Who should attend: System administrators who are curious about the benefits of virtualization or who need to deploy it in their environment.

Virtualization is a hot computing topic these days, but you may be wondering whether it will actually benefit your site. When is virtualization appropriate and when isn't it? What does it take to administer a virtual infrastructure? How do you handle challenges such as OS and software installation and backups? This course will answer those questions. It will also provide the technical information you need to actually get started planning and deploying VMs and a virtualization infrastructure.

Take back to work: The ability to begin deploying virtualization in your environment, along with an understanding of the many tradeoffs you will need to address.

Topics include:

• What virtualization is and what it can and cannot do for you
• Available software and management options, including getting started basics
• Typical deployment scenarios and special-purpose solutions (e.g., server isolation, server consolidation, student labs, testing environments, HPC, HA/load balancing)
• Administrative challenges of integrating virtualization into your existing environment: monitoring, resource management, performance optimization, software upgrades, legacy hardware
• Security issues with virtualizatio

Who should attend: Junior system administrators with anywhere from little to 3+ years of experience in computer system administration. We will focus on enabling the junior system administrator to "do it right the first time." Some topics will use UNIX-specific tools as examples, but the class is applicable to any sysadmin and any OS. Most of the material covered is "the other 90%" of system administrationthings every sysadmin needs to do and to know, but which aren't details of specific technical implementation.

We aim to accelerate the experience curve for junior system administrators by teaching them the time honored tricks (and effective coping strategies) that experienced administrators take for granted and which are necessary for successful growth of both the administrator and the site.

The class covers many of the best practices that senior administrators have long incorporated in their work. We will touch on tools you should use, as well as tools you should try to avoid. We will touch on things that come up frequently, as well as those which happen only once or twice a year. We will look at a basic security approach.

Take back to work: Ideas about how to improve and to streamline your systems and your workload, and, just as important, where to look to find more answers.

Topics include:

• Why your computers should all agree on what time it is
• Why root passwords should not be the same on every computer
• Why backing up every file system on every computer is not always a good idea
• Policies—where you want them and where you might want to avoid them
• Ethical issues
• Growth and success as a solo-sysadmin as well as in small, medium, and large teams
• Training
• Mentoring
• Personal growth planning
• Site planning
• Budgeting
• Logistics
• Books that can help you and your users

Who should attend: Linux system administrators and users.

Ever had a hard drive fail? Ever kick yourself because you didn't keep backups of critical files, or you discovered that your regularly nightly backup didn't succeed? Of course not: everybody keeps regular backups and verifies them to make sure they are successful. But for those people who think they might nevertheless someday need this information, this tutorial will discuss ways of recovering from storage disasters caused by failures somewhere in the hardware or software stack.

Take back to work: How to recover from storage disasters caused by failures somewhere in the hardware or software stack.

Topics include:

• How data is stored on hard drives
• Recovering from a corrupted partition table
• Recovering from failed software RAID systems
• Low-level techniques to recover data from a corrupted ext2/ext3 filesystem when backups aren't available
• Using e2image to back up critical ext2/3 filesystem metadata
• Using e2fsck and debugfs to sift through a corrupted filesystem
• Preventive measures to avoid needing to use heroic measure

Who should attend: Linux Kernel developers and advanced system administrators. Familiarity with Linux kernel internals is extremely helpful.

SystemTap is a tool that allows kernel developers and system administrators to deeply examine the activities of a live Linux system via simple scripts. These scripts allow data from a running Linux system to be extracted, filtered, and summarized in order to help diagnose complex performance problems or track down tricky Linux kernel bugs. A SystemTap script allows handlers to be run when specific events, such as entering or exiting a function or a timer expiring, occur. A handler can extract data from the event context, store it in internal variables, or summarize and print results.

The course will feature examples of how SystemTap can be used to track down system bugs and identify the source of performance problems.

Take back to work: How to install and run SystemTap on your Linux systems and write basic SystemTap scripts and tapsets.

Topics include:

• How to get the latest version of SystemTap
• Managing kernel debuginfo files
• Programming SystemTap scripts
• How to create tapsets
• Examples of SystemTap in action