Conference Report: 1998 Advanced Technical Workshop

Tuesday, December 8, 1998
Adam Moskowitz <adamm@genomecorp.com>, Facilitator
Rob Kolstad <kolstad@delos.com>, Co-chair and Scribe

This information appeared in slightly different form, misattributed to Bruce Alan Wynn, in the February 1999 (volume 24, number 1) issue of ;login:.

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Profiles

We first went around the room introducing ourselves, the quantity of users and the quantity and type of hosts we supported (whether individually or as part of a team), and 2-5 topics we wanted to discuss during the day. We came up with ranges of up to 10,000 users, 10,000 PCs, 2,000 Macs, and 3,000 Unix hosts of various flavors. Other notes were multiple terabytes of disk storage (with projected short-term growth to exceed a petabyte), strange printer requirements, and extremely high growth rates (up to 400%/year).

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Discussions

After determining the list of possible topics, we took a quick vote of what topics would be of general enough interest to discuss in the session. We determined that we wanted to talk, in general, about:

• Consistency/standardization in sysadmin practices as organizations grow
• Cool systems administration tools and paradigms
• Specific hot technologies/paradigms to prepare for/Crystal ball

First we discussed the issue of internal consistency and standardization in technical practices. We tried to look at the "problem," but realized that we all had slightly different ways of looking at it — which was unsurprising considering that we had 31 people in the room, all with different backgrounds and experiences and so on. We seemed to agree in general that creating standards is challenging, enforcing them is a hard problem, there are many more variables than may be obvious at first look, and so on. The concept of a "taxonomy" or categorization of problems into areas seemed to make sense to a lot of the folks present.

We next had a free-form discussion on cool systems administration tools and paradigms. Some general comments were:

• DSL is great. (10 people have 56K or more to the home, all but one of those has 56K or faster bidirectionally; 6 people have >128K. Most of these are business-paid and not individual-paid.)
• MRTG (discussed in a paper at the conference) was hailed as a wonderful network mapping tool. It uses SNMP polling on a 5-minute interval and creates web pages with usage graphs. It ages data appropriately and is freely available. Big Brother, a systems monitoring package, integrates with MRTG and is also freely available.
• Intrusion detection systems now are in the same sort of not-yet-well understood position as firewalls were a decade ago. While then we had free firewalls which later became commercial, now we have commercial intrusion detection systems (IDS) even though the problem is neither understood nor solved.
• Turnover can be interesting. (16 people changed jobs at least once in the past year. 4 of these were internal (same company) job changes. Raises in the new job ranged from 0-90% and seemed to average around 28%.) And 14 people present have open requisitions they are actively hiring for.
• Enforcing the use of a PDA like the Palm Pilot has improved the follow-through for members of the group. Many folks at one company have bought one with their own money.
• 19 of those present carry a cell phone; 26 carry pagers; 7 carry authentication devices. A few have 2-way pagers; 12 participants pay at least part of their monthly fees for the portable communications devices.
• 5 members use a Ricochet or similar device for wireless digital communications. 14 more would use it if it were available in their area.
• 7 people have an agreement to attend conferences annually. In spite of that small number, 10 have some kind of permission to attend more than 2 per year. A couple can go to even more if they have papers presented at them. Everyone pretty much gets at least one/year. About half can attend two or more per year, depending on circumstances.
• Some cool utilities are ssh and Curl. LDAP or similar directory services are on the rise; 11 attendees have this.
• Cordless phones in machine rooms are a major win.
• Tools sometimes die for lack of nurturing. It would be nice if there was some way to solve that problem (like a MacArthur grant type thing). Even finding current versions is too hard. See ftp.sage-au.org.au for LOTS of sysadmin tools.

Next we discussed hot technologies, rumors, and similar prognostications. One hot technology we talked about is XML, the Extensible Markup Language. It is self-verifying, easy to parse, easy to search, and has a universal file format. It's different from SGML in that it doesn't include the hard-to-implement features. XML is written in Unicode.

The next hot technology we see on the horizon is Unicode. It represents all characters (including non-Roman alphabets like Cyrillic, Hebrew, Farsi, and so on). Microsoft Office 2000 uses Unicode; rumor has it that Word already uses it too.

Other hot technologies we seemed to think were coming soon are voice over IP, directory services becoming more important, applications will support more location independence, voice input and/or recognition will grow in the next year, and digital camera use will continue to rise.

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