E-mail
2009 Conference Wishlist
These suggestions have been made by members as things they'd like to see at a conference. Use these ideas to inspire your talk and tutorial ideas, but be aware that we will only accept a maximum of one presentation from each wish.
Tools of the trade
This talk would be from a veteran covering all the things about system administration that they know, and would pass on to a novice given the opportunity. It would include day-to-day resources, websites, services, tricks/tips and philosophies to share with someone who is still exploring the daily challenges and nuances of the role.
Migrating to IPv6: how and why
How, why, when. Advantages, disadvantages.
Web technologies today
Web technologies change rapidly. Running a web server hosting multiple sites is a real challenge these days. Every web developer has his/her own set of favourites they want to use. Just keeping up with basic SW revisions like PHP or apache or tomcat is a challenge. What approaches do people use for this? Tradeoffs?
MMOs and planning
This talk would ideally be by an administrator from a major MMO presenting on capacity planning, provision and how DR and upgrades are performed.
Disasters we've had
Disaster recovery stories (success or failure - lessons learned) and more about incident response. In particular major disasters rather than just the success stories we normally hear about. Something like "We were hacked! This is how we discovered it and what we did about it." or "Our 10TB RAID5 array lost two disks at the same time and our backups didn't work! This is what we did so it wouldn't happen again."
Change control in multiple environments
Suggestions on how a system administrator may successfully manage change control for applications and systems across multiple environments and platforms (eg dev/test/prod for a multi-tier application with mirrored DR site).
ITIL/COBIT implementation
Experiences from someone who has been closely involved with sysadmin aspects of ITIL / COBIT implementation would be interesting.
Becoming energy efficient - from on the ground
Ideally this would be an outline of what a site has done in the energy efficiency area, with some detail of calculations and changes made, then analysis of effectiveness of the changes and unexpected benefits or traps. Not so much "we bought carbon credits" but actions like forcing low power mode in devices, creative cooling solutions, net effect of sleeping computers overnight...
System Performance tuning
How to get the most out of your Windows/Solaris/Linux/etc box. When is it time to tune? Is it worth the effort? When you should focus on tuning apps instead.
System Monitoring
How to implement monitoring. What tools to consider. Why you should monitor. A selection of Open source tools, maybe a few commercial tools.
Change Management
How to implement change management. What items should be under change control? How to start formulating a change management policy.
Developer wishlists
Managing web servers for multiple sites (keeping up with developer wish-lists, software revisions etc. Approaches, trade-offs).
Configuration Management
cfengine/puppet etc. How to implement automation to make your life easier. Why you will never "automate yourself out of a job".
Storage
What to consider when implementing a SAN/NAS solution
Virtualisation
What to consider. How do you start. Why bother. What's the current market, what's the state-of-the-art?