Tom Talpey, Network Appliance, Inc.
Talpey presented on optimizing NetApp performance using NFS and TCP
over ethernet. According to him, with the proper tuning, NFS can
deliver the performance of local disk. Tunings to look at:
network (wires, jumbo frames), clients (mount options, NFS
readahead, socket options, driver specific settings), and servers
(volume/spindle tuning). This was an extremely interesting and useful
presentation. He mentioned sio, dt, and iozone -- command
line utilities. We need to look at our NFS implemention and
configuration as well as out network configuration to improve our
perfomance.
David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This was not a formal presentation. The topics discussed were:
* Limiting root access:
* Political problems
* Least privilege / Kerberos syste
* Config management: almost everyone does it, usually cfengine
* Ticketing systems: why not tie a ticket number to every config change?
* RT very popular - the only system which most users liked
* Project management systems
* Nobody likes them - expensive, bad products for
the wrong problem
* Documentation
* Wikis are very popular
* Search is critical
* Moving FAQs from tickets to docs
* Working with users
* Surveys - frequently but make sure they're open-ended enough. No
substitute for simply talking with people.