LISA 2010 - Ronaldo's attendee notes

LISA '10: November 7–12, San Jose CA

Training Sessions Attended

Real-World Insights on How to Secure and Route Your Linux Network

Instructor: Jason Faulkner (http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/training/tutonefile.html#m5)

• Description:
  • Basic network configuration (Sysconfig-based configuration, ifconfig/route, iproute2)
  • Other useful network troubleshooting tools (ethtool, sysctl -a, ip route get [ip address])
  • Firewalls, Iptables and Advanced routing

Recovering from Linux Hard Drive Disasters

Instructor: Theodore Ts'o, Google (http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/training/tutinstructors.html#tso)

• Description:
  • How data is stored on hard drives
  • Recovering from a corrupted partition table
  • Recovering from failed software RAID systems
  • Low-level techniques to recover data from a corrupted ext2/3/4 filesystem when backups aren't available
  • Using e2image to back up critical ext2/3/4 filesystem metadata
  • Using e2fsck and debugfs to sift through a corrupted filesystem

Administering Linux in Production Environments

Instructor: Æleen Frisch (http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/training/tutinstructors.html#frisch)

• Description:
  • Advanced file systems and the LVM
  • Disk striping
  • Optimizing I/O performance
  • Clustering and high availability
  • Parallelization environments/facilities

Linux Performance Tuning

Instructor: Theodore Ts'o, Google (http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/training/tutinstructors.html#tso)

• Description:
  • Tools for measuring system performance
  • Memory usage tuning
  • Filesystem and storage tuning
  • NFS performance tuning
  • Network tuning
  • Latency vs. throughput
  • Capacity planning
  • Memory cache and TLB tuning

Advanced UNIX Tools

Instructor: Doug Hughes

• Description:
  • Quick and dirty tools: paste, col, split, fold, yes, sdiff
  • Frequency and statistical analysis with awk
  • Topological sorting for ordering items
  • xargs—why you should use it more
  • diff, dircmp, diff3—compare and contrast
  • Checking memory issues
  • Advanced tricks with dd

Over the Edge System Administration, Volume 2

Instructor: David N. Blank-Edelman Caveat: "The slow way is the fastest way"

• Description:
  • How to exploit side effects to your benefit
  • Applying the arts and crafts you learned in camp to system administration
  • Pressing Web apps from places like Google and Yahoo! into service as sysadmin tools
  • How to perform SQL queries on your network equipment
  • How to use even more ordinary objects you have lying around the house to make your life easie

Vendor notes

Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions

Amanda Backup

Paddy Sreenivasan and Chander Kant, Amanda Project

Amanda is the leading open source backup software in the world. During this BoF we invite current and future Amanda users to share their experiences. We would also discuss future directions of Amanda and get your input.

Zenoss Open Source Monitoring

http://www3.zenoss.com/e/3432/ocs-DOC-2614/4USAA/54634082
Zenoss Core is an open source IT monitoring product that delivers the functionality to effectively manage the configuration, health, performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package.

Highlights of Zenoss Core:

• Single Integrated Product - to monitor your entire IT infrastructure
• Open Source CMDB - a single repository for your IT assets
• Easy To Use Browser-Based GUI - no Linux skills needed, access from anywhere
• Enterprise-Ready Architecture - tiered architecture that scales to thousands of nodes
• ZenPacks Framework - packaging system for Zenoss plugins, skins, etc...
• Open Source - free and open source

Oracle Solaris 10 and Beyond

Oracle Solaris Engineer Panel Moderator: Dan Roberts, Oracle Bart Smaalders and Dan Price, Oracle

This session covers the current state of the Oracle Solaris 10 and gives insights into the future direction of Oracle Solaris technologies and products. Come learn how Oracle Solaris can benefit your environment today and what will continue to make Oracle Solaris the most advanced mission critical enterprise OS going forward, with even more features for performance, serviceability, and ease of administration in both small- and large-scale deployments.

Vendors met:

Stonefly, Inc.

http://info.dnfcorp.com/e/81/2010-11-16/HAO0A/340897046

King Star Computer

http://www.servonusa.com/ Rackmount Server Specialist, Supermicro Preferred System Provider

Oracle/Sun

Relevant Subjects

Ext4, new features:

• Extents
• Delayed allocation
• Journal checksumming
• Nanosecond timestamps
• Faster (9-12x faster than ext3) fsck times
• Exabyte filesystem size (userspace support in development)
• On-line defragmentation (in development) For more information: http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org

Advantages of using:

• xfs and zfs
• reiserfs
• iproute2 (over net-tools)
• IPv6
• Amanda for backups
• OSCAR (over rocks) for cluster management (oscar.openclustergroup.com)
• Cfengine

Subjects to learn more about

• Firewalling:
  • xtables: –Generic kernel interface that all of the below programs use.
  • iptables –Filters IPv4 packets.
  • ip6tables: –Filters IPv6 packets.
  • arptables: –Filters ARP requests.
  • ebtables: –Filters packets that travel across an Ethernet bridge.
  • nftables: –The future of packet filtering on Linux.
• Using the dd command
• Cfengine