Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

Outstanding end-user support is not just a matter of having great technical knowledge. Successful IT pros build great careers by also understanding the importance of human-relations. Part technologist, part psychologist, the exceptional IT professional understands that there is an art to using technology as the solution for workplace problems. This presentation will focus on helping IT professionals deliver great end-user support by knowing how to combine the technical aspects of the job with an empathetic (and occasionally sympathetic) ear. Don will also cover how to use emotional intelligence techniques to manage emotionally-charged situations, and he’ll conclude with a section on stress management.

Don R. Crawley is President/Chief Technologist at soundtraining.net, the Seattle-based I.T. training firm. He holds multiple technical certifications and is the author of five books on various topics for I.T. professionals, including “The Compassionate Geek: Mastering Customer Service for I.T. Professionals”. He has spoken before audiences in all 50 states, throughout Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Come join us to hear from the attendees of the LISA ’11 conference things they thought were note worthy and that the rest of us might want to look into.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

We’re in the process of migrating to a new server. This post is merely a test. Had it had real content it would have had something to say.

In other words, test post is a test post.

Discussing best practices with Puppet and technologies around configuration management such as software repositories, data storage, directory services, security, automated provisioning, and how to create disposable architecture.

Will also cover how to structure your version control system to deal with configuration management code and a simple methodology for deploying different revisions across different environments, such as Dev, QA, Staging, Prod, etc.

While this talk focuses on Puppet integration, most of the material is tool agnostic and will be applicable to other configuration management tools.

Garrett Honeycutt has been hacking *nix based systems and spreading the merits of open source software for over ten years. He began using Puppet in 2007 while building out a national carrier grade VoIP system, where he wrote many Puppet modules and acted as release engineer for Puppet code. Previously he has worked on such things as building core internet infrastructure for an ISP and creating mobile media distribution platforms. Currently he works as a Professional Services Engineer for Puppet Labs where he teaches, consults, and presents around the world.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

One of a Linux system manager’s worst nightmares is when the auditors come in and they start asking questions. One of the questions they’re bound to ask in these compliance-ridden days is “Do you track root level activity?” How do you track root’s activity? Sudo and process accounting aren’t enough for the purposes of compliance, change management, auditing, and incident response. As Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl said, “There’s more than one way to do it.” We’ll explore the several Open Source ways to track root’s activity and get the auditors off our backs (at least on this instance).

Gary Smith is a Cyber Security Analyst with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Gary started out his professional career as a chemist/materials engineer. His start down the path to the Dark Side of Computing began when he wrote a program to design an optimal extruder screw rather than face thousands of calculations with a slide rule (yes, a slide rule.) Since then, he’s done a lot of different things in computing: microprocessor cross assemblers and simulators, disk device drivers, communication device drivers, TCP/IP hacking and multi-threaded printer spoolers. Always a glutton for punishment, he wrote his own sendmail.cf from scratch. Around 1993, Gary started doing computer security when the semiconductor company he was working for was forced to get on the Internet to send/receive Integrated Circuit designs faster and a firewall/Internet gateway was needed. Since then, Gary’s been involved in firewalls, intrusion detection and analysis, vulnerability assessments, system and application hardening, and anti-spam filters. Gary really does computer security to support his bicycling habit. He has more bikes than most other people have computers. And they’re a lot more expensive. Gary says “Bikes are like computers: both can crash, sometimes with disastrous results to the user.”

His presentation is Got Root Presentation

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

We will start with a quick overview of the three categories of backups – fumble finger, Disaster Recovery, and archive. We will then look at the particular needs of each category of backup and why disk or tape might potentially be better or worse for each one. We will examine the relative costs-of-acquisition and costs-of-ownership. The talk will close with a very small degree of prognostication and a whole lot of rabble-rousing about the actual needs and reasons for backups/restores.

Lee Damon has a B.S. in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE (US) & LOPSA since their inceptions. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of LISA ’04 and co-chair of casitconf’11.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Data deduplication is a hot topic in storage and saves significant
disk space for many environments, with some trade offs. We’ll discuss
what deduplication is and where the Open Source solutions are versus
commercial offerings. Presentation will lean towards the practical –
where attendees can use it in their real world projects (what works,
what doesn’t, should you use in production, etcetera).

Specific implementations covered: LessFS, SDFS (OpenDedupe), BackupPC.

Nick Webb is the founder of Seattle, Washington based Red Wire
Services, LLC and has made a career of designing solutions that
improve data availability and enable disaster recovery. Nick brings
more than 10 years of experience planning, implementing and
maintaining best practice solutions for systems management for a wide
range of organizations. His firm, Red Wire Services, specializes in
preparing small businesses to survive technological disasters — while
also helping unprepared organizations recover their data and systems
so they can return to operation.

Nick holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the
University of Idaho and is a certified LPIC-2 Advanced Linux
Professional. He has extensive experience in both Linux/UNIX and
Windows platforms working mostly as a professional system
administrator from 1999 to 2010.
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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

This month you all get an opportunity to talk. Some ideas on what to speak about are:

- what is your favorite/cool toy/tool you are finding really useful right now?
- what favorite/cool toy/tool would like to have?
- what is your favorite system admin website?
- what is your favorite non-system admin website?
- what is your biggest sore point/heartache that you are dealing with?

In addition, if you have a cool project you want to share, we would love to hear it.

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Our web browser has become the universal app. We no longer use it just to peruse static web pages, but to interact with a menagerie of complex online applications hosted “in the cloud.” While this evolution of web interactivity provides us with many new opportunities, and immense value, it has also made today’s web the most dangerous place on the Internet.

Join WatchGuard Senior Network Security Strategist and CISSP, Corey Nachreiner, to hear why he believes web-based threats will pose a huge risk to your network in 2011. During the talk, you will learn how the three most common web-based attacks — drive-by downloads, cross-site scripting (XSS), and SQL injection – work. You’ll even see them in action during sample attacks.

Nachreiner will also discuss why Social Networks sites are the worst “web-threat” offenders of them all. He’ll highlight three attributes that make Social Networks a ripe target for attackers, and likely the primary source of malware in the coming years.

Finally, and most importantly, you’ll learn practical steps you can take, and defenses you can erect, to protect yourself from these web-based threats. As the American cartoon, G.I. Joe, used to say, “Knowing is half the battle.”

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Corey Nachreiner has been with WatchGuard since 1999 and has since written more than a thousand concise security alerts and easily-understood educational articles. His security training videos have generated hundreds of letters of praise from thankful customers and accumulated more than 100,000 views on YouTube and Google Video. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Corey speaks internationally and is often quoted by other online sources, including C|NET, eWeek, and Slashdot. Corey enjoys “modding” any technical gizmo he can get his hands on, and considers himself a hacker in the old sense of the word. Today, you can find Corey’s most recent articles at WatchGuardSecurityCenter.com.

As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

Congratulations to our new officers. They are:

Scott McDermott: President (president@sasag.org)
Lee Nomad: Vice President (vicepresident@sasag.org)
Jon Lasser: Secretary-Treasurer (sectres@sasag.org)