The LISA ‘06 Conference Blog

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.