Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

BoF Descriptions

AWS EC2 BoF
Jean-Paul Bauer, Amazon Web Services
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 pm- 8:00 pm, Cedar AB

Come join us for an open discussion about AWS, and more specifically EC2. We would love to hear your success stories, challenges, cool ideas and projects, and feature requests.

PostgreSQL 9.4 BOF
Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL Project, Core Team
Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Juniper

PostgreSQL 9.4: It's A database for both Dev and Ops! It's NoSQL on ACID! Learn about the new features coming in PostgreSQL 9.4, including indexable binary JSON, new replication methods, docker-friendliness, and more.

Red Hat Vendor BoF - Fedora Server: Returning to Our Roots!
Steven Gallagher, Red Hat
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Ballard

In the beginning, Red Hat Linux was a powerful, open platform for server administrators. As this evolved into Fedora, the project shifted slowly towards becoming more of a client platform. With the Fedora.next process, we're developing a new release of Fedora targeted at system administrators. Join us to find out more about how we're returning to our first constituents and taking advantage of our new sibling relationship with CentOS.

Research and evaluation within a DevOps culture
John Constable, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Tuesday, November 11, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Madrona

Research and evaluation into, and of, new technologies is always a balancing act, not to mention hard to find time and justify within the day to day workload. This BOF is for people who want to, or are currently performing product evaluations possibly if not probably!) also performing the regular tasks of a sysadmin or developer. Particular interest is how this works in the DevOps culture, and representation from anyone doing this would be appreciated!

Why FreeBSD Is For Me
Dru Lavigne, FreeBSD Foundation
Tuesday, November 11, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, LISA Lab (Willow A)

Swing by to find out more about the FreeBSD Project and how becoming part of the Project can benefit you and the community.

Email Administrators BoF
Steve Shipway, The University of Auckland
Tuesday, November 11, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Madrona

A chance to meet up with fellow Email Administrators, and discuss your approach towards email security. Do you use software, an appliance, or a cloud solution? Do you use SPF, SIDF, DKIM or DMARC? What mailing list software do you use, and has DMARC broken your mailing lists? Do you use content scanning and data loss prevention?

Alternatively, just let off some steam about spammers. We all understand.

GPG Key Signing BoF
Ken Schumacher, High Performance Computing Department, Fermi National Accelerator Lab
Tuesday, November 11, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Ballard

There has been a key signing BOF at many of the LISA conferences (all of the one's I've attended) in the past. This year, our gathering is scheduled for 8:00 Tues evening in the Ballard room. Those of you attending this GPG key signing BOF might also be interested in the CAcert BoF starting at 9:00 in the same room.

If you are interested in attending this meeting, please e-mail your key to me at kschu at gswot dot org. I will add your key to a keyring specific to this event. I will use this keyring to generate the key/fingerprint list we will use at the keysigning.

For more information on Key Signing Parties, I recommend the "GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO" document. Our format will follow the suggestions there, specifically the List Based party format. I will bring a printout of the submitted keys. Please submit your keys at least 12 hours in advance of the party to ensure your key fingerprint is on the list.

Please bring multiple forms of ID, at least one being a photo ID. Other attendees (such as those coming from over seas) may not be familiar with the format of your ID. By having multiple IDs, you should have at least one that others will find acceptable. I'm bringing my passport, my Illinois Drivers License and my Fermilab (US Dept. of Energy) photo ID card.

PLEASE NOTE: If you don't submit your key in advance, we will have to go through the awkward process of you reading your key aloud so that everyone attending can write down your fingerprint. This can be a bother and not everyone may be willing to go to that extra effort. Please submit your key in advance or bring some handout with your Key ID and the key fingerprint. Printing this info on the back of business cards is probably acceptable. We will complete authentication of keys submitted in advance before we do any "walk-in" keys.

Future of PRObE. How would you use 1000+ machines? BoF
Andree Jacobson, New Mexico Consortium
Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Juniper

PRObE is an NSF funded large-scale low-level systems research center located in Los Alamos, NM (http://www.nmc-probe.org/). We currently have about 800 active nodes, and are replacing some 500 current nodes with another 1500 over the course of the next few months. As we're approaching our funding renewal cycle, we're reaching out to some new communities to see if there's interest in access to large systems for testing, and if so - how you'd propose to use them. LISA is one of these new target communities, because we believe it's as important to develop the workforce to admin these machines as it is to be able to build them.

Come join us for a discussion about making some very large scale resources for testing and experiments available to the LISA community. We're looking forward to seeing you there!

The Future of Product Documentation: An Open Discussion
Steven Levine, Red Hat
Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 pm-10:00 pm, Cedar AB

When an admin in 2014 needs to know something, where does that admin go? What types of documentation do you need, want, and use? Are administrator manuals outmoded? When do you need a reference? What frustrations have you had in finding information? This BOF will be an open discussion on different document types, and what we can do to make sure we all have or can provide the types and forms of documentation that address an administrator's needs.

CAcert Assurance BoF
Ken Schumacher, High Performance Computing Department, Fermi National Accelerator Lab
Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Ballard

CAcert.org offers digital certificates to everyone for free. The goal of this event is to inform attendees how the CAcert assurance process works. The presentation will also review recent changes to the CAcert Community Agreement. The primary purpose of our gathering is to bring together qualified assurers in order to help those interested in attaining the points needed to start assuring others. By helping new assurers qualify, we will help make CAcert free digital certificates available to more people.

For a more details, I recommend that you review the complete event description on the CAcert Wiki site. There are instructions there for preparations you can accomplish in advance of the BoF session. Make sure you bring more than one government issued photo ID to the event.

If you are a qualified CAcert Assurer, please consider attending this session and helping us get a pool of new assurers started with their first 100 points. Please contact Ken Schumacher to discuss your availability.

What is new in RRDtool Version 1.5
Tobias Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG
Tuesday, November 11, 9:00 pm-10:00 pm, Madrona

A bunch of reasons, for breaking out that old compiler again and maybe creating your own copy of the latest and greatest version of RRDtool, even bevore it is officially released.

Learn all about RRDtool 1.5 and ask those tricky questions you always wanted to get an answer for.

Card Games BoF
Tuesday, November 11, 10:00 pm–11:00 pm, Cedar AB

Bring your favorite card game to this LISA BoF!

Cloudera Vendor BoF: Best Practices for Running Apache Hadoop in Production
Yanpei Chen, Gwen Shapira, Karthik Kambatla, Jon Hsiesh and Kate Ting, Cloudera
Wednesday, November 12, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Redwood AB

Have questions about Hadoop storage, ingest, performance, or processing? Ask away in the Hadoop in Production BoF. It'll be an informal session where we share tales from the field and the subsequent lessons learned.

Pythian Vendor BoF - Moving Toward Infrastructure as Code
Organizers: Bill Frasier, Pierig Le Saux, Pythian

Wednesday, November 12, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Grand Ballroom A

Bill and Pierig, Principal Consultants for the SRE practice at Pythian, will be discussing what it really means to be practicing Infrastructure as Code. They will provide examples of concepts, tools and workflows, and encourage attendees to engage in a dialog of how our day-to-day work is changing. Catered with snacks and beer!

CFEngine BoF
Ted Zlatanov
Wednesday, November 12, 7:00 pm-8:00 pm, LISA Lab

A meetup for CFEngine configuration management users

Open@Citrix Vendor BoF -Hyper-dense Virtualization with XenServer
Tim Mackey, Citrix
Wednesday, November 12, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Ballroom A

Virtualization with XenServer has come a long way in the past few years, and today it is entirely possible to run hundreds of VMs on a single XenServer host. With XenServer Creedence we’re pushing the envelope further with a thousand VMs being a reality. Come join Tim Mackey the XenServer Community Manager for a BoF covering all aspects of virtualization performance and what improvements you can expect from Creedence.

To the future! What's new in Puppet Enterprise 3.7
J.D. Welch, Sr. UX Designer, Puppet Labs
Wednesday, November 12, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Redwood AB

There are some major changes coming to Puppet Enterprise in 3.7. We've completely redone the server that runs the master and have created a completely new, much more powerful node classifier that incorporates role based access control. We'll be showing off these new features, answering questions, and talking about anything puppet.

Docker and Kubernetes Containerized Applications
Mark Lamourine, Red Hat
Wednesday, November 12, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Cedar AB

Discussion of people's experiences creating containerized applications in general and using Docker and Kubernetes in particular.

Center for Internet Security vendor BoF - Secure Configuration: Content Development and Workflow Automation
Blake Frantz, Center for Internet Security
Wednesday, November 12, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Grand Ballroom

The Center for Internet Security is a nonprofit organization that develops free best practices (aka "benchmarks") for configuring IT assets, such as DBs, OSs, and web servers. Come join us in a casual setting for drinks, light snacks, and to learn/share about secure configuration topics and workflows, with a heavy emphasis on content development and automation.

Asperger's and Autism Spectrum in the Workplace BoF
Mark D. Roth
Wednesday, November 12, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Juniper

Are you on the spectrum? Have a co-worker who is? Come discuss issues and strategies!

AI Planner for Orchestrating Configuration Changes
Herry, University of Edinburgh
Wednesday, November 12, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Cedar AB

Are you tired on writing workflows manually? If yes, then we have a solution for you. We presents the Nuri, a configuration management tool that allows you to specify the desired configuration state and the global constraints of the system. Nuri uses an automated planner to automatically generate the workflow for you. The execution of the workflow can bring the system into the desired state, while preserving the global constraints during configuration changes.

Please come to watch our presentation and live demos!

Chef Open Table
Jennifer Davis, Chef
Wednesday, November 12, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, LISA Lab

Building your infrastructure with code can be challenging especially if you are 1 person Operations team. Let's get together and share our recipes! We can talk about turning production checks into tests, windows automation challenges, building providers, plugins, or anything else that folks want to share. If you are new to using Chef, we can walk through some exercises that will help hone your skills. Long term Chef? Come share things you want to see change or stay the same.

Monitoring systems—Which ones do you {like|hate|use}, and why?
Mark Bartelt, California Institute of Technology
Wednesday, November 12, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Cedar

There are an overwhelming number of opensource monitoring tools: Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix, PCP, and many others. Which one(s) do you currently use? Which ones do you like and dislike, and why? Have you been able to deploy some new (better) system, jettisoning whatever had been in use previously? If so, what barriers (technical, bureaucratic, whatever) did you encounter? Come share your experiences, and learn what others have done with regard to deploying a monitoring infrastructure.

Geocachers BoF
Steve Shipway, University of Auckland
Wednesday, November 12, 9:00 pm-10:00 pm, Juniper

Do you use multi-million dollar satellites to search for Tupperware in the woods? If you do, or want to know what it’s all about, come along and discuss Geocaching. Swap stories, discover trackables, and chat with other geocachers. Sign up for the planned visit to Groundspeak HQ Cache on Friday afternoon.

Hadoop Operations
Jennifer Davis, Chef
Wednesday, November 12, 9:00 pm-10:00 pm, Madrona

Meet up with fellow Hadoop Administrators, and discuss strategies for managing, configuring, securing, tuning Hadoop and other applications in the Hadoop ecosystem. If there is interest, we could do some community building and work on contributing back through filing bug requests, and discussing options for improving components of the Hadoop ecosystem.