USENIX Update

Phew! Those SCALE folks know how to put on a fabulous event!

A big THANKS to all the organizers, volunteers, exhibitors, and attendees for making SCALE10x the best one yet. Also, I’d like to thank everyone who stopped by the USENIX booth. I loved seeing so many familiar faces and old friends, and it’s always great to meet new people each year, too.

If you didn’t get a copy of ;login: before we ran out, be sure to check out some of the free articles we have posted online or learn more about benefits of joining USENIX and SAGE on our membership page.

Also, I wanted to thank everyone who contributed to, attended, or gave me feedback on my UpSCALE talk: 10 Ways to Anger Your Admin.

Hopefully we’ll see you at a USENIX conference or another event soon!

Are you thinking about submitting a paper for WebApps ’12? If so, get on it. Submissions are due January 23, 2012, 11:59 p.m. PST (hard deadline, no extensions, no exceptions, so don’t ask).

In this interview, WebApps ’12 program chair Michael Maximilien (IBM Research—Watson) offers a sneak peek at what we can expect to see this summer in Boston:

RE: We have some topic ideas listed for WebApps ’12. Which particular topics, products, services, or themes are most interesting to you or stand out this year?

MM: I think topics related to cloud computing and platform as a service (PaaS) as it relates to WebApps and their management might be an interesting topic. Also, WebApps with mobile views and techniques to create such apps are important topic for this year.

RE: Would you like to have anything new or different in the schedule for 2012?

MM: Yes, indeed. One of the main changes this year is the addition of “demo” papers. These are short papers — about half the size of regular papers — but that have an accompanying built system, application, etc., or in other words, a demo. The demo papers are designed to encourage industry and open source participants who might have interesting technology but are not used to the rigorous writing and review process for USENIX, or who simply do not have the time to write a full paper.

RE: Any sneak peeks or teasers yet for what we can expect at WebApps ’12?

MM: Yes, we have two confirmed distinguished keynotes already. One is the create of JSON, Doug Crockford from Yahoo!, and the other is a superstar in the open source world with significant contributions to Ruby, Rails, Merb, jQuery, and many others. I am talking about Yehuda Katz. We might have one more keynote — a surprise.

SYSTOR 2012, the 5th annual international systems and storage conference, promotes experimental and practical computer systems research through paper presentations and with interactions between the relevant industry and academia communities. SYSTOR will additionally host distinguished keynote speakers, a highlights track (containing exciting research results accepted to a recent top-tier systems conference or journal), a poster session, and several social activities at the conference.

SYSTOR will be taking place June 4-6, 2012, in Haifa, Israel. For more details, please see http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/conferences/systor2012/

One of the options during each of the technical sessions is called “The Guru Is In.” These are informal sessions with an expert in a particular topic relevant to sysadmins. Guru sessions are a great opportunity to discuss ongoing issues that you’re actually experiencing. The best part is that there’s not just one guru — the other attendees are gurus as well. Those who attend to ask questions often find themselves answering the questions of others. While training sessions and the other technical sessions provide great information, the guru sessions are uniquely able to address your own specific bothers.

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending two excellent guru sessions. The first, starring Oracle’s Janice Gelb, focused on documentation. Her opening remarks included comments about the weaknesses of wikis as documentation repositories. This reinforces comments made by Mark Burgess in his Tuesday morning training: “wikis are where knowledge goes to die.” Janice suggests that wikis be used for interactive work, but that more authoritative documentation be maintained.

In order to keep documentation up-to-date, a culture of documentation must be fostered. This requires scheduling regular updates and maintenance of documentation. Management must also be convinced of the value of maintaining documentation.

In the afternoon, Tom Limoncelli held a session on time management. Tom, of course, is a leading expert in the field, having published a book and presented several trainings at LISA conferences. Sysadmins, being chronically short of time, packed the room to learn and discuss.

Tom began with five keys to managing time:

• Create a mutual interruption shield
• Turn chaos into routines
• Record all requests, don’t rely on your brain
• Make 365 to-do lists a year
• Document the procedures you hate

Unlike the earlier guru, Tom advocated wikis to document tasks and procedures. Checklist-type procedures and infrequent, error-prone tasks are especially suitable to be documented. This task list can serve as a list of tasks to delegate to junior admins and can be a guide for writing job descriptions.

Tom advocates making a to-do list for every day of the year. Any unfinished items should be carried forward to the next day. A large number of applications exist to help with this, although a simple text editor or even pen-and-paper are well-suited for to-do list management.

Managers can make it easier for their staff to by setting three policies:

• How to get help (hey, file a ticket!)
• Written definition of what constitutes an emergency.
• Scope of support