Recently in lopsa Category

Announcement.

Like, really early. And this is a good thing! In previous years it opened just about the time my employers stopped accepting travel requests, since they both wanted several months lead time to get the best deals on flights. This is a good thing they're finally doing!

Not that I need it this year since LISA is in DC this time around. And on the Metro, so I won't even need a hotel.

But still, a trend I encourage!

This is inspired from last night's LOPSA DC meeting. The topic was IPv6 and we had a round-table.

One of the big questions brought up was, "What's making me go IPv6?"

The stock answer to that is, "IPv4 addresses are running out, we'll have to learn at some point or be left behind."

That's all well and good, but for us? Most of us are working in, for, or with the US Government, an entity that is not going to be experiencing v4 address scarcity any time soon. What is going to push us to go v6 (other than the already existing mandate to have support that is)?

In my opinion, it'll come from the edges. IPv6 is a natural choice for rapidly expanding networks such as wireless networks, and extremely large networks like Comcast/Verizon run for their kit. These are two areas where sysadmins in general don't deal with much at all (VPN and mobile-access being the two major exceptions).

If your phone has an IPv6 address and accesses the IPv4 internet through a carrier-grade NAT device, you may never notice. Joe Average User is going to be even less likely to notice so long as that widget just works. Once v6 is in the hands of the "I don't care how it works so long as it works" masses, it'll start becoming our problem.

Once having a native v6 site means slightly better perceived mobile performance (those DNS lookups do cause a bit of latency you know), you can guarantee that hungry startups are going to start pushing v6 from launch. Once that ecosystem develops it'll start dragging the entrenched legacy stuff (the, er, government) along with it.  Some agency sites are very sensitive to performance perception and will adapt early. Others only put their data online because they were told to and will only move when the pain gets to be too much.

Business-to-business links (or those between .gov agencies, and their .com suppliers) will likely stay v4 for a very, very long time. Those will also be subject to pain-based mitigation strategies.

But the emergence of v6 on mobile will likely push a lot of us to get v6 to at least our edges. Internal use may be long time coming, but it'll show up at all because of the need to connect with others.

This was posted earlier this year, but I only just ran across it.

http://ryanfunduk.com/culture-of-exclusion/

Summary: Alcohol seems to pervade (javascript) culture. Big boozy events are at every conference, and this is exclusionary.

Is this a problem at Sysadminly conferences?

Two kinds of people are needed for this DC chapter:

1. LOPSA members, or people willing to become one. These will be our Charter Members.
   
2. People willing to present on things.

The two can be one and the same person, but we still need to cover both types.

Presenting really isn't that hard, we're not holding you up to the standard shown at industry conferences. What we need is interesting. We already do interesting in the halls at conferences as we swap stories, so plenty of us already have the technical story to tell. The next step is working up some slides, or a demo, to show off whatever that is.

What qualifies as a good topic? Plenty!

• Solving a tricky cross-platform issue in Puppet/cfengine/chef/bcfg.
• Adding Windows to an existing Linux-only configuration-management system.
• Disaster recovery post-mortem notes.
• Office campaigns to convince financial powers-that-be that a major upgrade really is in their best interest, how the campaign was fought and won.
  
• Anything having to do with scaling out systems, and problems encountered.
• Creative ways of dealing with bring-your-own-device policies.

We have tech-startups, big government, and mid-size private companies all around the area, so there is a lot of potential audience for your story. And these meetings are the kind of place you can share just those stories.

Think you'd like to listen to these stories?

Think you could maybe share one or two?

Fill out this form!

Or drop a comment on this post! They're screened so I'll see them before they go public, and I promise I won't publish the comment if you ask me not to.

One thing lead to another and I'm now helping to co-found a Washington DC LOPSA chapter with LOPSA board-member Evan Pettery. We've had a chapter in the area for some time, the Crabby Admins, but I've yet to make a meeting since getting from downtown DC to where those meetings are is quite a challenge. Of the "get home from work early then drive there through Rush Hour traffic to a spot equidistant between DC and Baltimore" kind of challenge. We expect this new chapter will draw from the central DC and Northern Virginia areas.

It also helps that our meeting site is on Metro, just off Franklin Square. In fact, it's the same spot as the DC RUG and some MongoDC meetings.

What we need right now are two big things:

• People who want to attend
• People who want to show off what they've been working on

Drop a note here, or on the website and we'll get in touch.

I had heard of it before, but it looks like they managed to get it off the ground. The Cascadia IT Conference is a LOPSA-sponsored event, focusing on System Administration. It being within driving-range of my house and having a conference fee of under $1000 means that my ability to go is not zero. This is exciting. I haven't been to a conference since my last BrainShare in 2008, people are going to forget I exist.

The training schedule is pretty light, but they're in their first year so attracting both talent and people confident enough to present is tricky at this stage.

Whenever you talk about system-administration professional organizations, a very short list comes to mind. If any, I've met admins who've never heard of these.

• USENIX.Arguably the grand-daddy of them all.
• SAGE. The SysAdmin special interest group of Usenix.
  
• LOPSA. League of Professional System Administrators.

What's interesting to note is that each of these has a foundation in Usenix. LOPSA got its start in an effort to bring SAGE outside of Usenix. Usenix and LOPSA have joined to put on the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conferences.

I'd deeply love to go to LISA 2010, but no one is willing to give me the $3K it'll take to do it all. WWU certainly isn't, it's out-of-state travel and therefore banned this year, and I certainly can't afford it out of private funds. And looking at the session list there is almost nothing that's directly related to what I do for a living. I still want to go because I want to know about those other things, and would like to expand my career that direction.

I recently joined LOPSA since their goals are admirable and I'd like to be a part of that. However, the entire organization shows just the kind of anti-Windows bias you'd expect from an organization founded by a bunch of UNIX admins & engineers in the very pre-Windows 1970's. They say big tent, and I'll take it at its word. But the bias still shows.

Taking a look at the LISA technical-sessions I can find absolutely no sessions that directly discuss Windows installations. A lot of it is networking, which is a key factor in a large installation, but even the one session discussing large scale encrypted laptop backup and deduplication (neat!) is talking about OS X laptops. There are a couple that are tangentially related to Windows, specifically managing VMs and SLAs, but nothing direct.

The Training sessions are better, as there are some things in there that really are generic to the System Administration job, such as time management, better troubleshooting methodologies, and effective documentation. There is a lot of Storage Administration in there as well, which tends to cross boundaries. Also a few Linux-specific sessions, though again nothing Windows specific.

Given the look of LISA's program guide, if I were a pure Windows admin I probably wouldn't look twice at it. I'd see a bunch of Linux/Unix admins and we all know the kind of sneer they get when Windows comes up in conversation. Barely relevant, and not worth the effort. As it is I do have Linux experience and a fair amount of Storage admin as well, so the conference is relative to me. I even have sufficient Linuxy T-shirts for protective coloration! And my laptop is running openSUSE so I wouldn't feel self-conscious checking email in the middle of a crowded hall.

Or maybe it's because Windows admins haven't HAD a professional organization planted in the center of their sphere for decades the way that Unix-land has, and therefore don't consider it important. I don't know. But the SAGE and LOPSA outreach efforts aren't terribly effective either way. Maybe I can change that.

There are a variety of professions where mere strict adherence to the laws is not sufficient for maintaining a professional appearance. Some are subject to explicit professional ethical standards. Others, like Systems Administration, have an implicit ethical code. Sometimes I wish there was an explicit one to follow.

Yes, there is a moral standard I'm held to that is more than just 'don't get arrested'. People need to trust the guardians of their data, and that means meeting expectations for a position of high trust. Since there isn't a commonly accepted codified moral standard for Sysadmins, just exactly what the standard is changes from organization to organization.

This is one job where the mere accusation of wrong-doing can ruin a career. The accusation has to be meaningful in some way, it can't just be an office crank attempting to score points. I'm talking the, "Brought up on embezzlement charges, but the case was dropped due to lack of evidence," kind of accusation. Reputation matters, even to us suit-free IT geeks.

If I'm unlucky enough for something trust-bashing to make it to public-record, and therefore easy pickings for your standard pre-employment background-check, I may as well find a new line of work. While a future landlord wouldn't care that I was brought up on embezzlement charges but the case was thrown out on appeal, future employers care very much about that kind of thing. Such events can be purged from your public records, but... these days negative findings are sticky; it would not surprise me in the least that there are data-gathering firms out there that make sure that all negative findings are never purged from their own databases just so clients can know they happened. Once that kind of thing hits public record, my ability to be employed as a sysadmin in any organization of size is greatly reduced.

Heck, once the charge is laid it is entirely possible that I would be fired for cause. Never mind that the charge was dropped, or overturned on appeal. That's the downside of working in a trust-based industry.

And it's not just crime, it's internal politics as well. I have known IT workers who gleefully look at master contracts their ticket to free software, baybeee! They take home installation media for whatever and the master license key provided by purchasing and install umpty hundred (thousand) dollars worth of software on their home machines. This sort of casual piracy can infect SysAdmins as well, since we're the kind of people who just might have a need for, say, Server 2008 Enterprise or Exchange 2010 in our homes. (why? because we're nuts Continuing education. Yeah, that's it.) This sort of behavior can turn supervisors and peers against a person.

And it isn't just piracy. Getting a reputation for exploiting your godlike access to casually browse other people's emails, or indulging in curiosity and peeking at the Budget Office's internal documents to see what the coming IT budget is likely to look like, can be just as damaging if it gets discovered. Users are, justly, paranoid about their privacy, and finding out that the sysadmin has been browsing their data for their own curiosity rather than as part of their job-duties is a sure-fire way to make enemies. We can obtain official sanction to look at other people's data a variety of ways, but if we exercise this access for purely personal reasons it is a violation.

This is the kind of thing that can trip up new sysadmins. Just because you have access doesn't mean you have authorization. I find navigating our large Shared volumes a bit tricky since I can see everything. Access is having Administrator rights to a whole system. Authorization is being asked by an employees supervisor to go into a specific individual's mailbox to look for mails pertaining to topic X. Access does not directly imply authorization, not everyone gets this.

This kind of thing can have significant consequences. If as part of an illicit information gathering regime (looking to see how a certain high-value IT purchasing contract is progressing without harassing actual people for updates) I discover that a certain individual in the Purchasing office has been doing something illegal, what do I do? I certainly had sufficient access to the data in question, and I am duty bound to report malfeasance whenever I run into it.  The BOFH answer here is to shakedown the employee question in some way. Since BOFH is sysadmin dark humor, that's not really an answer. More realistically, what next? If I come forward with the evidence I have to provide some reason for why I was looking there in the first place, some reason other than "because I was snooping." As law enforcement will tell you, information found by way of an illegal activity is not admissible.

Losing the faith of your current employer is hazardous to your job, even if that activity won't splash on you enough to prevent you from finding work elsewhere. Annoy them enough, and they'll 'helpfully tip off' your future employer about your activities, which may cost you your new job before you actually start.

System Administrators are held up to a higher moral standard than ye olde citizen. We don't have the benefit of having a codified professional standard to follow other than, 'keep your nose clean, and don't be evil.' There are some attempts to codify this standard, but they haven't penetrated the entire industry the same way that, say, a Certified Professional Accountant is. But that doesn't stop me from trying to live up to one.