It’s always risky to pick out a few papers and say “I really like these,” because such an act tends to alienate and discourage authors of those that did not get chosen. So I have to say up front that I like all the papers we chose for this year’s conference. In fact, if I didn’t like them then they would not be in the conference.

But as we read through the submissions there were a few papers that really stood out. These are papers that really make me want to go see the presentations.

A collection of scientists from the Netherlands will be speaking on a hardware platform for the security and privacy administration of RFID tags. RFID is quickly permeating the marketplace. These tiny things are showing up everywhere, including US Passports. They’re ubiquitous and generally promiscuous, which in my mind is not a good combination. Some very clever people have come up with a way to provide security and privacy for RFID tags. The idea is timely, the execution is great, and the presentation is fantastic. The only concern we had with this paper was the appropriateness for LISA. But in this case the importance of the subject and the excellent research trumped concerns about the subject being a stretch for the audience. Their presentation will be in the Security session, conference Wednesday at 4 pm.

Dan Klein was looking through his MRTG graphs one day and discovered that his system was being hijacked by spammers. He immediately went in to an investigative mode and began collecting as much data as he could. The result is an amazingly thorough forensic analysis of this particular kind of spammer attack. His presentation is in the Electronic Mail session on conference Wednesday at 11 am.

People who don’t pay much attention to networking may not even know what a network flow is, but anyone who has ever tried to troubleshoot a network problem will certainly understand the concept. Rather than looking at a file full of packets sorted by time, one can collect up and examine packets by connection, or flow. Using flows can greatly simplify lots of tedious tasks in network adinistration and troubleshooting. The problem is, every manufacturer has a different way of storing and examining flows. Well someone from CERT (Brian Trammel) and from CA Labs (Carrie Gates) have come up with a suite of tools that lets you examine and manipulate flows. The result is great! The NetSA Aggregated Flow Suite does for network flows what ImageMagick does for digital images. Their presentation is in the Visualization session on conference Thursday at 4 pm.

Large installations have large problems, especially when part of the infrastructure fails and other parts have to be changed to take up the slack. Most installations use either manual or ad hoc mechanisms to detect these changes and take corrective actions. The state of the art in this area is policy-based management systems, but even these don’t always scale well to large installations. Interdependencies of components can cause a flood of changes caused b a series of reactions to a single stimulus. Some scientists from UIUC and from HP think that part of the problem is the way in which policies are specified. Their paper does an excellent job of presenting the current widely accepted mechanism for policy specification, called Event-Condition-Action (ECA), and proposing an enhancement to it which will scale better in larger installations. This is an excellent presentation of sound theoretical work with immediate practical application. Their presentation is in the Theory session on conference Thursday at 9 am.

There are many more excellent papers that you may find interesting. I wish I had time to write about each and every one. Look through the conference schedule and see what papers sound promising. When you arrive at the conference, get your copy of the Proceedings right away, then read through those paper that interest you. If you like what you read, go to the paper’s presentation, hear what the author has to say, and you will even have a chance to ask questions, either as part of the audience or one-on-one when the session is over.

I hope you enjoy this year’s papers as much as I do.

A conference workshop is designed as a session where peers can gather together and discuss a specific set of topics in a round-table format. There is no single expert, there is just a facilitator (or moderator). The idea for a conference workshop originated with John Schimmel. He noticed that many of the more senior system administrators attending LISA conferences were having hallway discussions the Tuesday before the conference. But they would gather together in small groups — two here, three over there — and that these groups never really interacted with each other. “Wouldn’t it be great” he mused, “if we could get all these highly experienced people together in the same room to talk about some of the more difficult problems that we face?” This idea was the foundation of the very first Advanced Topics Workshop, held in Monterey during the 1995 LISA conference.

The Advanced Topics Workshop has been held at every LISA since 1995, and it became the model for workshops centered around other topics, such as the Andrew File System, Configuration Management, University Issues, and many others. As the conference planners committed more space to workshops, the list of topics has grown. Some workshops continue to be popular and timely, and are held every year.

This year I am very pleased to provide you with 7 workshops spanning three days. Of course the granddaddy of them all, the Advanced Topics Workshop, will be returning under the careful ministrations of Adam Moskowitz. The Configuration Workshop, which has proved to be incredibly useful to it attendees, will again be hosted by Paul Anderson. Tom Limoncelli and Cat Okita will be returning with their workshop on Managing Sysadmins. The University Issues Workshop will also be making a reappearance, hosted by John “Rowan” Littell.

We have several new workshops this year as well. One that I am particularly excited about is the workshop on Datacenter Management, hosted by Robert Sidney Wilroy. This is an excellent place for people to share ideas on building and maintaining data centers. Sandra Bittner will be hosting a workshop on Software Licensing, where participants can discuss the very difficult problem of managing a large number of licenses across an equally large installation base. Finally, Luke Kanies and Narayan Desai will be presenting a workshop on Configuration Tools. This workshop is a bit different from Configuration Management as its focus is specifically on the tools that can be used to implement configuration management, such as Puppet and Bcfg2. It should have a more practial bent than its counterpart has traditionally had.

Some of these workshops have very specific entrance requirements, so be sure to read the details for the workshop that you are interested in. Workshops do cost some extra money, and this is used to cover the expense of the hotel meeting space and the lunch. Did I mention that lunch is provided for workshop attendees? I should also mention that you don’t pay for a workshop when you pre-register for the conference. During pre-registration you can express an interest in attending one of the workshops. But you don’t actually pay for the workshop until the day you show up for the conference. So bring your credit card with you!

I have attended nearly every Advanced Topics Workshop since the first year it was presented. I have also attended many of the configuration management workshops. I have always found the workshops to be a great experience. I hope that you have a chance to try one out this year.