LOPSAgram June 2014

LOPSA News
01. Thoughts from the President (Dan Rich)
02. LOPSA Elections Are Open (Leadership Committee)
03. 2014 LOPSA WiAC Stipend Awarded to Anahita Davoudi
04. Financial Transparency (LOPSA Finance Committee)
05. Survey: Professional Headshots at LISA14? (Matt Simmons)
06. LOPSA Communications Committee expands (Ski Kacoroski)
07. Mentorship Program Changes (LOPSA Mentorship Program)
08. Let LOPSA Help Market Your Publications
09. MongoDB World Discount (Ski Kacoroski)

Chapter News
10. SASAG (Seattle, WA) from Ski Kacoroski
11. LOPSA-San Diego (San Diego, CA) from Christopher Grau
12. LOPSA-NJ (Lawrenceville, NJ) from William Bilancio
13. Crabby Admins (Baltimore, MD) from Ryan Frantz
14. LOPSA-Columbus (Columbus, OH) from Warner Moore

Upcoming Events
15. DevOps Days Silicon Valley (June 27-28 - Mountain View, CA)
16. USENIX Federated Conferences Week (June 17-20 - Philadelphia, PA)
17. USENIX Security (August 20-22 - San Diego, CA)

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01. Thoughts from the President (Dan Rich)

It's that time of year again when you have the chance to directly influence the future of LOPSA.

One half of the seats on the board are currently open and voting for them started this past Sunday.

We have five excellent candidates running, two incumbent and three running for their first term. Each of them brings a unique set of skills to the table and I encourage you to read their candidate statements and see how they feel they will help LOPSA to move forward and fufill its mission. If you weren't able to attend the two LOPSA Live candidate forum sessions, you can find the transcripts of those on lopsa.org as well at https://lopsa.org/content/lopsa-live-transcript-may-7-2014-candidate-session & https://lopsa.org/content/lopsa-live-may-15-2014-candidate-forum-transcript

We would love to have a good turnout for this election, so head on over to https://election.lopsa.org/lopsavote/, log in with your lopsa.org credentials and cast your vote!

You do need to be a current member to vote, so if you have any trouble logging in check your membership in the block in the upper left  of the lopsa.org home page. If you are still having problems contact us at custserv@lopsa.org and we'll coordinate with the Leadership Committee, as they are responsible for the election process.

After the elections have been certified by the Leadership Committee, the existing board will meet in person with the new board members in July or August to transition to the new board and select officers. This will also serve as the planning and initial strategy meeting for the year. If you have suggestions for what you would like to see LOPSA accomplish in the next year this is the time to make your opinion known. Please send me your thoughts at  president@lopsa.org and I will make sure they are included in the discussions at the first meeting of the new board.

As anyone who lives in California has heard ad nauseam over the past few weeks as we approach our primaries, your vote is important! Please take the time to be involved in your organization and cast a vote for the next LOPSA Board. I thank you in advance for your participation.

Daniel Rich
LOPSA President

02. LOPSA Elections are Open (Leadership Committee)

Right now, the 2014 LOPSA Elections are open for voting. There are five candidates vying for four open positions on the LOPSA Board of Directors. The newly elected board will, at their first meeting, choose officers for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer.

We want to have a great turnout this year - your opinions matter, so make sure that they're heard. There are a number of important decisions that the Board will be making in the coming year, so it's important to select members who will represent your best interests. The candidates' statements can be found below:

George Beech
John Boris
Matt Disney
Steve Murawski
Steve VanDevender

Visit the following URL to cast your ballot:

https://election.lopsa.org/lopsavote/

Log in with the credentials you use for lopsa.org. Please contact membership@lopsa.org if you have issues.

Thanks for your continued support of LOPSA.

The LOPSA Board of Directors and the LOPSA Leadership Committee

03. 2014 LOPSA WiAC Stipend Awarded to Anahita Davoudi

We received several entries for the 2014 WiAC stipend, and choosing was difficult, but in the end, we decided that Anahita Davoudi's entry best exemplified the spirit of the event.

Anahita is in the PhD program at the University of Central Florida. This will be her first time attending the Women in Advanced Computing event, and we hope that she has a great experience.

We'll be hearing back from her later about the Summit, and what she thinks of the event after having attended it.

You can read her essays in the announcement at LOPSA.org.

04. Financial Transparency (LOPSA Finance Committee)

The LOPSA Finance Committee has been working with the LOPSA Board of Directors to increase financial transparency of the organization to its members. Although the Form 990s have been published for several years on governance.lopsa.org, these don't give point-in-time information, and the only real information officially published until now has been at the annual meeting at LISA, which only a few members are able to attend.

The first step of several is going to be that, going forward, each Board Meeting minutes will include the treasurer's report, which includes the assets of the organization. In the near future, it will include the debts, as well, and we are planning several other methods of presenting the information in a clear and easy to understand format. Thanks for your patience, and please stay tuned as we work out the best way to give you this information.

Sincerely,

The LOPSA Finance Committee

05. Survey: Professional Headshots at LISA14? (Matt Simmons)

I realized the other day that I haven't had a professional portrait done in several years - so many that I hardly look like the picture I had taken! Looking around at the headshots I see LOPSA members use on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter, I can tell I'm not the only one.

Like me, most people have resorted to using cropped pictures taken by cell phones, which is fine for some sites, but I don't want that to be my professional head shot if I get an article published, or I'm speaking on a panel somewhere.

LOPSA is a professional organization, and I feel like we don't offer enough professional services for our members, and this seems like something useful that we could do relatively easily.

Before we go out and hire a professional photographer, rent a room at LISA14 to serve as the portrait studio, and then work on finding a sponsor to defray the cost, we wanted to see if other people would be interested in this.

The idea is that the portrait would be free for LOPSA members (non-LOPSA members could, of course, pay $40 and get a free membership!). We would provide LOPSA-branded button-up shirts to borrow if the attendees didn't bring a professional looking shirt to wear (with the option to buy one, of course).

Please fill out the survey and let us know if this is something you would like us to pursue.

06. LOPSA Communications Committee expands (Ski Kacoroski)

As the number of social media sites increases, so do the number of LOPSA members using them. We've always had a membership full of early adoptors, so it's important to make sure that we engage our current and potential members wherever they are.

To help us with that, LOPSA Member Craig Constantine has joined the LOPSA Communications Committee and has been helping us to distribute news and reply to member queries on the various social media forums. We'd like to take this moment to thank Craig, and to remind you that you can reach out to us on Twitter via @LOPSA, as well as the pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

If you know of a network that we should be paying attention to, but we aren't yet, please drop us a line at communications@lopsa.org to let us know!

Thanks,

LOPSA Communications Committee

07. Mentorship Program Changes

Greetings fellow LOPSA members! You'll recall that we recently made some changes to provide students with discounted memberships and offer complimentary memberships for people in financial need (see https://lopsa.org/about_membership for details). It's important to us as an organization that the benefits of LOPSA are available to everyone, even those who are less able to spend money on professional organization memberships.

In conjunction with this change, we are also making some modifications to the requirements of the mentorship program. We have always required that all mentors be LOPSA members to ensure they shared the same values and ideals that define our mission. We did not require that proteges become LOPSA members because we wanted to offer assistance to professional and fledgling systems administrators who might not be able to afford the cost of membership. Now that we have removed the financial barrier, we will require any new proteges who sign up for the program after June 30th to be LOPSA members as well. Note that this does NOT affect proteges in an existing relationship, though signing up for membership is definitely encouraged.

We intend that this change create a twofold benefit.  First, our mentors work hard to provide guidance and insight to help our proteges move forward in their careers. Requiring membership helps identify the proteges who are more serious in their pursuit and will help keep them engaged with the field and their mentor. Secondly, we believe that providing the ability to work with a mentor as a concrete benefit of membership, instead of a service we offer to the public at large, is in the best interest of the LOPSA community as a whole.

There are always proteges looking for new mentors, so if you feel you have experience to share, please take a moment to consider signing up at https://lopsa.org/mentor

With thanks,
The LOPSA Mentorship Program Team

08. Let LOPSA Help Market Your Publications (LOPSA Communications Committee)

Once upon a time, we thought about developing a list of all of the publications that LOPSA members have written or contributed to, but we gave up because of the overwhelming number. There were just too many.

Since a lot of LOPSA members author and contribute to pieces, and it's often difficult to market to your target audience, the LOPSA Communications Committee would like to help.

We're not sure yet what the best way to do this is, so we're likely to try things and learn as we go, but if you'd like to help us learn, and you have a published book or article coming out, let us know and we'll try to help spread the word among our members and followers online.

We're also welcome to suggestions anytime at communications@lopsa.org.

09. MongoDB World Discount (Ski Kacoroski)

MongoDb World is happy to announce a 25% discount for LOPSA members.

To take advantage of the discount, enter the code 25SteffanyBoldrini into the Discount code field on the MondDB World registration form at http://world.mongodb.com/register

The MongoDB World conference will take place in New York City, NY on June 23rd - 25th, 2014. It offers over 80 in depth sessions on using MongoDB, opportunities to network with other users and experts, and meet with vendors of the MongoDB ecosystem.

Chapter News

10. SASAG (Seattle, WA) from Ski Kacoroski
On June 12th, James Murray will give a talk titled "Why IT fails and what to do about it".   He will discuss basic methodologies that will improve success rates on IT deployment from a national average of 50% failure rate to over 95% success rates. These are methodologies that are easy to explain and our customers understand and will be on board with.

11. LOPSA-San Diego (San Diego, CA) from Christopher Grau
System administrators from across the greater San Diego area gathered in the Atrium at websense to enjoy pizza and a deep dive into ZFS. Peter Ashford gave an in-depth presentation on ZFS Performance Tuning, providing a great deal of useful information and prompting great conversation.

Our next meeting will take place on Thursday, June 26. Please RSVP (http://www.meetup.com/LOPSA-SD/) if you can attend, so we can plan for food. Keep up with us on our blog (http://lopsasandiego.wordpress.com) or on Twitter (@LOPSASanDiego).

12. LOPSA-NJ (Lawrenceville, NJ) from William Bilancio

Topic: Enterprise  monitoring using Zabbix
Speaker: Jonathan Bayer
Date: Thursday, June 5, 2014
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Pizza and Soda being brought to you by: INetU

If you are planning on coming please RSVP (http://www.lopsanj.org/rsvp) so we have a  good count for the pizza and drinks.

Location:
Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library
2751 Brunswick Pike
Lawrenceville, 08648-4132


Zabbix is an enterprise-class monitoring solution which is also totally open source.  It is written and supported by Zabbix SIA (http://www.zabbix.com)

During this talk, I’ll go over how to set up an initial Zabbix server using a script that I’ve written and maintain, and will then go over the basic configuration of the system.  At the end, assuming that I have  internet connectivity, I’ll show our production configuration and answer questions.

Bio:
Jonathan has been working with computers since 1977 (not counting time in school).  More than 30 years programming experience in a variety of languages.  Was in own business from 1980-1990, programming & selling software to employment agencies (not doing the selling, was the technical side of the business).

Currently working as Manager of Technical Operations at Achieve3000.

Blog: linuxnotes.us

13. Crabby Admins (Baltimore, MD) from Ryan Frantz

The last 3 years co-organizing the Crabby Admins group has been a great experience. I've learned a lot about so many things. The best part of it all was getting to develop a small community and meeting all of you.

I am grateful to Evan for having brought the idea forward to start this chapter and for sharing the responsibility of doing so.  Now, however, it's time for both of us to move on.  We will no longer be organizing Crabby Admin meetings.

If you'd like to take up the Crabby Admins banner, definitely reach out to me and Evan off-list and we'll talk. Just because we won't be organizing it, doesn't mean the group has to dissolve.

Evan and I have spoken about this and we'd like to invite you all to one last get-together this Wednesday, June 4th at Looney's Pub (in the plaza next to OmniTI).  We'll be there starting at 7:00PM EST.

I'd like to thank Eric Sproul, Mark Harrison, and Theo Schlossnagle for their continued support of our group.

I wish all of you well in whatever you do.  You can always reach out to me at this address if you have any questions or simply want to chat.

Ryan Frantz

14. LOPSA-Columbus (Columbus, OH) from Warner Moore

LOPSA Columbus is proud to present the "Tech Crawl" as a new quarterly series, which will showcase innovative technology businesses in Columbus, OH. Learn about cool companies and how they do things differently than the rest!

The June tech crawl will be announced this week. Watch the LOPSA Columbus mailing list for details.

Upcoming Events

15. DevOps Days Silicon Valley (June 27-28 - Mountain View, CA)

5th Anniversary DevOpsDays Silicon Valley!
Date : 27 & 28 of June 2014
Location: Computer Museum Mountain View, CA

DevOps Days is the conference that brings development and operations together. Register today for $150.

http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-siliconvalley/

16. USENIX Federated Conferences Week (June 17-20 - Philadelphia, PA)

Back for 2014, USENIX Federated Conferences Week is combining a variety of events, established and new, into a week chock-full of research presentations, intensive training sessions, and information sharing. FCW ‘14 offers a unique opportunity to gain insight into a variety of hot topics, while the joint lunches, breaks, and evening events provide cross-topic networking possibilities.

Conference topics include cloud, storage, configuration management, release engineering, and more! See the following URL for full details:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fcw14

17. USENIX Security (August 20-22 - San Diego, CA)

Join us in San Diego, CA, August 20-22, 2014, for the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium. USENIX Security '14 brings together researchers, practitioners, systems programmers and engineers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity14