LISA ‘05 Wrap Up
Days 5 and 6 of LISA flew by in a flurry of refereed papers, invited talks, meeting peers, and BoF sessions. For Thursday, I attended Modern Trends in UNIX and Linux Infrastructure Management, followed by Automatic PC Desktop Management with Virtualization Technology. Both talks I was quite interested in, but both fell flat on my expectations. The first invited talk went through common problems with scaling; the same thing that has been iterated in the training series. For the second talk, it was basically VMware player as a portable network client. That is great and all, but VMware is slow, and this was mainly for Windows. No one even touched on license issues.
Not all was lost though, after noon, when the sharp geeks finally rise from their night of drinking, the real fun began. During the lunch break, Dan Kaminsky gave another one of his awe-inspiring talks: Network Black Ops: Extracting Unexpected Functionality from Existing Networks. A little history in case you don’t know Dan. He has a database that he has collected of every DNS server on the Internet, and some not even on the Internet. He has a lot of bandwidth, and he likes to mis-use the Internet standards and bend them to some new and very interesting ways. In short, he covered in detail: bypassing IDS’s, using IPS’s to attack the host, redirecting traffic for entire sites, and of course video-over-DNS. Don’t worry, he’s the good guy.
On the note of security, Lance Cottrell, famous for Anonymizer, gave a chilling talk on Internet Counter-Intelligence: Offense and Defense. In this presentation, Lance outlined how personal security is violated via logs, how online stores adjust prices based on your history and loyalty, along with your country. On top of that, he explained how companies can use their logs to track how competition has been visiting their site, detect a hostile take over, product launch, or people jumping ship, to gain an edge in the market. Before I cut out early, he spoke about the political implications of logs, and how in some countries they are used to hunt down and murder anonymous political opponents on message boards. And you thought trolling was fun?
So what was the talk I cut out of such a spooky talk for? Tom Limoncelli’s Time Management guru session. On the way to the session, I stopped by the O’Reilly booth and picked up a copy of his new book, aptly titled Time Management for System Administrators so I could get it signed. Tom gave an entire tutorial on Time Management earlier in the week, and now I regret missing out on it. He presented techniques on when it is appropriate to buy a solution, script a solution, do it by hand, or delicate it to someone else. He also hammered in the idea of a Wiki for documentation, something that I wish more people would use.
On Friday, I went to the Production Change Management: To Each, His or Her Own tutorial. I know this sounds like a very dry topic, and why would I subject myself to such torment? Well, I see in the next phase of my career a lot of managerial wrangling along-side some very important and very publicly visible servers. That is, someone might die if I don’t get it right, and I want to know how to deal with this in the face of political issues along with issues with developers and users. That said, it was a really good session, and gave me some sound insights on how to not only progress into a dangerous maintenance problem, but also how to prepare for the fallout: including what to do about Murphy’s law.
It is worth mentioning a little discussed but very important part about LISA: The Hallway Track. This isn’t an organized speaker, nor is it a paper presentation or a BoF. It is stopping people in the hall, at lunch, at dinner, or just sitting drinking coffee, and talking to them. During the hallway track I met people from the Stanford Linear Accelerator, GaTech, MIT, Google, Match.com, Sun, Vmware, XenSource, Austria, Australia, Germany, Texas, New York City, and San Jose, to name a few. Some people were famous and I didn’t even know it until later, others gave me new ideas and viewpoints that I don’t know where else I would have gotten.
As David, a LISA attendee who happened to be on the plane back from LISA said to me, “I’ve been going to LISA for a decade, and I don’t know where else you can learn new skills in the industry like this.”
And I couldn’t agree more.