[SASAG] Next meeting is April 10th, Thursday at 7PM

[Ski Kacoroski]

The next Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild meeting is
Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 7pm.

There will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics.  Check them out
at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the
University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the
EE Department's web site below. Parking is $5 after 4pm.

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Date: 	April 10th, 2008
Time: 	7pm
Place: 	EE1 Building (Electrical Engineering)
Room 403
University of Washington Campus
Directions: 	http://www.ee.washington.edu/contact.html
Subject: 	Why Do We Need Infrastructure
Presenters: 	Lee Damon

Many people in the Unix and other computing communities accept without
question the fact that we need infrastructure to make things work. We
accept this without actually thinking about _why_ we need
infrastructure, what infrastructure is, or even how we make an
‘infrastructure’.

On the flip side there are managers, users, and even computing
professionals who not only don’t know what an infrastructure is but
question the very basis of the assumption that such a beast is of any
use, let alone desirable. They know their desktop system or the
computer they have at home works and don’t see a need to go beyond that.

This talk will start with a basic analysis of what constitutes an
infrastructure. It will then touch on why such a thing is often
necessary.

Along the way we will briefly examine the difference between an
infrastructure for supporting computing in general (”infrastructure
architecture”) versus one for specific application support
(”application architecture”) - which is needed when and why.

We’ll take a moment to look at at some basic needs - both hardware and
software. We will see why things like common account information and
network clocks are vital to a successful infrastructure. We will look
at the differences between homogeneous and heterogeneous
infrastructures. We will see that while no one solution works for
everyone there are some basics that you can’t do without.

We will take side journeys into hardware needs - computer
rooms/data-centers, network designs, upstream connections, etc - and
put all of that together with a scale-to-fit-needs discussion to answer
the basic question: “Why infrastructure?”

—–

Lee Damon has been a Unix system administrator since 1985 and has been
active in SAGE since its inception. He assisted in developing a mixed
AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed
environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently
leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University
of Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other
professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and
past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was
the chair of LISA ‘04. He was awarded SAGE’s 2003 Outstanding
Achievement Award “for service to SAGE and the system administration
profession as a whole.”