Sydney - Wednesday 6 July 2005
| 0830 - 0920 | Registration (tea and coffee served on arrival) | |
| 0920 - 0930 | Welcome | David Purdue, President, AUUG Inc. |
| 0930 - 1010 | Automated Monitoring Of PC Hardware | Frank Crawford, ac3 |
| 1010 - 1050 | Which Linux Filesytem? | Dr Peter Chubb, Gelato@UNSW |
| 1050 - 1110 | Morning Tea | |
| 1110 - 1150 | Solaris Network Performance Considerations | David Purdue, Sun Microsystems |
| 1150 - 1230 | Firewall Redundancy and Failover - The Thousand Dollar Challenge | Adrian Close, Hitwise |
| 1230 - 1330 | Lunch | |
| 1330 - 1410 | Patch Management Through Automated Baseline Management Services | Rodney Lindner, Sun Microsystems |
| 1410 - 1450 | Minimising Threats By Keeping Red Hat And Related Systems Up To Date | Frank Crawford, ac3 |
| 1450 - 1510 | Afternoon Tea | |
| 1510 - 1550 | Security Without Firewalls | Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| 1550 - 1650 | Panel Session: Fitness for purpose - selecting the right platform for the job | Dr Peter Chubb, Gelato@UNSW Frank Crawford, ac3 Alan Hargreaves, Sun Microsystems Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| 1650 - 1700 | Wrap Up | David Purdue, President, AUUG Inc. |
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Automated Monitoring Of PC Hardware
It's not just enterprise servers that include hardware monitoring facilities - commodity PCs and peripherals include facilities to monitor their state and alert administrators before problems become critical. However, these facilities are often underutilised, even when PCs are used for critical applications. Frank Crawford will show techniques and freely available software (e.g. lm_sensors and smartd) that will equip you to pro-actively monitor PCs within your installation and catch problems before they impact your service levels.
Frank Crawford, ac3
Frank Crawford is professional System Administrator, who has managed computer systems for the AAEC, Qantas, ANSTO and now ac3 for over 20 years. He has gone from managing Unix systems involved in the control of scientific experiments through to the fastest system in Australia. However he also deals with low-end systems, running a home network which is documented in his regular column, "My Home Network" in AUUGN.
In addition to managing system, he is an extensive contributor to such organisations as AUUG and SAGE-AU, having been on the boards of both organisation and a frequent presenter at their conference and author of articles for their newsletters. He is also the co-author of the book OzInternet.
topWhich Linux Filesytem?
The choice of "which Linux filesystem?" is often lost in the decision of "which Linux distribution?" But the choice of filesystem is important - it influences performance, reliability, ease of administration and recovery time after problems.
Linux provides a choice of half a dozen or so filesystems that could be used - but which one is best in a particular situation, given that the various filesystems behave differently under different workloads, and under different conditions.
Peter Chubb will present a talk that will equip you with the information and techniques to help you decide on which filesystem is appropriate to your needs.
Dr Peter Chubb, Gelato@UNSW
Peter Chubb is a Senior Research Engineer at National ICT Australia and a Research Officer at UNSW. He completed his PhD under Associate Professor John Lions in 1989. Peter worked at Softway Pty Ltd (now Aurema Pty Ltd) as a consultant and software engineer doing Unix kernel, security, and embedded work. He joined Gelato@UNSW at its inception in 2002. Peter's hobbies include music (he runs a recorder consort), aquaria (3 tanks at present, no room for more), and fine wines.
Firewall Redundancy and Failover - The Thousand Dollar Challenge
Redundancy and automated failover are systems capabilities often thought to require expensive proprietary solutions. As it turns out, this is now easily achievable with garden-variety hardware and non-patent-encumbered open-source operating systems, with ingredients you probably already have.
This talk will focus on the CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) features of OpenBSD and show you how to build a multi-node firewall that maintains connections across node reboots and even operating system upgrades.
Adrian Close, Hitwise
Adrian Close is a Unix and information security professional with Hitwise. He has been designing and building commercial solutions on OpenBSD for almost as long as he can remember, but takes a "tool for the job" approach.
There are entirely too many computers on his home network, and he enjoys playing a variety of musical instruments (most of which aren't networked).
Solaris Network Performance Considerations
Drawing on the expertise of two of Sun's top network performance specialists, David presents an overview of network performance tuning for the Solaris operating system. The presentation will look at some common network performance problems and how to solve or work around them.
David Purdue, Sun Microsystems
David Purdue is the President of AUUG Inc. He works for Sun Microsystems as a Client Delivery Executive, addressing support issues for Sun's Top 100 global customers. He is also a moderator of Sun's Performance Roundtable group. It is AUUG's worst kept secret that he is a Morris dancer.
Patch Management Through Automated Baseline Management Services
Patching is a necessary part of managing risk in today's corporate computer environment. Patching and tracking of patch levels in a datacentre has always been a mammoth undertaking. Automated Baseline Management (ABM) is Sun's latest offering in patching tools/services. ABM creates a controlled environment that allows the use of stable patch bundles and reporting to make patching cheaper, more scalable and with lower risk than ever before.
Rodney Lindner, Sun Microsystems
Rodney Lindner started in computers in the mid 80's working on Mainframes in large datacentres. Originally working on hardware, he moved into Unix development and support, beginning on Mainframes and migrating to mid-range systems. After a stint contracting in the UK, he returned to Australia to take up a position at Sun Microsystems in 1999. He currently works as a National Systems Support Engineer for Sun Microsystems covering Australia and New Zealand.
Minimising Threats By Keeping Red Hat And Related Systems Up To Date
With the increasing threats from hackers and other malicious users, it is important to keep systems up to date. Modern Linux systems have a a set of tools to help the administrator keep systems up to date, and so minimise exposure.
This talk by Frank Crawford will focus on the tools available in Red Hat Linux and related distributions (e.g. CentOS, Whitebox Linux, etc) but will include principles relevant and useful to administrators of other versions of Linux.
Frank Crawford, ac3
Security Without Firewalls
Firewalls are popularly believed to be the "correct" approach to effectively securing a network. However, there is little practical basis for these beliefs, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center's track record, while not perfect, has demonstrated that there are other methods to securing networks that may be more effective. This talk will explain some of the common myths and realities about security practices, and how SDSC maintains a pretty robust environment.
Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Abe Singer is a member of the Security Technologies Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In providing operational security for the Center, he participates in incident response and forensics, and is expanding the SDSC logging infrastructure. His research is in pattern analysis of syslog data for data mining. Mr. Singer is the author of "Building a Logging Infrastructure" (SAGE, 2004. http://www.sage.org), and is currently writing a book on Log Analysis, due out around January 2006.