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2015

May

The Future of System Administration (and What You Should Do to Prepare)
Adam Moskowitz, MathWorks

System Administration is changing faster and more radically that at any time in its history. Like it or not, your job is probably going to be very different in 10 years (and maybe even in 5 years); come hear where the field is headed and what you should do if you want to stay on the leading edge of system administration. (Sneak preview of the recommendation: "stop being a sysadmin.")

Adam Moskowitz is a Senior Tools Developer at MathWorks in Natick MA; in the past he has also been a system administrator, and his current project marries those two disciplines and if it works, will make a significant change in how system administration is done. Adam has been in the field since 1978 but claims he keeps working "to keep food in his puppy's bowl" (and to support his barbecue habit).

(no slides)

April

Compliance Double Header
Josh Boon and Walt Williams

Compliance Soup: PCI DSS Condensed (Josh Boon)

An overview of PCI DSS 3.0 requirements and definitions. In this talk I'll define types of credit card data and the storage requirements of each, the types of merchants and service providers and the reporting requirements of each, and summary of the twelve requirements of PCI compliance. A participant should be able to take away from this talk the basics of PCI and if it applies take the next steps towards compliance.

Josh Boon has worked across many verticals including higher education and ecommerce primarily as a sysadmin expanding into compliance with a focus on securing credit card data and personally identifiable information. He now works for NutraClick in the role as a senior sysadmin and internal security assessor and consults for other companies in the PCI and PII space.

Compliance Soup: ISO, ISACA, SSAE, NIST and CSA Oh My! (Walt Williams)

A brief history of the alphabet soup that is security standards, looking at the goals and scope of each of the commonly sought certifications, applicability of each, challenges in achieving/maintaining and the bang for the buck if you will, or are they worth the time invested. The person shall be able to take away a comparative understanding of the many standards available in Information Security.

Walter Williams served as an infrastructure and security architect at firms as diverse as GTE Internetworking, State Street Corp, Teradyne, The Commerce Group and EMC. He has since moved to security management, where he'd served as at IdentityTruth, Passkey and now manages security at Lattice Engines. He is an outspoken proponent of design before build, an advocate of frameworks and standards, and has spoken at Security B-Sides on risk management as the cornerstone of a security architecture. His articles on Security and Service Oriented Architecture have appeared in the Information Security Management Handbook. He sits on the board of directors for the New England ISSA chapter and was a member of the program committee for Metricon8. He has masters degree in Anthropology from Hunter College.

(no slides)

March

Hyper-V and Openstack
Peter Pouliot, Microsoft

OpenStack is a rapidly evolving open source cloud computing infrastructure typically thought of as a Linux centric technology. Microsoft however has been involved with the OpenStack from early on ensuring that Hyper-V, Windows and other core Microsoft technologies interoperate within the OpenStack API framework. This talk will discuss some key areas of integration between Microsoft technologies and the OpenStack architecture while additionally highlighting Microsoft's involvement in the OpenStack project Development and Continuous Integration cycles.

Peter is the OpenStack subject matter expert within Microsoft as well as the evangelist for OpenStack awareness and adoption of OpenStack Windows platforms.

(no slides)

February

(Meeting canceled due to snow)

January

Radical ideas from The Practice of Cloud System Administration
Tom Limoncelli

Tom will highlight some of the most radical ideas from the new book "The Practice of Cloud System Administration". The book focuses on "distributed" or "cloud" computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this new reference centered around a comprehensive approach.

Some of the radical advice includes: improving uptime by using cheap unreliable hardware, why you should crashing servers at random times, and that you should make peace with outages.

Info about the book can be found at http://the-cloud-book.com

Tom Limoncelli is best know for books like Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He works in New York City at Stack Exchange, home of ServerFault.com and StackOverflow.com. He tweets @YesThatTom and blogs at http://everythingsysadmin.com

slides (PDF, 8.3MB)