. . . → Read More: “Building Small Servers For Network Testing, HD Music, and More”]]> Speaker: Jon Meek
Date: Thursday,  February 2, 2012
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planning on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 Brunswick Pike
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132
See map: Google Maps (New link with better coordinates)

Have you ever needed a small server to use as a test or monitoring platform but did not want the bulk, noise, power consumption, or cost of a typical 1U server? Voyage Linux on a USB flash drive and an old desktop or notebook may be the solution. 

We will provide complete instructions for installing the distribution on a USB drive and configuring applications that include: network testing and monitoring, sailboat data logging, NAT router, IPv6 lab gateway, lightweight desktop, and audiophile music server. There will even be some travelogue content. 

A demonstration network with a USB drive on a netbook, and $150 5 Watt Compact Flash based servers will be used to demonstrate some of the applications.

Bio:

Jon Meek works in network security and performance at a large global enterprise. After receiving a PhD in Chemical Physics he morphed into an Analytical Chemistry instrument designer, a manager, and finally some form of a System and Network Administrator. 

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planing on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 US . . . → Read More: Topic: You Suck At Time Management (but it isn’t your fault!) or… “Why Security Engineers can’t manage their time”]]> Speaker: Tom A. Limoncelli
Date: Thursday,  January 5 2012
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planing on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 US Highway 1
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132
See map: Google Maps

So much to do!  So little time! Security people are pulled in so many directions it is impressive anything gets done at all.   The bad news is that if you work in security then good time management is basically impossible.   The good news is that it isn’t your fault.   Tom will explore many of the causes and will offer solutions based from his book, “Time Management for System Administrators” (Now translated into 5 languages.)

Bio:

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

“LOPSA-NJ is an organization for system administrators in New Jersey formed to facilitate information exchange pertaining to the field of system administration. LOPSA-NJ is not affiliated with a particular hardware or software vendor or company. Everyone is invited!”

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planning on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer . . . → Read More: Content-aware Load Balancing for Distributed Backup (paper to appear in LISA’11) – November 3rd 2011 @ 7pm]]> Speaker: Fred Douglis
Date: Thursday,  November 3rd, 2011
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planning on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 US Highway 1
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132
See map: Google Maps

When backing up a large number of computer systems to many different storage devices, an administrator has to balance the workload to ensure the successful completion of all backups within a particular period of time. When these devices were magnetic tapes, this assignment was trivial: find an idle tape drive, write what fits on a tape, and replace tapes as needed. Backing up data onto deduplicating disk storage adds both complexity and opportunity. Since one cannot swap out a filled disk-based file system the way one switches tapes, each separate backup appliance needs an appropriate workload that fits into both the available storage capacity and the throughput available during the backup window. Repeating a given client’s backups on the same appliance not only reduces capacity requirements but it can improve performance by eliminating duplicates from network traffic.  Conversely, any reconfiguration of the mappings of backup clients to appliances  suffers the overhead of repopulating the new appliance with a full copy of a client’s data. Reassigning clients to new servers should only be done when the need for load balancing exceeds the overhead of the move.

In addition, deduplication offers the opportunity for content-aware load balancing that groups clients together for improved deduplication that can further improve both capacity and performance; we have seen a system with as much as 75% of its data overlapping other systems, though overlap around 10% is more common.  We describe an approach for clustering backup clients based on content, assigning them to backup appliances, and adapting future configurations based on hanging requirements while minimizing client migration. We define a cost function and compare several algorithms for minimizing this cost. This assignment tool resides in a tier between backup software such as EMC NetWorker and deduplicating storage systems such as EMC DataDomain.

Joint work with  Deepti Bhardwaj, Hangwei Qian, and Philip Shilane.

About the speaker:

Fred Douglis holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from U.C. Berkeley and a B.S. in computer science from Yale.  He has worked in industrial applied research throughout his career, including Matsushita, AT&T (Bell) Labs, IBM Research, and currently the CTO office of EMC Backup Recovery Systems. He also has been a visiting professor at VU Amsterdam and Princeton University.  He received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement award for his contributions to System S, productized as  Infosphere Streams. His research interests include storage, distributed systems, and Internet tools and performance.

He served as editor in chief of IEEE Internet Computing from 2007-2010 and has been on its editorial board since 1999.  He formed the Technical Committee on the Internet, chairing it from 1997-2000, and previously chaired the Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments from 1996-1998.  He has been program chair or co-chair of five major conferences: WWW2005, the 8th International Web Content Caching and Distribution Workshop (2003), the first IEEE/IPSJ International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (2001), the USENIX 2nd Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (1999), and the 1998 USENIX Technical Conference.  He is currently the USENIX Association’s liaison to the ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware conference.

“LOPSA-NJ is an organization for system administrators in New Jersey formed to facilitate information exchange pertaining to the field of system administration. LOPSA-NJ is not affiliated with a particular hardware or software vendor or company. Everyone is invited!”

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planing on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer . . . → Read More: LOPSA-NJ – The *!#* site is down! Again!?]]> Speaker: John Wagner
Date: Thursday,  October 6, 2011
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planing on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 US Highway 1
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132
See map: Google Maps

The *!#* site is down!  Again!?

At any web conference, there are always presentations honing in on how to communicate with your desired audience. But the best built site becomes useless when the platform it runs on is down. I’ll talk about the things you can do to provide a web platform in the cloud experience without platform in the cloud expenses.

Bio:

John Wagner is a Systems Programmer at Princeton University and has been playing with computers since they first taught him to program “You have $100 and 3 animal types and you have to buy 100 legs” in FORTRAN. He is currently part of a group that does Infrastructure Services (email, web systems, video streaming, and SharePoint). He subscribes to the motto, “If you know we are there, we haven’t done our job”.

“LOPSA-NJ is an organization for system administrators in New Jersey formed to facilitate information exchange pertaining to the field of system administration. LOPSA-NJ is not affiliated with a particular hardware or software vendor or company. Everyone is invited!”

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planing on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the . . . → Read More: LOPSA-NJ – Walk a kilometer in my shoes: What sysadmins wish developers knew, and ($a,$b) = ($b,$a);]]> Speaker: Tom A. Limoncelli
Date: Thursday,  September 1  2011
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU Managed Hosting

If you are planing on coming please RSVP so we have a good count for the Pizza.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 US Highway 1
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132
See map: Google Maps

Sysadmin teams and a software development teams have been known to work closely together, not at all, or somewhere in between.  What happens when the barrier between such groups disappears and the two teams become one?  The recent trend has been to incorporate “shared responsibility” for operational matters such as deployment, scalability and performance.  As a result projects are more successful in ways one wouldn’t have expected.

Bio:

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

“LOPSA-NJ is an organization for system administrators in New Jersey formed to facilitate information exchange pertaining to the field of system administration. LOPSA-NJ is not affiliated with a particular hardware or software vendor or company. Everyone is invited!”