Speaking about Automating Network Configuration at BayLISA, this Thu 20 Aug 09

I've just accepted a last-minute opportunity to speak about "Automating Network Configuration" at this month's BayLISA meeting, which is this Thursday evening (20 Aug 09) at 7:30pm at the LinkedIn offices at 2027 Stierlin Ct. in Mountain View, CA.

Here's the description of the talk:

Automating Network Configuration

You've been using tools like Puppet and cfengine to corral the complexity on your servers. You revel in the scalability, reliability, and ease of maintenance of doing it The Right Way. You don't fear the next change because you know the tools will just get it Right. But you still tremble at an "enable" prompt, hoping you remembered all the bits that need to be twiddled, on all the networking devices everywhere. Is your DNS tied on straight - both ways? Is it all *really* being monitored by Nagios? As your network's complexity increases, so do the errors, inconsistencies, and omissions caused by manual configuration, and brokenness abounds. But wait - there's a way out of the swamp! Come hear world-renowned networking expert and popular BayLISA speaker Brent Chapman as he reveals methods and tools for automating the mind-numbing task of configuring network devices and services. Among other things, he'll talk about his cool new open source "Netomata Config Generator", which addresses some of these problems.

Brent Chapman is the founder, CEO, and technical lead of Netomata, Inc. He is the coauthor of the highly regarded O'Reilly & Associates book Building Internet Firewalls. He is also the founder of the Firewalls, List-Managers, and Network-Automation Internet mailing lists, and the creator of the Majordomo mailing list management package. In 2004, Brent was honored with the annual SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award "for outstanding sustained contributions to the community of system administrators". He has spoken at BayLISA numerous times over the past 15 years.

I hope to see you there!

BayLISA meetings are free and open to the public. To help them know how many attendees to prepare for, BayLISA requests RSVPs by email to rsvp@baylisa.org.

Upcoming Talks

I'll be giving this same "Automating Network Configuration" talk in Seattle on the evening of Thu 10 Sep 09 for SASAG (the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild).

I'll also be presenting a full-day tutorial on Automating Network Configuration and Management at this year's USENIX LISA conference, on Mon 2 Nov 09 in Baltimore.

Please email me (brent@netomata.com) if you're interested in scheduling a presentation for your user group, company, or other organization.