IPv6. You might have heard about it. You’re probably even a little afraid of it. Soon, you won’t be able to avoid it. Those weird, long addresses that you keep trying to make go away are actually one of your best friends and a solution to your networking headaches. This presentation will start with a brief intro to IPv6 from a sysadmin perspective. It will transition into a hands on experience showcasing ways you can start using IPv6 in your organization today to help you ease your networking issues and expand new horizons.

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Chris Mosetick is a certified IPv6 Sage by Hurricane Electric Internet Services IPv6 certification program. For the last six years Chris has been working as an independent sysadmin consultant working with small businesses on a variety of technical projects. Recently he has taken on a sysadmin position for Revolution Analytics in Seattle. When not behind his Dvorak keyboard, Chris spends his free time in the mountains pursuing his year-round back-country skiing passion.

This talk will describe how the Meerkat framework is used to perform availability and performance monitoring here at UW. Meerkat embraces SOA principles of loose coupling between producers and consumers, with ActiveMQ-based brokers providing the underlying messaging. The framework can even be used to implement workflow: just plug a workflow component into the framework and it can leverage existing dashboard and RT (ticketing system) integration to generate alerts and alarms.

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This talk will explain what is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), how it evolved into its current state, the problems it addresses, and cover some typical use cases. Examples will be taken from both Citrix and VMware VDI products.

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The talk will open with a Brief History of Source Control, tracing developments in version control systems (VCS) from RCS and CVS up through modern decentralized systems such as git. I’ll then walk through specific comparisons of the features and workflows supported by Subversion and Perforce and illustrate how similar workflows are realized in git. I’ll finish with an overview of support tools for git, both developer-facing and workflow support/server tools.

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John Whitley is currently a development lead with Intelius, Inc. He’s worked on everything from consumer electronics firmware to high-scale service oriented architectures, and is an avid programming languages and source control geek.

The RFID Guardian Project is an initiative to put practical open-source HW/SW tools for RFID Security and Privacy into the hands of security consultants and the general public alike. This talk will discuss Radio Frequency Identification, its security and privacy implications, and will provide the newest information about Version 4 of the RFID Guardian, which we intend to launch soon to the general public.

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Dr. Melanie Rieback is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, in the group of Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. Melanie’s research concerns the security and privacy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and she leads multidisciplinary research teams on RFID security (RFID Malware) and RFID privacy management (RFID Guardian) projects. Her research has attracted worldwide media attention, appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, UPI, Computerworld, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and many other print, broadcast, and online news outlets. Melanie’s research has received several awards (Best Paper: IEEE PerCom ‘06, Best Paper: USENIX Lisa ‘06, NWO I/O Prize, VU Mediakomeet, ISOC Award finalist), and Melanie has also served as an invited expert for RFID security discussions with both the American and Dutch governments. In a past life, Melanie also worked on the Human Genome Project at the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research.

Nagios is a useful tool for server monitoring. Can it be effective for monitoring networks? Cacti is an efficient tool for monitoring devices with SNMP. Can it be turned into an effective tool for generating meaningful notifications? We’ll look at the strengths and weaknesses of each tool and see if a combination of both could be ‘right’ for the purpose.

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Dave Blunt has been using Nagios (or Netsaint before it) since 2001 and Cacti since 2004, for server, application, and network monitoring. He has worked at GroundWork Open Source in the Services organization since 2005 delivering deployments of GroundWork Monitor – an open source based monitoring solution that has Nagios as a core component.

Ever tried to figure out what the web server was really saying to the client? Maybe more importantly, what the client was really saying to one of your servers? Maybe you have a system that’s slow for no obvious reason or a network service that doesn’t seem to always work right. With a run of the mill laptop and Wireshark, you can gain insight into what’s actually happening on the “wire” (or the “wireless”). This talk will give you an introduction to Wireshark and the basics of how it can be used to investigate these problems that can otherwise be difficult to diagnose. The talk will also touch on some of the useful tools you can add to Wireshark to make it an even more useful tool.

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Scott McDermott has been practicing system administration for 16 years. He has managed networks and systems ranging from 10Base2 networks with a couple SparcStations and DGUX boxen to 10Gig networks with 200 mixed servers. He currently works as a Network & System Administrator for the King County Library System, with an emphasis on the Network” portion of his job title. Wireshark is his tool of choice for diagnosing the problems that aren’t obviously DNS or permissions.

Gotten your hands dirty with Microsoft Hyper-V yet? If not, this talk will give you plenty of virtual rope. Even if you have, we’ll build on the basics by discussing advanced topics such as clustering, disaster recovery, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

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Dan Griffin, the founder of JW Secure, Inc. and Restorify, LLC, is a Microsoft Enterprise Security MVP. He previously spent seven years working on smart cards and cryptography for Microsoft while on the Windows Security development team. He has published several articles on Windows security software development and is a frequent speaker at security conferences. Dan holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a Bachelors degree in CS from Indiana University.

Come join us for a holiday party and talk for 5 minutes on a topic that interests you. Example ideas for talks are (taken from Duncan Hutty’s LISA BOF):

• Here’s a really cool tool/technique that I think is underrated.
• Call for Assistance. “I want to do X, but I need help”.
• Wouldn’t it be nice if…? Someone should do it.
• Here’s how I got to wear the hero cape recently at my company. And how you can too.
• Heresy. “Everyone” says/does X and this is why they’re wrong.
• Orthodoxy. “Everyone” says/does X and this is the lesser known reason *why*.
• You All Suck. Here’s what’s wrong with this community and how to fix it.

Come join us for a LISA conference report and bring your hard system admin questions to see if you can stump the group.

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