moin, moin,

A couple of weeks ago I attended LISA, Large Installation System
Administration, the largest conference of the year for USENIX, the UNIX
association.

This year LISA got off with a smokey start as much of SoCal was in
flames. According to those who arrived early Saturday was beautiful, but
starting Sunday the fires and the smoke from them became all to evident.

Not that big a tragedy for those at the conference, but some people stayed
away from the conference due to health reasons.

Others, such as myself, were delayed in arriving due to highway and airport
closures. A minor inconveniece compared to those experienced by people who
live in the area.

The hotel was handing out painters masks and much of the outside staff was
wearing them throughout the week :).

As I arrived after the conference was going the first place I headed was the
terminal room in order to jack in and try to catch those in presentations.

Most of the conference rooms had wireless connectivity, so there was lots
of electronic chatter going on the whole weak. The wireless was often
overloaded with the number of people on it. The uplink to the Net was a pair
of DSL connections, which was wholly inadequate. Then again, with 1300 geeks
an OC192 might be wholly inadequate :).

Many people talked about the traffic they were seeing with sniffers, so
remember to use encryption.

There were presentations on SPAM, security without using firewalls, tracking
DoS attacks and viruses, configuration management, AFS, Linux, sys_adms in
pop culture, how to get your paper accepted and many more.

Birds of a Feather (BoF): these are like the GNU/Linux Stammtisch, they're a
meeting about a particular interest. Some are vendor presentations ( those
usually have no cost drinks ), many are geek topics ( *BSD, configuration
management ), some are activities ( key-signing party ), some are just plain
parties :).

Some BoF topics were LSB, women in computing ( no men allowed ), SAGE
local groups, configuration management ( a two hour geek war ), *BSD and a
key-signing party.

BoFs are a good chance for networking ( in the meeting people sense ) and
for learning more about a topic through group conversation.

Hallway Track: the "Hallway Track" is a euphemism for meeting people and
learning via spontaneous geek conversations. The last night I got to know a
couple of nice Canadians by overhearing a question about SSL and stopping
to join the conversation. One of the Canadians is working on research for
her PhD at CERT in Pennsylvania and can likely help a friend working on
her Masters at ASU. The hallway track can be very productive. It's full of
geeks, not marketing droids :).

There are often outings to non-geek activities ( LEGOland is a common
destination when in San Diego ), but I didn't participate in any of these
this conference. I did get out and "aboot" ( as one Canadian put it :) for
dinner a couple of times.

Conferences bring in a wide variety of people from all over the world, so
don't be surprised if you find yourself to be in the cultural minority. It's
a learning experience.

It was strange, even for me, to be at parties where a significant number of
people were drunk and have conversations about geek topics such as how to
improve SMTP, or which wireless technologies to watch, or advantages and
disadvantages of programming languages, editors, MUAs, etc. It was also
interesting to turn around at a party and meet Eric Allman :).

People I (re-)met: Bdale Garbee, USENIX board, SAGE board, Eric Allman, kc
claffy, Greg Rose, Thomas Lange ( author of FAI ), Eric Allman.

As I already posted to the list from LISA, it was really fun to give Bdale
a copy of the AZOTO/PLUG-branded Knoppix. He thought it was cool. When I
called debian the 'one true distribution', he stopped, looked at me and
said, "I love it when other people say that" :).

LISA wraps up with the game show. Rob Kolstad has been running the game show
for 17 years. It's like Jeapardy, but with geeks as the contestants. In
short, it's hilarious. If you go to LISA, plan on staying to see or maybe
even participate in the game show. It's a great way to finish off the week.

Maybe even hope the game show breaks down because then Dan Klein, the mouse
driver for the game show, might do some stand up. He's pretty funny.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
#  https://www.LuftHans.com/    http://www.AZOTO.org/
#  "... the social skills of a cow on acid." - der.hans