A report from LISA; A recap of LISA '99 and books you should know about

Last November's 13th annual LISA Conference was among the best ever. Several good talks were given, although as usual the most useful events were the BOF (birds of a feather) gatherings where sysadmins met and exchanged information before, during, and after official happenings. The halls, bars, and restaurants at a LISA conference are always the best places to find out which products are hot and which aren't, what works and what doesn't, the cool techniques sysadmins are using to solve problems, the answers to difficult questions, and opinions on anything from the worst sysadmin book to the best antispam method. RedAlert is object oriented and uses Perl's Data::Dumper and TCP connections to pass objects around a network. It also uses SNMP for notification, which lets it integrate with other monitoring platforms. Much of this paper details the implementation of RedAlert to monitor Netscape Message Server error messages, aggregate them, and determine the proper actions based on the details of the errors. Managing Intel's more than 2,500 computers and 2,000 users requires the efforts of 85 systems administrators and the REQADM ticket management tool suite. The sysadmin team began with a combination of ticket management systems, including Trouble-MH, QMH, Req, QMH-with-complainers, and Request, but there too many errors, including lost ticket numbers, MH sequence file corruption, fragile scripts, and complex bugs.