The SCaLE University training program is presented by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) in partnership with SCaLE. The classes will give SCaLE attendees a more intense and personal learning experience on Friday, February 20th.

We are offering four half-day classes for system administrators of all skill and experience levels. The SCaLE University Pass includes a full day of training (two classes of your choice) and full access to all three days of SCaLE. To register, select the "SCALE 7x Full Access Pass" and then the "SCALE University Pass" which will include a $60 discount on your total charge.

Morning classes

9:00 - 12:30

Introduction to Virtualized Storage Management

Instructor: Jesse Trucks

Disk storage is no longer as simple as plugging in some disks and partitioning the individual physical drives for different mount points. These days we need mount points larger than our disks, we use SAN and NAS storage that presents arbitrary drive sizes to the Operating System. We use an extra layer of management on our machines to logically manage the storage.

This course will discuss how virtualized storage operates on a fundamental and technical level. Real examples using storage
management packages available on many Linux and Unix systems, such the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) that is included in most Linux distributions and the Veritas Storage Foundation (VSF) suite's Veritas Volume Manager, will be used to illustrate the implementation of real world storage configurations. Students are expected to bring questions of implementation for solving their storage needs, and participants can expect to utilize their new-found knowledge immediately upon returning to the office.

Internal documentation for SysAdmins
Instructor: Chris St. Pierre

This half-day class, dealing entirely with internal documentation -- i.e., documentation written for sysadmins, by sysadmins -- is designed as an introduction to the field for people who are not documenting, or documenting minimally, maybe with something like Word.

The class begins with a theoretically grounding in the hierarchy of needs upon which good documentation systems are built. From theory we move into practice, with a whirlwind discussion of wiki software, tips for getting other team members to write documentation and avoiding (or harnessing!) politics to get documentation written, and suggestions for where to start when you're staring at your big blank wiki.

Real-life examples of bad documentation -- some funny, some terrifying -- are used throughout the class to illustrate the topics and ideas taught.

Afternoon Classes
1:30 - 5:00

Disaster Recovery: Will you survive?
Instructor: Jesse Trucks

Every IT operation eventually faces a disaster on some scale. Despite most disaster based damage being avoidable, the result is usually catastrophic in some way or another. This class teaches how to mitigate risk of disaster through a variety of methods by covering Disaster Recovery (DR) as a discipline and the low level mechanics of evaluating risks and developing mitigation or reactive disaster recovery plans as part of business continuity planning. All system administrators, regardless of the size or scope of their operation, will benefit from the more in depth understanding of DR obtained through this class.

Students can expect to gain the skills and knowledge that allows them to implement immediate improvements to the disaster readiness of their own operations back at the office.

Saving the World with Fedora Directory Server
Instructor: Chris St. Pierre

Fedora Directory Server is a high performance, feature rich, enterprise-class LDAP server that also happens to be free. An LDAP service can help you centralize authentication and authorization, widely distribute account information, and even integrate with Windows through Samba or Active Directory -- in effect, it can save your world from countless horrors.

This tutorial will introduce students to the wonders and joys of running LDAP, specifically through the magic of Fedora DS. We'll
cover LDAP basics, setting up Fedora DS, and the Fedora DS graphical console, one of its most attractive features. More advanced topics will include backups and restores, configuring SSL and TLS, multimaster replication, using and creating LDAP schemas, and the configuration tree in depth.

Much of this class will also be applicable to Sun Directory Server, CentOS Directory Server, and Redhat Directory Server, which are all based on the same codebase as Fedora DS.

About the Instructors

Jesse Trucks

Jesse Trucks has worked in a startup, at an ISP in the late 90's, as the single IT guy at a publishing company, and as part of an
organization with nearly 150 system administrators maintaining more than 5,500 enterprise servers. Recently, he managed a team of systems administrators for a consulting firm, and currently works on a team doing Unix systems related research and development for new projects and products, process improvement, and advanced technical assistance for internal clients and coworkers. He has extensive security experience in incident handling, intrusion detection, policy development, monitoring, and implementation management, and he is well versed in Disaster Recovery planning and testing.

Trucks advocates for extensive documentation, strong security, change control, and professionalism. He is a Founding Member of the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), founded the LOPSA- Madison chapter in Madison, WI, and is serving as an elected member of the LOPSA Board of Directors for the 2007 - 2009 term. In addition, he assists the LOPSA Education Committee organizing and teaching at training events.

Trucks taught four of the 16 classes at the inaugural Sysadmin Days 2006 in Phoenix and the subsequent Sysadmin Days 2007 in Cherry Hill, NJ. He has taught other courses for related conferences and training events. Trucks has served as a Local Mentor in the GCUX course for the SANS Institute, and he currently holds GCIH and GCUX certifications. He serves as a member of the SANS Advisory Board, as well. He resides in Black Earth, WI and is available for teaching or presentation engagements in any location.

Chris St. Pierre

Chris St. Pierre is the system administrator at Nebraska Wesleyan University, a small but growing liberal arts university. In his four and a half years there, he has lead a charge to document and modernize the computing infrastructure. He has taught widely on spam filtering and internal documentation, and has considerable experience and interest in issues of scalability, business continuity, and automation. Chris enjoys fighting spam in his spare time, and he maintains Fedora DS Graph, a graphing and statistics package for Fedora Directory Server.

About The League of Professional System Administrators

The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) is an independent nonprofit professional association dedicated to advancing the practice of system administration. The LOPSA training program is vital part of the LOPSA mission to serve the System Administration community and advance the profession.

LOPSA provides educational and networking opportunities, a forum for support and ideas, and an active community engaged in discussion of sysadmin issues. As a member driven organization, LOPSA's best ideas come from its membership; IT professionals looking to influence the field of IT can join LOPSA to find other IT professionals to collaborate on projects, advance the state of the art, and search for and share the best practices in IT.

More information about LOPSA is available at www.lopsa.org

Registration

Registration for SCALE U is an option as part of the regular SCALE registration process.