Talks

Welcome to 2013. We don’t have jetpacks, robot butlers, teleportation or lots of stuff we were promised but we do have clouds, autonomous computing, and other wondrous things. With all of these things comes a familiar siren song “we are just around the corner from a place where we won’t need people to run or maintain all of this great technology…it will just run itself…we won’t need you”.

I’m here to tell you that sysadmins still matter. Come hear why a sysadmin, with our without a jetpack, is still our best hope.

This talk covers essential topics in IPv6 Systems Administration with real world examples presented in Linux. Topics covered include basics, address assignment, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, and HTTP server configuration, ip6tables, and more.

Within the last 5 years, virtualization has taken the IT industry by storm. There is rarely a shop that doesn’t use virtualization in some way, and almost everybody can benefit from using it in their infrastructure. A more recent technology that is just starting to gain traction is the use of containers.

In this talk I will cover what containers are, several pieces of container software, and go over how easy they are to use. In particular I will focus on LXC, and how one might use it to great advantage in situations like continuous integration, where ever a special environment is needed, when temporary instances are needed, or when virtual machines might a better option.

Given enough time I would continue into some tricks I’ve discovered to using containers to deploy entire mirrored infrastructures on a single laptop, and how I’ve combined it with Puppet to simulate bringing up entire infrastructures in separate containers to mirror the isolation and interconnectedness of a real network of machines.

The infamous hacker Mudge said that he loved security because it was the most challenging job in technology. There is truth in the fact that nothing is tougher than doing IT under adversarial conditions. If you think security is about configging firewalls, rooting boxes with Metasploit or checking boxes on an audit form, then you need this session. There is a dire need for effective security professionals. Learn how to become one.

At Portland State University’s Computer Action Team (CAT) we provide a wide variety of services (direct and remote login machines with nfs homedirs, web, mysql, postgres, project management, version control, colocation, virtualization, storage, backup, GPU through cuda, CAD tools) to the more than five thousand students at the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. We do this with a small set of full time administrators, including only one full time unix/linux admin, and a small army of students who we train up from literally nothing to becoming fully fledged(and fully rooted) members of the *nix, windows, and networking teams. In this talk we will present our methods and lessons including our teaching format, how we provide graduated access and responsibility through git and puppet, and our answers to the challenges faced by any IT department in higher education today.

“To BYOD or not to BYOD” – that really is the question, isn’t it? As IT professionals, we’re seeing a major uptick in the growth of “Bring Your Own Devices” – from iOS to Android and smartphone to tablet, it seems that everyone’s bringing their own tech into the office…and expecting us to support it. In this session, we’ll talk numbers (How many companies are really supporting the trend? How many are flat out refusing? What can we expect to see in terms of growth?), plus, we’ll talk about actual strategies from real IT pros who are tackling this challenge head-on.

Logs are a mess. Too many formats and too few common tools. Ugh! There’s hope! Logstash and other tools are here to help. This talk will cover common logging practices (good and bad), some tools you might want to learn about later, and provide coverage of logstash from introduction to use cases. Learn how how you can use logstash to achieve victory in the battle against log abuse!

We demonstrate a OSS-based peering router on the WIX (Wellington Internet Exchange) implemented using the RouteFlow software stack and Pronto 3290 hardware. Current functionality includes a BGP route server, and in the near future the router will be distributed across two switches and a virtual machine, showcasing the flexibility SDN (Software Defined Networking) brings to network design by physically separating the data plane and control plane. This setup gives WIX engineers an opportunity to become familiar with the underlying SDN concepts, build operational confidence, and understand how BGP works on a distributed switch with a single IP loopback address.

Routeflow is an OSS project that connects OpenFlow switches to an OpenFlow controller via a virtual network environment. Routeflow in turn leverages the Quagga OSS project to provide legacy IP routing protocol support (OSPF, BGP), enabling control plane packets like BGP updates to flow up from the switch to Quagga. After Quagga processes the packets and makes needed updates to the Linux IP tables, Routeflow pushes the changes down into the switch FIB (Forwarding Information Base) tables, thus implementinga dynamic control plane and linerate hardware forwarding.

All this is possible from generous contributions by Dean Pemberton (use of his WIX peering session), Victoria University Of Wellington, and REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand).

Beyond clever systems design, failover tests, verifying your backups, and setting up secondary data centers, beyond the latest business analysis buzzwords, and beyond workplace safety requirements… there is emergency operations planning and drill design. You too may become the gamemaster, bringing emergency response, emergency operations, business continuity and disaster recovery together into practical drill design… you may prepare your organization for whatever zombie apocalypse it may face. Hard-hats and d10s not included.

As we continue through the process of IPv4 free pool exhaustion, more and more of us will be deploying IPv6 on our networks. THe vastly larger address space requires some very different approaches to planning than what we did in IPv4. This session seeks to help attendees learn new ways to think about IP addressing and the benefits of a vast address space as well as provide the skills necessary to take full advantage of that vast address space in future-proofing your network and simplifying administration.

Learn how the OSUOSL operates their hosting environment which powers the core open source eco-system. Our environment is fairly unique with the variety of systems and and projects we host. We use a variety of technologies such as ganeti, kvm, glusterfs, cfengine, puppet, nagios, munin, etc. This session will cover what we do and how we do it.

Level-up your Chef skills by learning about these areas of Chef:
* Attribute Precedence – Role, environment, cookbook, data bag? Which attribute value will be used in my chef run? Walk through an example that will show you which value gets applied in your chef run.
* Encrypted Data Bags – Chef 0.10 brought us encrypted data bags. We’ll look at how to create and use data bags and how to keep them up-to-date in your repository.
* LWRP – What is a LWRP? How and why do you create one? We’ll look at a couple of sample LWRPs and learn how to build a simple one.
* Error Handlers – Demystify exception and report handlers by writing a simple one and seeing examples of how they work in the wild.
* Testing Your Chef Code – Take a quick look at some of the tools and techniques that you can leverage to test out your Chef codebase

Have you ever started a new SA job, asked for a list of managed systems, and received blank looks in response, or half-hearted guesses, or pointers to six different places where you could dig up the information? Could you quickly provide such a list in your current position, and know without a doubt that it was accurate and complete? Do you know precisely where every system you manage is located, which version of an OS it’s running, and what it does? How easily can you find any system’s serial number? In this presentation, we’ll talk about how to make all this possible, with a single repository of system truth.

This panel discussion will address the roadblocks – real or perceived – of women in tech, and discuss ways in which the field can increase diversity. The discussion is open to both men and women, and will include personal anecdotes, success stories, and research findings. One goal of the panel is to continue the discussion about women in computing from the USENIX LISA panel, and the Women in Advanced Computing Summit. Another goal is to meet and learn from allies in tech.

Puppet is a popular automation tool for managing infrastructure. However, Puppet module development and distribution can become tiresome without automated testing.

Testing Puppet modules provides: early exposure of issues, quicker iteration on module development, allows for easier verification of multiple environments, and provides simple usage documentation. Tools like puppet-lint, the built in syntax validator, and rspec make this possible. This presentation will include an overview of available tools and methods for testing Puppet modules, the advantages of different testing methods, and examples of continuously verifying modules with CI tools.

In the beginning there was the web. Through its evolution there were many traps which threatened to change it from a tool to empower users to merely an extension of a home shopping network. Firefox OS is a new mobile operating system based on open web technologies from your friends at Mozilla. It’s designed to ensure that the web remains free and answers to nobody but you. I will demonstrate how this scary new thing (mobile) doesn’t have to be scary at all, and how leveraging the open web empowers you to go beyond the walled garden or incompatibility hell

11:00-12:30 OpenStack and OpenShift hands-on workshop

Spend about 15 minutes sitting down at a workstation and getting hands-on experience with OpenStack or OpenShift. Joe Julian and John Mark Walker will be available to tutor and answer questions as you install OpenStack and spin up a VM or two or  install OpenShift and roll out an application.

1:30-3:00 Logstash and GlusterFS hands-on workshop

Spend about 15 minutes sitting down at a workstation and getting hands-on experience with GlusterFS or Logstash. Joe Julian and Jordan Sissel will be available to tutor and answer questions as you install GlusterFS, create a volume and write and read files from it, or install Logstash, fetch some logs and explore the filter tool.

3:30-5:00 oVirt and Puppet hands-on workshop

Spend about 15 minutes sitting down at a workstation and getting hands-on experience with oVirt or Puppet. John Mark Walker and Jordan Sissel will be available to tutor and answer questions  as you  install oVirt where you can create and manage a small private cloud., or install Puppet and define a node with some services, then spin up a new VM and have puppet finish the configuration.