LOPSA held a live IRC chat last evening with all of the board candidates. There were several interesting questions and answers during the session. If you didn’t make it to the live session, check out the transcript here:
https://lopsa.org/content/lopsa-live-may-08-2012-candidate-forum-transcript
There will be additional LOPSA Live sessions in the future. Stay tuned to the LOPSA Discuss mailing list for more information.
As we mentioned a few weeks ago, our own Evan Pettrey has been nominated as a candidate for the 2012 LOPSA Board for a term of 2 years. Evan’s candidate statement is available here:
https://lopsa.org/content/2012-candidate-statement-evan-pettrey
To read all of the candidates’ statements, see here:
https://lopsa.org/category/candidate-statement/2012-candidate-statements
The May 2012 meeting will be a round table discussion about configuration management. The primary question to get the conversation started is:
Which configuration management solution do you use (i.e. Puppet, Chef, CFEngine, “glue” scripts) and what is the scope of its deployment?
Different shops have different needs so I’m certain this discussion will shed a lot of light on how various sysadmins apply configuration management tools to meet their needs.
As always, we look forward to seeing you there! For information on the meeting location, see http://crabbyadmins.org/meetings.
One of our very own has been nominated for the 2012-2013 LOPSA Board!
The Leadership Committee is pleased to announce the slate for the 2012
LOPSA Board elections. The following LOPSA members have agreed to
stand for elections for the 2012-2013 Board.Martin James Gehrke
Evan Pettrey <<— BAM!
John Boris
Kent Brodie
Matt Disney
Congrats to Evan!
It’s been a little over a year since the LOPSA Baltimore chapter was founded. I am very pleased to note that during that period the attendance in the group has not only steadily grown, but remained fairly consistent. We’ve managed to pack OmniTI’s conference room nearly every month. And with next month’s presentation by Tom Limoncelli, we’re anticipating even more folks. It’s really exciting to see this thing grow from an idea into something real.
If you will, dear reader, allow me to wax nostalgic for a moment. When I moved to Maryland some years ago, I tried to find local IT groups through which I could learn and network. I found Crabby Admins (all others were in the D.C. area). The group was effectively defunct and didn’t having any meetings or activity to speak of. Nonetheless, I joined the group’s mailing list. Several years passed and along came Evan Pettrey on the mailing list, asking if anyone was interested in reviving the group and/or starting anew. I pounced. This was just what I was looking for. We slapped up a web page or two, reached out to fellow sysadmins and here we stand: a well known and respected sysadmin/author is going to present to our group next month. It’s impressive.
On that note, I have to give kudos to Evan for his efforts in developing and extending the group this past year. He has managed to find and pin down the lion’s share of speakers and create a cohesive group and compelling forum for sysadmins in the Baltimore area. In addition, none of this would be possible without OmniTI’s generosity with their office space to hold these meetings. I am very proud to be a part of this group and look forward to its continued success.
I hope to see you all next month!
Just a reminder that our April meeting will feature guest speaker, Thomas A. Limoncelli, who will be presenting on the Ganeti open source virtualization project.
This month’s meeting will be hosted at Next Century across the street from OmniTI and will run from 7pm-9pm.
Everything you need to know about how to reach the location can be found here.
Address:
7075 Samuel Morse Dr Ste 250
Columbia, MD 21046
A full summary of the presentation can be seen just below (two posts down).
The March 7th meeting of the Crabby Admins will be a roundtable discussion of methodologies used to patch non-desktop *nix systems. On the agenda will be:
Thanks go to Howard Bampton for the topic recommendation.
We will be meeting at the office of OmniTI from 7-9pm with an option for drinks afterwards.
I’ll see everybody there!
Thomas A. Limoncelli has agreed to come and speak at our April meeting. This promises to be a very exciting presentation so I encourage everybody to find a way to attend. A summary of the presentation is below:
Topic: The Ganeti open source virtualization project (and why a Time
Management guru loves it)
Speaker: Tom Limoncelli, syadmin at Google NYC and author of the
O’Reilly “Time Management for Sysadmins” book
Description:
Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool built on
top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and
other Open Source software. Ganeti takes care of disk creation,
migration, OS installation, shutdown, startup, and can be used to
preemptively move a virtual machine off a physical machine that is
starting to get sick. It doesn’t require a big expensive SAN,
complicated networking, or a lot of money. The project is used around
the world by many organizations; it is sponsored by Google and hosted
at http://code.google.com/p/ganeti
Bio:
Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system
administrator. His best known books include Time Management for System
Administrators (O’Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network
Administration (Addison-Wesley). In 2005 he received the SAGE
Outstanding Achievement Award. He works at Google in NYC on the Ganeti
project (http://code.google.com/p/ganeti).
http://EverythingSysadmin.com is his blog.
Our next meeting will be Wednesday, February 1 from 7-9pm. John Coale will be our guest speaker for the meeting and the topic will be:
The Convergence of Social Media Technologies – How Gaming, Virtual Worlds, and Social Networking are Coming Together
As a career government employee, Mr. Coale has over 25 years of government service, including 16 years in the intelligence community. He teaches courses in clandestine communications. After beginning his career as a civilian electrical engineer with the Navy, he moved on to modeling and simulation of foreign platforms and weapons systems in support of US naval capabilities. He spent ten years at the Defense Intelligence Agency; his work there included all-source senior intelligence analysis and reporting in the areas of advanced telecommunications technologies, information warfare, national and foreign critical infrastructures, computer network operations, modeling and simulation, and foreign naval platforms and weapons. He is still employed by the Department of Defense as a technical director. Major career achievements include Intelligence Community Officer Designation (2002), US Navy Civilian Meritorious Service Award and Medal (2002) and National Y2K Medal (2002). Mr. Coale received his MS in Strategic Intelligence from Joint Military Intelligence College in 1996.
Our January meeting will be Wednesday, January 4, from 7-9pm. Our speaker will be Scott Roberts a Sr. Systems Administrator at Johns Hopkins University’s Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.
Scott is a professional sys admin with a proven track record of systems analysis and design, project management, information security, programming, and innovating solutions. He has a diverse background in computing, networking, and programming technologies, and is an engineer at heart.
Topic Summary:
High Performance Computing is continuing to expand at a phenomenal rate in education and big business, being used anywhere and everywhere from trying to find the cure to cancer to serving your Facebook profile. HPC is used across Johns Hopkins University, and Scott will be discussing how they implemented a new departmental compute cluster to serve our cutting-edge language research community based on the Rocks Clusters software distribution.
He will be walking through the process from planning through implementation and will touch upon some of the hot-button topics in this area such as environmental, hardware, and storage concerns. You, too, will find out that in certain instances terabytes of storage and 10-gigabit networking are just not enough. This will be a quasi-interactive presentation; audience participation is encouraged!
I look forward to seeing you all at the meeting for what promises to be a very exciting topic.
