I want to mention some training sessions I attanted

• Dtrace course by Jim Mauro and a lot of extra information came from Richard Elling and 1 other Sun employee. Together they provided a lot of real world examples on how to use Dtrace. And nice details about how it works in the kernel. Everyone knows Dtrace from the youtube movie by Brendan Gregg more info on his blog. So now I should enable all Dtrace probes and start screaming in the datacentre and see if I was loud enough

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• ZFS by Richard Elling, I never had time to look into this FileSystem before, so a great way to learn all about it in one day. One of the nice features is the buffering of disk-writes which gives a kind of breathing or heartbeat towards the disks. And with ZFS you can buffer writes to a solid-state drive before sending it to the “slower” disks.

• Jquery given by Tobias Oetiker,an easy way to build spiffy webpages that look the same on each browser. Like this demo . Got a really great explanation about the problem with the scope of variables in Javascript especcially because JQeury uses the “$” as a variable and how to get around it using a function. And there is a nice page with a lot of Jquery plugin material http://plugins.jquery.com.

• Nagios Advanced Topics by Sellens , I discovered that the feature I am still missing in Nagios isn’t build yet , having two nagios hosts loadbalance the load and keeping each other in sync. We already build our own solution of nagios hosts keeping eachother in sync only the loadbalancing part needs some work maybe I need to spend some time on reading the nagios mailinglist.

The Sun guys were really pushing or should I say selling opensolaris , well they were giving away a lot of opensolaris dvd’s and they mentioned the website http://www.solarisinternals.com/ a lot. Really cool to see all the buzz about an open system.
In the hotel I had breakfast with Mike Ciavarella, we spoke about his training session about documentation and how it would secure your job and even helps getting a better position.

Attended a lot of BOF Session , one of them was with D.Brent Chapman from Netomata. About the automation of network Configuration and Management it brought back a lot of memories of the times I was managing systems that configure and monitor ADSL modems. People just turn of their modem and I needed to figure out if this was an outage or a Human action, that was fun.

Sjoerd already mentioned the national democratic institute, what really stayed in my mind is that everybody is trying to encrypt as much as possible, and think about social engineering to get information. The people at ndi need to work different, they make sure never to encrypt stuff and be as open to the world to get their Institute accepted by getting trust from governments and groups in the difficult areas where they work. Every time when I use GPG to keep others from reading my data I think about the guy we met at Lisa09.

During a Google-Wave sponsored drink met some people from Research in Motion (RIM) that manage the linux servers that make all connections from the RIM towards google , msn etc possible.

So had a lot of fun at #lisa09 , and nice weather too.

So LISA09 took place between 1 and 6th of November, 2009 in lovely Baltimore, MD. I chose to follow more the tutorials (trainings) path. Got five tutorials – one bad, two medium and two nice ones. The problem with tutorials is that sometimes they are very basic which I really didn’t expect to be a case on such event.

So a quick summary on the thing that got my attention.

A non-technical tutorial about management skills. Looked like regular project/team management training but with special attention to the idea of geeks being managed by geeks. So no suits in the area. As we all know it is not easy to manage highly skilled individuals or being a “proxy” between business and the geeks. One of the big issues – managing people way older and more experienced than you are – was also covered. Unfortunately it was just confirmed to be not that easy to do..

Lot of noise around ZFS. Nice training about the file system internals. Also other trainings given by James Mauro and Richard Elling were very interesting – DTrace, Solaris 10 performance tuning etc. SUN (probably as always at LISA) was very noticeable at the conference. Evening sessions kind of Schuberg Philis’ style although they still need some practice in that area

cfengnine3 vs. puppet – unfortunately didn’t attend to any of those workshops but you could smell a gun powder in the air

XEN – as great it is everyone knows but they really should spend some effort in doing a good presentation/training because the one which took place in Baltimore wasn’t the best way to get on board with it.

Google was giving away a free stuff, it was very popular..

Over the Edge System Administration – nice one, basically non standard system administration procedures (behavior). Stuff that happens for everyone from time to time. Do something not very common which works and sometimes stays in production for years.. Kind of BOFHish too..

Maybe some tips for people who will attend in LISA in future:

• Avoid trainings unless you’re really sure that level/scope will really suits you
• Wear black clothes – people will like you more
• Grow a beard – you will be respected more

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.