LISA 2009
Already three weeks back from Lisa, and after some gentle stimulation trying to write down my experiences of this event. For the people who don’t know LISA, LISA is the Large Installation System Administration conference, a whole week of talks, trainings and workshops about various subjects all related to the work of unix admins in big IT environments.
From what I understood from people who had been here previously, the attendee list was a lot smaller than previous years. But still, there were more than enough people to share a talk with. It was good to have the opportunity to talk to people working at some big and very known companies like Yahoo, Pixar etc. But also I met some people who worked for less know companies (at least for me) but maybe even more interesting companies, for example, the national democratic institute. A non-profit organization facilitating democracy in countries where democracy isn’t that natural as in most western countries. I don’t think a lot of system admins have to worry about problems like militia stealing servers from your datacenter.
The first 5 days I followed a set of trainings, some days training for the whole day, some days a morning and an afternoon session. In general I was a bit disappointed by the trainings, they covered a lot of basic stuff, a whole day can be a very long sit for just 2 new bits of information. But a few sessions were quite interesting and/or entertaining.
One of the more interesting ones was the IPv6 talk by Rudi van Drunen (who will also be the program chair for next year). The information wasn’t particularly new or interesting (‘We really need IPv6 because we will be out of IP’s very soon!’) but it’s funny to listen to a fellow Dutch guy giving a talk on the other side of the ocean. Makes you feel a bit at home 
Another talk which I found interesting was the Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli, a nice and funny guy to listen too with very practical tricks and solutions to spend your time more efficiently. Especially his tips on spending as less as possible of your time in meetings were very good. One of the more funny one was, tell the other people that you really have just a half hour of time, and ask them to move your subject to the start of the meeting and leave after half an hour. Not really nice, but efficient. One I really liked was, to let everybody write down the items they want to discuss in a wiki with a death line of one day before the meeting and cancel the meeting if no subject were brought up. This ensures that meetings are only organized on a need to have basis.
On the Friday and last day I planned a Tech Sessions Day, this has more the setup of a standard conference, 3 tracks of various topics all about 2 hours each. I enjoyed this setup a lot more. It’s probably better suited for my short attention span . I especially liked the talk from 2 Google guys, who were presenting some software they build while working for Google, and were now releasing it to the public. It gave me some insight in how Google is developing software and approaching system administrative problems. The software is a kind of meta language enabling a generic way of managing the configurations of various firewall equipment (Cisco, Juniper, Iptables).
All together it was a long week, but well spent with a lot of new experiences and also a nice opportunity to learn a bit more about my co-workers.