LISA16 Build - The Spirit of Sysadmin

It's the way of any power user: the network is never fast enough. Given the chance, I’m sure we could do better. So when we get to a conference with a thousand or so other people, and the wireless network stinks (or so we think), it's not the Way of the Sysadmin to just let it go.

For 24 years, the LISA Special Interest Group for Sysadmins (LISA SIG, formerly known as SAGE) has been a resource and virtual meeting ground for the sysadmin community at USENIX. Despite its sometimes tumultuous history, dedicated members have provided content for Short Topics books, shared insight with colleagues via mailing lists, and helped advance the state of the profession via the creation of the System Administrators' Code of Ethics, contributions to salary surveys, postings to colleagues via the Jobs Board, and nominations for the Outstanding Achievement Award.

I wasn't able to attend last year's LISA Conference, so when I started planning out my sessions for this year, I was surprised to see that the tutorials ended on Tuesday instead of going all week. That wasn't entirely true, though. The half- and full-day tutorials stop once the technical program starts, but the technical program is interspersed with mini-tutorials.

Kyle Neumann had never attended LISA before, but when his employer encouraged him to go to a conference, he started looking around. A Reddit comment and his own research lead him to LISA. Although his primarily role is a Windows administrator, he didn't necessarily want to go to a Microsoft-specific conference. He told me he likes that LISA content focuses on the domain, not a specific technology. "Even the technology-specific stuff," he said, "is technologies instead of technology."