July’s presentation is courtesy of our very own John Skarbek. John will giving an exciting talk on what he has learned since he started using Vagrant.

Summary: Greet the guy that is going to help you put together, very quickly, a single machine or an entire environment for which you can develop/test something that can be made portable, easily reproducible, highly customizable, and light on the resources. Make a sysadmins life easier and develop locally and build a solution that easily be shared with the community.

Who is John Skarbek?

jskarbek has been a System Administrator for the last 4.5 years and loves what he does. You can find more about him at the following places:
http://jtskarbek.wordpress.com
http://github.com/jtslear
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnskarbek

Date: Wednesday, July 3rd
Time: 7-9pm

This month’s meeting will be an open forum. We’ll talk about whatever attendees want to discuss and let the topics come organically.

I look forward to seeing you all there.

Just a reminder to everybody that April’s meeting is tomorrow, April 3rd, from 7-9pm.

This meeting is a make up of the March meeting that was cancelled. Full details are available below.

The March meeting promises to be an exciting one as we take a step outside the box and take a look at risk balance and what can be learned from failure. Anybody in IT Operations worth their weight has been involved with some sort of failure at at least one point in their career. However, what did you learn from it and how did you use that knowledge to balance risks in the future to maximize your probability of success? The insight gained from dealing with a failure has the potential to be far greater than anything learned from a success.

Our March speaker, Bryan Fafaul, is Project Manager of the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), Flight Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Mr. Fafaul has worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center since 1986 in a wide variety of technical and management positions. Bryan started his career in the Parts Branch and then moved into project management. He has served as the Mission Manager for the Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE), the Instrument Systems Manager for Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Mission 3A, 3B and 4, the Deputy Project Manager for the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP), and the Project Manager for Glory prior to his current position as the Project Manager for JPSS.

Date: 3/6/2013
Time: 7:00PM EST – 9:00PM EST
Where: OmniTI Office
11830 West Market Place, Suite G
Fulton, MD 20759
(entrance is in the back, between 11820 and 11830)

While flinging myself down the bunny hill on a snowboard for the first time in my life today, my thoughts (believe it or not) turned for a moment to this week’s Crabby Admins meeting. I am so happy with the turnout to hear Jason Dixon (@obfuscurity) speak about his ideas on the state of monitoring and what he thinks can be done to abstract the various components in the monitoring stream. Not only was his presentation evocative, it generated a lot of very engaging questions. Folks were genuinely interested in the subject and brought many good queries to the discussion.

To that point, the Crabby Admins have only been successful because of the attendance and contributions of fellow sysadmins in the area. My hope is that you continue to attend our meetings and bring your ideas and energy with you.

Thank you,

Ryan

Jason Dixon (@obfuscurity) is presenting at this month’s Crabby Admins meeting in @OmniTI offices.

Date: 2/6/2013
Time: 7:00PM EST – 9:00PM EST
Where: OmniTI Office
11830 West Market Place, Suites F
Fulton, MD 20759

Come one, come all!

See http://crabbyadmins.org/2013/01/27/february-meeting-the-state-of-monitoring-with-jason-dixon/ for more details.

In February, Jason Dixon (Twitter: @obfuscurity) will be discussing the state of monitoring in IT operations. This will be a recap of his presentation from DevOpsDays Rome:

https://speakerdeck.com/obfuscurity/the-state-of-open-source-monitoring

Jason currently works at Github and has worked on several projects including OmniTI‘s Reconnoiter. He’s also written the Graphite dashboards Tasseo and Descartes. Check out www.github.com/obfuscurity to learn more about his projects.

Date: 2/6/2013
Time: 7:00PM EST – 9:00PM EST
Where: OmniTI Office
11830 West Market Place, Suites F
Fulton, MD 20759

Several local groups are converging in to a super meet-up this February and the Crabby Admins will be there. We want YOU there too! On the agenda is a review of the Ops School project by Avleen Vig and Patrick McDonnell and a presentation from Theo Schlossnagle on career development. Nathen Harvey has a complete write-up on the event here:

http://www.meetup.com/DevOpsDC/events/97686352/

Sign up, show up, and (as Nathen writes), level up.

By way of Nathen Harvey (@nathenharvey), I’ve learned that Opscode will be in DC on January 15th offering an introductory Chef workshop.

Use the promotional code “meetup” to receive 10% discount off the cost of the class.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5091340336

This Chef Introductory Workshop is a hands on training class for getting familiar with Chef for performing common automation tasks. By the end of this workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Set up a local workstation with Chef and connect to a Chef Server.
• Describe the steps performed during a chef-client run
• Describe Chef’s Authentication Cycle
• Build Chef roles using the Ruby DSL
• Manipulate configuration through data in attributes
• Use Chef’s search API for dynamic configuration
• List a number of additional resources that are available
  for help

Join them on Tuesday, January 15th for this one-day workshop and begin your journey towards automation with Chef. This class will be held at MicroTek, 1101 Vermont Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC.

Registration and other details for the class can be found online at the URL below:

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5091340336

Don’t forget to use promotional code “meetup” to receive 10% off the cost of the class.

What follows is an almost verbatim re-posting of my original message to the group on the lopsa-us-baltimore-dc mailing list from last week.

Fellow Crabby Admins,

tl;dr
1. December Data Center Tour Recap: Edge Web Hosting
2. January Meeting: Do we even have one? (Looking for responses)
3. February Meeting: Jason Dixon and Monitoring Love
4. March and Beyond: Ideas?

I wanted to take a moment to follow up with you all about this past month’s meeting, and what to expect in the next two months, as well as get some feedback from each of you.

1. December Data Center Tour Recap: Edge Web Hosting

This month we visited Edge Web Hosting’s data center in downtown Baltimore. We had 6 group members in attendance and Edge Web had another 4. The tour was fun and Vlad Friedman had much to do with it as he brought his enthusiasm during his presentation of the facility. Afterward, Ben Liyanage gave a presentation on the InfoBlox DNS appliance. Finally, Vlad treated us to eats and drinks at Peter’s Pour House. That was a great way to cap off the night. Many thanks to Edge Web Hosting for their hospitality.

2. January Meeting: Do we even have one?

January’s meeting is scheduled for 1/2/2013. That’s the day after New Year’s. Also, I’ll be out of town (I’ve accepted a position at Etsy and will be in Brooklyn for 3 weeks). At this time, there are no speakers lined up for the meeting. We can do one of two things:

1. Hold a round table discussion on any topic the attendees like.
2. Cancel the meeting.

Send an email to lopsa-us-baltimore-dc@lists.lopsa.org with your opinion and we’ll decide democratically.

3. February Meeting: Jason Dixon and Monitoring Love

In February, Jason Dixon (Twitter: @obfuscurity) will be discussing monitoring in IT operations. This will be similar to his presentation at DevOpsDays Rome:

https://speakerdeck.com/obfuscurity/the-state-of-open-source-monitoring

Jason has worked on several projects including OmniTI’s Reconnoiter and Graphite dashboards such as Tasseo and Descartes. Check out www.github.com/obfuscurity to learn more about the last two!

I’ll get an official presentation synopsis from Jason and post it to crabbyadmins.org.

4. March and Beyond: Ideas?

I know that Evan is working on a presenter for the March time slot. We’ll here more about that in the near future. After that, we have an open slate. If you have any recommendations for topics/speakers, please submit your ideas and I’ll do what I can do line things up. If you’d like to present to the group, definitely send me a message and we’ll talk.

Finally, if I don’t hear from or see any of you before next week, have a /(Merry|Happy) (Christmas|Hanukkah|Kwanzaa|Festivus|New Year’s)!/