I recently attended UKUUG’s annual Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference, this year hosted in Leeds over 2 days.

Overall I was very impressed with the event, at some points I was torn with that track to go on. In the end I attended the following:

  • A bird’s-eye view on DNSSEC (Jan-Piet Mens)
  • Managing distributed web services with OpenNMS (Dr. Craig Gallen)
  • Unbound as a caching validating DNSSEC resolver (Jan-Piet Mens)
  • IPv6 update from a broadband ISP (Adrian Kennard)
  • The Future of Configuration Management – Latest developments from Cfengine (Mark Burgess)
  • FusionInventory and GLPI (Fabrice Flore-Thebault)
  • The benefit of BGP for every service provider (Thomas Mangin)
  • DNSSEC zone-signing tool chest (Jan-Piet Mens)
  • Scale out Datacenter Architecture (Bernd Erk)
  • Digital Forensics in Large Scale Environments (Si Biles)
  • Large Scale file storage with MogileFS (Stuart Teasdale)
  • OpenStack: Towards a fully open cloud (Thierry Carrez)
  • PostgreSQL: New features for Large Systems Administration (Simon Riggs)

Some of the above were very interesting, which I hope to blog about in detail in the near future.

The evening was very enjoyable and I fully enjoyed taking to like minded people. Although not a HE based conference, I was pleasantly suprised to meet fellow sysadmins from other Universities. Some as close as Bath, yes it takes a trip up to the north to meet people from a city on my doorstep.