Message from the Program Co-Chairs

USENIX Association LISA '10: 24th Large Installation System Administration Conference

(This "welcome" letter appeared on the USB stick given to all attendees. Since most people probably missed it I thought I'd repost it here.)

Message from the Program Co-Chairs

Dear LISA '11 Attendee,

There are two kinds of LISA attendees: those who read this letter at the conference and those who read it after they've returned home. To the first group, get ready for six days of brain-filling, technology-packed, geek-centric tutorials, speakers, papers, and more! To those that are reading this after the conference, we ask, "What's it like living in the future? How was the conference? What cool tips and tools did you take home with you to make your job easier?"

Being a sysadmin is kind of like living in the future. You work with technology every day that would make Buck Rogers jealous. Most of our friends are jealous, too. When LISA started 25 years ago, a "large site" had 10 computers, each the size of a dishwasher, with a few gigabytes of combined storage. Today our cell phones have 32GB of "compact flash," which is often more than the NFS quota we give our users.

Attending LISA is kind of like spending a week living in the future. We learn technologies that are cutting-edge-- little known now, but next year everyone will be talking about them. When we return from LISA we sound like time travelers visiting from the future talking about new and futuristic stuff. LISA makes us look good.

LISA rarely has a cohesive conference theme, but this year we thought it was important to highlight DevOps, as it is a significant cultural change. Although DevOps is often thought of as "something big Web sites do," the lessons learned transfer well to enterprise computing.

LISA has always been assembled using the sweat of many dedicated volunteers. It takes a lot of effort to put a conference like this together, and this year is no different. Most prominent are the Invited Talks committee (Æleen Frisch and Kent Skaar) and the Program Committee (Narayan Desai, Andrew Hume, Duncan Hutty, Dinah McNutt, Tim Nelson, Mario Obejas, Mark Roth, Carolyn Rowland, Federico D. Sacerdoti, Marc Stavely, Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, Avleen Vig, and David Williamson), but also important are the Workshops Coordinator (Cory Lueninghoener), the Guru Is In Coordinator (Chris St. Pierre), the Poster Session Coordinator (Matt Disney), and the Work-in-Progress Reports Coordinator (William Bilancio). We couldn't have done it without every one of them. Of course, nothing would happen without the leadership of the USENIX staff. We are indebted to you all!

Of the 63 papers submitted, we accepted 28. These papers represent the best "deep thought" research, as well as Practice and Experience Reports that tell the stories from people "in the trenches." We encourage you to read them all. However, the power of LISA is the personal interaction: introduce yourself to the attendees standing in line near you, strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you. And remember to have fun!

Sincerely,

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Google, Inc.
Doug Hughes, D. E. Shaw Research, LLC
Program Co-Chairs