Lisa conference report

From Computing Project Repository

LISA'05

On Friday, December 2nd 2005, four brave members of the staff at Oslo University College depart for San Diego. Their objective:

To attend the Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '05) (http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa05/).

You can follow their exciting journey, as they eat, sleep and inhale the adventure that is LISA. Watch this space to get updated information as the events unfold.

General remarks

This year's LISA conference was the best in a long time. We made many good contacts with old friends and colleagues.

Student Impressions

Espen

The most valuable for me at LISA'05 was the virtualization BOF where I got in contact with the "virtualization community". I signed up for an attendee mailinglist and discussed my master thesis description with Steve Traugott in infrastructures.org. Monica Lam's talk about "automatic PC desktop management with virtualization technology" was also interesting, and I discussed a while with Costa Sapuntazakis (Lam's phd student). Both Traugott and Sapuntazakis were interested in my thesis, and encouraged me to establish e-mail contact with them when I started to work on it. These contacts will probably be valuable resources in my master thesis.

I got in touch with Jeff Polo in Google before the google BOF, and also other google employees at the BOF. We mostly discussed the possibility for internship in Google in Norway. I am going to send e-mails to the people I talked to, and hopefully get more information about Google in Norway and how to best get in touch with them.

I attended several other sessions as well, but only for my own interest (shell programming, os x, network black ops, backup, etc). It felt very valuable to attend sessions that was related to my master thesis, and on a conference like this I think it is important to have a topic that one can consider as "my own field" - in my case, virtualization.

Maurice

Our part of the USENIX sponsoring agreement was to stuff bags on Saturday before the conference, as well as handing out printed material (tutorials) to conference participants on 2 other days. This gave me the chance to get to know both USENIX staff and others - some of them I knew as book authors, or I had heard about them as authorities in the sysadmin field. Exciting to meet them personally! Even during our working days it was possible to attend tutorial sessions, and some of them were a delight: interesting material, presented in a great manner.

 Attending the more academic sessions (invited/refereed papers) allowed 

me to have an update on recent research, and experiencing "live" the interactive nature of these talks by means of q&a mostly at the end, but sometimes even during the presentations.

Being able to attend LISA was not only useful for my Master thesis (got several useful contacts, plus opinions and hints from experienced people), but also an ice-breaker for future conferences. I am very grateful for both the support HiO/IU (a special thanks to you, Mark!!) and USENIX provided - it was really a sweet deal!

Ilir

he trip to LISA was carried out in the right time for me. It was a period when I was a little unsure about my professional orientation. The selection of technical sessions and tutorials was wide, yet I managed to join in a couple of them. We as a group of voluntary students were lucky to be able to join any of them for free. I attended "Network Black Ops: Extracting Unexpected Functionality from Existing Networks Dan Kaminsky, DoxPara Research" and of special interest was the Network Activity Visualizing part of the lecture, as my Masters Project is going to involve a lot of network traffic analysis. I also found interesting to get more familiar with MACs, as it was one of the main laptop brands used by participants in LISA. The lecture "About the Integration of Mac OS X Devices into a Centrally Managed UNIX environment by Anton Schultschik, ETH Zürich" contained interesting informations and appealed me to join. Appreciation of security is crucial for an SA, so I decided to get some information, and joined "What's the Worst That Could Happen? by Peyton Engel, Berbee Information Networks Corporation". Though not very technical, it provided plenty of useful information regarding broad concepts of security issues. "Picking Locks with Cryptology Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania" was another useful lecture, which gave insights on technologies used in eavesdropping links, and ways to secure the information exchange.

Masters programme BoF was a good way to portray our work at Oslo University college. Meeting and finding potential employers was a very important moment. I got the chance to talk to Google company representatives, who were hiring. Exchanging information with them was very useful. Additionally, there were many job postings in message boards which had useful information regarding job inquiries.

I am thankful to you for providing/introducing me with this opportunity to meet with professionals, and see some real-life applications of what we read from books. I must say it has been often discouraging to see such high-level experts, worrying whether I will personally be any close to that, and at the same time encouraging one since it opened some doors of opportunity, where I could see myself working, applying and developing my knowledge.

Kyrre

Kyrre joined a tutorial on Linux System Administration in Production Environemnts in order to update himself on the lates techologies used in the industry. He also attended a workshop on system administration education. This workshop was productive in many ways as the community got together and discussed problems and challenges. Kyrre recieved a great deal of positive feedback and suggestions for the software tool MLN which is designed by Kyrre and developed at IU.

Siri

I attended several of the technical sessions, but particularly enjoyed the sessions on System Administration Theory, and the session on Network Visualization.

In addition to the technical sessions, I also attended a couple of BoF's (Virtualization and Cfengine), in addition to the BoF where the Oslo University College Master programme was presented. I also attended a so-called Work-in-progress-session, where each presenter only had five minutes to present the essence of their work. This allowed 11 people to present their work during less than two hours, which was a very interesting and entertaining session.

During the conference, I met several interesting people, and got to discuss issues strongly related to the topic of my Phd-project.

Day 7, Friday

Mark takes the masters students out to dinner in the San Diego old town.

Day 6, Thursday

Mark gave a paper in the morning and a tutorial in the afternoon.

Day 4, Tuesday

Mark gave a tutorial in the morning.

System admin education workshop

Below are the DRAFT notes from this year's workshop. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it. Please let me know of corrections.

Thanks, Steven

9-10 Introductions

    - Problems
      * How to connect our graduates to jobs
      * Scott: How to build good problem-solving instead of recipes
      * David: no money for course development -- drives towards
      shared platform -> agree on a platform so we could share exercises
      more easily
      * Elizabeth: testing & assessment; external validation of testing
      and assessment: SAGE certification standards/tests
      * Matt: advocacy of education efforts
      * Steven: how to connect us to others (in particular, to ACM)
      * Steven: no web & ftp teaching materials       

     - Issue that seems common: lack of Windows administration expertise

10-12 Virtualization

     - mln "My Linux Network"; Kyrre runs close to 100 hosts with mln.  Built
     on UML, so there are some stability issues because UML is still heavily
     under development
     - Two other products in the same space: vulab & vcml (by Zach Lowry: built on
     QEMU); VMware or VirtualPC-based solutions are also possible.
     - lab issues: logistics (physical space, setup time) x 
                   cost (of hardware & space) =  pedagogical payoff
     - A solution adopted by everyone would need to be low/no cost and
     cross-platform (e.g., VMware, VirtualPC, etc)

     Assessment/Testing/Evaluation
     - 'group riders' - 
       * weight group-work less than individual metrics (ie, homeworks 20%, 
       tests 80%)
       * exams-per-assignment (ie, grade per topic is a combination)
       * inter-group evaluations/peer evaluations
       * add a notebook component per person
     - Automated assignment grading
       * some are doing it, basically by pre-setting test systems
       * Acuitus handles tracking by looking at the following: 
         - machine's behavior, 
         - change ontology (ie, machine state),
         - student belief state (ie, what the student thinks the problem is)
      - David does interviews/demonstrations with each group of students to 
      do assessment
      - David is moving _towards_ recipes _because_ of the 'just google it' 
      phenomenon (i.e., they search for 'email configuration' and find AIX 
      docs, even though they are working on, say, Solaris)
      - Another common strategy is to give recipes at the beginning and 
      wean them from them over the course of the program.
      - Some do pre-tests and post-tests to show improvement (this is 
      basically a required approach for accreditation).  Some would like to 
      do 'test-out' approaches for earlier labs, for example.  Using such 
      tests for diagnostic purposes seem to be a good theme.  It might be 
      useful to have a common (ie, across this group) diagnostic test, or 
      perhaps a modular set.
      - Big issues for us: (our) time, dealing with 'out of the ordinary' 
      approaches for solutions (e.g., instead of fixing the 'broken' box, 
      break the correct one
      to match the broken one), breaking down larger projects into 
      (checkable) milestones,
      - David has a vi tutorial he gives
      - Modules people would like to see:
        * LDAP (Aeleen Frisch did an LDAP module at Oslo this Fall)
        * ActiveDirectory (an equivalent module to the LDAP one)
        * Basic stuff: cd, editors, etc
        * (Kyrre) a way to more easily and accurately describe overlap 
        between courses  among schools
        * Backups (and restores): Curt has some materials that may be 
        sharable/helpful. Aeleen did a backup module for Oslo also.
        * Authentication & Authorization
      - External assessment
        * a more generic tool like SAGE cerification would be viewed as a very
        positive thing
        * one view is that a particular exam (within a course or program) 
        is hard to be exchanged with an external one
        * 'nice to have', not necessary
        * could be nice as an integrative exam (within a 'track', 'thread', 
        'concentration' or 'emphasis' program)

12:30-1:30 lunch

1:30-3 ACM IT Curriculum (and community issues)

      * sysadm-education recommended curriculum models
      * How to connect our graduates to jobs
        - bringing students to LISA has mixed success 
        - internships are a great idea
        - Oslo has had some success where students' final
        projects (which include an industry customer) ends up
        in job offers for those students (ie, job offers from the
        customer).  
        - visibility and credibility (of the field) is an issue
      * Advocacy of education efforts
      * How to connect us to others (in particular, to ACM)
      * Mark suggests a consortium idea -- grouping together to
        - apply for grants/funding
        - publish papers together
        - (collaborate in general)
        - Consortium of System Administration 
        with the overall view of raising visibility of System Administration
        education and research
      * Oslo:
        MS program:
        - has graduated one class (of 12)
        - second class has ~15 students
        - next has ~15 students
        - two goals of program: terminal degree _and_ leave open
        option of research (ie, PhD)
        - currently 2 PhD students, expecting to graduate in 2007
      * Alva currently has 4 PhD students, Yizhan Sun (almost finished),
      Ning Wu (post-qualifiers), Mark Chiarini (pre-quals, post-courses), 
      and Hengke Susanto (working on autonomics).

3-3:30 Break

3:30-5 Textbooks & Materials

      * Quite a few _are_ using Mark's Principles book as the core
      text (both w/in the workshop and outside)
      * Scott's school has access to 'Books 24/7'
      * Steven's school has access to Safari (safari.oreilly.com)
      * Technical book vs textbook: Kyrre sees a difference in quality
      of reports in the original sources (recipes vs textbook)
      * Curt is using outside reviewers of student papers (eg, students
      in a different course will give feedback on the writing)
      * Firewalls and Intrusion Detection (Kyrre is using)
        - Northcutt's Network Intrusion Detection
        - Ziegler's Linux Firewalls
        

      * Ethics: some have a few chapters, but there don't seem to
      be any good Ethics texts for System Administration (The Gift
      of Fire seems to be fairly popular).  Curt shilled 'Ethics and
      Computing' by KW Boyer.  The SAGE Code of Ethics is too 
      general and high-level to be the basis for a course in Ethics
      for System Administrators.
      * Security: Bishop, Secrets and Lies
      * Networking:
        - Peterson & Davies
        - Kurose & Ross - for undergraduates
        - Fourazan - good on details
        - Tanenbaum
        - Leon Garcia's: Communication Networks
        - Alva has a lecture called 'Breaking IP'
      * Another missing area: how to do write about research.  
        - problem is missing the scientific context
        - Steven needs to dig up the reference on research methods
        for CS paper that he has lying in his office somewhere
      * Unix Fundamentals: 
        - Glass' Unix for Programmers and Users
        - Mark Sobel's book Unix System V
        - It's hard to beat Kernighan and Pike
        - David would be interested in collaborating on a book for this
        - Mark offerred to let people start from his notes to put
        together an online text/version 

• Mark offered to let us host our notes & materials on the Oslo

'System Administration Resources' site so that we can more easily
collaborate/share materials (http://www.iu.hio.no/SystemAdmin/). Contact
Matt if we want to put content up.

• Another possibility is the Drupal site set up last year (or conference

 wiki?).

• A site for sharing this information might be something useful for the

 Consortium to have as a main(?) focus.

• Norway's Network of Excellence called 'Magix' -- they are motivated

 to produce teaching resources.  They are going to make a virtual
 laboratory to share the resources of ~30 universities.  They might
 be able to assemble a scheme wherein the Consortium could access
 the resources as well.

* If someone is interested in looking at other student projects (e.g.,
Master's Theses), some way of sharing those might be something the
Consortium could do.

• Another idea is cross-institution collaboration on projects.
• YAI is doing external audits of curriculum

Thoughts on this year:

* good discussion today
* a paper idea would be to write up issues & challenges (and even a survey)
of virtualization and System Administration, Security, & Distributed
Computing Education (Kyrre and Matt, among others, are interested in that)
* The consortium idea has some support.  Oslo will set up a wiki.  One goal
would be to have it visually appealing (hint: anyone have a student project
to do web design?)

Attendees:

Curt Freeland - curt@cse.nd.edu

Steven Jenkins - jenkinss@etsu.edu

Scott Orr - sorr@cs.iupui.edu

Elizabeth Zwicky - zwicky@acuitus.com

Steve VanDevender - stevev@uoregon.edu, Univ of Oregon

David Byers - davby@ida.liu.se

Kyrre Begnum - Oslo kyrre@iu.hio.no

Matt Disney - Oslo matthew.disney@iu.hio.no

Terry Countryman - GIT terry@cc.gatech.edu

Mark Burgess - mark@iu.hio.no (afternoon)

Alva Couch - couch@cs.tufts.edu

Rik Farrow - rik@usenix.org

Day 3, Monday

Mark gave a tutorial in the afternoon and attended the workshop in the afternoon.

Notes from the configuration management workshop

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/group/lssconf/config2005/index.html

Day 2, Sunday

This was a day working on private things.

Day 1, Saturday

There really is not much happing today, as far as LISA is conserned. We just registered, and use the oportunity to get online as well. We used some of the time earlier today to do some work.

Simen's notes

Visualization can be used to improve understanding of complex matters. The idea is to create a simple interface that can be used to set up a simple scene. The framework can be controlled with only a few parameters. The interface can presented both as a 3-dimensional and a classic 2D graphical user interface (GUI). After the initial setup of the display, the visualization is controlled by modifying only a small number of parameters. The system will consist of two main parts.

1. The visualization engine
2. The plug-ins (monitors)

The visualization engine is just a simple interface with which the plug-ins will communicate. The communication will be done through a network socket. This allows for distributed plug-ins. It also allows for the plug-ins to be written in any language, as long as it can send and receive messages through the network.

Each plug-in will typically represent one input to the system. It may represent a single machine or network, or it may represent a property of a machine or network. By using several monitors, a complex picture of the whole system can be monitored with relative ease.

- Metrics (or utility factor for decision-making)
- Policy (bgp)

Specifying networks and systems in Maude

Maude (http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/) is a formal specification and analysis tool based on rewriting logic.

Pictures

The whole gang (except me, who is taking the picture) was joined by Æleen Frish for a dicussion about nothing in particular. Later we went on a litter excursion to somewhere and looked at some seals. It was nice weather. We also ended up eating lunch.