APRIL 2007 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 2 THE USENIX MAGAZINE OPINION Musings RIK FARROW SYSADMIN Autonomic Computing: Freedom or Threat? GLENN FINK AND DEB FRINCKE The Secret Lives of Computers Exposed CHAD VERBOWSKI Lessions Learned from Living with LDAP BRENDAN QUINN Introducing System Engineering to the System Admin JOHN LLOYD Promises, Promises: An Interview with Mark Burgess RIK FARROW Spam and Blogs. Part 1: Spam: A Balancing Act DANIEL L. APPELMAN All Quiet on the Western Front: A Discussion on the Necessity of Good Reporting THOMAS SLUYTER COLUMNS Practical Perl Tools: These Inodes Were Made for Walkin’ DAVID BLANK-EDELMAN VoIP in an Internet Service Provider Network ROBERT HASKINS Asterisk Appliance HEISON CHAK /dev/random ROBERT G. FERRELL BOOK REVIEWS Book Reviews ELIZABETH ZWICKY ET AL. STANDARDS Why Standardize? NICHOLAS M. STOUGHTON USENIX NOTES SAGE Update JANE-ELLEN LONG AND ALVA COUCH CONFERENCES LISA '06: 20th Large Installation System Administration Conference The Advanced Computing Systems Association Upcoming Events 11 TH WORKSHOP ON HOT TOPICS IN OPERATING 3RD WORKSHOP ON STEPS TO REDUCING SYSTEMS (H OT OS XI) UNWANTED TRAFFIC ON THE INTERNET Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with the IEEE Technical Co-located with the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Committee on Operating Systems (TCOS) JUNE 18, 2007, SANTA CLARA , CA , USA MAY 7–9, 2007, SAN DIEGO , CA, USA http://www.usenix.org/sruti07 http://www.usenix.org/hotos07 Paper submissions due: April 17, 2007 5TH ACM/USENIX I NTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE INAUGURAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MOBILE COMPUTING SYSTEMS , A PPLICATIONS , ON DISTRIBUTED EVENT -B ASED SYSTEMS AND SERVICES (M OBI SYS 2007) (DEBS 2007 ) Jointly sponsored by USENIX and ACM SIGMOBILE, in Organized in cooperation with USENIX, the IEEE and IEEE Com - cooperation with ACM SIGOPS puter Society, and ACM (SIGSOFT) JUNE 11–15, 2007, PUERTO RICO JUNE 20–22 , 2007, TORONTO , C ANADA http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2007/ http://www.debs.msrg.utoronto.ca WORKSHOP ON EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTER SCI - THIRD WORKSHOP ON HOT TOPICS IN SYSTEM ENCE (ECS ’07) DEPENDABILITY (HOT DEP ’07 ) Sponsored by ACM SIGARCH and ACM SIGOPS in cooperation Co-sponsored by USENIX with USENIX, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM SIGMETRICS JUNE 26, 2007, EDINBURGH , UK JUNE 13–14, 2007, SAN DIEGO , CA, USA http://hotdep.org/2007 http://www.expcs.org/ 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE E LECTRONIC VOT - THIRD INTERNATIONAL ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ING TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP (EVT ’07 ) CONFERENCE ON VIRTUAL EXECUTION ENVIRON - Co-located with Security '07 MENTS (VEE ’07) AUGUST 6, 2007, BOSTON , MA , USA Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN and ACM SIGOPS in cooperation http://www.usenix.org/evt07 with USENIX Paper submissions due: April 22, 2007 JUNE 13–15, 2007, SAN DIEGO , CA, USA http://vee07.cs.ucsb.edu 16 TH USENIX S ECURITY SYMPOSIUM AUGUST 6–10, 2007, BOSTON , MA , USA SECOND WORKSHOP ON HOT TOPICS IN AUTO - http://www.usenix.org/sec07 NOMIC COMPUTING (HOT AC II ) Sponsored by IEEE in cooperation with USENIX and ACM 2007 L INUX KERNEL DEVELOPERS SUMMIT JUNE 15, 2007, JACKSONVILLE , FL , USA SEPTEMBER 4–6 , 2007, CAMBRIDGE , U.K. http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/HotACII/ 21 ST LARGE INSTALLATION SYSTEM 2007 USENIX A NNUAL TECHNICAL ADMINISTRATION CONFERENCE (LISA ’07 ) CONFERENCE Sponsored by USENIX and SAGE JUNE 17–22, 2007, SANTA CLARA , CA , USA NOVEMBER 11–16 , 2007, DALLAS , TX http://www.usenix.org/usenix07 http://www.usenix.org/lisa07 Extended abstract and paper submissions due: May 14, 2007 For a complete list of all USENIX & USENIX co-sponsored events, see http://www.usenix.org/events. OPINION 2 Musings RI K FARROW SYSADMIN 6 Autonomic Computing: Freedom or Threat? GLEN N FI NK AND DEB FRI NCKE 15 The Secret Lives of Computers Exposed: Flight Data Recorder for Windows contents CHAD VERBOWSKI 21 Lessons Learned from Living with LDAP BRENDAN QU INN 28 Introducing System Engineering to the System Admin JOH N LLOYD 38 Promises, Promises: An Interview with Mark Burgess RI K FARROW 41 Spam and Blogs. Part 1: Spam: A Balancing Act DAN I EL L. APPELMAN 45 All Quiet on the Western Front: A Discussion on the Necessity of Good Reporting THOMAS SLUYTER COLUMNS 52 Practical Perl Tools:These Inodes Were Made for Walkin’ DAVI D BLAN K-EDELMAN 57 VoIP in an Internet Service Provider Network VOL. 3 2 , # 2 , APRIL 2 0 0 7 ROBERT HASKI NS EDITOR ;login: is the official Rik Farrow magazine of the 61 Asterisk Appliance [email protected] USENIX Association. HEISON CHAK MANAGING EDITOR ;login: (ISSN 1044-6397) is 64 /dev/random Jane-Ellen Long published bi-monthly by the ROBERT G. FERRELL [email protected] USENIX Association, 2560 COPY EDITOR Ninth Street, Suite 215, BOOK REVIEWS David Couzens Berkeley, CA 94710. [email protected] $85 of each member’s annual 66 Book Reviews PRODUCTION dues is for an annual sub- ELIZABETH ZWICKY ET AL. Lisa Camp de Avalos scription to ;login:. Subscrip- Casey Henderson tions for nonmembers are STANDARDS $115 per year. TYPESETTER 69 Why Standardize? Star Type Periodicals postage paid at NICHOLAS M. STOUGHTON [email protected] Berkeley, CA, and additional offices. USENIX ASSOCIATION USENIX NOTES 2560 Ninth Street, POSTMASTER: Send address Suite 215, Berkeley, changes to ;login:, 72 SAGE Update California 94710 USENIX Association, JANE-ELLEN LONG AN D ALVA COUCH Phone: (510) 528-8649 2560 Ninth Street, FAX: (510) 548-5738 Suite 215, Berkeley, CONFERENCES http://www.usenix.org CA 94710. http://www.sage.org ©2007 USENIX Association. 74 LISA ’06: 20th Large Installation System USENIX is a registered trade- Administration Conference mark of the USENIX Associa- tion. Many of the designa- tions used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trade- marks. USENIX acknowl- edges all trademarks herein. Where those designations ap- pear in this publication and USENIX is aware of a trade- mark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. I N MY LA ST C O LUMN, I A RG U E D T HAT we need to be willing to change. Change is RIK FARROW inevitable. Just as the seasons change and the climate warms, our computing environ- ment also changes, slowly enough that we sometimes miss noticing the changes until we run smack up against them. musings Let’s consider one change in the world of comput- ing, and see how it relates to a topic that is only [email protected] tangentially related—system administration. One of the hot computing news stories eight years ago (1999) was the race to produce a desktop PC for less than $1000. These computers came with 366MHz Celeron CPUs and no monitor [1]. Fast- forward less than ten years, and you can buy a system with a dual-core, 64 bit, 2-GHz CPU with a 19-inch LCD monitor and one hundred times the storage capacity for under $700. I’d like to ignore discussions of Moore’s Law and cut to the chase. Today’s base system has capabilities gener- ally undreamed of just ten years ago. Running multiple VMs on desktop systems is not only fea- sible but not uncommon. Fertility System administrators have more than high-per- formance desktops in their basket full of changes. I mentioned VMs, which seem to multiply like rabbits in the springtime. VMs encapsulate whole operating systems as well as at least one applica- tion, yet they still must be managed and config- ured, and the data—often just the data—must be properly backed up. So one system today may rep- resent not just a faster system but many multiples of past systems. What is true of desktops is true of servers as well. Servers have become just as fecund, if not more so, than desktops, expanding to fill ever-shrinking machine rooms, even as they release ever greater amounts of “waste” heat. It is not the energy by- product of servers that concerns me here, but their ever-increasing capacity for fruitful labor. Servers too become targets for VMs, so that every last erg of energy will be useful, and not simply add to the entropy of the universe and deplete our fast-declining store of fossil fuels for no good pur- pose. Once upon a time, system administration meant editing configuration files, using your text editor of choice. Today, the hand-editing of files has gone 2 ;LOGIN: VOL. 32, NO. 2 the way of the oxcart, with the rare exception of systems that are just too different to be managed en masse. As system administrators, we are faced with a choice: to become equally obsolete, or to change with the times and become meta-administrators instead. Going Meta One of the joys of being an editor is the ability to spout silly ideas, even attempt to coin words that may help us understand the world we live in. Meta-administration means system administration that has moved beyond the editing of configuration files. The knobs in those files remain there, just as adjustable as ever. What has to change is how we manage to tweak those knobs. It has always been difficult to know how to manage multiple versions of UNIX, where the configuration files may not be the same (think AIX or Mac OS X) and small changes may have large unintended consequences. Now we have multiplied the number of systems we must manage, even as the speed of those servers and desktops has grown expo- nentially. To expect that we can hand-edit configurations, or even launch a script that will zoom across the network making the same changes every- where, is no longer plausible. Meta-administration means that we will be providing guidelines for how the system of systems should behave.