News from within and of interest to the NYSA community.
Special Meeting: Marshall Kirk McKusick
WHEN: Saturday, October 16, 2pm
WHERE: Columbia University, Mathematics building, Rm. 312
Find a map of the campus HERE.
On that map, click the "View full map" link to see whole campus
Find directions HERE.
[excerpt from directions link]The Columbia campus on Morningside Heights is located at Broadway and 116th Street in Manhattan.
BY NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Five bus lines (M4, M5, M11, M60, M104) and one subway line (the #1 or #9 local) serve the Columbia neighborhood. The M60 bus is a direct link between campus and LaGuardia Airport. The Columbia stop is 116th Street. Do not use express trains #2 and #3, which follow a different route and do not stop at Columbia University; if you do, be certain to transfer at 96th Street to the 1/9 local.
Marshall Kirk McKusick, the well-known veteran BSD hacker, will be speaking for NYCBUG at the Saturday afternoon meeting.
Kirk's The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is being revised and republished this summer.
Without question, Kirk's meeting will be fascinating and well-attended.
Just in:
Eric Allman will also be speaking about the sender id controversy, as sendmail.org has been embroiled in the debates. . .
Coming up
LISA - the 18th Large Installation System Administration Conference
November 14-19, 2004, Atlanta, GA: Atlanta Marriott Marquis
A one page B/W flyer,
35 page Color brochure
Invitation from the program chair
LISA comes to Atlanta November 14-19. As always, the breadth and quality of this years tutorials, refereed papers, invited talks, and participants is excellent. Some highlights:
- Professional TRAINING: The biggest and best slate of tutorials we've
ever had: 36 instructors teaching 51 full-day and half-day tutorials,
30 of which are new. Some quick examples:
- John Sellens: System and Network Monitoring
- David Rhoades: Securing Web-based Apps
- Eric Allman: Advanced Sendmail
- Rik Farrow: Thinking Like a Hacker
- Peter Baer Galvin: Advanced Solaris Administration
- James Mauro and Richard McDougall: Solaris Kernel Performance, Observeability, and Debugging
- PAPERS and INVITED TALKS: luminaries such as Joshua Goodman, Esther
Filderman, Gerald Carter and Yi-Mon Wang will present cutting-edge
issues in topics such as:
- Looking at both symptom and state information for configuration faults
- Biology and Informatics for System Adminstrators
- Electronic Presidential Campaigning and the lessons learned
- How spammers are circumventing Bayesian filtering
- Information Security Laws
- Grid Computing
- Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and Work-in-Progress reports give you a preview of next year's news, or present fledgling work of your own and get feedback from the audience.
Single- and multi-day registration options let you attend for one day or several. Register by October 22 and save up to $300.
In Memoriam Dear SAGE members,
Chuck Yerkes, as a former Sendmail employee and long time opensource
and Unix proselytizer had many current and former Sendmail employees
at Eden Hospital in Castro Valley, California, in support him and his
very significant, Val. Much of our company and compatriots were on
email, IRC, wireless, and phone trees, united in concern for our very
dear friend.
The news from the doctor took us all by surprise, as this wonderful
spirit who consistently sought to help those of his beloved opensource
and Unix based community, and with a passion encouraged all of us to
always seek to build better software, hardware, and products - was
gone.
I have been reading over many of the emails that Chuck has sent to the
sage-members list. It is a pleasure to read his words, and consider
his thoughts and heart. Chuck Yerkes has made a lot of friends and
offered guidance and help to a large community.
Chuck Yerkes' passion and friendship will be greatly missed. May you
all continue to support and encourage each other in like fashion.
Randall
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:37:11 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
From: "Randall S. Winchester"
To: sage-members@usenix.org
Subject: [SAGE] Chuck Yerkes has passed away
I am very sorry to have to share with you that one of your long time
contributors, Chuck Yerkes, passed away this evening around 9:30PM
PST due to trauma from a motorcycle accident on his way home from work
at PeopleSoft.
TOPIC
Nagios is a host and service monitoring system primarily used for network monitoring and alerting. It is an open-source project that incorporates:
The NYSA talk will cover the following:
SPEAKER
Keith Weinberg has spent the majority of his career as a programmer and Unix Systems Administrator at financial firms on or near Wall Street. He can be found installing systems and writing automation components at his current employer, a prominent hedge fund in Connecticut.
During the dot-com implosion, Keith was immersed in the Linux/BSD world and didn't emerge unscathed. Working as the head of digital infrastructure for Clearchannel Communications and head of infrastructure at Fulcrum Analytics (a database marketing and analytics firm), he enjoyed a heavy dose of open-source philosophy and eventually, business reality.
His primary professional computing interests include large-scale systems architecture, automation and monitoring. Personally, he uses a Macintosh at home and feels a little bit guilty.
Keith has a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University where he was the founder of the Princeton ACM and recipient of the AT&T Engineer of the year award.
SPEAKER
Josh Rabinowitz is a 13-year veteran of the software industry who cut his teeth at NASA Ames Research Center and at CNET.com and other web companies. He currently is an independent internet consultant and software developer in New York City, and the publisher of SkateboardDirectory.com, which aims to be your guide to skateboard sites on the Internet.
TOPIC
Perl 6 and Parrot
Perl 6 is more than an incremental upgrade to the Perl 5. It's "the community's rewrite of perl", and seeks to add deep features and language changes while retaining backward compatibility with the huge code base of current perl software. While Perl 6 as a language is still in the design phase, many decisions are being made, and development is underway on Parrot, an underlying "virtual machine designed to execute bytecode for interpreted languages efficiently" that is intended to act as a platform for Perl 6, as well versions of Scheme, BASIC, Befunge, and other languages.
In this talk Josh will cover why the world needs Perl 6, the over-arching Perl 6 design philosophies, some Perl 6 language features that are in discussion and how they differ from Perl 5, and new features that have no Perl 5 analog. Josh will also discuss Parrot's design, which is driven by three principles: speed, abstraction, and stability, and provide an overview of the current status of Perl 6 and Parrot.
TOPIC
Internet Mailers
E-mail has become one of the most important applications in almost every company everywhere, and the ability to send and receive Internet e-mail is a must. There are several popular, public domain mail transfer agents (MTAs) to choose from. We will present three of these, "sendmail", "postfix" and "qmail". The merits of each will be discussed in a panel forum, and interaction from the audience is encouraged. protocol in the world, and is available on almost all UNIX platforms, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP.
SPEAKER
Sendmail will be presented by David Feldman. Dave studied Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and then went to work for ATX Telecommunications. From there Dave moved to the financial industry working for such firms as D.E. Shaw, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank. Dave is now Vice President of Systems Architecture at Tudor Investment Corp. and is Vice President of NYSA. Dave has extensive experience with sendmail, having set up systems at Merrill, Deutsche and Tudor. Dave has also given presentations on e-mail to both Unigroup and NYSA.
Postfix will be presented by Perry Metzger. Perry is a managing partner at Metzger, Dowdeswell & Co., a consulting company. Previously he ran Piermont Information Systems, also a consulting company, and then Wasabi Systems, an embedded systems software company. He's active in the IETF and the NetBSD project, runs a well known cryptography mailing list, teaches cryptography occasionally at Stevens, and is on the NYSA board. Perry also owns a geranium.
Also presenting Postfix will be Viktor Duchovni. Viktor is a UNIX systems programmer, architect, and system administrator. He has been involved with UNIX systems and network applications since the mid 80's starting at Princeton University. He architected a global systems management environment at Lehman Brothers in the early 90's, and designed and implemented a sophisticated name space management tool called UName*It for a consulting firm. He then returned to Wall St., working at D.E. Shaw and is now a member of the Security Engineering/Architecture team at Morgan Stanley where he has developed a proprietary MIME filter. Viktor has contributed code to multiple open source projects including Emacs, Popper, Tcl/Tk, and Postfix.
Qmail will be presented by George Georgalis. George began his system admin career in 1998 in San Diego, and recently relocated to the East Coast. He has designed or re-engineered small offices, ISP facilities and a top level domain registrar. George is a NYSA Board member and is experienced with sendmail but decided to make the switch to qmail over a year ago.
Topic: Clustering: An Overview of the Past, Present and Future.
Speakers Background:
Topic: Enterprise Architectures for Mid-Sized Companies
Speaker: David Feldman
Rather than concentrating on the nuts-and-bolts which we are all so familiar with, this presentation concentrates on the process of being the Systems Architect for a mid-sized company, followed by a concrete example of how this process effects the resulting system designs. The following areas will be touched upon:
- What is an Enterprise Architecture and what is the role of the Systems Architect?
- What management issues must the Architect deal with in order to be effective?
- What key lessons have been learned?
- What architectureal principals seem to be most important?
- How does documentation play a central role?
- A basic design integrating the networking, UNIX and Windows platforms.
- A detailed example of one key aspect of the architecture: E-mail.
This example was chosen because it ties together many distributed pieces into a single unified system based on architectural standards. The emphasis will be on how the standards and the design interact with one another.
Speaker:
David Feldman began his career at the University of Pennsylvania where he attended as an undergraduate and worked in the Distributed Systems Lab (DSL) as well as the General Robotics and Active Sensory Processing (GRASP) Lab. He moved on to Telecommunications where he worked as the senior systems administrator for ATX Telecommunications in Philadelphia. Making the jump to Wall Street, David has worked for D.E. Shaw, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.
David joined Tudor Investment Corporation, a premier hedge fund, in 1997 and is currently Vice President of Systems Architecture. He is directly responsible for the long-term design and development of all computer, network and data communication systems world-wide. In particular, he is responsible for strategic project planning, maintenance of documentation, and is known by management as the "guru of gurus".
David has given other presentations in the past including presentations to NYSA on E-mail and Systems Management. David sits on the NYSA Board and was recently voted to the Position of Vice President of NYSA.
Topic: Information Security, The Right Mindset
Brett Wynkoop has been programing and administering Unix and Unix like systems since 1982. His background and extensive experience in system and network security has enabled him to track down many sources of breakins and security breaches for various clients in a wide range of industries. Brett has provided information security services to Chase, Citibank, and HSBC as well as several regional ISPs, defense contractors, the US Air Force, and the FBI. Brett currently heads Wynn Data Limited ( http://www.wynn.com ), a Unix and Open Systems consulting firm.