LOPSAGrams

  • 14 Feb 2017 1:36 PM | Deleted user

    1. Cascadia IT conference 2017: Register NOW for Early Bird

    2. Mentorship Program Needs Redesign With Your Help

    3. LOPSA-East Cancellation

    4. Free T-Shirt from Sponsor Datadog

    5. Locals

    6. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    7. Comments or suggestions?

    February 2017 LOPSAgram

    1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017: Register NOW for Early Bird

    Cascadia IT Conference registration is open.. and the Early Bird discount ends February 15! So register NOW while you're thinking about it. Many of you will be able to simply expense it, as the conference is so affordable. But you might still need to have a conversation with your boss. If so, here are some highlights to bring up:
    1. Price/value - most other conferences cost much more, and at Cascadia, you can hear speakers who give Training/Talks at much larger more expensive conferences. Give a summary of your expected expenses - no hotel or flight if you're local!
    2. Look at the schedule, and list key Training & Talks that apply directly to your work and will produce immediate and longer term results: https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/schedule/
    3. Connections with local IT experts means they indirectly support from a more diverse group
    4. Friday and Saturday - only one day away from the office, and one day of personal time.
    5. Promise to give a post-conference report to other technical staff - particularly developers to facilitate DevOps. Perhaps even suggest that a developer attend?

    Register by February 15 to get the Early Bird discount, though of course the conference is still a bargain at full price:

    https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/register-now/

    2. Mentorship Program Chair Needed

    The mentorship program is one of our most exciting and successful programs. Over the years it has brought many new (often student) members to LOPSA for this program alone, and has provided us all with valuable teaching, learning and technical experience.

    We are currently looking for someone to chair the mentorship committee. If anyone is very passionate about helping other system administrators, and wants to help us get the Mentorship program back up and running please contact volunteers@lopsa.org


    3. LOPSA-East Cancellation

    The LOPSA-NJ Local is going to focus on growth for 2017, and postpone the large effort of hosting a conference to another year. LOPSA will focus on another Cascadia IT Conference, and supporting locals around the country.

    4. Free T-Shirt from Sponsor Datadog

    With Datadog all your infrastructure is in one place.

    Track & alert on the health and performance of every server, container, and app. Free t-shirt for LOPSA members. Click here:



    5. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    SASAG's big event this month is the Cascadia IT Conference. Register now!


    https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/register-now/

    SASAG needs speakers. If you are interested in speaking, or have a vendor contact that can give a good technical presentation (no marketing please), contact the organizers through Meetup.com or the email list:  members@lists.sasag.org

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    • Next Meeting: Shell Basics: Under the Hood II

    • Tuesday, February 21

      7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
    • 4th Floor
      Burbank, CA
    • Coding Dojo

      175 E Olive Ave 
      4th Floor
      Burbank, CA (map)

    • Consulting sysadmin Mike Weilgart returns to LOPSA LA with a presentation on UNIX/Linux Shell Basics.

      Description:

      We've all heard of the shell, and we've all used it at least a little bit. But what IS a shell, really? What makes shell scripting fundamentally different from any other programming language? What really happens when you type a command into your shell--and how does this relate to the mistake found in over 50% of Production shell scripts? Attend this talk, demystify the shell and learn to use it right!

    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

    LOPSA-NJ needs speakers. Contact the organizers through Meetup:

    https://www.meetup.com/LOPSA-NJ/

    6. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    Thanks to our Lifetime Members: Benjamin Carrell, Philip Kizer, Greg Rose, Todd Taft, Jennine Townsend

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Sponsor DataDog helps you monitor your entire stack. Graphing, alerting and correlatoin for all your systems. Sign up for a free 14-day trial.

    LOPSA's web content is hosted by DreamHost .

    7. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org 

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 22 Jan 2017 1:34 PM | Deleted user

    1. Tribute to John Boris

    2. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Managers & Vendors

    3. LISA 2017 Preliminary Call for Participation

    4. 25% Discount with AC&NC Jetstor

    5. Locals

    6. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    7. Comments or suggestions?

    January 2017 LOPSAgram

    1. Tribute to John Boris

    I was notified by John's son that he passed away on Jan 14th. John was not only a very active member of LOPSA, its board, and the system admin community, but he was also an incredible friend and a mentor to me. John was always optimistic, kind, considerate, and willing to help anyone who asked. 

    John passed on his knowledge via his stories of working both as a system admin and in his previous career as a machinist and by posting at http://blogs.lopsa.org. He was a typical system admin of his era with no formal training, just a fascination of computers and a talent for troubleshooting their problems. He was as master at making systems work long past their EOL date as evidenced by his work on keeping SCO systems running at his job. 

    Even though John had health issues, I was constantly amazed how he never let them slow him down. At the age most of us would be happy to retire he was still on the board, actively coaching football, and working. Many of you saw him at LISA in Boston. A few days after the conference he had open heart surgery to replace a blocked artery. I talked with John last week and he was so happy as he had more energy than he had in years and was looking forward to attending more conferences and keeping his "little hacker" of a granddaughter out of trouble. 

    John, I miss you very much. Peace be with you. 

    Ski


    2. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 - Managers & Vendors

    Cascadia IT Conferece schedule will be posted soon as we work out the last remaining details. We've got some fantastic talks and tutorials this year, including repeats of some well received content from previous years as well as an interesting variety of new talks. 

    Now is the time to start talking with your manager about attending. Cascadia IT conference is always excellent value for the money, and travel expenses are minimal if you are anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. We haven't made one for Cascadia IT conference yet, but here's a great template for an email to your boss from our LOPSA-East conference:

    http://lopsaeast.org/2016/convince-your-boss/

    We also need sponsors - and the best sponsors are your vendors. Ask your vendor to sponsor Cascadia IT Conference, and cc: casitconf-sponsorship@casitconf.org. You may need to talk to someone in Marketing, rather than Sales - but your salesperson has a good incentive to connect you to the right person! Your vendor will want to be convinced as well - and the sort of information they need is in our Sponsor Prospectus:

    https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/sponsorships/

    3. LISA 2017 Preliminary Call for Participation

    From the LISA 2017 Chairs: 

    We are excited to announce that the Preliminary Call for Participation (https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/call-for-participation) for LISA17 (https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17) is now available. LISA17 will take place October 29-November 3, 2017, in San Francisco, CA. 

    LISA is the premier conference for operations professionals, where systems engineers, IT operations, SRE practitioners, and academic researchers share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world. 

    We invite both industry leaders and people on the front lines to propose topics that demonstrate the present and future of operations. LISA submissions should inspire and motivate attendees toward action that improves their day-to-day work as well as the tech industry as a whole. We are seeking proposals in the following topics: 

    • Architecture
      • Scalability and resiliency
      • Infrastructure design
      • Machine learning
      • Performance planning
      • Strategic vision
      • On the horizon 
    • Culture
      • Building DevOps relationships
      • Business communication
      • Standards and regulatory compliance
      • On-call challenges
      • Workplace diversity
      • Mentorship, education, and training
    • Engineering
      • Dynamic service implementation
      • Continuous delivery
      • Monitoring and instrumentation
      • Machine and service hardening
      • Analytics of system data
      • Release engineering

    LISA encourages submissions from people from a wide range of backgrounds. Our early proposal program allows first-time submitters and/or submitters of controversial topics to receive feedback and improve their chances for acceptance. Submit your early proposals by Monday, February 27, 2017. Standard proposals are due by Monday, April 24, 2017. 

    Please view the complete Preliminary Call for Participation (https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/call-for-participation) for additional details and submission instructions. We look forward to receiving your proposals. 

    On behalf of the LISA17 Organizers,

    Caskey Dickson, Microsoft Azure 

    Connie-Lynne Villani, Grilled Cheese Invitational 

    LISA17 Program Co-Chairs lisa17chairs@usenix.org 

    4. 25% Discount with AC&NC Jetstor

    Advanced Computer & Network Corporation / Jetstor is offering a LOPSA members a 25% discount on the new JetStor 826FXD all flash storage appliance. Offer runs for Q1 2017.



    5. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    Date: Thursday, February 9th, 2017
    Time: 7pm
    Place:

    1111 3rd Ave #2500,

    Seattle, WA

    98101

    Directions:

    25th Floor, meet in the lobby
    Corner of Third and Seneca
    Subject: Systems Reliability Engineering – What Does It Mean to Be One?
    Presenters: Caskey Dickson
    Caskey L. Dickson is a Site Reliability Engineer at Microsoft where he is part of the leadership team reinventing operations at Azure. Before that he was at Google where he worked as an SRE/SWE writing and maintaining monitoring services that operate at "Google scale" as well as business intelligence pipelines. He has worked in online services since 1995 when he turned up his first web server and has been online ever since. Before working at Google, he was a senior developer at Symantec, wrote software for various Internet startups such as CitySearch and CarsDirect, ran a consulting company, and even taught undergraduate and graduate computer science at a University. He has a B.S. in Computer Science, a Masters in Systems Engineering, and an M.B.A from Loyola Marymount.

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    SASAG needs speakers. If you are interested in speaking, or have a vendor contact that can give a good technical presentation (no marketing please), contact the organizers through Meetup.com or the email list:  members@lists.sasag.org

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    • Next Meeting: Shell Basics: Under the Hood

    • Tuesday, January 17, 2017 (today!)

      7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
    • 4th Floor
      Burbank, CA
    • Coding Dojo

      175 E Olive Ave 
      4th Floor
      Burbank, CA (map)

    • Consulting sysadmin Mike Weilgart returns to LOPSA LA with a presentation on UNIX/Linux Shell Basics.

      Description:

      We've all heard of the shell, and we've all used it at least a little bit. But what IS a shell, really? What makes shell scripting fundamentally different from any other programming language? What really happens when you type a command into your shell--and how does this relate to the mistake found in over 50% of Production shell scripts? Attend this talk, demystify the shell and learn to use it right!

    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

    The February meeting will be held at Montclair State University. Please note that it will be held on Wednesday, not Thursday. More details will be coming for directions and parking.

    Topic: Stealing the Best Ideas from DevOps: A Guide for Sysadmins without Developers Speaker: Tom Limoncelli 

    Date: February 1st, 2017 

    Description: DevOps is not a set of tools, nor is it just automating deployments. It is a set of principles that benefit anyone trying to improve a complex process. This talk will present the DevOps principles in terms that apply to all system administrators, and use case studies to explore their use in non-developer environments. 

    Bio: Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. His latest book is the 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He is also known for The Practice of Cloud System Administration (Addison-Wesley) and Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). He works in New York City at StackOverflow.com. He's previously worked at Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, AT&T, and others. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom. He lives in New Jersey.

    Please RSVP either to the Meetup page that will be updated soon or via email to younj@montclair.edu so we know how much pizza to get.

    Location: The Center for Environmental and Life Sciences CELS 110 1 Normal Ave Montclair, NJ 07043

    Announce mailing list Announce@lists.lopsanj.org http://lists.lopsanj.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

    6. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    Thanks to our Lifetime Members: Benjamin Carrell, Philip Kizer, Greg Rose, Todd Taft, Jennine Townsend

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Sponsor DataDog helps you monitor your entire stack. Graphing, alerting and correlatoin for all your systems. Sign up for a free 14-day trial.

    LOPSA's web content is hosted by DreamHost .

    7. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org 

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 28 Dec 2016 12:17 PM | Deleted user

    1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 CfP and Call for Sponsors

    2. 25% Discount with AC&NC Jetstor

    3. LOPSA at LISA 2016

    4. LISA 2016 Ski's Report

    5. LOPSA Members LISA 2016 Report

    6. Locals

    7. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    8. Comments or suggestions?

    December 2016 LOPSAgram


    1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 CfP and Call for Sponsors

    LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation is open, but only until January 1! We invite you to present a talk or Training at the 2017 LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle

    LOPSA Cascadia is gathering of professionals from the diverse IT community in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. We gather to learn from each other, share ideas and meet new friends and peers. Whether you are paid to work with computers or just like to experiment with technology, your time is well spent at LOPSA Cascadia.

    To find out more read the full call for participation: https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/cfp/

    Then submit your talk or Tutorial: https://goo.gl/forms/yd7N0xNQPHLqeayh2


    We also need sponsors - and the best sponsors are your vendors. Ask your vendor to sponsor Cascadia IT Conference, and cc: casitconf-sponsorship@casitconf.org.

    2. 25% Discount with AC&NC Jetstor

    Advanced Computer & Network Corporation / Jetstor is offering a LOPSA members a 25% discount on the new JetStor 826FXD all flash storage appliance. Offer runs for Q1 2017.



    3. LOPSA at LISA 2016

    For the first time, LOPSA's booth was on the expo floor during LISA. We registered 19 new members and had great conversations with future members, sponsors, collaborators and volunteers. Thank you to everyone who stopped by!

    See you in San Francisco at LISA 2017!

    LISA 2017:

    The Call for Participation will be available in January 2017.

    Early proposals deadline: Monday, February 27, 2017
    Standard proposals deadline: Monday, April 24, 2017

    4. LISA 2016 - Ski's Report

    I felt that LISA this year was rich with content that I could bring back to work and immediately use.  For me a few of the highlights were:

    • A VMware Infrastructure Design tutorial that has several great ideas for optimizing your vmware infrastructure.  This was much easier than digging through reams of documentation to find the information.
    •  A systemd tutorial that was very useful for getting me up to speed on the basics so I can not experiment with it on my own.
    •  A talk on the new features in Windows 2016 such as containers, native ssh, and Powershell V5.
    • A talk on the basic principles of DevOps and how they can be applied in non-dev environments.

    Finally there were several talks that stressed the future will be changing even more rapidly due to new technologies such as persistent memory, IoT security issues, and
    increasing complexity in all our systems.  As system admins, we will need to spend more time learning in order to keep up with the changing systems.

    cheers,

    ski

    5. LOPSA Members LISA 2016 Reports

    Tom Limoncelli, who donated a copy of his latest book for the LOPSA Annual Meeting Raffle, thanks Tom!

     http://everythingsysadmin.com/2016/12/lisa16-success.html

    Aleksey Tsalolikhin, who won our first issued LOPSA Challenge coin! Congratulations Aleksey.

    http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/what-i-learned-at-lisa-2016-conference/

    6. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    SASAG needs speakersIf you are interested in speaking, or have a vendor contact that can give a good technical presentation (no marketing please), contact the organizers through Meetup.com or the email list:  members@lists.sasag.org

    SASAG needs a regular place to meet. We've had generous hosts over the years, but now we need a new location. Ideally:

    • Downtown, or easy access from downtown and transit
    • Available nearby parking on a weeknight at ~6:30pm
    • Free!
    • Projector and meeting room for up to ~30 people

    On December 16  we had our LISA Wrapup and Holiday Party at the offices of Qumulo.

    Our next meeting is location & speaker TBA on Thursday January 12.

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    LOPSA-LA in December was one of those fantastic nights with tasty food and free-flowing and stimulating conversation. Thank you to everyone who attended and special thanks to our guest of honor, DevOps Handbook co-author John Willis @botchagalupe


    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

    LOPSA-NJ is planning for their February Meeting. We are looking for Speakers for  February and future meetings. If you are interested please send an email with your talk description to jboris@lopsa.org.5. Thank You To Our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.


    7. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    Thanks to our Lifetime Members: Benjamin Carrell, Philip Kizer, Greg Rose, Todd Taft, Jennine Townsend

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Sponsor DataDog helps you monitor your entire stack. Graphing, alerting and correlatoin for all your systems. Sign up for a free 14-day trial.

    LOPSA's web content is hosted by DreamHost .

    8. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org 

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 15 Nov 2016 12:54 PM | Deleted user

    1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 CfP and Call for Sponsors

    2. Monitor Your Stack With DataDog

    3. USENIX LISA 2016 Registration Discount

    4. USENIX LISA 2016 LOPSA Booth Help

    5. LOPSA Members Speak at USENIX LISA 2016

    6. LOPSA After Dark Party at USENIX LISA 2016

    7. LOPSA Annual Meeting Raffle Back Again This Year

    8. LOPSA Membership Renewal or Registration Discount During LISA

    9. Thanks to Tech Team for Dreamhost Migration Project

    10. Locals

    11. Thanks to our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    12. Comments or suggestions?

    1. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 CfP and Call for Sponsors

    LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation is open. We invite you to present a talk or Training at the 2017 LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle

    LOPSA Cascadia is gathering of professionals from the diverse IT community in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. We gather to learn from each other, share ideas and meet new friends and peers. Whether you are paid to work with computers or just like to experiment with technology, your time is well spent at LOPSA Cascadia.

    To find out more read the full call for participation: https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/cfp/

    Then submit your talk or Tutorial: https://goo.gl/forms/yd7N0xNQPHLqeayh2


    We also need sponsors - and the best sponsors are your vendors. Ask your vendor to sponsor Cascadia IT Conference, and cc: casitconf-sponsorship@casitconf.org.

    2. Monitor Your Stack With DataDog

    Monitor your entire stack. Graphing, alerting, and correlation for all your systems.
    Sign up for a free 14-day trial.




    3. USENIX LISA 2016 Registration Discount

    Planning on attending USENIX LISA16? LOPSA members qualify for a $45 registration discount.  Get the discount code from https://lopsa.org/Member-Discounts (member login required) and enter it into the LISA16 registration form to receive the discount.

    4. USENIX LISA 2016 LOPSA Booth Help

    When you're at LISA16, look for the LOPSA table near the registration area on Tuesday and in the LISA16 Expo on Wednesday and Thursday. You can meet and talk to current members, and help us register new members by volunteering to staff the table. Sign up now:

    http://www.SignUpGenius.com/go/4090B4CA8A92CAAFF2-lisa


    5. LOPSA members speak at USENIX LISA 2016

    Many LOPSA members will be speaking at LISA. Here is a schedule to help you catch their presentations:

    Branson Matheson - LISA Build Coordinator

    Lee Damon - Workshops Chair

    Wednesday, 9:00 am-9:15 am, Opening Remarks, Matt Simmons, SpaceX

    Wednesday, 11:00 am–12:30 pm, Mini Tutorial I, Git Crash Course, Thomas Uphill, Wells Fargo

    Wednesday, 2:00 pm–2:45 pm, Talks II, Capturing All of Stack Overflow's Logs, George Beech, Stack Overflow

    Wednesday, 2:00 pm–3:30 pm, Mini Tutorial I, S, M, and L Logstash Architectures: The Foundations, Jamie Riedesel, HelloSign

    Wednesday, 2:00 pm–3:30 pm, Mini Tutorial II, Quick Start to Pacemaker HA, Mike Diehn

    Wednesday, 2:00 pm–5:30 pm, LISA Lab, Core Skills: Scripting for Automation, Mike Ciavarella, Coffee Bean Software Pty Ltd

    Wednesday, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm, Mini Tutorial I, S, M, and L Logstash Architectures: Reaching For the Sky, Jamie Riedesel, HelloSign

    Thursday, 2:00 pm–2:45 pm, Talks I, Stealing the Best Ideas from DevOps: A Guide for Sysadmins without Developers, Thomas Limoncelli, StackOverflow.com, and Christina Hogan, Independent Consultant

    Thursday, 2:00 pm–3:30 pm, Mini Tutorial II, The 90-Minute Cassandra DBA, Chris McEniry, Sony Interactive Entertainment

    Thursday, 4:45 pm–5:30 pm, Talks III, From BOFH to Just Another Person in the Standup, Surviving the Move to DevOps, Jamie Riedesel, HelloSign

    Friday, 11:00 am–11:45 am, Talks I, Lost Treasures of the Ancient World, David Blank-Edelman, Apcera


    6. LOPSA After Dark Party at USENIX LISA 2016

    LOPSA will be holding its Annual After Dark party on Thursday at 9:30pm.  The party is sponsored by Silicon Mechanics who will be holding a special raffle at the party.  Stop
    by the LOPSA table to enter into this raffle and find out where the party will be held.

    7. LOPSA Annual Meeting Raffle Back Again This Year

    Thanks very much to these vendors who support LOPSA and its mission, we will be having another great raffle after the Annual Meeting on Thursday night.  The vendors who have
    already donated gifts are:
    Stop by the LOPSA table to see what the gifts are and attend our Annual meeting on Thursday at 8:30pm to be entered into the raffle.

    8. LOPSA Membership Renewal or Registration Discount

    We'd love to renew your membership in person at the LOPSA booth at LISA 2016 - so much that we're offering a great discount - renewal or new memberships will cost only $35 at the LOPSA booth during LISA.

    Be sure and bring over non-members to take advantage of this great deal and get to meet us face to face.

    We want your feedback, and in person at LISA is our best opportunity to get it - only once per year!

    If you can't make it to LISA, we're still offering you a discount - $40 renewal or registration during the week of LISA.

    In person or otherwise, we're also extending our offer of a free t-shirt as well.


    9. Thanks to Tech Team for DreamHost Migration Project

    Many thanks so much to our tech team, particularly Dan Rich for migrating our various websites and content from our old host ServerBeach to our new provider DreamHost. Much work over many months were required, and now we're running current versions of software and saving money on hosting. Thanks!

    10. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    SASAG needs speakers. If you are interested in speaking, or have a vendor contact that can give a good technical presentation (no marketing please), contact the organizers through Meetup.com or the email listmembers@lists.sasag.org

    SASAG needs a regular place to meet. We've had generous hosts over the years, but now we need a new location. Ideally:

    • Downtown, or easy access from downtown and transit
    • Available nearby parking on a weeknight at ~6:30pm
    • Free!
    • Projector and meeting room for up to ~30 people

    On November 10 Lee Damon spoke on "A Rough Intro to ZFS." In December we'll have our LISA Wrapup and Holiday Party at the offices of Qumulo.

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    Many thanks to our SASAG members Lee Whalen, Lee Damon, Carl Riches, Thomas Uphill and Brian Globermann for staffing our LOPSA booth at the Seattle Linuxfest SeaGL on Friday and Saturday.

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    SoCalCodeCamp will feature LOPSA-LA's "Build a Cloud Workshop" on Saturday, Nov. 12th at USC https://www.meetup.com/lopsala/events/234896878/  Thanks to our presenter the dynamic expert Brian Bennett of Joyent.

    LOPSA-LA's "Data Science made Easy with Hadoop" meetup on October 18th at IBM had thirty attendees. Kudos to Thomas Liakos for organizing and presenting!

    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

    LOPSA-NJ is planning for their November Meeting. We are looking for Speakers for  November and future meetings. If you are interested please send an email with your talk description to jboris@lopsa.org.


    11. Thank You To Our Sponsors & Lifetime Members

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

    Thanks to our Lifetime Members: Benjamin Carrell, Philip Kizer, Greg Rose, Todd Taft

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    LOPSA's web content is hosted by DreamHost .

    12. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org


  • 03 Oct 2016 8:55 AM | Deleted user

    1. President's Corner

    2. Monitor Your Stack With DataDog

    3. USENIX LISA 2016 - Discount & LOPSA Booth Help

    4. Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

    5. Free LOPSA T-Shirt (offer ends Oct 31)

    6. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation Open

    7. Vertical Sysadmin Discounts

    7. Locals

    9. Thank you to our sponsors

    10. Comments or suggestions?

    October 2016 LOPSAgram

    1. President's Corner:

    I would like to first say a giant thank you to Ski for all of his service to the board. I have big shoes to fill and I hope that I can continue to move LOPSA forward. I am looking forward to this challenge and am very happy about the things to come.

    The new board is just starting to hit its stride; we are working hard to make sure that LOPSA is ready for the future, and continues to grow and be a great educational
    organization.

    I look forward to seeing LOPSA-East brought back this year, Cascadia-IT continue to be a strong conference and the new and improved mentorship program launched.
    As with everything else in a volunteer organization we cannot truly succeed without the help, and support of our membership. And, I am proud to say that we do have a very
    engaged, helpful group of people working hard on all of these projects.
    That said, we always are in need of more people to help us towards our goals. So, I am going to take a moment and ask our membership for a bit of help. If you have some time
    and you would like to help us continue to grow and put on great conference programs, please reach out to the board!

    I am very excited about the projects we are starting to work on and look forward to sharing them with everyone in the future.

    -George

    2. Monitor Your Stack With DataDog

    Monitor your entire stack. Graphing, alerting, and correlation for all your systems.
    Sign up for a free 14-day trial.



    3. USENIX LISA 2016 Discount & LOPSA Booth Help

    Thinking of attending USENIX LISA16? LOPSA members qualify for a $45 registration discount.  Get the discount code from https://lopsa.org/Member-Discounts (member login required) and enter it into the LISA16 registration form to receive the discount.

    When you're at LISA16, look for the LOPSA table near the registration area on Tuesday and in the LISA16 Expo on Wednesday and Thursday. You can meet and talk to current members, and help us register new members by volunteering to staff the table. Sign up now:

    http://www.SignUpGenius.com/go/4090B4CA8A92CAAFF2-lisa

    4. Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

    The Chuck Yerkes Award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding individual contributions in online forums over the past year. It was created after Chuck Yerkes' untimely death in 2004 to memorialize the mentorship he provided countless system administrators through his helpful and accurate posts to system administration mailing lists. Each year, an awards committee selects someone who followed Chuck's example in the prior year in their contributions to system administration online forums—whether mailing lists, web forums, or chat rooms. From 2005–2008, the USENIX Association presented this award. Beginning in 2009, the Chuck Yerkes Award is presented by LOPSA.

    Help us find individuals deserving of this award by sending your submissions to:

    board@lopsa.org

    Please share the name, nick/handle and the forum(s) in which the individual has made their contributions.


    5. Free LOPSA T-Shirt With Referral or Renewal

    We've got a stockpile of great LOPSA t-shirts with our logo and name on the front and mission statement on the back. Would you like one of these classics? For a limited time, renew your LOPSA membership OR refer a new member to LOPSA and we'll send you one for free. Refer a few friends and you could get multiple colors!

    Referrals are a great way to build up our membership base and we'd like to encourage it with this limited time offer. Have your fellow sysadmin use your name in the registration field "How did you hear about LOPSA?"

    The free t-shirt offer expires October 31, 2016.

    6. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation Open

    LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation is open. We invite you to present a talk or Training at the 2017 LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle

    LOPSA Cascadia is gathering of professionals from the diverse IT community in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. We gather to learn from each other, share ideas and meet new friends and peers. Whether you are paid to work with computers or just like to experiment with technology, your time is well spent at LOPSA Cascadia.

    To find out more read the full call for participation: https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/cfp/

    Then submit your talk or Tutorial: https://goo.gl/forms/yd7N0xNQPHLqeayh2

    7. Vertical Sysadmin Discounts

    Vertical Sysadmin, Inc. offers LOPSA members a 10% discount on GitLab Enterprise Edition and a 15% discount for on-site training on Git.  We present the materials such that
    real learning occurs.  

    "I have got by on minimum understanding of Git for a couple of years now--this really brought up my confidence in using Git. After I learned the Git internals, the esoteric commands really started falling into place."

    -- Nicholas Santucci, Monitoring and Performance Engineer

    Email Aleksey Tsalolikhin directly for your discount: aleksey@verticalsysadmin.com

    8. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    On October 13 we had Lightning Talks. The topic for November will be announced on the website & meetup:

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    LOPSA Columbus

    Over 40 folks registered to meet on September 29 to celebrate LOPSA Columbus' fifth anniversary! After a quick presentation going over some of the chapter's history, members shared some of their favorite experiences over the past five years. Big thanks to TekSystems for picking up the tab. Some stats from the past five years...

    • 19 meetings since we’ve missed one
    • Over 44 meetings
    • Four tech crawls, where we toured innovative Columbus tech businesses
    • Four data center tours, which ended with a tour of Nationwide's 100 million dollar tier IV data center
    • Over nine parties

    The next LOPSA Columbus meeting will be about FreeIPA on October 27 at CoverMyMeds. RSVP here: https://lopsacbus201610.eventbrite.com

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    "Build a Cloud Workshop with Brian Bennett of Joyent" is going to be on Saturday, November 5, 2016 and is going to be spectacular!  (His "Running Containers in Production - No, Really" was a real hit.)  RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/lopsala/events/234896878/


    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

    LOPSA-NJ is planning for their November Meeting. We are looking for Speakers for  November and future meetings. If you are interested please send an email with your talk description to jboris@lopsa.org.


    9. Thank You To Our Sponsors

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

    10. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org
  • 15 Sep 2016 9:56 AM | Deleted user

    1. President's Corner - Changes for LOPSA

    2. Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

    3. Free LOPSA T-Shirt

    4. USENIX LISA 2016 Discount

    5. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation Open

    6. Ohio LinuxFest & DevOps Days

    7. Locals

    8. Thank you to our sponsors

    9. Comments or suggestions?

    September 2016 LOPSAgram: Welcome New Board
    1. President's Corner: Changes for LOPSA

    This is my last President's Corner as George is taking over the leadership of LOPSA.  While a lot has been accomplished in the last year, I feel that I no longer have the energy that LOPSA needs in its President to move forward. George has this energy and along with the board, some great ideas on how to make LOPSA a better organization for system admins.

    I have enjoyed my 7 years on the board - talking with people about system administration, mentoring folks, and seeing how LOPSA can make a difference in people's lives.  One experience that will always stay with me was talking to a LOPSA member who volunteered at the SCALE booth one year.  He told me how LOPSA's mentorship program was why he got his first system admin job and how thankful he was that LOPSA existed.  This is what LOPSA means to me - making a difference in people's lives.

    I am going to spend the next year focusing on documenting LOPSA's internal processes; cleaning up our board wiki, google doc space, and policies; and helping George as he takes over as President.  I also hope to see a few of you at conferences, volunteering for LOPSA, and giving the board ideas on how to make LOPSA your organization.

    cheers,

    ski

    2.Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

    The Chuck Yerkes Award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding individual contributions in online forums over the past year. It was created after Chuck Yerkes' untimely death in 2004 to memorialize the mentorship he provided countless system administrators through his helpful and accurate posts to system administration mailing lists. Each year, an awards committee selects someone who followed Chuck's example in the prior year in their contributions to system administration online forums—whether mailing lists, web forums, or chat rooms. From 2005–2008, the USENIX Association presented this award. Beginning in 2009, the Chuck Yerkes Award is presented by LOPSA.

    Help us find individuals deserving of this award by sending your submissions to:

    board@lopsa.org

    Please share the name, nick/handle and the forum(s) in which the individual has made their contributions.


    3. Free LOPSA T-Shirt With Referral or Renewal

    We've got a stockpile of great LOPSA t-shirts with our logo and name on the front and mission statement on the back. Would you like one of these classics? For a limited time, renew your LOPSA membership OR refer a new member to LOPSA and we'll send you one for free. Refer a few friends and you could get multiple colors!

    Referrals are a great way to build up our membership base and we'd like to encourage it with this limited time offer. Have your fellow sysadmin use your name in the registration field "How did you hear about LOPSA?"

    The free t-shirt offer starts today, September 15 and expires October 31, 2016.

    4. USENIX LISA 2016 Discount

    Thinking of attending USENIX LISA16? LOPSA members qualify for a $45 registration discount.  Get the discount code from https://lopsa.org/Member-Discounts (member login required) and enter it into the LISA16 registration form to receive the discount.

    When you're at LISA16, look for the LOPSA table near the registration area on Tuesday and in the LISA16 Expo on Wednesday and Thursday.

    5. Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation Open

    LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference 2017 Call for Participation is open. We invite you to present a talk or Training at the 2017 LOPSA Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle

    LOPSA Cascadia is gathering of professionals from the diverse IT community in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. We gather to learn from each other, share ideas and meet new friends and peers. Whether you are paid to work with computers or just like to experiment with technology, your time is well spent at LOPSA Cascadia.

    To find out more read the full call for participation: https://www.casitconf.org/casitconf17/cfp/

    Then submit your talk or Tutorial: https://goo.gl/forms/yd7N0xNQPHLqeayh2

    6. Ohio LinuxFest and Ohio DevOps Days

    Ohio LinuxFest is one of the largest Open Source conferences in the country and will be hosting its fourteenth event with the theme of innovation and entrepreneurship with Open Source. Ethan Gladsted the founder and creator of Nagios will be keynoting. OLF will also have professional training covering subjects like penetration testing, Ansible, OpenStack, and time management for System Administrators. The event will be on October 7 and 8!

    Register at https://ohiolinux.org

    Be sure and stop by the LOPSA booth when you're there.

    The second DevOps Days Ohio will be on October 31 and November 1 covering the broad subject area of DevOps culture and practices. Topics will include automation, soft skills, and the practices driving innovation in System Administrator. More information is available at:

    https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-ohio/welcome/

    7. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    In September we had an 'expert office hours' for members. The topic for October will be announced on the website & meetup:
    https://SASAG.org
    https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Area-Systems-Administrators-Guild-SASAG/
    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    LOPSA Columbus

    LOPSA Columbus missed an update last month but we certainly didn't slow down. We were up to our usual annual antics and threw a Sysadmin Day party with DevOps Columbus and the Central Ohio Linux User Group. Outside of T-shirts and Sysadmin swag from LOPSA, Chef generously stepped up and covered the bill for food and drink. We had over 50 RSVPs! Following, there was an after party that CoverMyMeds picked up the tab for. Sad you missed out on the fun? It's not quite Sysadmin Day but we are having an epic celebration, as it's our fifth year anniversary! Join us at Land Grant and RSVP here:

    https://lopsacbus201609.eventbrite.com
    Big thanks to TekSystems for sponsoring us again this year, they're picking up the tab.

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    Keep up with the LOPSA community through http://www.meetup.com/lopsala


    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

    LOPSA-NJ is planning for their October Meeting. We are looking for Speakers for October and future meetings. If you are interested please send an email with your talk description to jboris@lopsa.org.


    8. Thank You To Our Sponsors

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

    9. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 09 Aug 2016 10:59 AM | Deleted user

    1. President's Corner - The Specialization of System Administration

    2. Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

    3. Start and Run a Local Chapter

    4. Upcoming Events of Interest

    5. Member Tech Blog Highlight

    6. Locals

    7. Thank you to our sponsors

    8. Comments or suggestions?

    August 2016 LOPSAgram: Specialization

    1. President's Corner: The Specialization of System Administration

    Like many careers, system administration has become a collection of specialized jobs all under the umbrella of system administration.  Back when I started in the career many years ago, a system admin was the person who did everything in support of computer systems.  This included understanding the requirements, choosing all the parts of the system, ordering, unpacking, installing, configuring, and maintaining the computers, networks, applications and their supporting power and cooling systems.  We were the folks that 'got things done'.

    While some of us still are generalists like this, many of us have specialized into one aspect of system administration.  This is an ongoing trend that was noted by Thomas Malone, et. al. in their article "The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization" (https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-the-age-of-hyperspecialization).  For system admins this mean you may end up as a storage, network, configuration, monitoring, virtualization, forensic, security, Windows, UNIX, etc. and rarely if ever do any other kind of system admin work.

    Some of the advantages to specialization is that you become an expert in your area of specialization which will tend to increase your value and pay.  You will be more productive and may have more job security.  For example, Cobol programmers are in high demand now because there are very few people willing to work maintaining these legacy systems.

    However, there are many downsides to specialization that you need to be aware of.  You may become bored doing the same thing day after day.  You career opportunities may be less because companies are paying you for your existing knowledge, not to learn something else.  Your job may disappear as technology changes or be replaced by a computer (this happened to my cousin when Microsoft implemented network switch configuration management).  After years of doing one thing very well, you may have problems learning something else.

    So while specialization will probably make you more valuable in the workplace and increase your pay, be careful to make sure you are not trapped.  Make sure you keep earning new technologies even though they may not directly apply to your area.

    2.Call for Nominations for Yerkes Award

    The Chuck Yerkes Award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding individual contributions in online forums over the past year. It was created after Chuck Yerkes' untimely death in 2004 to memorialize the mentorship he provided countless system administrators through his helpful and accurate posts to system administration mailing lists. Each year, an awards committee selects someone who followed Chuck's example in the prior year in their contributions to system administration online forums—whether mailing lists, web forums, or chat rooms. From 2005–2008, the USENIX Association presented this award. Beginning in 2009, the Chuck Yerkes Award is presented by LOPSA.

    Help us find individuals deserving of this award by sending your submissions to:

    board@lopsa.org

    Please share the name, nick/handle and the forum(s) in which the individual has made their contributions.

    3. Start and Run a Local Chapter

    Starting or running a LOPSA Chapter near you may seem like a daunting prospect, but it is much easier than you think. Of course LOPSA will support you as a distributed remote team via email, phone, IRC/Slack etc. We have a great deal of collective expertise on running successful local chapter meetings to share.

    Some of the work can only be done in person, here are the top needs:
    1. Meeting Location: Find a reliable, recurring meeting location, ideally for free, ideally with someone-not-you (delgation!) who is the point person responsible for ensure it is booked, available etc every month. By far the easiest solution is a member's workplace with a sufficiently large conference room, but other options include libraries and community centers, which can be free if the meeting is open to the public.
    2. Speakers: Speakers are by far the biggest draw for attendance. There are other options such as watching LISA videos, or round table discussions but attendance is always better with a scheduled speaker. A queue of people willing to speak, and scheduled for some months out, and listed on a website in advance boosts attendance a great deal. Coordinating speakers is another job that can be smoothly delegated to spread the work.
    3. Food Sponsor: With a free venue, food is the only thing that costs money, and a regular food sponsor can make coordination easy, and managing money can be avoided if the sponsor actually places the order themselves. Of course, food isn't a requirement but it is a big draw for attendance, particularly for a weeknight meeting starting approximately at dinner time! The best candidate for a food sponsor is a local technology vendor from which attendees are likely to make purchases. A mutually beneficial arrangement like this is quite affordable under the sponsor's marketing budget.

    4. Upcoming Events of Interest

    Just because it is summer doesn't mean everyone is on vacation. There are many events of interest to LOPSA members coming up.

    And it is never too early to mention USENIX LISA, December 4 - 9, Boston, MA. Early bird registration ends Thursday, November 10.

    https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/attend


    5. Member Tech Blog Highlight - John Boris

    LOPSA Board member John Boris blogs regularly at https://blogs.lopsa.org/author/jboris/

    A recent entry discusses RAID:

    WOW! RAID REALLY WORKS

    To some of you this may be a trivial thing but for me it is like finding that extra money in your wallet or even hitting the lottery. Some of you may know I am a single sysadmin shop. I do have other sysdmins in my Department but I am actually on my own to handle my legacy SCO Boxes as well as my LINUX boxes. My experience with RAID systems has not been favorable. The first one I ever dealt with was a RAID 5 system that had a drive go bad and when I replaced the drive (after a long search to find an exact replacement) found that it was never setup properly and did not automatically repair itself. So the next system I setup came in with the RAID system setup and two weeks after it was setup I had a Drive go south. I got a replacement the next morning, did the Hot Swap and the rebuild process kicked off. WOOT! that was great. Until recently when a Synology NAS unit decided to go belly up. I was struggling to quickly find a replacement as this device was not under any major support contract. The unit drove me nuts and I figured all was lost. It gave all signs the Motherboard was gone. Anyway I found a replacement drive and installed it. I expected the system to see it and kick off the repair but that wasn’t happening. All I saw was a Degraded notification and a constant beeping sound. If anyone has used a Synology they will know that documentation is not this company’s strong point. So as i fumbled through the many screens in the Manager I find that one little button that says to repair. I clicked it and it started doing its thing. Sad part it took almost 20 hours to rebuild a 2TB Raid system under Synology’s SHR Raid system. I wasn’t sure if I was going to even see my data. I was like a kid on Christmas that got that BB gun when I logged in this morning and saw all of my data restored.

    As a lesson learned I made sure I ordered a spare drive for a new system we spun up which means that by the time I need that drive as a replacement I will be replacing the unit due to age.

    I guess the moral to this story is that RAID will work but with the large amount of Data we store today you have to be very patient when rebuilding a system

    Do you have a technical blog you'd like featured in the LOPSAgram? Email: board@lopsa.org

    Don't have a blog yet? You can use your LOPSA blog at https://blogs.lopsa.org. Choose sysadmin-news as the category if it is recent news item for the https://lopsa.org front page.

    6. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    On Thursday August 11th we'll hear from Brian Kraft on "Introduction to Ansible"

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    aleksey@verticalsysadmin.com to get a copy of our catalog. \"The balance between theoretical and practical knowledge is just\nperfect. No bullshit.\" --Bernard Brandl, Administrateur Syst\u00e8me Linux"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}" data-sheets-note="Responder updated this value.">LOPSA LA held a social dinner to celebrate Sysadmin Day on July 29th and met again on Thursday August 4, Joyent Sr. Cloud Operations Engineer Brian Bennett presented "Running Containers in Production, no really".  Keep up with the LOPSA community through http://www.meetup.com/lopsala


    LOPSA-NJ: New Jerseyjboris@lopsanj.org if you have a topic for the meeting.\n"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">

    jboris@lopsanj.org if you have a topic for the meeting.\n"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">LOPSA-NJ will be coming back from vacation on September 1st.

    Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
    2751 Brunswick Pike
    Lawrenceville, 08648-4132

    Meeting time is 7 PM (Social time) 7:30 pm (discussion)

    The talk should be 45 -60 minutes in length which will allow time for discussion. The meeting ends at 9 PM.

    Please reply to jboris@lopsanj.org if you have a topic for the meeting.

    7. Thank You To Our Sponsors

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

    8. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org 

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 11 Jul 2016 10:55 AM | Deleted user

    1. President's Corner - Vendor Relations

    2. Happy Sysadmin Day - LOPSA Contest & Meetups

    3. Welcome New Sponsor DataDog

    4. Leadership Committee Update

    5. Member Tech Blog Highlight

    6. Locals

    7. Thank you to our sponsors

    8. Comments or suggestions?

    July 2016 LOPSAgram: Happy Sysadmin Day!


    1. President's Corner: Vendor Relations

    As system admins one of our joys is dealing with vendors. I am sure each of you have war stories about untrained support people, products that do not perform as advertised, and don't get me started on documentation. While it can be cathartic to share war stories over a few pints, we also need vendors as they enable us to provide services to our customers.  This column is about how we can improve our interactions with vendors.

    First, you when you talk with a vendor, let them know the what you like and dislike about their product/service.  The better vendors will take this feedback and improve their products/services to better meet your needs.  Take the time to find out how to submit enhancement requests and include in the request the business impact of the changes you request.  For problems with their product/service, let know what is the time and dollar cost of the problem to you and your business.  I find it very useful to mention how my users perceive the company and their product/service in order to increase their interest in fixing a problem.

    Second, take time to interact with vendors at conferences, via professional associations like LOPSA, and even attend a marketing presentation now and then to let them know what you need and do not need. I know some folks do not like to do this, but if we cannot tell the vendors what is working and what is not, how will we ever get the products that we need?  The vendors are subsidizing your tickets to the conferences and your membership at the professional associations so take a few minutes and stop by the booth or click the link to see what they have to offer.  Then take a few more minutes to let them know what you think about their product or service.  If you do not do this, then the price of conference attendance and professional association membership will increase.  

    Finally, take time to foster a professional relationship with the vendors and their VARs as this will encourage them to go the extra mile for you when you really need it. They are much more likely to fix a problem quicker and in your favor if you have that relationship.  So take time to talk with them when they call, at a marketing event, or at a conference.  The time you invest in the vendor will most likely pay off later on down the road when you need help.

    2. Happy Sysadmin Day - LOPSA Contest & Meetups

    Friday, July 29, 2016, is the 17th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. If you're a sysadmin, your boss might need a reminder that there is a special day to celebrate your often quiet accomplishments. Get this day on your boss's calendar and ensure that you and all future sysadmin hires get properly acknowledged each year. And if you manage system administrators, now is a time to show them your appreciation.

    Help us celebrate #sysadminday on the last Friday in July, July 29th 2016. Show us your top 10 pictures that showcase your day as a sysadmin, tweet to @lopsa with #SAtop10.  Contest closes at midnight July 27 (EDT).  Winners to be determined by retweets and favorites.

    Don't feel like posting pictures? Big brother won't let you? Tweet us your favorite Sysadmin tool or Online resource with #SAfaveTool.  Winners of the Favorite tool will be decided by a vote of the board.  Same deadline.  Good luck to all.

    Let us know if you are having a #sysadminday celebration and how you are celebrating. If you set up a meetup and 6 or more people sign up, send an email to communications@lopsa.org with the meetup link and LOPSA will send you 6 t-shirts to help celebrate SysAdmin day.

    LOPSA will maintain a list of System Administrator Appreciation Day meetups:

    https://lopsa.org/event-2275321


    3. Welcome New Sponsor DataDog

    See metrics from all your apps, tools, and services in one place. Begin your trial today, install the agent, and Datadog will send you a free t-shirt!


    "Datadog was attractive because of all the integration tools that allowed for 'out of the box' integration, even with more esoteric metrics from HAProxy and ElasticSearch" - Joel Barkaiuskas, Director of Platform, Blue State Digital

    4. Leadership Committee Update & Election Results

    The elections for the 2016 LOPSA Board of Directors have concluded. The winners are George Beech, Brian Globerman, Scott Suehle, Thomas Uphill, and Steven VanDevender.

    Big thanks to the Leadership Committee team and the candidates for their time. Without them, we would not have had an election.

    5. Member Tech Blog Highlight - Standalone Sysadmin

    Many will already be familiar with member Matt Simmons' blog at http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/, but did you know about the handy Sysadmin Calendar feature? With events of interest to system administrators, in a handy Google Calendar to which you can subscribe, or submit your own events:

    http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/sysadmin-calendar/


    Do you have a technical blog you'd like featured in the LOPSAgram? Email: board@lopsa.org

    Don't have a blog yet? You can always use your LOPSA blog at https://blogs.lopsa.org. Choose sysadmin-news as the category if it is recent news item for the https://lopsa.org front page.

    6. Locals

    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    On Thursday July 14th we'll hear from Brian Globermann on " Implementing Zabbix in Azure for network and server monitoring."

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

    The next LOPSA LA meetup will feature Brian Bennett of Joyent presenting "Running Containers in Production, no really" Thursday, August 4, 2016 at Q.  

    RSVP http://www.meetup.com/lopsala/events/231964739/


    LOPSA Columbus

    LOPSA Columbus met on June 21 and Bill Sempf presented about Why the Web is Broken. LOPSA Columbus is partnering with DevOpsDays Ohio for a Sysadmin Day celebration on July 29.

    RSVP here: https://sysadminday2016.eventbrite.com

    7. Thank You To Our Sponsors

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

    8. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org 

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 20 Jun 2016 7:21 AM | Deleted user

     1. President's Corner - Lessons Learned

     2. LOPSA Board Elections - Vote now!

     3. Welcome New Sponsor DataDog

     4. Member Tech Blog Highlight

     6. LISA Conversations

     7. Locals

     8. Thank you to our sponsors

     9. Comments or suggestions?

     June 2016 LOPSAgram: Vote!

    1. President's Corner: Lessons Learned
    I have been thinking a lot lately about a series of major system outages this year in my datacenter at the school district where I work.  They are all related to the switching infrastructure between my ESXi cluster and my SAN. What could I have done to avoid the outages and what lessons can I learn from the outages?

    My set up is a cluster of 4 switches of which 2 are redundant (1GB), while the other 2 are not (1 fiber and 1 10GB).  When connected together, they become one switching fabric.  The fiber switch is connected to storage and the 10GB copper switch to the ESXi servers.  In summary, over the past four months I have had four incidents that crashed the datacenter as the servers had no access to their storage:

    Incident #1: Cable installers cut power to fiber switch
    Incident #2: Switch VLAN reconfiguration causes switches to go offline
    Incident #3: Fiber switch completed failed
    Incident #4: Adding in replacement fiber switch caused SAN to have problems

    Lessons learned from all of these incidents are:

      Redundancy is necessary in a modern datacenter.  Incidents #1 and #3 could have been avoided if we had redundant fiber switches.  Our previous switches from this vendor never had any downtime in over 4 years so we were lulled into a false sense of safety.
     Make small changes and test them first.  For Incident #2 we thought that the new VLAN configuration would work fine so we pushed it out to all ports on that non-redundant fiber switch.  This summer when we try again, we are going to test it on a few of the redundant 1GB ports with a test ESXi server.  Once the new configuration is fully tested we will push it out to 1 of the fiber switches and then if it works to the redundant fiber switch.
     Make sure you have 7x24 support on all parts of your infrastructure. During Incident #4 we found out that while we had 7x24 support on the ESXi servers and the switches, we only had 5x9 support for the SAN.  So we had to wait overnight before we could verify the SAN was the problem (the symptom was iSCSI sessions being dropped).
     Just because something has failed in the past doesn't mean it failed again and if something has not failed before there is always a first time.  For incident #4 we were sure it was a switch problem again as that is what failed the previous 3 times.  It took a hours before we were really looking at the SAN which had never failed before as the possible cause of the failure.
     Make sure 7x24 actually means that there is someone who is available 7x24. For the switch vendor, when we called their support no one would pick up. This happened twice to us during Incident #4 and we are now discussing with them what happened and why.
     Rebuilding your datacenter while in production is asking for trouble.  It is just too easy for the installers, etc. to bump a power cord, patch cable, etc. and cause a problem.  I am actually a bit surprised we did not have more issues because of this.
     A supportive team is very helpful.  Many times as system admins we are responsible for systems that fail due to things out of our control.  In these cases, it is really nice to have a team around you that helps out to get services running without pointing fingers, but rather looking for ways to speed the recovery process and then figure out what could have been done to avoid the failure.
     That said, spend a few hours and document the risks you see in your datacenter so your management is aware of the risks.  This makes it a lot easier when a failure does happen as they will not feel totally blindsided by the failure.
    I would love to hear from you about some of your lessons learned.  Email me at
    ski@lopsa.org and I will put the best ones into next months column.

     2. LOPSA Board Elections - Vote now!
    The Leadership Committee is pleased to announce that they have opened the 2016 LOPSA board member elections.


    Before voting, please take a moment to review the first[1] and second[2] LOPSALive sessions, where the candidates answered LOPSA member questions. Finally, review all the candidate statements[3].

     Brian Globerman - Candidate Statement
    George Beech (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
    Scott Suehle - Candidate Statement
    Steven VanDevender (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
    Thomas Uphill (Incumbent) - Candidate Statement
    Trevor Thorpe - Candidate Statement
    Vote[4] before the LC closes the polls on June 23 at 12:00AM Eastern.


    [1] https://lopsa.org/blog/4025835
    [2] https://lopsa.org/blog/4041805
    [3] https://lopsa.org/blog/4014528
    [4] https://election.lopsa.org/lopsavote/

     3. Welcome New Sponsor DataDog

     See metrics from all your apps, tools, and services in one place. Begin your trial today, install the agent, and Datadog will send you a free t-shirt!


    "Datadog takes care of the complex task of managing a metrics back-end. Instead of figuring out how and where to store data, we get to focus on actually using the data to make better decisions." - Arup Chakrabarti - Head of Operations Engineering, Pagerduty

    4. Member Tech Blog Highlight - Vertical Sysadmin
    Member Mario Obejas provides a guest post on member Aleksey Tsalolikhin's blog Vertical Sysadmin on “a replacement for bash?” and on writing production-grade code in any language.

    http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/mario-obejas-on-a-replacement-for-bash-and-on-writing-production-grade-code/

    Aleksey Tsalolikhin recently presented to educators from the California community college network at the Digital Media Educators Conference (http://ict-dm.net/tracks-2016/data-representation/item/infrastructure-administration-server-management-at-scale) on June 10th on what is a sysadmin and how to make one, with examples of working at scale from the world of CFEngine.  Many thanks to Ski Kacoroski for the presentation slides.

    Vertical Sysadmin is offering a 15% discount to LOPSA members on professional Git training http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/git/.   "I have got by on minimum understanding of git for a couple of years now--this really brought up my confidence. After I learned the git internals, the esoteric commands really started falling into place."
    -- Nicholas Santucci, Systems Administrator

    Do you have a technical blog you'd like featured in the LOPSAgram? Email: board@lopsa.org

    Don't have a blog yet? You can always use your LOPSA blog at https://blogs.lopsa.org. Choose sysadmin-news as the category if it is recent news item for the https://lopsa.org front page.

    6. LISA Conversations - Unleashing the Power of the Unikernel
    Every month Lee Damon and Tom Limoncelli chat with a LISA conference presenter in LISA Conversations. In June they will be chatting with Russell Pavlicek about Unleashing the Power of the Unikernel.

    The conversation will be live at:

    https://plus.google.com/events/cn9jhevr8t2de55e8n4dr1va2rk

    on Tuesday, 28 June at 3:30pm PDT, 6:30PM EDT.

    Past LISA Conversations can be found at:

     https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/lisa-conversations

     7. Locals

     SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

     In June, new officers were elected:

     President: Thomas Uphill
     Vice-President: Brian Globermann
     Secretary: Curtis Elgin
    In July we'll hear from Brian Globermann on " Implementing Zabbix in Azure for network and server monitoring"

     Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

     CBUS: Columbus

     LOPSA Columbus met last on May 19 at CoverMyMeds. Rob Kinyon gave a presentation titled "Devs are from Mars, Ops are from Venus" where he empathized with and shared the perspectives of different disciplines of technology professionals. The next meeting will be on June 21 at 6:00PM. RSVP here: https://lopsacbus201606.eventbrite.com


    LOPSA-NJ: New Jersey

     The June Talk was given by Sujit Pal on IoT.

     History and Future of IoT (Commercial and Research)
    How is IoT going to impact us
     Some Example Applications of IoT
     Components of IoT infrastructure
     Challanges to be overcome for IoT go mainstream
     Some sample solutions
     There were 25 people present and Suji's talked sparked discussions on how the use of RFID chips has expanded as the devices shrunk in size. LOPSA-NJ will be on their Summer Break but Joe Youn and Mike Stoppay are the new Organizers for the group and will be working with help from John Boris of the Board of Directors and LOPSA-NJ member to learn the ropes on managing the group. The next meetup will be September 1st at the Mercer County Library Branch in Lawrenceville, NJ. They are actively looking for a speaker for September and October. If interested you can contact John Boris at jboris@lopsa.org.


    LOPSA-LA / UUASC: Los Angeles

     Thirty people attended the LOPSA-LA meeting on Thurs June 2, where Mike Weilgart presented on Git Basics.

     Mike Weilgart is going to repeat his popular "Taming the Git Filesystem" talk at LOPSA LA meeting in Burbank CA at Coding Dojo on Thursday, June 23rd, 7-9 PM.  RSVP  http://www.meetup.com/lopsala/events/23171720

     Keep with the LOPSA-LA community and upcoming meetings via the email list and website: http://www.lopsala.org/

     8. Thank You To Our Sponsors

     We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

     Thanks to our individual sponsors:

     Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell

     Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

     Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

     Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

     Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

     9. Comments or suggestions?

     As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org

     Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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  • 17 May 2016 7:57 AM | Deleted user

    1. President's Corner - Community

    2. LOPSA Board Elections - Candidate Slate & LOPSA Live

    3. Call for Volunteers: Conference Organizers & Assistants

    4. William Bilancio Board Resignation

    5. Member Tech Blog Highlight

    6. Looking for Information on Sysadmin Education

    7. LISA Conversations

    8. Locals

    9. Thank you to our sponsors

    10. Comments or suggestions?

    May 2016 LOPSAgram: Community


    1. President's Corner: Community


    This month I would like to talk about community.  Over the last several months
    I have mentioned the LOPSA community several times, but never really defined it
    or what community means to me. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a
    community has these definitions that apply to LOPSA:

    1. "a group of people who live in the same area"
    2. "a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattere through a larger society

    LOPSA is a community of system admins through its locals (definition #1) and
    through the common interests of its members (definition #2).  LOPSA has core of
    around 450 paying members and another 200+ student members along with 5 - 8
    active locals.

    So what makes for a successful, healthy community?  Some of the characteristics
    of successful communities are:

    • A clear and realistic set of community goals.  LOPSA has a clear mission statement, but I feel that in the past has tried to do too much given our limited resources. We are changing that to focus on a more realistic set of goals going forward - professional development for existing system admins and helping new system administrators enter the field.
    • A definable and sustainable set of reasons for your community to participate. LOPSA's member participation right now is limited.  We have a few members who work on the board, running locals and conferences, and giving talks; but many folks have chosen to not participate with their time.  On the plus side we have the core group of members who believe in LOPSA mission through their memberships, but on the downside we need to figure out ways to get more people involved to avoid burning out the members who are giving time.  If you have any ideas, please let me know.
    • A solid and accessible set of community tools.  This has been a problem in the past, but I hope with the new website we have solved many of these issues.  We are still working to consolidate our social media accounts and improve our support of members who do give time to the community.  One way we plan to accomplish this is by hiring a part time staffer to help out.
    • A staff who are supported and understand their role in the community. LOPSA needs to do a better job of recognizing and support its members who give time to the community.  We recognize people who give money as individual sponsors, but not people who give time. Please contact the board anytime you see a member giving time to the community so we can recognize them.
    • A supportable economic model if the community needs to provide revenue to sustain itself.  This is difficult for all membership based communities as with all the options these days, most membership based communities are seeing their member numbers drop.  Many communities are evolving into conference communities (e.g.  https://www.usenix.org/blog/refocusing-lisa-community). The Board is very aware of this problem and looking at options for LOPSA. Please send any ideas, thoughts you may have to board@lopsa.org.
    • Listen and be flexible - be ready to change should your community require it. LOPSA needs to evolve to survive and we need to hear from you on how you would like to see LOPSA evolve.

    So please email board@lopsa.org with your ideas for how LOPSA can evolve to better support you, the system administrator.

    2. LOPSA Board Elections - Candidate Slate & LOPSA Live

    Your Leadership Committee (LC) has been hard at work preparing our candidates for the upcoming election. Incumbent Board Members John Boris and Matt Disney will not be running for re-election. 

    For this election, we have five seats to be filled and six candidates running. Our candidate slate follows:

    The LC actively sought candidates who have management and leadership experience as well as who bring new skills and experience to the team. We hope that you are as pleased with our candidates as we are!

    Please mark your calendars for our first LOPSA Live session on May 17 at 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST. We will hold a second session before the ballots open, watch for a later announcement.

    The ballots will open on June 9.

    3. Call for Volunteers: Conference Organizers & Assistants

    We want to continue to improve conference programming to ensure it meets the changing needs our membership. The success of our conferences relies on dedicated members and volunteers –– CascadiaIT is already gearing up for next year! We are in need of people to help organize, promote, and run all of our conferences. If you would like to help out with CascadiaIT, or are interested in organizing a LOPSA conference in your area, please email board@lopsa.org and let us know!

    4. William Bilancio Board Resignation


    William has resigned from the Board because of other commitments.  Being a board member is a great way to help out the system admin community.  If you are interested in helping out by being a board member, please contact the leadership committee at leadership@lopsa.org for more information.

    5. Member Tech Blog Highlight


    Member Warner Moore and fellow team members post to https://www.scriptscribe.org great technical content for sysadmins and our peers in QA and dev. For instance, this recent post from Jesse Throwe talks about challenges in Multi-Factor Authentication:

    https://www.scriptscribe.org/information-security/a-tale-of-two-factors-authentication/


    Do you have a technical blog you'd like featured in the LOPSAgram? Email: board@lopsa.org

    Don't have a blog yet? You can always use your LOPSA blog at https://blogs.lopsa.org. Choose sysadmin-news as the category if it is recent news item for the https://lopsa.org front page.

    6. Looking for Information on Sysadmin Education


    The Education committee maintains the  Education and Training portion of the LOPSA Website.

    https://lopsa.org/System-Admin-Colleges

    If you know of a College/University that offers such a program send the information to educators@lopsa.org so we can add it to our list.

    We are also building a new page that we hope can be built into a one stop place for you to find the latest information on conferences and local training events. Again if you know of any send the info to educators@lopsa.org and we will add it to the page.


    7. LISA Conversations

    Every month Lee Damon and Tom Limoncelli chat with a LISA conference presenter in LISA Conversations. In May they will be chatting with Clay Caviness & Edward Eigerman from Google about Managing Macs at Google Scale.

    Are you responsible for making more than one computer work? Join us as we chat with Clay and Edward about how Google manages their fleet of Macs. This will not, by any means, be a Mac-centric conversation. Things done here will apply to any OS you might encounter in this kind of situation.

    The conversation will be live at:

    https://plus.google.com/events/cdiueoaaie266ejkv53jdtu818s

    on Tuesday, 31 MAY at 3:30pm PDT, 6:30PM EDT.

    Past LISA Conversations can be found at:

    https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/lisa-conversations

    8. Locals


    SASAG: Seattle Area System Administrators Guild

    Officer elections for SASAG will be held next at our June meeting on Thursday June 8. Watch our website for a speaker and talk topic announcement: https://sasag.org

    Dinner will be sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.

    CBUS: Columbus

    LOPSA Columbus met on April 28 at CoverMyMeds. Matt Williams presented about the 12 factors for application development. Following, there was lively discussion about the past way to scale technology platforms. The next meeting will be May 19. RSVP here: https://lopsacbus201605.eventbrite.com


    9. Thank You To Our Sponsors

    We'd like to thank our sponsors. We're deeply grateful for their continuing support of LOPSA. More information on how to become a sponsor.

    Thanks to our individual sponsors:

    Platinum: Jennine Townsend, Dan Rich 
    Gold: Ski Kacoroski
    Silver: Matt Disney, Lee Damon, Scott Murphy, Ian Viemeister
    Bronze: Gary Studwell
    unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Gold Sponsor Paessler AG

    Bronze Sponsor Edgestream Partners is a small group of scientists and engineers with a unique approach to trading in the financial markets. Our company designs, builds and runs a global trading software platform. We take pride in our software craftsmanship and use Python, Cython and C on Linux to run our global trading operations. We also use open-source tools as much as possible - Python, PostgreSQL, numpy, git, Cobbler, Puppet and Ansible are all crucial to our business.

    Bronze Sponsor O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Check them out.

    Some of LOPSA's web content is hosted by ServerBeach.

    10. Comments or suggestions?

    As we close out this month's LOPSAgram, we want to make sure we're giving you the information you want or need. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to communications@lopsa.org 

    Office: +1 (202) 567-7201, Fax: 609-219-6787, Address: PO Box 5161, Trenton, NJ 08638-0161

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