The LISA ‘05 Conference Blog

(here’s another burning-hot news nugget that will be posted on the official conference site within a few days)

This year our Guru-is-in Coordinator did such an amazing job at finding great speakers that we found ourselves with a overflow of great speakers on topics we knew attendees would want to hear about.

We know that people really like these sessions because it gives them a chance to interact with some of the heavy-hitters in an area. Imagine getting advice on (to pick some at random):

• backups from Curtis Preston
• Samba from Jerry Carter
• OSX from Jordan Hubbard
• OpenSSL from Ben Laurie
• Solaris 10 features (dtrace, zones, ZFS) from key members of the Sun engineering team

This level of access to the best in the field was too cool for us to limit, so we decided to do everything we needed to make sure we could accommodate the bonanza. As a result, you’ll find that we’ve split some of the sessions and added extra session rooms to the schedule wherever we could. Going to be a heck of a track this year.

Register for the conference and the tech program here.

Hoo boy, we’re getting really close to the conference (early bird reg discount ends in just three days!). Even at this late date we’re still working hard to add cool stuff to make this LISA conference extra cool. Here’s one piece of news that’s so hot-off-the-wire that it hasn’t hit the official conference website yet.

Ben Laurie has agreed to be a speaker in our guru-is-in track. You probably know his name because he’s been key contributor in several of the projects you deal with daily (Apache/Apache-SSL and OpenSSL ring any bells?). He’s also done some tremendously cool security related work like the Bluetooth attacks (see his blog and homepage for other examples).

Here’s the official bio:

Ben Laurie is the Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting. He is the author of Apache-SSL as well as serving as an Apache core team and board member, and an OpenSSL core team member.

Register for the conference and the tech program here.

If you’ve been in the business for a while you probably recognize the name Jordan K. Hubbard. (If you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you may even remember it from the comp.sources.unix days).

Hubbard was one of the co-founders of FreeBSD and one of the reasons why that project has developed into the well-respected operating system it is today [just fyi, the words you are reading are being served off FreeBSD boxes].

I still remember when it was announced in 2001 that Hubbard joined Apple to work on Darwin. It was at that point that I knew we were in for some interesting and substantial stuff out of Apple. Turns out I was right [he says while typing on an Apple Powerbook].

For the Guru-is-In track, we do our best to bring someone who really knows their stuff on a topic. For Mac OSX I’m sure you’ll agree we found the very epitome of the term “guru” when you hear that we’re privileged to have Hubbard as the Mac OSX guru-is-in speaker at LISA 2005.

Here’s Jordan Hubbard’s bio from our program:

Jordan Hubbard is the Director of UNIX Technology, CoreOS, at Apple Computer. He has been a software developer since the late 70’s and is a longtime contributor to the open source community, from the earliest days of USENET’s comp.sources.unix group, through MIT’s X11 contributed software collection, to the FreeBSD Project, which he co-founded in 1993. These days, he focuses on the day-to-day development of Mac OS X and, more generally, on Apple’s open source strategy and its relationship with traditional UNIX developers and administrators. His current pet count, for those who follow such things, is 10 cats and 4 dogs.

One of the key things the organizers of LISA have tried to do is keep our ear to the ground for emerging topics our attendees need to know about (or will need to know about). It is pretty clear that we are going back to the future because the topic of Virtualization seems to be coming up more and more these days.

The old guard from the Big Iron days is sure to be amused by a new generation of sysadmins discovering the value of running services in a consolidated virtual machine framework. But this trend is not just a rehash of Ye Olde MVS or other architectures from the glory days of mainframes. The new crop of virtual machine environments and current day service requirements are bringing new challenges to our field.

This year LISA will offer a full three hours of training plus a Guru-is-In session with John Arrasjid and John Gannon from VMware to help people deal with the new challenges around Virtualization. Here are their bios to give you an idea of their qualifications in this realm:

John Y. Arrasjid has 20 years 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 service offerings focused on Performance Management, Security, and Disaster Recovery and Backup. John earned his Computer Science degree at SUNY Buffalo.

John Gannon has over ten years of experience architecting and implementing UNIX, Linux, and Windows infrastructures. John has worked in network engineering, operations, and professional services roles with various organizations including Sun Microsystems, University of Pennsylvania, Scient Corporation, and FOX Sports. John is currently responsible for delivering server consolidation, disaster recovery, and virtual infrastructure solutions to VMware’s Fortune 500 clients.
John received a BS degree in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.