Tom's technical workshops

If you need a publicity photo, please use this photo of me.

Time Management for Sysadmin (half-day and full-day)

• The proposal in text format.
• Getting control over your schedule, flawless follow-through, managing your boss, dealing with email, prioritizing so your users think you are a genius, how to leave your office with a smile every day.
• Presented at: LISA 2003, OSCON2004, LISA 2004

Introduction to Massive Upgrades and Changes (half-day)

• The proposal in text format.
• Case studies from upgrading a single host well, to making the same change on a thousand machines, to renumbering/reorganizing entire networks. Tips on moving data-centers too!
• This has been presented at: LISA 2002, LISA 2003, LISA2004

Tools for Creating Happy Users (full day)

• The proposal in text format.
• Creating/managing a helpdesk, providing superior desktop rollouts (and lifecycle), maitaining a positive relationship with your user-base, monitoring and fixing problems before they are noticed.
• This has been presented at: SAGE-AU 2002, NordU 2003, LISA 2002, SANE2004.

• In general, I'm willing to develop an invited talk based on any chapter of The Practice of System and Network Administration", or any of the papers I have published in the past (listed here). However, more realistic ideas are...
• "How do sysadmins write books?" or "How to write a book with someone you don't know: Internet collaboration for the truly geeky"
  • Fun/technical talk describes how we applied sysadmin principles to the process of writing the book.
  • The proposal in text format.
  • This talk has been given a couple times locally and has been a big hit.
  • It's a fun talk with a serious side. It tells the story of how we wrote the book, including many funny stories, and along the way you learn about being the sysadmins for collaborative work.
  • As seen at many user groups ($GROUPNAME, BLUG, SAGE-SJ?, ACUG-NJ) and conferences (SAGE-AU 2002, NordU 2003, LISA 2003)
• "Splitting & Renumbering IP Networks"
  • Describes the massive project to split Bell Labs' network when AT&T split into AT&T, Lucent and NCR. It was fun, parts were a disaster, parts were great.
  • Based on "Creating a Network for Lucent Bell Labs" paper from LISA '98.
  • Was repeated as an Invited Talk at Usenix NETA '99 (slides in PowerPoint format.)
  • This is a fun & technical talk. The 'war stories' aspect keeps people's interest but there are enough technical details to be certain that the audience will learn a lot.
• "Tricks you can do when your firewall is a bridge"
  • Abstract
  • Slides from the Usenix NETA '99 presentation in PowerPoint format.
  • This is sort of a wacky technical talk. Using a firewall that is a bridge lets you hide it on the network and therefore do many odd-ball tasks in new ways. A good talk for a highly-technical audience.
• "Providing Reliable NT Desktop Services by Avoiding NT Server"
  • Abstract
  • Slides from the Usenix LISA '98 presentation in PowerPoint format.
  • This talk is really about the importance of using Open Protocols as the basis for your network architecture. Once that decision is made, everything else falls into place. Of course, the interesting part of this talk is describing how we dealt with the exceptions to the rules. That's where you spend 90% of your time anyway.
• How to fire a sysadmin... safely
  • Based on the last chapter of our book. Firing a sysadmin is unlike removing anyone else from your network. We explain a 3-tier model that we've used successfully to remove sysadmins from the network. In once case this was used to remove the manager of the sysadmin team from the network. A very thought-provoking tutorial. While we try to make all of our talks "fun", the seriousness of terminating an employee (especially the life-changing effect it has on them) is taken very seriously.

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