The LISA ‘05 Conference Blog

I know that I break out Ethereal at the first sign of trouble on my network. I’ve used it to deal with security issues, client-server problems, and all sorts of other hairy situations. Though I’ve gotten pretty facile with it over the years through sheer trial-and-error, I’ve always wondered just how much more effective I’d be if I had someone who really knew what she or he was doing showing me the ropes.

Now you have the chance. Gerry Carter, one of the hardest working people in the training biz, is teaching a class on just this subject (Ethereal and the Art of Debugging Networks). He’s been a core member of the Samba team (who know more than anyone should have to know about protocols on a wire) and a LDAP/Kerberos guru so he has tremendous Ethereal chops.

More information on the training class here. Register for the conference and this class here.

LISA (and the other USENIX conferences) are well known for the quality of their training/tutorial sessions. Highly practical and timely, they are a good place to pick up the info you need to be on top of the latest tech to do your job. The classes are taught by some of the top people in our field (who often are around during the rest of the conference for side questions and conversations).

Dan Klein, the training program coordinator, does his best to make sure that each conference brings with it new and exciting classes. This year’s LISA is no exception so I though I would highlight some of the new classes that caught my eye in this blog entry and the next few entries.

This year I noticed that Mark Burgess (the only full professor of network and system administration I know of), is teaching a new intro class in configuration management (Understanding Configuration Management). This is like offering a beginning animation class with Will Eisner (RIP) or Hayao Miyazaki. Burgess is the author of cfengine and has been an active researcher at the forefront of the configuration management for many years. It’s a heck of an opportunity if you are interested in configuration management at all.

More info on the training class here. Register for the conference and this class here.

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.