Something wonderful about Nagios, Cacti, and/or RRDTool.

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Dave Blunt currently manages Professional Services for GroundWork Open Source, Inc. and has previously held roles as system administrator, systems architect, manager of internal and production IT organizations, and IT consultant.

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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BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Unix, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain. This talk will cover BackupPC home, small business, and large scale enterprise scenarios along with tips and tricks for optimizing BackupPC

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Ski Kacoroski is going on his 24th year as a system admin. He currently works at Northshore School District and is LOPSA director. He has been using BackupPC for over 5 years. When not working, he is often up in the mountains backpacking or as a member of King County Search and Rescue looking for people.

You’ve been using tools like Puppet and cfengine to corral the complexity on your servers. You revel in the scalability, reliability, and ease of maintenance of doing it The Right Way. You don’t fear the next change because you know the tools will just get it Right. But you still tremble at an “enable” prompt, hoping you remembered all the bits that need to be twiddled, on all the networking devices everywhere. Is your DNS tied on straight – both ways? Is it all *really* being monitored by Nagios? As your network’s complexity increases, so do the errors, inconsistencies, and omissions caused by manual configuration, and brokenness abounds. But wait – there’s a way out of the swamp! Come hear world-renowned networking expert and popular BayLISA speaker Brent Chapman as he reveals methods and tools for automating the mind-numbing task of configuring network devices and services. Among other things, he’ll talk about his cool new open source “Netomata Config Generator”, which addresses some of these problems.

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Brent Chapman is the founder, CEO, and technical lead of Netomata, Inc. He is the coauthor of the highly regarded O’Reilly & Associates book Building Internet Firewalls. He is also the founder of the Firewalls, List-Managers, and etwork-Automation Internet mailing lists, and the creator of the Majordomo mailing list management package. In 2004, Brent was honored with the annual SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award “for outstanding sustained contributions to the community of system administrators”.

Cfengine is probably the most widely deployed configuration management software and is widely considered to be the defacto standard. Since Cfengine is a highly customizable framework, it’s implementations can vary widely. This talk will be an overview of how cfengine works, and how to implement a basic setup. This talk will not cover Cfengine 3 or promise theory.

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Scott Lackey is a unix systems automation engineer who has ten years of consulting work for NASA, IBM, Caterpillar and other Fortune 500 companies. He is currently a systems engineer at Clearwire.

Right now, not enough people spend time there to make it worthwhile—so either we need more participants, or maybe we should just call it a day.

Comments are welcome.

The separation between how you manage your infrastructure and how you build your applications is disappearing. Adam Jacob, CTO of Opscode and primary author of Chef, will teach you what this means in practice – through showing how to deploy real-world applications with Chef on EC2.

We’ll talk about:

Deploying Web Applications… * Ruby on Rails * Catalyst * Django * Tomcat * PHP Setting up Database Servers… * MySQL * PostgreSQL Automating Monitoring and Trending… * Nagios * Munin * Ganglia Centrally managing your application configuration Along the way we’ll be talking about best practices in systems automation, quirks about EC2, and talking about how tools like Chef, Nanite, RabbitMQ and CouchDB can make your life easier.

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A twelve year system operations veteran, Adam is a Co-Founder and the CTO of Opscode, whose mission is to bring “Infrastructure Automation to the Masses”. He is the primary author of Chef.