The LISA ‘06 Conference Blog

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.

For those who are interested, here is a list of past LISA conferences, locations, and conference chairs.

At this year’s conference you will have a very unique opportunity to hear from one of the leading researchers in the field talk about visions of the future. Autonomic computing, outsourcing, and service oriented architectures are all poised to radically change the way we do things. Are they really going to have a big impact on our profession? Are they going to make all of your knowledge and experience obsolete?

This year at LISA 06 we are trying something a little different. We will be presenting a lunch-time talk, and we will be inviting attendees to go grab lunch and bring it back to this presentation. It is a unique format for a unique talk. Dr. Alva Couch will be presenting his thoughts on the future of system administration, and how you can best prepare yourselves professionally to take the most advantage of these emerging technologies and business models. It may be controversial, and it will certainly be enlightening. So I hope you will join him at this year’s special lunch and learn on conference Friday from 1 to 1:45. The morning sessions will end at 12:30, and that leaves you just enough time to race out to a fast food place, grab something on the go, and bring it back to the lunch and learn.

Truth be told, this isn’t really the first “lunch and learn” that we’ve done at LISA. Last year (LISA 05) one of our speakers had an unexpected conflict and was unable to make his presentation on the date and time we had scheduled. We held his talk during the lunch hour on the next day. So although this year’s lunch and learn isn’t the first, it is the first time we have done one intentionally.

Invited talks are quite a bit different than refereed papers, and the process used to accept them is also quite a bit different. Two members of the program committee are specifically designated at the IT co-ordinators. This year we are very fortunate to have two excellent folks as co-ordinators. Last year’s conference chair, David Blank-Edelman along with Doug Hughes headed up the effort this year to select two tracks of invited talks.

The original intent of the invited talks track was that the committee would invite prominent individuals to speak at the conference. That’s why they’re called “invited”. But as the conference expanded it was decided that we would be served well by actually soliciting proposals from those who were interested in speaking. We still invite speakers, but we also accept proposals. In order to keep everything fair, we ask those we invite to submit a proposal. This allows us to review all the possible talks in the same manner.

The proposal is not that complicated. We ask for a speaker’s biography, a description of the talk, and an outline of what will be presented. With these proposals the committee needs to choose enough talks to fill two full tracks of 10 slots each, for a total of 20 presentations. Sometimes this number will be a little less. If the committee finds a particularly strong or important presentation that we think everyone needs to year, we will create a plenary session on Thursday.

When choosing talks, we look at several characteristics. We want the subject matter to be relevant. A talk that explains the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem would be interesting, but hardly relevant. We also want variety among the presentations. Although Spam prevention is important, we don’t want four separate presentations about it. We want to ensure that the presentation is thorough and backed by sound facts and research. Finally, we look at the quality of the speaker.

You can see how much this differs from selecting papers. A paper is selected solely on its own merit, regardless of the authors or their abilities as speakers. The focus is on the research presented in the paper: the presentation is secondary. But an invited talk lasts nearly 90 minutes, and the presentation is the final product. So it is appropriate to consider the presenter’s abilities as a public speaker. But bear in mind that it isn’t the only criteria. Committees are willing to consider average or below average speakers if their topic is particularly important or relevant. And the converse is also true: we would consider a weak topic if it was presented by a strong speaker.

After the submission deadline had passed and we were sure all the lingering proposals had been submitted, the two co-ordinators got together on a conference call and discussed the proposals, generally classifying each as “definitely”, “maybe”, and “no way”. This provides an idea of how many “maybe” talks need to be accepted to fill out the slate. These choices are made based on the criteria listed above: what talks look good and relevant, what provides the best variety, and which speakers appear to be strong. The end result is a list of those talks we want to accept and a short list of alternates. This list was presented to me for final approval. There were a few choices that the co-ordinators were not able to reach a concensus on, so I ended up making the final decision. This year I feel very fortunate that we were able to get a strong slate of talks, due to the tireless efforts of our fantastic IT co-ordinators.

Once the choices were finalized, we contacted the speakers to make sure that they were still interested in presenting. If anyone had backed out, we had alternates to fall back on. This year, it wasn’t necessary to use any of our alternates.

One interesting problem we faced this year was a presentation proposed by one of the most prominent researchers in our community on a topic that the committee felt was particularly important and relevant. However, the speaker told us that he didn’t think he could fill more than 45 minutes. That makes for a very short presentation unless we could find something to pair it with. Unfortunately, we couldn’t, and we ended up in a difficult position. We really wanted to accept this talk, but there was no place on the program to put it. We don’t really have a position for a 45 minute presentation unless we invent one. So that is eventually what we did: we turned it in to the Friday lunchtime presentation, where Dr. Alva Couch will be telling all of us how autonomics will change our industry. I will post more about that at a later date.

Dan Klein has very generously taken the time to create some ICS format calendars for the conference schedule. I put together the raw information and he magiccally turned it in to a set of ICS files. These should be usable with iCal, evolution, and any number of other on-line calendar systems. As of now there is no location information in the entries. As soon as I get a list of rooms from the conference staff we will update the calendars with location information for each presentation.

To subscribe, go to this page: http://ical.usenix.org

After a day of arguing over papers at the program committee meeting in Chicago, everyone was ready for some nourishment. Although a few people had to leave that evening, most of us were able to stay and went out for a very enjoyable evening at a restaurant in Schaumburg. The place we went to is a Brazilian churrascaria called Sal y Carvão, which I think is Portugese for “stuff yourself silly with meat”. It’s like an all-you-can-eat-buffet, except they bring the meat to you. The dinner was absolutely wonderful and the company was lots of fun.

After everyone was completely sated with meat, salad, meat, dessert, more meat, and drink (and some more meat) it was time to return to the hotel. We had enough cars that we only needed to call one cab, but we did have to request a van. The van showed up and one individual in the group, who shall remain nameless, decided to open the hatchback to put a bag in the back. The cabbie came around the back to help out just as our illustrious committee member started to slam the overhead hatch closed, and the door came down very hard on the poor cabbie’s shoulder. He was clearly in pain and we feared his reaction, but he got back in the driver’s seat and was ready to go. Perhaps he sought revenge, or perhaps he was simply dazed with pain, but the trip back to the hotel was one I really wish I had not experienced. He drove slow. He refused to take the tollway. For awhile I wasn’t really sure he was taking us in the right direction. But the topper was the red light that he completely ignored. This wasn’t like stretching a yellow. This light had been red for awhile when our cabbie just rolled on through it as if it didn’t exist. A car came out of the side street at the same time and came very close to hitting us. We all started looking at each other with the same thought: “we are all going to die!”

The good news is that we did make it back to the hotel safely, and we were never sued by the cab driver. But it did make for an exciting conclusion to a very busy day.

David did such a great job in last year’s conference blog describing the process by which papers are reviewed, discussed, and ultimately accepted. The process is mostly the same from year to year, but I wanted to expand on certain aspects of the process.

Committees use a web-based system to examine and review the submissions. After the submission deadline I scanned every paper and assigned a gneral category to each. The categories vary each year depending on what types of papers are submitted. This year we had 16 categories: Applications, Autonomics, Backups, Clustering and distributed computing, Configuration and Change Management, Databases, E-commerce, High availability and redundancy, Mail systems, Networking, People management, Security, Spam, Telecom integration, Troubleshooting, and Virtualization. Each paper was tagged with one or more of these categories. Then I asked the committee members to indicate their preference for each category: will review, will not review, or don’t care. Using this information I was able to assign papers to members of the committee.

It soon became clear that I would need more people reviewing papers if I didn’t want to overwhelm the committee members. So I began recruiting readers to supplement the committee’s work. A reader reviews a paper in exactly the same way that a committee member does. He or she grades the paper and adds comments. However, readers do not participate in the program committee meeting and have no input in to the final discussions of paper acceptance. By using the readers I was able to get a wide variety of input on each paper without requiring every reviewer to read a dozen or more papers. A few ambitious reviewers managed to read and comment on every paper that was submitted. That was quite an effort!

To review a paper, a reviewer thoroughly reads it, then grades it in each of four areas:

• overall quality
• technical quality: the quality of the technology being presented,
• editorial quality: the quality of the presentation (how good is the paper as a paper),
• suitability: does it fit a LISA conference.

In addition, each reviewer rates himself on his or her own confidence in the subject matter of the paper. These scores are added and adjusted based on the reviewer’s confidence and form a weighted average. This gives the committee a quantifiable view of the paper.

In addition to the scores, each reviewer can submit comments about the paper. These comments are separated in to three categories: solely for the chair, only for the committee, for the authors. This structure allows the reviewer to be as candid as possible for the appropriate audience. Authors never see their scores, but when acceptance and rejection notices go out, the author comments are also sent. It is hoped that these comments can provide some constructive feedback that will enable the authors to improve the quality of their papers not only for this year but for future submissions as well.

This year paper submissions were due on May 23. By May 31 I had all the papers assigned to reviewers and I let them loose on the papers. I urged them all to have their reviews done by June 20. During those twenty days I reviewed as many papers as I could and I regularly reminded everyone else how close the deadline was! I’m sure most of the committee got sick of my e-mail messages. In reality I didn’t get to do the final summation of scores until late on the 21st, so that gave the reviewers a little extra time. However, I was scheduled to leave for Chicaog on the 22nd so that I had a day to visit relatives. It was a tight squeeze, but I did manage to get everything prepared in time for my trip.

The committee met face-to-face in Chicago on June 24. The scores were used to provide the order in which we would discuss papers. The comments to the committee were used as the basis for conversation, and those that had read a particular paper would offer their insights. But the final decision was based solely on the discussion, not the scores.

In the end, out of 49 submissions we accepted 24 (that’s 49% for those of you without a calculator). I believe that the resulting slate of papers is excellent this year, and I am looking forward to reading and hearing as many of these papers as I can.

I’ve been working hard with Dan Klein in the past few days to put together an iCal calendar that contains the session information for the conference. I’ve never put one of these together before, so I’m still making some beginner’s mistakes. Dan and I settled on a simple multi-line format for the records that will be easy to maintain. Dan wrote a perl script that converts this format to ICS and from there (as I understand it) iCal compatibility is a snap. For now we don’t have location information on any of the sessions. Once we get room names we will add that stuff to the calendar. I am also currently musing about whether or not to include the invited talk descriptions. Right now it is just speaker and talk title. But I may add the descriptions as well before we make the calendar live. I’m not much of an iCal person, so this is all still pretty new to me.

I shall keep you posted.

The program committee met at the end of June at the O’Hare Hyatt Regency in suburban Chicago. I arrived in town a day early to visit relatives and drove out to the hotel the night before the meeting. I didn’t get to the hotel until very late, around 11:30 pm. You probably know what a hotel lobby is like late at night. The skeleton crew is behind the desk: there are maybe two people on duty. You walk in and go right up to one of them and check in. You’re done and on your way in 5 minutes, maybe less. Not that night! When I got to the front desk there was a line a mile long and it didn’t seem to be moving very fast. I checked my watch to see if I had suddenly fallen through a time warp, but it still said 11:30. How weird. As I was standing around waiting for the line to move, eager to get to my room and rest up before the big meeting, I wondered aloud why there were so many people. The lady standing next to me was kind enough to share her story. Apparently a United flight to Phoenix had been cancelled, and she suspected several other flights had suffered the same fate. Most of the people waiting in line were airline refugees, sent there with the promise of a room for the night and a $7 meal voucher. I wasn’t really sure what sort of meal $7 was going to buy in the Hyatt Regency, especially since the only place still open was the sports bar. $7 of room service might get you a napkin and a glass of water, but only if you pay for the mandatory gratuity yourself.

I was sure glad that I had a reservation, and was afraid they might decide to give my room away anyway, considering how late my arrival was. But my fears were unfounded. When I finally got to one of the frazzled employees behind the front desk, I cheerily said “Hi! My name is William LeFebvre and I actually have a reservation.” He sighed and replied, “Thank God!”