Returned from LISA09!
November 8, 2009
As the title suggests, I’m now back from the LISA 09 conference in Baltimore, MD. I had an amazing time there. The Marriott Waterfront was beautiful, and I had almost floor to ceiling windows of the harbor and downtown. It was gorgeous, and going to sleep looking at the Baltimore skyline and waking up to the waterfront was something that will stay with me for a long, long time.
If I were asking myself a question, the first one that would come to mind is “What did you think?”. The only correct answer would be “a lot”. I thought a lot. I learned unbelievable amounts. There isn’t just one thing at LISA, so you’ve got to break it down to really figure out what it’s about.
First, there is the training. The training begins on Sunday, and runs through Friday. These are structure half day and day long classes taught by people who are industry leaders in the subject they cover. Probably the best example of this was Theodore Ts’o teaching “Linux Performance Tuning“. Ted was actually the first North American kernel developer, according to that wikipedia article. He didn’t happen to mention that in the class, only that the first version that he worked on was something like .1. He currently maintains the ext2/3 and is actively developing ext4. And I sat in his class for half a day and just let my brain absorb every word he said. Oh, and I took 8 pages of notes.
Over the course of the week, I took classes in management skills, SELinux, IPv6, eliminating backup bottlenecks, documentation techniques, and advanced Nagios topics, in addition to the aforementioned Linux performance tuning.
Aside from the training, there are the actual keynotes and presentations. This year’s keynote was by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, and Charles Wimmer blogged about it for USENIX. Werner talked about the Amazon cloud services and how they relate to the future of systems administration. Werner’s take is that we’re going to move from the command line and do more scripting. This sounds pretty familiar, but hearing it from the CTO of Amazon really drives it home.
The conference featured various technical sessions, such as invited talks and refereed papers. These went on Wednesday through Friday, and were well attended, though I didn’t make it to any. The papers should go up on the Usenix site shortly, I would imagine.
If I had to nail down my favorite part of the whole conference, it would be the hallway track. There’s just something about a conference where 850+ sysadmins are milling about that makes people want to talk. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t meet new and interesting people. I hung out with people like Ken Schumacher, who works with supercomputer clusters at Fermi and is an all-around excellent guy, to Hugh Brown, who wants to throw frozen-tundra-con in his native Canada. I met new sysadmins, old sysadmins, and all sorts of people who had written all sorts of books for and about sysadmins. The amount of knowledge in the place was staggering.
LISA is also home to Birds of a Feather, or BoFs (pronounced “boffs”). These were semiformal groups of people who met together to discuss a specific topic. I was lucky enough to attend the MRTG on Virtual Machines BoF, which was apparently the first presentation at LISA via teleconference. The gentleman presenting was in New Zealand recovering from a broken leg. I also organized two BoFs myself, one for small infrastructures and one for bloggers. Anyone was free to make one and schedule it. It worked out really well.
Of course, there was also the vendor floor show, where people brought out their hardware and let people play with it. I personally held in my hand a $16,000 450GB RAMSAN memory card. I also got to play with a 300-tape library, and got into a discussion about the driving forces of IPv6 with the people from ARIN (and got some IPv6 stickers from them!).
Maybe the most entertaining part of the week was the Sysadmin of the Year contest put on by BigFix. A big “Party Like a Rock Star” thing was put on, and there was a cake from “Ace of Cakes“. Duff Goldman and his band …soihadto… were there and put on a show. It was a great time, and yours truly even got to go up to the stage, since I had been selected as a “finalist” in the competition. Wild! I’ve requested the full list of winners from Big Fix, so if they send them to me, I’ll let you know, but congratulations and thank you to everyone who entered.
And now I’m home. I’ve got some lingering network issues to clean up, some backup things to straighten out, but otherwise, I’m pretty excited to implement some of the ideas I got while listening to other people. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks, but really, when is it not a busy couple of weeks?
Oh, and I mentioned that I was a member of the blogging team. Some really awesome content by vbloggers Pam and Marla haven’t been made part of the website yet, but you can find the videos at Pam’s YouTube page. Check it out!
One more thing. I met a lot of readers last week. A lot of you who attended LISA made it a point to come up to me and mention Standalone Sysadmin, and I want you to all know that I really appreciated it. It surprises me that someone else cares about something I do that much, and it makes me feel great, even if I sometimes don’t know what to say. So if you were at LISA and said hello, thanks. And even if you didn’t, thank you very, very much for reading.
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November 8th, 2009 at 10:31 am
The list of winners was just published online.
http://sysadminoftheyear.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/sysadmin-of-the-year-is-anonymous/
Interesting to note the likely “spell check induced typo” in the URL.
November 8th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Well the view on my side of the hotel was city streets instead of harbor, but it was a wonderful hotel. I think this was probably the best venue I have visited yet for a LISA conference. The only complaint about the hotel was when all us computer geeks overwhelmed the hotel’s internet connection. I did a workshop on Sunday about real-world configuration management, took a Cfengine all-day training on Tuesday, taught by the author of Cfengine and the full technical sessions track on Wed through Friday. The one most helpful for me to “bring back to work” was the Zero Emmissions Data Center plenary on Friday morning. I saw lots of people I have met before and I met alot more people, some of whom I had only met on-line. And I learned of and joined LOPSA. This is without a doubt the most valuable Systems Admin conference out there and I look forward to seeing folks again at another event.
November 8th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Congrats on the recognition. You truly are a rock star!
November 8th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
A lot of interesting stuff i see happened there, too bad i couldn’t attend
Do you know if the presentations will be put online? i’m most interested in the tunning one of Theodore Ts’o
thanks.
November 8th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
“FrozenTundraCon”. I like that a lot.