network connections can
all be changed by software. The challenges of configuring this infrastructure have some interesting analogies with the task of programming the first computersand the whole new discipline of software
engineering was needed to fully exploit their power. What does this
mean for todays system administrator?
The Guru Is In

Managing Large (to Massive) Storage Systems

Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services
Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.
20 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12

2:00 P.M.3:30 p.m.

4:00 P.M.5:30 p.m.

Refereed Papers

Refereed Papers

Large-ish Infrastructure

Trust and Other Security Matters

Petascale System Management Experiences

Narayan Desai, Rick Bradshaw, Susan Coghlan, Andrew Cherry,
Cory Lueninghoener, and William Scullin, Argonne National
Laboratory

Fast, Cheap, and in Control: Towards Pain-Free Security!

Sandeep Bhatt, Cat Okita, and Prasad Rao, Hewlett-Packard

Rapid Parallel Systems Deployment: Techniques for Overnight

Clustering
Donna Cumberland, Randy Herban, Rick Irvine, Michael Shuey, and
Mathieu Luisier, Purdue University

Concord: A Secure Mobile Data Authorization Framework for Regulatory Compliance

Gautam Singaraju and Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina
at Charlotte

ENAVis: Enterprise Network Activities Visualization

Authentication on Untrusted Remote Hosts with Public-Key Sudo

Matthew Burnside, Mack Lu, and Angelos Keromytis, Columbia
University

Qi Liao, Andrew Blaich, Aaron Striegel, and Douglas Thain,

University of Notre Dame

Invited Talks I

Invited Talks I

Deterministic System Administration

Andrew Hume, AT&T LabsResearch
The vision is clear and seductive: take a modest-sized specification
of a computing environment and automatically derive all the stuff
you actually need, from DHCP configurations to ordering cables. Is it
possible to account for every box, every cable, every RAID box, every
volume mounted, every OS deployed? I describe an attempt to do
so, fighting the forces of Chaos and Nature, armed only with logical
positivism, Ruby, little languages, and sarcasm.

Does Your House Have Lions? Controlling for the Risk from Trusted
Insiders
Marcel Simon, Medco Health Solutions
How do you control for risk from trusted insiders? The nature of the
job that system/network/database administrators, application developers, operations center staff, etc., do pretty much requires them
to have privileged access to your infrastructure. That very privilege
means rogues among such individuals can both do great damage
and cover their tracks, so how do you protect your information? This
talk proposes a practical, technology-neutral approach to trusted
insider controls that adapts readily to your business practices and
has proven itself over years of production usage.

Invited Talks II

How to Proceed When 1000 Call Agents Tell You, My Computer Is

Slow: Creating a User Experience Monitoring System
Tobias Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG

Invited Talks II

Once users have figured out that their computers are slow, there is
an uphill battle to improve the performance and at the same time
lose that slowness image. In this talk I will report on the development
of a Perl-based system for passive application monitoring for a large
Swiss telecom company. The system keeps track of hundreds of different performance metrics. Running on over 1,000 client workstations, several gigabytes of performance data are gathered each week
and stored in a central PostgreSQL database. An Ajax-enabled Web
application allows users to explore, compare, and investigate performance data. Hear how investigating performance problems has
turned from random guesswork into a clearly defined process, based
on objective measurements rather than rumors.

Spine is Ticketmasters in-house configuration management system,

which was recently released to the community via GPL. Spine contributes significantly to our ability to manage 4,000+ globally distributed systems with a relatively small team of sysadmins. We rely on
OS-supplied provisioning tools to perform the initial bootstrap, after
which Spine is deployed and used to apply system-specific configuration. We use Spine for the day-to-day management of our infrastructure, including the rollout of new applications and enforcing
the consistency of a given configuration across an essentially infinite
number of instances.

Spine: Automating Systems Configuration and Management

Rafi Khardalian, Ticketmaster

The Guru Is In

The Guru Is In

MySQL 4:00 p.m.4:45 p.m.

Sheeri K. Cabral, The Pythian Group

Spam Fighting
Chris St. Pierre, Nebraska Wesleyan University

PostgreSQL 4:45 p.m.5:30 p.m.

Josh Berkus, Josh Drake, and David Fetter, PostgreSQL Project

Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.

Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 21

TECHNICAL SESSIONS
9:00 A.M.10:30 A.M.

11:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

PLENARY SESSION

Refereed Papers

Reconceptualizing Security
Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer, BT

Virtualization

Security is both a feeling and a reality. You can feel secure without
actually being secure and you can be secure even though you dont
feel secure. We tend to discount the feeling in favor of the reality, but
theyre both important. The divergence between the two explains why
we have so much security theater, and why so many smart security
solutions go unimplemented. Several different fieldsbehavioral
economics, the psychology of decision-making, evolutionary
biologyshed light on how we perceive security, risk, and cost. Its
only when the feeling and the reality of security converge that we
have real security.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a security guru, he
is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and
commentator. When people want to know how security really works,
they turn to Schneier.
His first bestseller, Applied Cryptography, explained how the arcane
science of secret codes actually works. It was described by Wired as
the book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published. His book on computer and network security, Secrets and
Lies, was called by Fortune [a] jewel box of little surprises you can
actually use. His current book, Beyond Fear, tackles the problems of
security from the small to the large: personal safety, crime, corporate security, national security.
Regularly quoted in the media, he has testified on security before the
United States Congress on several occasions and has written articles
and op eds for many major publications, including The New York
Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Wired, Nature, The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post.
Schneier also publishes a free monthly newsletter, Crypto-Gram,
which has over 130,000 readers. In its seven years of regular publication, Crypto-Gram has become one of the most widely read forums
for free-wheeling discussions, pointed critiques, and serious debate
about security. As head curmudgeon at the table, Schneier explains,
debunks, and draws lessons from security stories that make the
news.

Storm: Weathering Network and Electrical Surges Using Virtualization

Mark Dehus and Dirk Grunwald, University of Colorado
IZO: Applications of Large-Window Compression to Virtual Machine
Management
Mark A. Smith, Jan Pieper, Daniel Gruhl, and Lucas Villa Real, IBM
Almaden Research Center
Portable Desktop Applications Based on P2P Transportation and
Virtualization
Youhui Zhang, Xiaoling Wang, and Hong Liang, Tsinghua University
Invited Talks I

Mac OS X: From the Server Room to Your Pocket

Jordan Hubbard, Director, UNIX Technology Group, CoreOS, Apple, Inc.
This talk will cover the evolution of Mac OS X and its deployment on
everything from large servers to embedded platforms. Hardware
trends and some of the challenges they present for Apple and the
industry as a whole, as well as some of the challenges facing UNIX,
will be discussed.
Invited Talks II

An Open Audit of an Open CA

Ian Grigg, CAcert
How does a lightweight community Certificate Authority (CA)
engage in the heavyweight world of PKI and secure browsing? With
the introduction of Public Key Infrastructure, the Internet security
framework rapidly became too complex for individuals and small
groups to deal with, and the audit stepped into the gulf to provide a
kinder face, in the form of a simple opinion or judgment call. This
talk tracks the systems audit of CAcert, an open-membership CA,
as a case study in auditing versus the open Internet, community
versus professionalism, quality versus enthusiasm. It will look at
how CAcert found itself at this point and then will walk through some
big-ticket items, such as risks, assurance, disputes, privacy, and
security. Can CAcert deliver on its goal of free certs?
The Guru Is In

VMware
Richard McDougall and John Y. Arrasjid, VMware
Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.

22 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13

2:00 P.M.3:30 P.M.

4:00 P.M.5:30 P.M.

Refereed Papers

Refereed Papers

On the Wire

Getting Stuff Done

Correlated Distributed Events as Feedback for an Adaptive Firewall

Matthew Disney and David Vasil, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Sysman: A Virtual File System for Managing Clusters

Mohammad Banikazemi, David Daly, and Bulent Abali, IBM T.J.
Watson Research Center

Topnet: A Network-aware top(1)

Antonis Theocharides, Demetres Antoniades, Michalis Polychronakis, Elias Athanasopoulos, and Evangelos P. Markatos, Institute of
Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology (ICI-FORTH),
Hellas, Greece
Fast Packet Classification for Snort
Alok Tongaonkar, Sreenaath Vasudevan, and R. Sekar, Stony Brook
University
Invited Talks I

OpenSolaris and the Direction of Future Operating Systems

James Hughes, Sun Microsystems
This presentation will discuss the currently available OpenSolaris
distribution, which is based on Solaris and provides a new installation, patch, and package system. It offers improved familiarity
for developers coming from a Linux environment, with the goal of
providing a capable platform for creating applications. Computing
requirements are changing and future operating systems (not just
OpenSolaris) will have to be capable of handling large memory, high
hardware thread counts, and high-performance networking, while
adding security, scalable storage management, and virtualization
and making new classes of large-scale applications possible.
Invited Talks II

Auditing UNIX File Systems

Johnnie Konstantas, Varonis
Lack of visibility into UNIX file share data use and poor access control
have been a reality since the inception of UNIX. Today, data governance initiatives are providing companies with the means to obtain
a consistent, enterprise-wide view of their data, to improve data
security, to create an audit trail, and to take significant steps toward
compliance and risk reduction. This talk will focus on how technologies that actualize the tenets of data governance can simplify the
process of auditing UNIX file systems and prevent the misuse of an
organizations confidential data. We will also discuss the importance
of managing access controls and how to integrate a comprehensive
data governance framework into the UNIX environment.
The Guru Is In

Time Management
Tom Limoncelli, Google NYC
Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.

Devolved Management of Distributed Infrastructures with Quattor

Stephen Childs, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Marco Emilio
Poleggi, INFN-CNAF, Bologna, Italy; Charles Loomis, Laboratoire de
lAcclrateur Linaire (LAL), Universit Paris-Sud, Orsay, France; Luis
Fernando Muoz Mejas, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid (UAM),
Spain; Michel Jouvin, Laboratoire de lAcclrateur Linaire (LAL),
Universit Paris-Sud, Orsay, France; Ronald Starink, National Institute
for Subatomic Physics, Nikhef, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Stijn De
Weirdt, Interuniversity Institute for High Energy Physics (IIHE), Vrije
Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; Germn Cancio Meli, European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland
Authorisation and Delegation in a Configuration System Called
Machination
Colin Higgs, University of Edinburgh
Invited Talks I

WTFM: Documentation and the System Administrator

Janice Gelb, Sun Microsystems
Most sysadmins hate documentation, both writing and reading it.
This talk attempts to alleviate that frustration by explaining why
system administration documentation is important, showing how to
resolve common documentation problem areas using real-world examples, and describing how to improve product documentation from
your company and from companies that make products that you use.
Invited Talks II

Fighting Spam with pf

Dan Langille, Afilias USA, Inc.
Dealing with spam consumes time, bandwidth, and disk space. This
talk will introduce pf and show how it will reduce both the load on
your mail server and the amount of spam received. This solution will
work with any mail server and requires no changes to your existing
mail server configuration.
The Guru Is In

Solaris Fault Management 4:00 p.m.4:45 p.m.

Scott Davenport and Louis Tsien, Sun Microsystems, Fault Management Development Team
ZFS 4:45 p.m.5:30 p.m.
Richard Elling, Sun Microsystems, ZFS
Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 23

TECHNICAL SESSIONS
9:00 A.M.10:30 A.M.

11:00 A.M.12:30 P.M.

PLENARY SESSION

WORK-IN-PROGRESS REPORTS (WIPS)

The State of Electronic Voting, 2008

David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley

A Work-in-Progress report (WiP) is a very short presentation about

current work. It is a great way to poll the LISA audience for feedback and interest. We are particularly interested in presentations
of student work. To schedule a short presentation, send email to
[email protected] or sign up on the first day of the technical
sessions.

As electronic voting has seen a surge in growth in the U.S. in recent

years, controversy has swirled. Are these systems trustworthy? Can
we rely upon them to count our votes? In this talk, I will discuss what
is known and what isnt. I will survey some of the most important
developments and analyses of voting systems, including the groundbreaking top-to-bottom review commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen last year. I will take stock of where we
stand today, the outlook for the future, and the role that technologists
can play in improving elections.
David Wagner is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science
Division at the University of California at Berkeley, working in the
areas of computer security and electronic voting. He and his Berkeley colleagues are known for discovering a wide variety of security
vulnerabilities in various cell phone standards, 802.11 wireless
networks, electronic voting systems, and other widely deployed
systems. Last year, he helped lead a comprehensive review commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to examine
three California e-voting systems. David is a member of the Election
Assistance Commissions Technical Guidance Development Committee, the Federal advisory board charged with helping to draft future
voting standards.

Invited Talks I

How to Stop Hating MySQL: Fixing Common Mistakes and Myths

Sheeri K. Cabral, The Pythian Group
If you find yourself muttering MySQL is awful, you cannot miss this
session. Many common-sense approaches backfire when applied
to schemas and queries in MySQL. Sheeri K. Cabral of The Pythian
Group will explain why that happens and how to think about designing, tuning, and optimizing MySQL, so you can save your hate for
more important things, such as vi vs. emacs discussions. There will
be plenty of time, so feel free to ask any questions, particularly about
query and schema optimization (actual or in the abstract).
Invited Talks II

Designing, Building, and Populating a 10-Megawatt Datacenter

Doug Hughes, D.E. Shaw Research, LLC
10MW isnt anywhere close to the giant datacenters of Yahoo!,
Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, but they usually have large teams of
people at multiple locations and often none of them are sysadmins.
This talk will give you the system administrators perspective, since
I was heavily involved in many phases of the design, evaluation, and
build process. Well talk about compute density, things that inhibit it,
cooling, power and power distribution, machine planning, and supporting large and dynamic HPC clusters. How many kW can you fit in
a rack? Just because you can, should you? What sorts of redundancy
should you build in? How do you talk to site electricians? Weve looked
at these questions and more, arriving at some conclusions that could
help you.
The Guru Is In

AFS 11:00 a.m.11:45 a.m.

Esther Filderman, The OpenAFS Project
Configuration Management 11:45 a.m.12:30 p.m.
Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs
Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.

24 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14

1:00 p.m.1:45 p.m.

Lunchtime Talk
Standard Deviations and the Average System Administrator
Alva L. Couch, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Tufts
University
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them
from which to choose. Sysadmins often function according to
personal standards that are in fact not standards at all. By
comparison, electricians adhere to strict quality standards that
are externally verifiable. Compliance with standards goes beyond
certifying the administrator to certifying each site for compliance. Should there be standards for system administration? What
current standards exist? What might future standards be? What
would be the costs and would they be worth the trouble? I will discuss potential answers to these questions and solicit alternative
views from the audience. I will explain why I believe that if we are
to be respected as a guild of craftspeople, we must learnlike
electriciansto utilize standards strategically and effectively to
uplift the profession and encourage respect for its practitioners.

2:00 P.M.3:30 P.M. (continued)

Invited Talks III

System Administration and the Economics of Plenty

Tom Limoncelli, Google NYC
Over the years IT resources (disk space, CPU, bandwidth) have gone
from being scarce to being nearly infinitely plentiful. Why do our IT
policies still reflect the days of scarcity? Seeing the world in terms of
the economics of plenty brings about a paradigm shift that changes
the way we treat our users, manage our systems, and take care of
ourselves. Tom will discuss how this change in thinking can improve
IT policies and practices and will present his thoughts on why the
open source movement depends on this paradigm shift.
The Guru Is In

MacOS X
Jordan Hubbard, Director, UNIX Technology Group, Apple, Inc.
Bring your most perplexing questions on this topic to our gurus. See
www.usenix.org/lisa08/tech for more details.

2:00 P.M.3:30 P.M.

4:00 p.m.5:30 p.m.

Invited Talks I

Closing Session

Beyond VDI: Why Thin Client Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Arent Cutting It
Monica Lam, MokaFive and Stanford University
The advent of thin client computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) revitalized computing by enabling applications, remote
desktops, and even virtual machines to be run on centralized servers
in a datacenter. However, wracked by performance, cost, and delivery
issues, neither approach is cut out to solve the problem of managing
multiple desktops within an organization. Come hear about the rise
of a streamed virtual desktop approach that allows IT departments to
manage and deploy secure desktops that run across multiple hardware and operating systems while working online or offline.

LISA Quiz Show

Jeremy Allison, Google
The LISA Quiz Show is back! Closing this years conference, the
LISA Quiz Show will pit teams of attendees again each other in a
test of technical knowledge and cultural trivia. This year Jeremy
Allison will bring his acclaimed game show hosting skills to the
table, assuring a LISA Quiz Show unlike any other. Dont miss it!

Invited Talks II

Inside DreamWorks Animation Studios: A Look at Past, Present, and

Future Challanges
Sean Kamath and Mike Cutler, PDI/DreamWorks
This talk will share some insights into the DreamWorks Animation
Studios. Well explore the challenges of balancing custom workflow expectations, HPC compute requirements, the 10 billion files
dilemma, and bending the rules of physics and latency, all without
losing our artistic roots. Well explain how weve made technology
invisible in a workplace filled with scientists whose right brains are
bigger than their left, and what its like to run 2,000+ Linux desktops
being used full-time. We will engage in a debate on the merits of
globalized computing, very high density computing, and storage clusters, suggesting new ideas about how to overcome these barriers.
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 25

WORKSHOP SERIES

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9

Join Your Peers for three days of focused discussion

Senior system administrators will want to participate in one or more of these full- and half-day workshops. Attendance is limited for each
workshop, which ensures a seminar-like atmosphere. To attend a workshop, you must be an accepted participant of that workshop.

Sunday, November 9, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Sunday, November 9, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Sunday, November 9, 9:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

Fighting Spam: The State of the Art

MicroLISA

Business-Driven IT Management

Chris St. Pierre, Nebraska Wesleyan

University

Robert Au

Mark Burgess, Oslo University College;

Claudio Bartolini, HP Labs

Keeping up with the new techniques,

counter-techniques, tools, intelligence, and
approaches to fighting spam can itself be a
full-time job. The goal of this workshop is for
every participant to come away with an updated arsenal for fighting spam, whether its
a tool that makes their existing setup quicker
or easier, a concept they can develop into
another arrow in their quiver, or an entirely
new layer to fight the latest spamming techniques. The ideal attendee for this workshop
should have a mostly functional email and
spam setup that theyre looking to polish and
tweak. Since this workshop is predicated on
the idea of sharing tools and approaches, the
attendees should have some of each up their
sleeves (or, better yet, in production) that
they can bring. Contact lisa08ws-spam@
usenix.org to participate.

Sysadmins at small sites, those with at

most a few IT staff, face some unique technical and organizational challenges: teams
generally assign broader responsibilities
to each member; users and management
have more exposure to front-line workers, and vice versa; and the organizational
environment often limits budget and
manpower stringently. Some techniques
that are standard at larger sites may be
worthwhile in smaller sites, if their value
outweighs the often higher learning,
implementation, and maintenance costs.
Other problems, such as backup, restore,
and disaster recovery, require significantly
different solutions at small sites. Last
years MicroLISA drew participants from
diverse environments and the discussion
ranged over many of the topics above. We
will revisit some of those topics with another year of experience and innovations.
In addition, we will tackle some of our
ongoing problems. To participate, contact
[email protected].

How do we align IT systems with the needs

of a business or other organization? In this
half-day workshop we shall present a few
of the ideas that have emerged from the
successful BDIM conferences and open for
discussion by practitioners interested in
sharing and contributing to the understanding of this interesting problem. Sign up for a
frank exchange of ideas or come and present
your particular dilemma or solution. Contact
[email protected] to attend.

Sunday, November 9, 1:30 p.m.5:00 p.m.

Practical Configuration Management
Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs

The goal of the workshop is to understand

the state of configuration management
tools and practice. Attendees should be
high-level sysadmins currently using
configuration management and looking for
the next advance and to share failures and
successes. The workshop will be largely
self-organized, based on attendees suggested topics and goals, but will focus
entirely on practical solutions. Contact
[email protected] to participate.

26 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

Monday, November 10, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Monday, November 10, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Monday, November 10, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

University Issues

ZFS

John Rowan Littell, California College of

the Arts; Adele Shakal, University of Southern
California

Richard Elling, Sun Microsystems

Government and Military System

Administration

The objective of this workshop is to help

intermediate or advanced system administrators who manage file systems,
implement data protection schemes,
and provide backup/restore services to
become proficient at managing the ZFS file
system. Potential topics include planning
for use of disk storage, data protection,
redundancy, failure modes, fault detection, repair, performance, backup/restore,
hierarchical data storage, integration with
other storage services, clustering, tips,
tricks, and gotchas. To participate, contact
[email protected].

Andrew Seely, Science Applications International Corporation

Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 a.m.5:00 p.m.

Advanced Topics

Best Practices in the Server Room

Virtual Infrastructures

Adam Moskowitz, Permabit Technology Corp.

Hunter Matthews, Duke University

This workshop, intended for very senior

administrators, provides an informal
roundtable discussion of the problems
facing system administrators today.
Attendance is limited and based on acceptance of a position paper (plain ASCII,
three paragraphs maximum); a typical
paper covers what the author thinks is the
most difficult or important issue facing
system administrators today, why this is a
problem, and why this problem is important. More information about the workshop
and about position papers can be found
at http://menlo.com/atw/2008/overview.
html; position papers should be sent to
[email protected]. Attendees are
required to bring a laptop computer.

This workshop, intended for mid-level and

advanced sysadmins, is intended to share
best practices between sites and to try to
predict changes that will affect those best
practices. A definite topic this year will be
some discussion of green trends: newer
cooling techniques and power efficiencies. Attendance is limited to people with
at least some experience in this area and
who need to specify and build datacenters as part of their jobs. To attend, send
email to [email protected]
with a brief description of your areas of
interest/experience and indicate whether
you would be prepared to make a short
presentation.

Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh; Phil

Huber, XCalibre Communications

The focus of this workshop is on issues

peculiar to university and college computing shops. Schools vary greatly in their
approach to running computing infrastructures. The differences can stem from
the general culture of the school as well as
upper management, or even from departmental versus institution-wide services.
To attend the workshop, please send
email to lisa08ws-univissues@usenix.
org with a short paragraph describing
your institution, the biggest issue you face
today, or something about your institution
that works particularly well or that others might want to consider for their own
school. You can also include topics you
would like to see on the workshop agenda.

Are you the sysadmin responsible for

computing systems owned by government or military agencies? the sysadmin
who works in secure environments, deals
with classified data, provides GOTS support, and deploys to the latest military
hotspots? If so, then this workshop is for
you. Participants will share insights into
the broad range of government system
administration requirements and will benefit from making contacts in related fields.
Discussion topics will include effectiveness of contract, uniformed sysadmins,
DoD regulation 8570.01-M, challenges of
working across multiple security domains,
deployed sysadmin, and more. Contact
[email protected] to participate.

This workshop will provide a forum to

exchange the latest ideas about and experiences with virtualization. There will be
a mixture of short presentations and informal discussions; active participation will
be expected and applications are welcome
from anyone with practical experience
or research interests in the area. Please
send an email request to lisa08ws-virtu@
usenix.org for an invitation. You should
include a paragraph describing your interest/experience in the area and a short list
of topics/issues you would like to see discussed. Please also indicate if you would
be interested in giving a short presentation
on a particular topic. See http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/group/lssconf/iWeb/
lssconf/2008.html for updates and further
details.
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 27

Live Video Streaming

Live Video Streaming of Invited Talks Available
USENIX has partnered with Linux Pro Magazine to offer live video
streaming of the invited talks tracks.
The live streaming offers a visual of the speaker, the slides, and an
interactive chatting capability. After the live transmission of the conference, you can review all of the talks once more individually in the archive
whenever you like and as often as you like. Dont miss out on this excellent opportunity.
Find out more at http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/lisa08.
Looking for a sample? Check out the archives of the 2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference at
http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/usenix08.

28 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

VENDOR EXHIBITION

See whats new at the lisa 08 vendor exhibition

Wednesday, November 12,
Noon7:00 p.m.

Exhibitors as of August 4, 2008

Thursday, November 13,

10:00 a.m.2:00 p.m.

premium exhibitors

Dont Miss This unique opportunity

American Registry for Internet Numbers

(ARIN)

Make knowledgeable decisions on products and services for your business needs.
Exhibitor demonstrations save you hours
of research and let you quickly compare
solutions.

Google

Learn about the latest and greatest technologies and tools from industry leaders,
provocative startups, and open source
projects.

Silicon Mechanics

See demonstrations of innovative products

and services that can optimize your systems,
network, and Internet managementand
simplify your life.
Get in-depth answers from well-informed
company representatives. (LISA exhibitors
know to send technical people to this event!)
Buy books at discounted prices and get them
signed by the authors.

EVeryone is welcome!

GroundWork Open Source

ISC (Internet Systems Consortium)
Permabit
Sun Microsystems
Trusted Computer Solutions
Zenoss, Inc.

exhibitors
AdRem Software
Advanced Computer & Network
Corporation
Berkeley Communications
e-DMZ Security
FreeBSD

The exhibition is open to the public.

Linux Pro Magazine

Register for a free pass at www.usenix.org/

lisa08/exhibition.

No Starch Press

MRV Communications
Oracle

I got lots of great information and

learned about some great solutions.
a LISA attendee

PostgreSQL

exhibit hall happy hour

Join us at the Vendor Exhibition from 5:30
p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday for snacks
and drinks, and take the opportunity to learn
about the latest products and technologies.

sysadmin of the year

Dont miss Splunks Sysadmin of the Year
award presentation at the Exhibit Hall Happy
Hour!
Are you an IT superhero? Enter Splunks
Sysadmin of the Year Contest at http://www.
sysadminoftheyear.com.

LISA 08 Sponsorship & Exhibiting

Opportunities
Get system administrators talking about
your products and services.
Sell your solutions to a qualified
audience.
Conduct market research and enlist
beta testers.
Recruit among highly experienced,
highly educated system administrators.
Enhance your visibility among recognized leaders of the system, network, and security administration
communities.
See www.usenix.org/lisa08/sponsors for
details or contact Camille Mulligan, Exhibits
Manager, (510) 528-8649 ext. 17 or exhibits@
usenix.org.

SNIA
Splunk
The Register
Zasmos
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 29

ABOUT USENIX & SAGE

USENIX: The Advanced Computing Systems Association
Since 1975, USENIX has brought together the community of system
administrators, innovators, engineers, scientists, and technicians
working on the cutting edge of computing. Our mission is to support
research and technical training for this dynamic community and our
over 5,000 active members. USENIX created the LISA conference
over 20 years ago, and it has become the forum for real-world, indepth system administration training. A USENIX membership offers
you all you need to stay ahead of the game in the ever-changing world
of IT, including plenty of sysadmin content and a sysadmin-dedicated
issue of ;login:, the bi-monthly USENIX magazine; the sysadminfocused training and practical information found at LISA, at the
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, and at the USENIX Security
Symposium; and the USENIX Jobs Board.
A complimentary membership in USENIX is part of every non
USENIX-member registration. The benefits of this membership
include:
Free subscription to ;login:, the highly regarded bi-monthly
magazine of USENIX, both in print and online
Discounts on technical registration fees for all USENIX-sponsored and co-sponsored events, including LISA
Discounts on purchasing printed Proceedings, CD-ROMs, and
other Association publications
Discounts on industry-related publications such as Linux Journal, ACM Queue, and OReilly and No Starch Press books
The right to vote in USENIX Association elections

SAGE: A USENIX Special Interest Group for S

ysadmins
SAGE is the USENIXSIG for sysadmins. Created by and for sysadmins, SAGEfocuses on evolving best practices and technology. Were
proud to offer our members access to information on the latest tools,
trends, and training in the field.
A complimentary membership in SAGE is part of every nonSAGEmember registration. The benefits of membership include:
Discount on registration for LISA, the annual Large Installation
System Administration Conference
A free Short Topics in System Administration booklet every year,
discounts on all Short Topics booklets, and access to the Short
Topics online library17 volumes and growing!
The option to join sage-members, an electronic mailing list for
peer discussion and advice
Immediate access to the results of the SAGE Salary Survey

Thanks to usenix & sage corporate supporters and

LISA 08 sponsors
USENIX patrons
Google

NetApp

Microsoft Research
USENIX Benefactors
Hewlett-Packard

Linux Pro Magazine

IBM

VMware

USENIX & SAGE PARTNERS

Ajava Systems, Inc.

Raytheon

DigiCert SSL Certification

Splunk

FOTO SEARCH Stock Footage

and Stock Photography

Zenoss

USENIX PARTNERS
Cambridge Computer
Services, Inc.

Intel

GroundWork Open Source

Solutions

Ripe NCC

Hyperic
Infosys

Oracle
Sendmail, Inc.
Sun Microsystems, Inc

SAGE PARTNER
MSB Associates
LISA 08 SPONSOR
Google
LISA 08 MEDIA SPONSORS
ACM Queue

Linux Journal

Addison-Wesley Professional/
Prentice Hall Professional/
Cisco Press

Linux Pro Magazine

Free Software Magazine

Homeland Defense Journal
IEEE Security & Privacy

Access to the SAGE Jobs Board, including real-time email notification of new jobs posted and the ability to post resumes

InfoSec News

Discounts on industry-related publications

Linux+DVD Magazine

ITtoolbox
Linux Gazette

LXer.com
Network World
No Starch Press
SNIA
StorageNetworking.org
SourceForge
Systems Management News
The Register
UserFriendly.org

live streaming powered by linux pro magazine

30 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

ACTIVITIES/services/info for students

To enhance your LISA conference experience, attendee events are
held throughout the week. Attend the very popular Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (BoFs). Mingle with your peers and with technological
luminaries during the receptions. See www.usenix.org/lisa2008 for
the latest additions to the activities schedule.

Exhibit Hall Happy Hour

Wednesday, November 12, 5:30 p.m.6:30 p.m.

Join us at the Vendor Exhibition for refreshments, and take the opportunity to learn about the latest products and technologies. Splunk
will also be announcing the winner of their Sysadmin of the Year
contest. Dont miss it!

poster sessions

Wednesday, November 12, 6:30 p.m.7:30 p.m

Thursday, November 13, 5:30 p.m.6:30 p.m.
The poster sessions are opportunities to display a poster describing
recent work. Authors will be present at the times indicated above to
discuss their work with anyone who is interested.

Conference Reception

Thursday, November 13, 6:30 p.m.8:30 p.m.

Join us at the Conference Reception for beer, wine, dinner, and an
added opportunity to network with your colleagues, get your questions answered, and chat about the conference.

Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs)

Monday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.11:00 p.m.

Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 p.m.11:00 p.m.
Wednesday, November 12, 7:00 p.m.11:00 p.m.
Thursday, November 13, 8:30 p.m.11:30 p.m.
Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Dont
miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your
time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-aFeather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested
in a particular topic. BoFs may be scheduled during the conference at
the registration desk or in advance by sending email to bofs@usenix.
org.
Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your companys latest
technologies with LISA attendees? Host a Vendor BoF! Email
[email protected] for more information.

Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs)

Friday, November 14, 11:00 a.m.12:30 p.m.

Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting
new or ongoing work. If you have work you would like to share or a
cool idea thats not quite ready for publication, send a one- or twoparagraph summary to [email protected]. We are particularly
interested in presenting students work. A schedule of presentations
will be posted at the conference, and the speakers will be notified in
advance. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations;
the time limit will be strictly enforced.

SPECIAL CONFERENCE SERVICES

Bring Your Laptop!

USENIX is pleased to offer Internet connectivity at LISA 08 via an
802.11a/b/g WiFi network. Those not wishing to use wireless can
plug in and charge up in the Laptop Lounge. No laptop? No problem.
The self-registration terminals are available for general use when
not being used for registration. Laser printers will be available in the
Laptop Lounge and at the self-registration terminals. Questions?
Send email to [email protected].
The wired and wireless networks provided by USENIX at this conference are for the use of conference attendees only, subject to the
following conditions:
USENIX may monitor these networks.
Any illicit or intrusive use of the network, including packet sniffing, is expressly forbidden.
The wireless network is open and insecure. USENIX strongly
recommends that all users encrypt their transmissions. Users
are solely responsible for the security of their passwords and
data.
If you have any questions or concerns about the use of these n
etworks,
please contact any USENIX staff or Board member immediately.

Conference Proceedings
Those registered for the technical sessions will receive a complimentary copy of the Proceedings, either in print or on CD-ROM. Additional copies will be available for purchase at the conference.
STUDENT DISCOUNTS & GRANTS

Training
A limited number of tutorial seats are reserved for full-time students
at the very special rate of $200 for one full-day tutorial (if you plan
to take half-day tutorials, you must take both half-days to qualify for
the student rate). You must send email to [email protected] to
confirm availability and make a reservation. In your email, please
specify which tutorials you wish to attend. You will be given a code
number to use when you register. The Conference Department must
receive your registration form, with the code number, full payment,
and a copy of your current student I.D. card, within 14 days of the date
you make your reservation, or your reservation will be canceled. This
special fee is nontransferable.

Technical Sessions
Full-time students may attend technical sessions for only $110 per
day. You must fax a copy of your current student I.D. card to the
USENIX Conference Dept. when you register. This special fee is not
transferable.

Student Grants for Conference Attendance

A limited number of student grants are available to pay for travel,
accommodations, and registration fees to enable full-time students
to attend the conference. To apply for a grant, see www.usenix.org/
students/grant.html. Sorry, faxes will not be accepted for student
grant applications.
Register by October 17, 2008, and save! | 31

hotel & travel information

hotel

Town & Country Resort and Convention Center

500 Hotel Circle North
San Diego, CA 92108
Telephone (toll free): 800.77.ATLAS
Telephone (local): 619.291.7131
Fax: 619.291.3584
Hotel Reservation Discount Deadline: Friday, October 17, 2008
USENIX has negotiated special rates for conference attendees at
the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center. Please make
your reservation as soon as possible by contacting the hotel directly.
You must mention USENIX or LISA to get the special group rate.
You may also book online at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa08/
towncountry.html.
Special Attendee Room Rates
Garden Rooms: $131 single, $146 double
Regency Tower/Courtyard Rooms: $143 single, $158 double
Royal Palm Tower Rooms: $154 single, $169 double
Rates do not include 10.5% Occupancy Tax or 2% San Diego Tourism
Marketing District Assessment.
Why should you stay in the headquarters hotel?
We encourage you to stay in the conference hotel and when making your reservation to identify yourself as a USENIX conference
attendee.
It is by contracting rooms for our attendees that we can significantly
reduce hotel charges for meeting room rental. When the sleeping
rooms are not utilized, we face significant financial penalties. As a
result, these penalties ultimately force us to raise registration fees.
We recognize, however, that not everyone can afford to stay in the
conference hotel, so we always try to book venues that have some
low-cost alternatives available near the conference.
With costs going higher and higher, we are working very hard to negotiate the very best hotel rates and keep other conference expenses
down in order to keep registration fees as low as possible. We appreciate your help in this endeavor.
Questions? Contact the USENIX Conference Department.
Phone: (510) 528-8649
Email: [email protected]
32 | Register Today! www.usenix.org/lisa2008

Transportation
Hotel parking is $4/day. The hotel is approximately 10 minutes
from the San Diego International Airport, Lindbergh Field. Airport
transportation options include taxi (approximately $2530 one way),
XPRESS Shuttle ($11 per person one way), and SUPER SHUTTLE ($12
per person one way). For more information about XPRESS Shuttle,
see http://www.xpressshuttle.com/san_diego.htm. More information about SUPER SHUTTLE can be found at http://supershuttle.com.
The San Diego Trolleys Green Line is adjacent to the Town & Country
at the Fashion Valley Transit Center. The Trolley is a fun way to get
around, whether traveling to the International Border or heading to
Centre Citys shopping, restaurants, harbor, and historic attractions.
The Trolley does not stop at the airport, but you can use bus service
to connect with the Trolley. See http://transit.511sd.com to plan your
trip. The Trolley system has two stations that connect with Amtrak.
Traveling to LISA 08 from Outside the U.S.A.?
See detailed advice from the National Academies about visiting
the United States at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/visas/
Traveling_to_US.html.
About San Diego
USENIX and SAGE are pleased to bring LISA back to San Diego and
the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center. San Diego offers
beautiful weather, a wide array of restaurants to suit every taste and
budget, and miles of stunning beaches. There are many attractions
that will be of interest to LISA attendees. Here are just a few:
The world-famous San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park, featuring thousands of species of rare and endangered animals
SeaWorld San Diego, a 150-acre park featuring marine habitats,
aquariums, and Shamu the killer whale
The Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, featuring planetarium
shows and more than 100 interactive science exhibits
The Birch Aquarium at Scripps, where you can explore coral
reefs, see sharks feed, and dip into tidepools
LEGOLAND California, an interactive theme park for LEGO
enthusiasts of all ages
More information is available from the San Diego Convention and
Visitors Bureau, http://www.sandiego.org, as well as the Town &
Country, http://www.towncountry.com.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION & FEES

Register or make a reservation on the Web today at
http://www.usenix.org/lisa08/registration.
Pay today with a credit card, or make a reservation online and then
pay by check, phone, or fax. Have the best of both worlds: the convenience of online registration without the hassle of hand-written
forms, and the ability to pay as you want, when you want!

Registration Fees
USENIX is pleased to offer Early Bird Registration Discounts of up
to $300 to those who register for LISA 08 by October 17, 2008. After
October 17, registration fees increase.
Daily Rates

Before
Oct. 17

After
Oct. 17

Early Bird Registration Deadline: Friday, October 17, 2008

1 day of technical sessions

$280

$330

Training Program Registration includes:

1 day of training

$635

$685

1 half-day of training; second half-day only $300 $335

$385

SAVE! Choose One of Our Special Discount

Packages

Before
Oct. 17

After
Oct. 17

A. 3 Days of Tech Sessions Save $100!

$730

$880

B. 2 Days of Training Save $50!

$1220

$1320

C. 3 Days of Training Save $100!

$1805

$1955

D. 4 Days of Training Save $200!

$2340

$2540

E. 5 Days of Training Save $300!

$2875

$3125

F. 6 Days of Training Save $600!

$3210

$3510

G. Wednesday/Thursday Half-and-Half
Tech and Training*
H. Virtualization or Solaris Training Series

$915

$1015

$3110

$3410

Admission to the tutorials you select

Lunch on the day of your tutorials
Training materials (on CD-ROM or in print)
Admission to the Vendor Exhibition
Admission to the Conference Reception
Admission to the evening activities on the days for which youre
registered
Conference t-shirt
Wireless connectivity in conference session area

Technical Sessions Registration includes:

Admission to all technical sessions on the days of your choice
Copy of the Conference Proceedings (on CD-ROM or in print)
Admission to the Vendor Exhibition
Admission to the Conference Reception
Admission to the evening activities on the days for which youre
registered
Conference t-shirt
Wireless connectivity in conference session area

workshop Registration includes:

Lunch and refreshment breaks on the day of your workshop
Multiple Employee Discount
We offer discounts for organizations sending 5 or more employees to
LISA 08. Please contact the Conference Department at lisa08_reg@
usenix.org for more details.
Refund/Cancellation Date: Monday, November 3, 2008
All refund requests must be emailed to [email protected] by
November 3, 2008. You may substitute another in your place.

For maximum savings, combine Package A with Package B or C.

*Attend any combination of two half-days of training and two half-days of
technical sessions on Wednesday and Thursday.

Workshop Fees
1 half-day of workshops

$75

1 full day of workshops

$150

Optional Costs
Continuing Education Units (CEUs): $15 per training day
Registration Fees for Full-Time Students
USENIX offers full-time students special low registration fees for
LISA 08 that are available at any time. See p. 31 for details.
Daily Rates

Please Read:This is not a registration form. Please use our

online form to register or make a reservation. If you choose to
make a reservation and pay later by check or credit card, you will
receive a printable summary of your session selections, the cost
breakdown, and the total amount due. If you are paying by check
or phone, submit a copy of the summary along with your payment
or have it with you when you call. Tutorial bookings cannot be
confirmed until payment has been received. Purchase orders,
vouchers, and telephone reservations cannot be accepted.

1 day of technical sessions

$110

1 day of training

$200

Nonmember Registration Fees

If you are a member of USENIX but not of SAGE, $45 will be added.
If you are a member of SAGE but not of USENIX, $120 will be added.
If you are not a member of USENIX, SAGE, EurOpen.SE, or NUUG,
$165 will be added.
Students who are not members of USENIX: $45 will be added.
Students who are not members of SAGE: $30 will be added.

LISA 08 is the meeting place of choice for system,

network, database, and other computing administrators. Take advantage of 6 days of top-notch training
and take home the tools you need.
ird discount
yb
l
r
er by

ea
regist

OCT 17 08

www

li
. use n ix . o rg /

s a2

00

Thanks to Our Sponsor

Google
Live Streaming Powered by

Linux Pro Magazine

Thanks to our media SponsorS
ACM Queue

ITtoolbox

No Starch Press

Addison-Wesley Professional/
Prentice Hall Professional/
Cisco Press

Linux+DVD Magazine

SNIA

Linux Gazette

StorageNetworking.org

Linux Journal

SourceForge

Linux Pro Magazine

Systems Management News

LXer.com

The Register

Network World

UserFriendly.org

Free Software Magazine

Homeland Defense Journal
IEEE Security & Privacy
InfoSec News

Non-Profit
Organization
US Postage
USENIX Association
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 215
Berkeley, CA 94710
510.528.8649
510.548.5738 fax

Register with the priority

code on your mailing label
to receive a $25 discount!

Register by October 17 and SAVE!

www.usenix.org/lisa2008

PAID
Permit #110
Hopkins, MN