Presentations
The following are confirmed abstracts for speakers at the LCA2006 Sysadmin Miniconf.
- A sysadmins view of VoIP - Ewen McNeill
- Virtual Servers using Linux VServer - Sam Vilain
- Service processor based server management - John Bordin
- Merlin, Point-of-Sale FOSS sorcery - Lindsay Holmwood
- Manipulating Email with MIMEDefang - Mark Suter
- What do you know? Plone, an OSS tool for all your Sysadmin Knowledge - Julie Kosakowski
- System Monitoring with WBEM - Tim Potter
- Building templates in Cacti - Andrew McMillan
- What is Manageability? - Randy Levensalor
- A few useful Linux tools you might not know about - Edward Murphy and Simon Lyall
- Setting up a LAMP (PHP) Server - Morgan Tocker
- Supporting and surviving volunteer tech work - Janet Hawtin
- Oh for a shorter tea break or reducing build link times - Kim Hawtin
- Google related, title TBA - Eric Pollmann
- SAGE-NZ - Ewen McNeill
- ssh -L and iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT: A Poor Man's VPN - Ewen McNeill
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A sysadmins view of VoIP - Ewen McNeill
An overview of Voice over IP (VoIP) technology from a system administrator's point of view. The talk will cover how VoIP works (focusing on SIP and H.323), issues with mixing VoIP with firewalls and/or NAT, and include a brief survey of open source tools for working with VoIP and debugging VoIP issues.
Length: 60 minutes
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Virtual Servers using Linux VServer - Sam Vilain
There are many ways to provide multiple UNIX environments on a single Linux system. Linux-VServer builds on classic UNIX concepts and BSD 'chroot' to provide fully functional virtual servers using a single Linux kernel. Entire networks of firewalled Linux environments can be easily setup on surprisingly modest systems. This talk describes the history and design of Linux VServer, information on getting started, and comparisons against competing and complementary virtualisation systems such as Xen, VMWare, UML, QEMU, Bochs, FreeBSD Jails, Solaris Zones, etc.
Homepage: www.linux-vserver.org
Length: 60 minutes
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Service processor based server management - John Bordin
Major Hardware vendors provide service processors (SP) with their servers. The management options provided by SPs include Out-Of-Band access to:
- The main server (through serial console and KVM over IP)
- power control
- sensors and system event log
- BIOS configuration, POST and boot messages
- virtual media
- SNMP agents
This presentation intends to inform and promote discussion on existing and future management options for service processors and related Out-Of-Band management technology.
The other main topic is how to increase the use of SPs through unification, standardization and improved security (encryption, authentication, authorization, auditing).
Length: 60 minutes
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Merlin, Point-of-Sale FOSS sorcery - Lindsay Holmwood
Project Merlin is an Australian equipment hire company's endeavor to standardise their front counter point of sales system, and bring Linux to the corporate desktop nation wide. This talk will provide a technical overview of the adaptation of Free Software to their unique position through the use of distributed LDAP authentication, Samba, Xfce and Gnome desktop environments, as well as issues involved with deployment, systems management, and long term maintenance of the system.
Length: 60 minutes
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Manipulating Email with MIMEDefang - Mark Suter
perl -pe 's/xxx/xxx/magic' <your email>
Length: 30 minutes
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What do you know? Plone, an OSS tool for all your Sysadmin Knowledge - Julie Kosakowski
System Administrators have a wealth of knowledge including a collection of best practices and procedures regarding the systems they setup, support and maintain. However, one of the biggest challenges is extracting this information from the minds of sysadmins and capturing, organizing and presenting this knowledge in a central location that fosters growth of that knowledge.
This talk presents a dive into Plone, the open source Content Management System (CMS), and highlights the features of it that enable collaboration and knowledge sharing between sysadmins and the teams they support, and helps to reduce the overhead involved in system administration tasks. In addition, a CMS also ensures repeatability of tasks and sustainability for future sysadmins by transferring knowledge. Some of the Plone features I'll touch upon that improve system administration environments are the following:
- Centralized collaboration tool, fosters additional knowledge growth amongst sysadmins, the teams they support, developers, qa, managers.
- Enables the site to be content and multiple users driven, therefore relieves pressure of one admin having to maintain a knowledge site
- Account-based to restrict areas to sysadmin specific information
- Issue trackers that allow submittal of sysadmin requests for the lab This avoids bottlenecking of requests/demands on the sysadmin
- File sharing that is not available on wikis or blogs
- Patch downloads, security notifications
- Shared calendar and event notifications to indicate system down times for example
- RSS feeds to tie into existing newsgroups, consolidates all sources of information into one location
- Forums
- Internal as well as external tool that sysadmin can install for their teams or provide to their customers as a tool.
The official Plone site: http://plone.org
Length: 60 minutes
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System Monitoring with WBEM - Tim Potter
Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is a protocol and schema for managing networks of heterogeneous devices. As a system administrator you may someday be given a new widget that uses WBEM. This talk gives a starting point for exploring managing this new widget with some simple monitoring scripts.
Length: 45 minutes
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Building templates in Cacti - Andrew McMillan
Abstract pending.
Length: 30 minutes
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What is Manageability? - Randy Levensalor
This talk will demystify the world of Linux manageability and will delve into reasons why it is important to System Administrators.
Manageability is the ability to monitor everything that you care about on your network with one protocol. For example, system administrators may need to know the status of a variety of networked devices including servers, routers switches and disk arrays. The status of such devices may consist of load, temperature and any failure conditions. The ability to manage these devices with one protocol from a central console, ensures that you can respond to problems efficiently in your infrastructure and effectively maintain it. Without these tools administrators would need log into every machine in the infrastructure, which is a daunting if not impossible task to monitor a machine every 5 minutes.
The two most common protocols for monitoring and maintaining network devices are SNMP and WBEM.
Net-SNMP ("http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net) is an open source implementation of the SNMP protocol. It provides a tool for running SNMP agents on a server. We will walk through the functionality that Net-SNMP provides, the security offered by different versions of the SNMP protocol and view information from SNMP running on a server.
Having a common management protocol is only a small piece of having a scalable portable infrastructure management solution. Another piece of this is a common method for querying servers, otherwise the agents / providers need to be rewritten for each server type. IPMI is a protocol to query the state of the server. The information provided from IPMI includes processor speed, serial number, temperature, etc. OpenIPMI (http://www.openipmi.org/) is an open source kernel driver that implements this interface.
Nagios (http://nagios.org) is an open source console that monitors devices using SNMP and other tools. A live demo of Nagios will show how manageability tools are used in a real environment.
Length: 60 minutes
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A few useful Linux tools you might not know about - Edward Murphy and Simon Lyall
The presentation will be a overview of a series of useful Linux tools that System Administrators might not be familiar with. Each tool will have a few minutes devoted to it giving a brief description, a few samples uses and pointers to how it can be used.
It is intended to cover at least 10 applications and while most of the audience will know some of them we hope everybody will learn about at least one new one.
Length: 45 minutes
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Setting up a LAMP (PHP) Server - Morgan Tocker
I'll be providing a basic overview of setting up a LAMP server on Debian sarge. Items covered include; Choosing your mysql distribution, Installing PHP5 + E-Accelerator, backing up the MySQL Server (mysqldump backup, backing up the datadir or backing up from mysqldump on a slave).
I'll also hint at small hints at optimisation (mysql's slow query log) and catching errors (mysql error log).
About Morgan Tocker: Morgan is employed by MySQL AB as a Support Engineer. He works from his place in Brisbane for the APAC team. Prior to working for MySQL, he was responsible for all sorts of messed up hacks in PHP working on someone's intranet.
Length: 30-45 minutes
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Supporting and surviving volunteer tech work - Janet Hawtin
Volunteer tech work is a partnership.
If you are a member of an organisation working with volunteer tech people you will know that supporting their role is important. This talk offers some suggestions for partnering with volunteer techies.
If you are a volunteer sys admin or tech support person youll need to have some ways to scope the project and engage the client in their part. This talk is an outline of some of the traps and strategies we have been working on while doing community computing project work.
Training is important, and building community.
About Janet Hawtin;
Originally a graphic and educational designer, Janet is learning about open source technologies and community project wrangling.
Length: 10 minutes
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Oh for a shorter tea break or reducing build link times - Kim Hawtin
In the quest to make our programmers more productive, we have been aiming to reduce the compile and link times of our game builds.
In the search to make the existing build process quicker we found the main bottlenecks, disk I/O; the dependency checking done by cons and linking the libraries to the static elf. Thus begins a perilous quest for RAMDrives, software RAID, numerous different filesystems and my favourite, the 32bit barrier...
About Kim Hawtin;
Kim has been putting Linux to work since 1993, most recently as a SysAdmin/Network Manager at Ratbag Games/Midway Australia.
Length: 10 minutes
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Google related, title TBA - Eric Pollmann
Details TBA
Length: 10 - 20 minutes
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SAGE-NZ - Ewen McNeill
SAGE (http://www.sage.org/) is the System Administrators Guild, based in the US. SAGE-AU (http://www.sage-au.org.au/) is an Australian equivilent, based in Australia.
A few years ago there was a tenantive SAGE-NZ as well, which had a mailing list and a few in-person meetings. Possibly we would like to revive it?
Length: 5 minutes
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ssh -L and iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT: A Poor Man's VPN - Ewen McNeill
ssh port forwarding can be quite useful for getting remote access to services behind a firewall. But you have to use a different address to connect, which can cause problems. However by using iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT as well, you can have a nearly transparent single-service connection to the remote network.
Length: 5 minutes