PICC ‘12 Training Classes

The training programs at PICC ’12 are in depth and useful for all levels of System Administrators. You will be able to select from 12 half day training tutorials spread over 2 days for a complete immersion into the topic. All events are held at the Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick, NJ.

For most classes the training materials will be provided to you on a 2GB USB drive. If you’d like to access them during your class, please remember to bring a laptop.

Friday May 11, 2012

Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.)
F1 Room A	Steven Murawski	PowerShell Fundamentals
F2 Room B	David N. Blank-Edelman	Implementing WordPress for Sysadmins
F3 Room C	Thomas A. Limoncelli	Introduction to Time Management for System Administrators
F4 Room J/K	Mark Burgess & Carolyn Rowland	A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World
F5 Room I	Jesse Trucks	Blitzkrieg Branding
F6 Room D	Thomas Uphill & Benjamin Rose	Using Puppet to Pull Strings: A Gentle Introduction to Puppet
Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m.)
F7 Room A	Steven Murawski	PowerShell Tips and Tricks
F8 Room B	William LeFebvre	Using Amazon Web Services
F9 Room C	Thomas A. Limoncelli	The Limoncelli Test: Evaluating and Improving Sysadmin Operations
F10 Room D	Aleksey Tsalolikhin	Automating System Administration with CFEngine 3
F11 Room I	N. Nadine Miller	Technical Resume Writing
F12 Room J/K	David Nolan	TCP/IP Fundamentals in the Real World

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Half Day Morning (9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.)
SA1 Room D	Shumon Huque	Using and Migrating to IPv6
SA2 Room I	Peter Baer Galvin	Practical Cloud Computing
SA3 Room J/K	Jacob Farmer	Backups, Archiving, and Life Cycle Management: Riding the Wave of Data Proliferation
Half Day Afternoon (1:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m.)
SA4 Room D	Shumon Huque	DNS and DNSSEC
SA5 Room I	Jesse Trucks	Intro to Basic Security Principles for System Administrators class
SA6 Room J/K	Adam Moskowitz	Workplace Presentations 101 for IT Professionals

F1: PowerShell Fundamentals

Steven Murawski

PowerShell Fundamentals will provide students with a basic foundation to begin leveraging PowerShell to accomplish standard systems admin focused tasks by teaching some concrete techniques that they can begin using immediately. The course begins with some of the basic terminology, as well as the four essential commands to using PowerShell. The course progresses into a number of task-based examples of system administration style tasks. The course finally covers using PowerShell with two products that many administrators have to work with, Active Directory and Exchange. (Note: these can be swapped out for some other product like Hyper-V, VMWare, Microsoft DNS, SQL Server, etc.. .)

Topics Include:

Terminology
The Big 4 – Four Essential Commands to Navigating PowerShell (40 min)
Working from the Shell
Dealing with Objects
Working with Workstations and Servers
Edit the registry
Working with text
Working with remote machines
Working with Active Directory
Working with Exchange

Steven Murawski is a Senior Windows Systems Engineer for Edgenet and a Microsoft MVP in PowerShell. He is an active participant in his local IT community. Steven is the founder of the Greater Milwaukee Script Club, a board member for the Greater Milwaukee IT Pro User Community, and an executive committee member for the Wisconsin INETA user group. Steven has been a member of LOPSA since 2006. Steven blogs at http://blog.usepowershell.com.

F2: Implementing WordPress for Sysadmins

David N. Blank-Edelman

Savvy SysAdmins know that WordPress is no longer just a blogging engine. In more and more cases it hits a sweet spot for people who need a simple content management system to manage their website. It is powerful, relatively easy to use, doesn’t require a consultant to set up, ties into a whole bunch of other services, is part of a thriving ecosystem, oh, and (mostly) free.

If you ever get asked to create a website for your company, a non-profit you volunteer for, your religious community, a friend’s business, an upcoming conference, or the ilk, you owe it to yourself to add WordPress to your toolbox. This class will teach you, from one sysadmin to another, how to implement WordPress to handle all of these scenarios. You’ll learn things like:

how to choose the best way to host and develop your WordPress site
how to choose amongst the kerjillions of WordPress themes available
the five plugins you won’t want to be without
ways to extend WordPress to make it sing and dance the way you want it to
keeping your WordPress installation as safe as possible
where to find the best tips and tricks to further your WordPress knowledge

We’ll go over together all of the steps a respectable SysAdmin would take from first download to final deployment (including all of those testing/staging steps in between non-sysadmins tend to forget). People with all levels of experience with WordPress are welcome. If you’ve already done a little work with WP, come extend and share your knowledge. After you take this class, don’t be surprised if the next website you implement is running WordPress.

David N. Blank-Edelman is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O’Reilly book Automating System Administration with Perl (the second edition of the Otter Book) available at purveyors of fine dead trees everywhere. He has spent the last 26+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi- platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of the LISA 2005 conference and one of the LISA 2006 Invited Talks co-chairs. David is honored to be the recipient of the 2009 SAGE Outstanding Achievement award and to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors.

F3: Introduction to Time Management for System Administrators

Thomas A. Limoncelli – Google

Who should attend: All sysadmins who want to collaborate efficiently within their team and with others (even solo sysadmins will benefit!).

Attendees must bring a laptop for in-class exercises. Techniques will apply to any wiki or collaborative document system, but the labs and demos will be done using Google Apps.

Take back to work: Techniques to help your IT team work better, faster, and more transparently.

Topics include:

Meetings and email
Making meetings not suck
Handling meetings that can’t be fixed
Stopping incoming email overload
Making sure your email gets read
How to get your co-workers to go along with your awesome ideas
Working better together using collaborative documents
Buy vs. build: How to get a team to agree
Common sysadmin uses of collaborative documents
Uncommon sysadmin uses of collaborative documents
Communicating a new design before you build it
Tracking loaner resources
Doing surveys
Assuring consistent results no matter who does the task
Making sure everyone on the team can share the work
Quick and easy way to document each service (and why you should)
Quick and easy way to document procedures (so others can do them for you)
Pager-duty tips for creating a feedback loop to assure constant improvement
Template for a simple IT department home page

Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His best-known books include Time Management for System Administrators (O’Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He received the SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He works at Google in NYC and blogs at http://EverythingSysadmin.com/. He was also the co-chair of LISA ’11.

F4: A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World

Mark Burgess, CFEngine; Carolyn Rowland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Who should attend: IT people and sysadmins interested in taking their career to the next level, improving their relationship with senior management, and increasing their value and marketability.

As a system administrator, you are already a crack technical analyst or engineer, but does your management understand the value and importance of your work? When you ask for staff or funding to support new or existing efforts, does management readily support you? Does management look to you to develop the future of IT services in your organization? Do you feel you have enough time to focus on projects and innovation instead of fire-fighting?

If you answered no to several of the above questions, then this course is for you. The first step toward improving your professional quality of life is to create a positive and collaborative relationship with your management. So why not take responsibility for the relationship? Senior management makes the decisions about budget, staffing, and, often, new services, without understanding the full impact of their decisions. What if you could make yourself part of that process? What if it was easy to ask your management for more resources because they already believed strongly in your positive contribution to the organization?

System administrators often have all the responsibility for IT systems, but none of the control. In this course we bring the two sides together by teaching the system administrator how to communicate effectively so that management will listen and understand. You can use the tactics presented here to increase your value in the organization and improve your marketability.

Make business look good, and you become an important asset to your organization. Your management will appreciate these skills because you will be demonstrating your value in ways they understand and that empower them to make smart IT investment decisions. In turn, your professional credibility increases, putting you in a position to influence decisions impacting your role in the organization.

Take back to work: Skills to help you develop a productive relationship with your management.

Topics include:

How to approach management to ask for resources you need
Empowering management to make good IT decisions
Demonstrating the value of your work in a way that management will understand
Convincing management of the importance of time to innovate (R&D)
Reducing time spent fire-fighting (efficiencies and cost savings)
Growing organizational loyalty for your team
How to build the perception that you are customer-focused and mission-oriented
Ways to communicate the benefits of supporting a strong IT presence
Increased organizational competitiveness
Increased employee productivity
Cost avoidance and efficiencies
Risk management
Knowledge and information management
How to develop a collaborative relationship with your management that enables both sides to be successful

Mark Burgess is the founder, chairman, CTO, and principal author of CFEngine. In 2011 he resigned as Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, where for twenty years he led the way in theory and practice of automation and policy-based management. In the 1990s he underlined the importance of idempotent, autonomous desired state management (“convergence”) and formalized cooperative systems in the 2000s (“promise theory”). He is the author of numerous books and papers on network and system administration, including the USENIX Short Topics books A System Engineer’s Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, co-authored with Æleen Frisch, and A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World, co-authored with Carolyn Rowland. He has won several prizes for his work.

Carolyn Rowland began her UNIX system administration career in 1991. She currently leads a team of sysadmins at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She focuses on raising the visibility of IT by aligning technology with business needs. She finds strength in service delivery, standardization, automation and cost control. Her tireless efforts succeeded in changing the perception of her team from yet another overhead cost to a highly respected part of the organization. Her team has distinguished itself as a leader in the development of new technology solutions that solve business and research problems across the NIST campus.

F5: Blitzkrieg Branding

Jesse Trucks

Who should attend: Anyone at any career level looking to advance their personal career, promote a project, and/or evangelize their team. This is a comprehensive course on how to brand and market yourself, your project, and/or your team with a variety of potential audiences in mind. The course will teach the students how to generate a personal brand for their career; a brand for their project (either for internal audiences within an organization or external audiences in the outside world); or their team for either internal or external exposure (think PR).

Looking to find a new job? Looking to advance your career inside your own organization? Perhaps you want to increase support and exposure for an internal project. Maybe your team needs a PR turnaround inside your organization for better coworker and management relations.

Blitzkrieg Branding will teach you how to accomplish all these things and more.

Take back to work: A plan of action for promotion and advancement of personal career, project, and/or team.

Topics include:

Creating your personal brand
Shaping your project’s message
Framing your team’s image
Using LinkedIn and other tools effectively
Networking – with people, not machines
How to think about resumes
Job searches in hard times
Ideas for interviews
Short term branding tactics
Long term branding strategies

Jesse Trucks has worked in a startup; at an ISP in the 90′s; as the single IT guy; in an organization with nearly 150 system administrators maintaining thousands of enterprise servers; managing a team of systems administrators for a consulting firm; on a Unix systems related R&D team at a mid-sized telco; and building and supporting more than a dozen special purpose supercomputers supporting computational biochemistry for a private research company. He now supports information security for the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – home of the Jaguar supercomputer among others.

Trucks has extensive security experience in variety of disciplines, and he is well versed in a variety of system administration and professional development related areas. He has worked for over a decade building his personal brand and contacts; which he has effectively leveraged to find many great career opportunities working with amazing peers.

He has served as an elected member of the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) Board of Directors since 2007, and he has taught more than a dozen classes at various conferences. He has been a Local Mentor Instructor for the SANS Institute SEC-506: Securing Unix/Linux course, and he currently serves as a member of the SANS/GIAC Advisory Boards. In addition, he has previously held a GCIH certification and currently holds a GCUX Gold certification.

F6: Using Puppet to pull strings: a gentle introduction to puppet

Thomas Uphill, Institute for Advanced Study
Benjamin Rose, Princeton University

Who should attend: System adminstrators who are tired of making the same configuration changes multiple times. Enterprise administrators who are looking for a way to maintain consistency across a large installation. Desktop administrators who seek an easier method to produce carbon-copy builds. Any administrator who is interested in tighter system integration. Presented from a puppet standpoint, this class can be relatively OS and distribution agnostic but will focus mainly on RPM-based Linux.

Take back to work: Building your own sites manifest from scratch. Translating requirements into puppet manifests. Modularising common tasks to reduce duplicated code and effort.

Topics Include:
Introductory Material:

Language/Type overview
Facter/Facts
puppetca: Puppet’s PKI
Server, Mongrel or Passenger
Manifests/Modules and Classes.
Templates
Monitoring/Reporting

Advanced Material

Chaining resources, classes, and run stages
Stored configurations
Virtualizing or exporting resources, then realizing or collecting them.
Systems integration

Thomas Uphill (http://ramblings.narrabilis.com/) has been a System Administrator for 16 years. He currently works at the Institute for Advanced Study where he is one of the main contributors to the PUIAS Linux distribution. Thomas has several Red Hat Certifications and currently holds an RHCA. Thomas enjoys building packages, fixing spec files and maintaining repositories. He’s spent the last year migrating all his perl and bash scripts to python.

Ben Rose (http://allmybase.com/) recently graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science. He is currently employed as a Network & Systems Administrator for the Computer Science department at Princeton University. He also contributes to the PUIAS Linux distribution and is responsible for ARM development and support. Ben is RHCE certified and spends his free time programming and helping to run several small web-startup sites.

F7: PowerShell Tips and Tricks

Steven Murawski

PowerShell Tips and Tricks will provide students with a variety of tips and tricks to make working with PowerShell simpler, more effective, and just plain fun. We will cover how profiles can help you have standard levels of features across users and machines, as well as providing customizability for an individual’s shell environment. We will explore the pipeline and how you can leverage the different capabilities provided by the PowerShell pipeline to make more concise scripts and functions. Additional topics we will cover include tricks with variables, getting around Execution Policy, making the Integrated Scripting Environment awesome.

Topics Include:

Profiles
Pipeline
Variables
Dealing with Execution Policies
Integrated Scripting Environment

StevenMurawski Steven Murawski is a Senior Windows Systems Engineer for Edgenet and a Microsoft MVP in PowerShell. He is an active participant in his local IT community. Steven is the founder of the Greater Milwaukee Script Club, a board member for the Greater Milwaukee IT Pro User Community, and an executive committee member for the Wisconsin INETA user group. Steven has been a member of LOPSA since 2006. Steven blogs at http://blog.usepowershell.com.

F8: Using Amazon Web Services

William LeFebvre, Chief Architect, CSE Digital

Who should attend:System administrators who currently use or are
considering the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as individuals who are tasked with supporting AWS for production services, especially if they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the command-line tools and the Web-based interface supplied by Amazon. Experience with cloud computing is not required. Experience with the installation and support of basic tools and languages (especially Java and Ruby) would be beneficial. Time will only permit us to study the creation and support of Linux instances in the Amazon cloud.

Amazon offers a solid collection of cloud services through the Amazon Web Services (AWS). These include virtual machines and storage, load balancers, replicated databases, content data delivery, and automatic scaling and monitoring. AWS provides a very rich API to facilitate building applications that utilize these services, but the actual user interfaces can be difficult to master. This tutorial introduces the Amazon Web Services and describes the more popular services and how they can all fit together to support an infrastructure. It provides in-depth instruction on using the user-level interfaces for the essential services: EC2, EBS, S3, and Cloudfront. Both the web console and the command line tools will be taught. Cautions and pitfalls will be presented along the way to ensure that the student will not make some common mistakes of first-time AWS users.

Take back to work: Knowledge of the techniques, pitfalls, commands, and programs that will help you make effective use of the Amazon cloud.

Topics include:

Introduction to AWS
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Simple Storage Service (S3)

William LeFebvre is an author, programmer, instructor, and system administration expert. He has been using UNIX and Internet technologies since 1983. First exposed to computer networking with the original ARPANet, he has stood on the leading edge of every new technology: the World Wide Web, Java, Ruby on Rails, cloud computing, blogs, and social networking. William is currently the chief architect for the digital division of CSE. He provides consultation and advice on the effective use of Internet technology and helps clients establish development and production environments in public clouds. For over four years William was a Technology Fellow at Turner Broadcasting, where he designed systems for high-volume Web sites, including CNN.com, Money.com, SI.com, NASCAR.com, and CartoonNetwork. During that time he led planning and deployment of Web server infrastructure for two general elections and other high-traffic events. In the late 1990s William ran his own consulting business, helping companies with UNIX systems and Internet technologies and teaching Cisco classes as a certified Instructor. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1983 and a Master of Science degree in 1988, both from Rice University. His monthly column “Daemons & Dragons” appeared in UNIX Review’s Performance Computing, and he served as editor of the USENIX series on Short Topics in System Administration for several years. He has given tutorials for technical conferences held by USENIX, Sun Expo, UK Unix Users Group, and IT Forum, and he was the program chair of LISA ’06. LeFebvre is currently on the leadership committee for LOPSA and on the LISA Steering Committee.

F9: The Limoncelli Test: Evaluating and improving sysadmin operations

Thomas A. Limoncelli – Google

Who should attend: Sysadmins working on teams or solo; junior sysadmins aiming to be senior sysadmins or team leaders.

Tom’s books total over 2,100 pages of advice. In this class he’ll narrow all that down to 32 essential practices. Tom will blast though all the 32 practices, explaining what brought him to include each one on the list, plus tips for incorporating the practice, policy, or technology into your organization. You’ll find some great ideas for providing better service with less effort.

Take back to work: How to identify and fix your biggest problems, cross-train your team, strengthen your systems—and more!

Topics include:

Improving sysadmin-user interaction
Best practices for working together as a team
Best practices for service operations
Engineering for reliability
Sustainable Enterprise fleet (desktop/laptop) management
How to figure out what your team does right, and where it needs to improve

Note: Attendees are greatly encouraged to read the test before the start of class.
http://everythingsysadmin.com/the-test.html or http://everythingsysadmin.com/the-test.pdf

F10: Automating System Administration with CFEngine 3

Aleksey Tsalolikhin

Modern system administration automates configuration management using state of the art tools. Here is an introduction to Cfengine, the open source configuration management tool with the longest track record, a large user base, and cutting edge features. System administrators will take back to work an understanding of Cfengine 3 including it’s syntax and benefits, and will be able to start using it.

Topics include:

Moving from ad hoc administration to automation
The importance of convergence and self-healing
The Promise model
Data types
Quickstart configuration
Example configurations and demos

Aleksey has been a UNIX/Linux system administrator for 13 years.
Wrangling EarthLink’s server farms by hand during growth from 1,000 to 5,000,000 users, he developed an abiding interest in improving the lot of system administrators through configuration management, documentation, and personal efficiency training. Aleksey teaches
public and private classes on these topics – http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/training.htm

F11: Technical Resume Writing

N. Nadine Miller

Technical Resume Writing covers the high points of overhauling your resume to receive better responses from the HR “gatekeepers” as well as potential IT managers and colleagues.

Topics covered include:

improving the 30 second response to your resume
adding quantitative information to your resume
“career objective” versus “professional summary”/”profile”
the type of resume to use
tailoring resumes to specific job listings
and improving the visual design of your resume

We will look at real-world examples of before and after resumes. The principles taught apply to social networking profiles in addition to paper and on-line resumes. Bring your resume and be ready to ask specific questions.

Nadine Miller currently works as a system administrator focussing on Solaris Java-based enterprise web sites. She has previously worked in various ares of information technology ranging from first line manager to desktop support. Her career also includes stints as a technical trainer and an undergraduate technical writing instructor at Texas A&M University. Nadine is currently serving on the LOPSA Board of Directors, and authors and maintains several web properties including http://nadinemiller.org.

F12: TCP/IP Fundamentals in the Real World

David Nolan

Who should attend: Systems Adminstrators who think the network team speaks Greek, routers are tools for cutting holes in wood, and DNS is just magic.

Description:
Every Systems Administrator needs to understand the basics of how networks operate, because every service you provide absolutely depends on the network. Layers, Protocols, Addressing, it all can seem like a black box. Lets open that box and help you understand the component parts. Maybe next time you send a ticket to the network team asking for a firewall change, they won’t come back asking for more details.

Topics:

The 7-layer (as in “dip”) model of networking, and why even network engineers get it wrong
IP vs TCP vs UDP: What do they provide and how do they interact
IPv4, it is not dead yet: IPv4 Addressing and Subnetting
DNS: Its the most critical service in the network, but often poorly understood.
DHCP: Without it, you have no users. (That is not a good thing!)
Real world experiences with how things interact and lead to head scratching moments
Unexpected network tricks. Sometimes what you think is happening isn’t whats actually happening behind the scenes. And more often then
not, that matters!

David Nolan is a Principal Network Engineer for Ariba, Inc. During his career he has been a Helpdesk Consultant, a System Administrator, a Software Developer and a Network Engineer. While officially having crossed over to the network team, he still sees himself as a Systems Administrator. His systems just happen to be made by Cisco, Juniper, etc.

SA1: Using and Migrating to IPv6

Shumon Huque

The Internet is facing an impending and imminent exhaustion of IP addresses. IPv6, the next generation Internet Protocol is designed to address this problem, among other things. This tutorial will provide an introduction to IPv6, and will also cover practical aspects of configuring and using IPv6 in network, operating systems, and applications. No prior experience with IPv6 is assumed, but basic familiarity with TCP/IP networking and operating systems is very helpful.

Topics to be covered will include some or all of the following:

IPv6 addressing
protocol details
neighbor discovery
auto-configuration
DHCPv6
DNS
tunneling protocols
routing
a survey of transition mechanisms
configuring hosts
configuration applications
troubleshooting and debugging
Time permitting, further topics such as configuring IPv6 routing, and some IPv6 programming examples will be covered

Who Should attend: System administrators, network admistrators, and application developers who need to prepare for migration to IPv6 and anyone who wants a general introduction to IPv6 and what is involved in deploying it.

Take Back To Work: An understanding of IPv6, and the basic knowledge to begin designing and deploying IPv6 networks, systems, and applications.

Shumon Huque is the Director of Engineering, Research, & Development for the University of Pennsylvania’s Networking & Telecommunications division and also serves as the Lead Engineer for the MAGPI GigaPoP. He is involved in network engineering, systems engineering, and the design and operation of key infrastructure services at Penn(DNS, DHCP, Authentication, E-mail, Web, VoIP, Directory, etc). He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Penn. In addition to his day job, Shumon teaches (part time) a lab course on advanced network protocols at Penn’s engineering school.

SA2: Practical Cloud Computing

Peter Baer Galvin

Who should attend: Sysadmins and managers interested in cloud computing but wondering what it’s all about, what works and what doesn’t, what to consider
putting into the cloud and what to keep on terra firma, and those interesting in guiding their company through a cloud decision and selection process.

Take back to work: Next steps for your company to execute to evaluate the use of cloud, a short list of cloud providers to consider, and a methodology for analyzing current business needs and determining if and what kind of cloud they should be in.

Topics include:

Cloud technology overview (public and private)
The “best” cloud technology companies
Datacenter transformation and Infrastructure maturity models
Pragmatic view of cloud computing
Driving It initiatives to cloud and non-cloud solutions
Developing a roadmap
Case studies

Peter Baer Galvin is the CTO for Corporate Technologies, a premier systems integrator and VAR (www.cptech.com). Before that, Peter was the systems manager for Brown University¹s Computer Science Department. He has written articles and columns for many publications and is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter teaches tutorials and gives talks on security and system administration worldwide. Peter is also a Lecturer at Boston University. He is a Senior Contributor to BYTE and anewdomain.net. Peter blogs at http://www.galvin.info and twitters as “PeterGalvin”.

SA3: Backups, Archiving, and Life Cycle Management: Riding the Wave of Data Proliferation

Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services

Who should attend: System administrators involved in the design and management of backup systems and policymakers responsible for protecting their organization’s data.

Most IT organizations report exponential data growth over time, and whether your data doubles every year, every two years, or every five years, the simple fact remains that if your data capacities double, then both the capacity and the performance of your backup system must double. All of this doubling stresses traditional approaches to data management. Thus, it is no surprise that backup/recovery is one of the most costly and unforgiving operations in the data center. Meanwhile, most IT organizations also report that the vast majority of their unstructured data is seldom or never accessed. Files accumulate year after year, choking the backup systems and driving up costs.

This course explores two main ways to manage the data deluge: (1) optimize backup systems by eliminating bottlenecks, streamlining operations, and bulking up backup infrastructure; and (2) manage the life cycles of unstructured data so that files that are not in active use can be managed separately from files that are in active use. We start by offering a simple framework for defining business requirements and comparing solutions at a high level. We then delve into the various mechanisms for lifecycle management and for eliminating backup system bottlenecks. Some time is spent exploring storage systems that have built-in mechanisms for data protection and lifecycle management.

Take back to work: Ideas for immediate, effective, inexpensive improvements to your backup systems and a vision for how you might deploy a lifecycle management system that fits your organization.

Topics include:

Formulating strategies for data protection and lifecycle management
Identifying and addressing backup system bottlenecks
Managing fixed content
Hierarchical storage management and data migration
In-band versus out-of-band approaches to file lifecycle management
Breathing new life into tape storage
Deduplication: separating hype from reality
Object-based storage models for backup and archiving
Self-healing and self-protecting storage systems
Leveraging the cloud for backup and archiving

Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMworld, Interop, and the USENIX conferences. Jacob’s no-nonsense, fast-paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Most recently Jacob was honored as the top-rated speaker at Storage Networking World, the preeminent conference for the data storage industry. Jacob is a regular lecturer at many of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Recently he has given invited talks at institutions such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, and Yale. Inside the data storage industry, Jacob is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups. Jacob is a graduate of Yale.

Follow him on Twitter @JacobAFarmer

SA4: DNS and DNSSEC

Shumon Huque

This tutorial will provide system administrators an understanding of the DNS protocol, including advanced topics such as DNSSEC (DNS Security). It will provide practical information about configuring DNS services using examples from the popular ISC BIND DNS software platform.

Topics include:

the DNS protocol and how it works
DNS master zone file format
a look at a variety of server configurations and recommendations
DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) and how to deploy it
many examples of DNS query and debugging using the “dig” tool
DNS and IPv6
and more

SA5: Intro to Basic Security Principles for System Administrators class

Jesse Trucks

This course is a primer for someone who has little or no security training and/or experience and wants to either learn the basics in brief enough
to keep out of trouble or to fill in gaps in their experience/knowledge. The audience for this course is any new or seasoned system administrator
of servers (or desktops) looking to build or fill in the gaps of their foundational security toolkit.

The course will cover:

Explanations of major types of security domains, like intrusion detection, vulnerability sccanning (active and passive),
vulnerability analysis, compliance management, incident reponse, and event correlation.
Technical descriptions of how to implement certain security controls on systems (both windows and linux/unix scattered throughout), with
discussion covering the reasoning behind the controls.
A list of resources to find more information, security news feeds, orgs with education and training, standards and legal compliance
information.
A general overview of the process and methodology of hardening a server, with some technical examples scattered throughout.

SA6: Workplace Presentations 101 for IT Professionals

Adam Moskowitz

Who should attend: All sysadmins and IT professionals.

Whether you are a new sysadmin or an IT team leader, presentations are an important part of your job. Need to convince your boss and work team that you have the right solution to a problem? Be sure to address the issues that are most important to them. Want to go to that conference again next year? Give a great report to your group when you get back. Hoping for that next promotion? The better you are at explaining your work, the clearer it will be that you are the right choice!

This class will introduce participants to an array of tools and techniques to give them confidence in planning and giving presentations to their peers, colleagues, managers, and maybe even the corporate executives. Attendees will learn and practice essential skills such as designing a talk to fit your audience, subject, and available time; effective use of software tools for presentations; and what to do (and how to feel comfortable) when you are finally in front of your audience.

Take back to work: An introduction to basic speaking techniques, an overview of presentation tools and how best to use them, and a solid understanding of the most common mistakes presenters make.

Topics include:

Analyzing the requirements for your presentation
Preparing your content
Preparing your materials
Practicing your talk
Giving your talk
Common mistakes and problems

Adam Moskowitz is the son of two public school teachers and has been teaching since 1977. He started with swimming and first aid classes for the American Red Cross, then as a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard University Extension Program, then full-time for six years with Instruction Set, teaching classes in C and UNIX programming and UNIX system administration as well as “train the trainer” for those same classes. He has given tutorials at LISA and presented several talks at LISA and other conferences. As part of his job he has made presentations to his peers, his manager, and his manager’s peers, to the entire executive management team, and to the whole company.