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

Speaker: (Either Tom or Chris can do the presentation, but not both)
	Tom Limoncelli, Lumeta Corp
		(if the presentation is in the US east coast)
	Christine Hogan, Independent Consultant
		(if the presentation is in the UK or US west coast)


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