LOPSA had their first "meet the candidates" a few weeks ago. I had blogged ahead of time the question I was planning to ask.

The question:

"I'd like to know about your experience with community-based projects. Please tell us about a project that you took responsibility for seeing through to completion. Please, only projects that are "done" or have reached a self-sustaining mode only. One or two sentences is fine. It doesn't have to be a project where you thought of the idea or even did all the work: just one where you assured it reached the finish line."

The answers were: [note: I did minimal spell correction and reformatting. In a live chat one doesn't expect every sentence to be Shakespeare but I felt it was worth correcting any word that my Mac underlined in red.]

Martin James Gehrke: On a majority of my community-based projects, the challenges have been people related, rather than technology related. Working toward a general consensus can be very difficult. Using the PGH local chapter as an example, we still squabble over the best meeting times.

Evan Pettrey: Starting the Baltimore/DC of LOPSA would be a good example for myself. first 6 months or so were challenging (for both getting people to attend as well as securing speakers). However, our membership has now nearly outgrown our current location, the word is spreading on its own, and we have speakers secured all the way through October.

John Boris: I have two to speak of recently. 1) The first is this year's PICC conference. As chairmen I kept the volunteers on track. I learned early on that good leaders have great people under them. I made sure their work was recognized and that they didn't overwhelm themselves. 2) Outside of work I put together a spring football league for 8th grade boys. I got it together from scratch to where now it is the model here in South Jersey. I rarely have to attend the games as I meet with the other board members and keep the goal in front of them. Teach the boys fundamentals of the sport and get them ready for High School.

Kent Brodie: Total re-computerization of my church. Meant going from 2 old DOS machines with some no-longer-available church management software to include modern machines, modern and supported software. I oversaw and/or was involved in the proposal, planning, acquisition, and installation of the entire deal. 80% of the work was people-skill related....

Matt Disney: Two things. First, my best work on that was probably in college when I was doing tech stuff for student government and established a benefit that was very popular, well-received, and lived on for about 6 years after I graduated. Second, I like to think a lot of the stuff I work on as being community-based, just at work. So each time I've left a job, I've left it with a healthy community.

My evaluation: When it comes to volunteer work, past performance is a good indicator of future performance. Some people "work hard" and others "get stuff done". An organization full of people that "work hard" goes out of business because everyone always thinks they "work hard". Successful organizations are made up of people that get stuff done. I encourage you to read the above statements carefully: some of the candidates were not able to say a single specific thing. I'm more impressed by the people that were able to name projects related to LOPSA, this shows they are already involved.

Later I asked another question:

If LOPSA received a grant for $10 million dollars next month, what should LOPSA do with it? (projects, not investment strategies)

Martin James Gehrke: Use it to hire some fulltime employees to help legitmitize ourselves and run the day to day, perhaps hire lobbyists to help get our voice heard in DC. make student membership free because in encourages students to actually see SYSADMINs as a profession to pursue post college. I'd also love to support some of the FOSS projects that we use in our daily administration (config mgmt, bind, etc)

[My calculations are that this would consume 15% of the grant.]

Evan Pettrey: I think it would be great if LOPSA would give back to the local chapters. Perhaps they could provide money for the chapters to take their groups out for dinner and drinks after meetings to show our appreciation. Additional money would be spent on springing up additional local chapters, publishing a monthly magazine (think LOPSAgram but with more time and investment put into it), advertising within professional outlets. The biggest investment would go into building a datacenter using a carefully though out standard of best practices as set forth by LOPSA. This would be used to demo to others in the industry how things can be improved and show what is possible with collaboration.

[My calculations are that this would consume 3-4% of the grant if we don't include the datacenter because it would be cheaper to write 100 case studies of existing data centers.]

John Boris: I would use it to help build a strong instructional plan for a young person to enter the field and this plan would be coupled with an acredited online Sysadmin College. It would also be partnered with one or more Universities/Colleges across the country.

[My calculations are that this would consume 20% of the grant.]

Kent Brodie: party like it's 1999. seriously: I have constantly been advocating spreading the word, advertising. I'd use a bunch of money for the sole purpose of name recognition. I'd also start setting up actual in-the-vendor-place booths at a variety of technical conferences as well. in addition, I'd turn some of the key roles of LOPSA to paid positions. Honestly, volunteers can only do SO much.

[My calculations are that this would consume 10% of the grant.]

Matt Disney: 1. Pay off our debt. 2. Establish a financial plan where we make money off our money. 3. Apply some of that money in a responsible way toward membership service management (e.g. pay people to answer the phones/emails). 4. Establish an endowment for system administration education including internships. 5. Bootstrap more training conferences.

[My calculations are that this would consume 1% of the grant plus whatever is spent on the endowment .]

My evaluation: This question evaluates the vision of the candidate. It exposes what the candidates feels the grand, long-term, vision of the organization should be. From these answers it seems that the candidates think the "big goal" of LOPSA is: to manage paperwork, to lobby in DC, to impress students, to fund open source projects, to feed pizza to our members, to increase the number of chapters, to publish a magazine, to advertise about LOPSA, to build a data center that shows off best practices, to establish an online sysadmin college, to gain name recognition, to have booths at other people's conferences, to replace volunteers with paid staff, to pay off our debt, to manage paperwork, to provide scholarships, to create more conferences.

To be honest, that's lame. LAME! Cross-reference that list to the mission of LOPSA ("to advance the practice of system administration; to support, recognize, educate, and encourage its practitioners; and to serve the public through education and outreach on system administration issues") and only 2-3 actually fall within the mission; most are ambiguous or tactical steps towards achieving a mission, and the rest have nothing to do with the mission.

Between now and the election I recommend that all the candidates read the mission and understand it. Either plan adopting it as your personal mission or draft a plan to change it.

Think bigger!

Here's some "big thoughts" that every candidate should have on their mind: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there were 347,200 sysadmins and growing. Our goal should be to have 100% of them be members of LOPSA. With a moderate membership fee we could be a huge lobbying organizations: educate congressional staff, make our presence known, and influence public policy (i.e. laws). We could establish a media campaign that would reshape the negative image that IT workers have in society, brings us new respect within business, and educates young people about what a great career choice being a sysadmin is. We could sit down with universities and establish a common curriculum standard, an accreditation program, and establish a network of researchers focused on system administration.

Lastly LOPSA doesn't need big money to do these things. We need big thinkers. We could do all of this by partnering with the top CIOs of the U.S. who would find value in having better trained, more consistently skilled, people to hire. We could apply for grants to major funding sources and make the case for the societal benefits to be gained from all-of-the-above, as well as help them understand the perils of a future without excellence in technology management.

LOPSA could start small with any one of those projects and focus, focus, focus to make it happen. Be creative. You don't need a million dollars in rent to have a lobbyist in DC: you can beg to use a desk in a like-minded organization. You don't need to own a university to teach sysadmins: get the professors that are teaching system administration together via phone and start establishing curriculum guidelines. Find a major CIO who is about to retire and recuit him/her to make one of these their legacy project. You don't need a PR agency to get a lot of press, you need to make sure that every New York Times reporter remembers you as the person that returns calls quickly so his/her 3pm deadline is never in jeopardy and soon every article has a quote from a LOPSA-identified spokesperson.

To get to 347,200 we need to create projects that recruit thousands of members each year. Most of new new members come via the conferences and the local chapters. At the current rate, we won't get to the 50% mark for a century.

At our current trajectory in 10 years we'll be "the world's largest user group".

Is that what we really want to be?

Think bigger!

LOPSA would like to show our support in this area and provide something concrete toward the topic. Matt (from the LOPSA Board) came up with a great idea to provide a stipend to assist someone in attending the conference. We will award based on submission of an essay, but I'll leave those details to the posting about it. If you want to make a submission or just learn more about it, please check out the info page at:

https://lopsa.org/content/stipend-competition-attend-2012-usenix-women-advanced-computing-summit

That links to the conference and summit details at the official site as well.

]]> tag:everythingsysadmin.com,2012://2.695 2012-05-03T18:23:01Z 2012-05-03T18:30:18Z

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh-agent-forwarding.html

In fact, I admit I had been avoiding using this feature because it adds a security risk and it is best not to use something risky without knowing the internals of why it is risky.

Now that I understand it and can use it, I find it saves me a TON of time. Highly recommended (when it is safe to use, of course!)

Tom

For more information check out the LOPSA NJ web site.

Someone asked me about "The Internet Needs a New Pair of Pants" and I thought it would be a good chance to post some thoughts I've had.

For the most part he's asking the wrong questions. Only #10 and #11 really matter.

But first a quick tangent...

We don't "store data" on the internet. You can 'store data' by putting it on a hard drive and then powering it off. That's easy. Anyone can do that. What you do on the internet (or "in the cloud") is you make data available (either to everyone, a restricted group, or just yourself). To make it available it uses a constant amount of power, upkeep, maintenance, backups, etc. Backups is often 9x the cost of hard drive you bought to store the data.

That said...

In the future we will store more and more of our information on other people's computers simply because it is cheaper. Energy is very expensive and typical data centers are built where power is cheap. There are efficiencies of scale to power one big data center rather than a million hard drives, each in that person's home. The power in data centers will always be greener than what you get in the home not because cloud providers are pollution-hating hippies but because when you do things at big scale it becomes cheaper to do things green. Lastly, at big scale things like backups, upkeep, maintenance, etc. all become much cheaper. The cost of a huge robotic tape backup system may be millions of dollars, but the cost of millions of homes each doing backups is hundreds of millions. More and more of our data is being stored in the cloud not just because it is easier that setting up a home system to do it for us but because we can't afford to do it any other way.

That said...

If we are going to put more and more of our data in the hands of other people, we need a "bill of rights" that protects us and the providers:

Users should:

1. be able to know what data is being stored about them (example)
2. be able to get a complete copy of all their data in a format that lets them change providers any time they want, no fees or penalties (example)
3. users should be able to grant access to their data to other people, easily see who has access, and revoke it (a good start)

Providers should:

1. Have a clear procedure to determining when a government subpoena for a user's data is valid (not a fishing expedition or witchhunt)
2. Not have all their computers confiscated due to a single user; even if user's data is mixed with others.
3. Should be required to publish statistics about which governments are making subpoena and take-down requests, how often, and whether or not they were rejected (example)

That list is just a start.

As system administrators we are probably the most aware of these issues. Sadly these decisions are generally made at the CEO level where we have very little influence, or in smokey, dark rooms where political decisions are made (and we have even less influence).

The problem is that the current laws are insufficient, new laws tend to be written by people that are against the things listed above, and nobody knows how to deal with data in one country being stored by a person in another county that breaks the laws of yet another country.

I've linked to services that do the things I talk about. I'll gladly add links to other services that have these features (email me or post a comment). I think everyone should go to their providers and ask (demand) all of the above, and we should ask (demand) our elected officials create laws that make these things possible, if not required.

But who has time for that, right? I mean... we're sysadmins! We're too busy to get political.

This new RFC basically says that vendors can no longer consider IPv6 as an optional feature. If you say it supports 'IP' you better include IPv6.

The RFC specifically calls out these best practices:

• New IP implementations must support IPv6.
• Updates to current IP implementations should support IPv6.
• IPv6 support must be equivalent or better in quality and functionality when compared to IPv4 support in a new or updated IP implementation.
• New and updated IP networking implementations should support IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence (dual-stack), but must not require IPv4 for proper and complete function.
• Implementers are encouraged to update existing hardware and software to enable IPv6 wherever technically feasible.

You: If you haven't started using IPv6 in your environment I highly recommend you take the time to educate yourself: Read a book, learn how Google did it, or sign up for the excellent IPv6 training at PICC.

Your vendors: When talking with vendors do not treat IPv6 as a "would be nice". Inform them that anything you buy this year must be IPv6 capable and can't have worse performance than IPv4. New network gear and software purchased this year will probably be in your network until 2020 or longer. If you don't think IPv6 will be in your environment this year, you have to agree it will be by 2020.

Your boss: If you need help explaining this to your boss read this fine article on IPv6 migrations (The "introduction" section is all background and history, after that is all the advice.) TLDR version: Start from your ISP to your external gateway, then work your way in enabling IPv6 carefully at each step.

Lastly... if you want a fun starter project, get it enabled at your house either via your ISP or get a free tunnel.

For more information visit:

http://lilug.org

See you there!