BayLISA 7:30pm Sep 19 (Thurs)

Mon Sep 16 20:55:57 PDT 2002

Yes, it's a Monday.  We all know about Mondays.  Our monthly BayLISA 
meeting is this week, and unless your downtime window at night allows
for you catching a bit of email - or you're in another time zone -
with any luck you're catching this on Tuesday.  

(Sorry about the late posting, but rest assured, it's going to a few
other places too.  The reminder Wed Eve/Thurs morning will be a lot
shorter.)

So.... you are cordially reminded...

   7:30 PM  

   Incyte Genomics Corporate Headquarters, Palo Alto.
             See http://www.baylisa.org/locations/current.html
	     for directions.

   TOM LIMONCELLI 
     Lumeta Corporation
     co-author of "The Practice of System and Network Administration"

     "How do sysadmins write books?"
                                     or
"How to write a book with someone you don't know: 
                           Internet collaboration for the truly geeky"

It's easy to do a new project: Just take everything you've learned
before, and reuse it the best you can.  When Tom Limoncelli and
Christine Hogan wrote the new book "The Practice of System and Network
Administration" they had a couple challenges:  They didn't know each
other.  They were 5 timezones apart.  They had to share and interact
with gigabytes of data.

Their solution was to apply their sysadmin tools to the process.  To
solve their Internet collaboration needs, they used the tools commonly
found in Open Source collaborations (CVS, SSH, Make, Apache, and so
on).  To deal with the fact that they didn't know each other, they
applied the "soft skills" concepts presented in the book.

This talk will cover the techniques they used to collaborate on a
project that would envelope their entire lives for more than 2 years.
Amazingly enough, the book was completed, nobody went crazy in the
process, and they've still only met in person 7 times.

While this talk sounds like it's about collaboration, it's really about
system administration.  The project had security requirements,
reliability requirements, bandwidth requirements, processes to be
defined, and tons of scripting.  We can't imagine how non-sysadmins
write books at all!

You can preview the book on
        http://www.EverythingSysadmin.com
or order it here:
        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201702711/safocus-20

NEWS .....

   We have an extra special thanks to Incyte for hosting us for a year 
   longer than any of our other previous meeting hosts.   They've
   been grand, and now it's our turn to offer them something special;  
   their room back  :>

   In the Olden Days the BayLISA meeting moved around.  We like the 
   solid feeling of coming to the same place every month.  

   We do have some offers from the past which we are looking into.
   If you have a site worth of hosting BayLISA general meetings for 
   a year or two, please contact the Wheels at blw at baylisa.org with
   details about the features and restrictions of your meeting space.

   And of course, stay tuned - when we confirm the new meeting 
   arrangements, we'll announce them far and wide.

BRUSH UP YOUR TALES AND TIDBITS ....

  December is our Short But Cool month, where members of BayLISA are
  encouraged to make smaller presentations about useful tricks and
  great tools that get the job done.  If you've got a 10 to 20 minute
  talk you'd like to give, please contact the Wheels to sign up as
  one of our Short But Cool talks for December.

THE USUAL .....

   Our meetings are free and open to the public.   But we do have
   expenses, bringing in great speakers like Tom.  So, if you like
   what you see, new members, renewals of old memberships, buying
   T-shirts and pint-glasses, or encouraging a Corporate Sponsor
   to become a member at the corporate rate are all appreciated.

   People sometimes go to dinner after the meeting.  The location
   is announced after the speaker finishes and we thank him and
   our hosts for the evening's dash of knowledge.

-* Heather Stern * Arch (secretary) BayLISA Board * http://www.baylisa.org/ *-