League of Professional System Administrators

Registration for the 24th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA 2010) is now open, and LOPSA members get an additional $45 discount (contact LOPSA for details).

LOPSA is once again working with the Ohio LinuxFest to offer OLFU: classes for system administrators, in Columbus Ohio, September 25th 2009.

Did you know that nearly 50% of the US lives within 500 miles of Columbus, Ohio? Me neither! Maybe it's even true. But either way you should consider dragging yourself to scenic downtown Columbus for the Ohio LinuxFest.

LOPSA is offering 6 half-day classes: the return of popular classes such as Linux Black Magic & Troubleshooting, Disaster Recovery (Will You SURVIVE?), and Fighting Spam with Open-Source Tools, as well as Advanced Security, Introduction to LDAP, and Linux Terminal Server Project Administration.

$350 gets you admission to two classes of your choice (including lunch), attendance at the main conference on Saturday (and lunch again!), a t-shirt, tickets to join the pre- and after-parties, and other fun trinkets.

More information on OLFU is available at http://www.ohiollinux.org/olfu.html.

Register for OLF: http://www.ohiolinux.org/register.…. Registration for the (Saturday) conference itself is FREE! So bring your friends, your enemies, your significant others, your potted plants - but please, the only animals allowed are service animals and humans. Sorry!

See you there!

p.s. the hotel block is running out soon! Rooms are $99/night including FREE parking (ignore what the web page tells you) and breakfast. Hurry hurry hurry!

The LOPSA Board elections are now open! Go here for candidate statements and here to vote.

On Friday, February 20th, LOPSA and SCaLE will offer four half-day classes for system administrators of all skill and experience levels. The tutorials will give SCaLE attendees a more intense and personal learning experience.

The instructors, Jesse Trucks (LOPSA Board of Directors) and Chris St. Pierre (Unix Systems Administrator at Nebraska Wesleyan University), are veteran LOPSA instructors who bring ample experience in the classroom and the server room to their classes.

Jesse Trucks will be teaching on Virtualized Storage and Disaster Recovery, while Chris St. Pierre will teach Documentation for Systems Administrators and Fedora Directory Server.

A full class schedule can be found at http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/…

The SCaLE University Pass costs $300, and includes a full day of training and full access to all three days of SCaLE.

SCaLE will run from the 20th until Sunday, February 22nd. To register for SCaLE, visit https://socallinuxexpo.org/reg7/

Every two years LOPSA elects the board of directors. Any paid member of LOPSA is eligible to vote -- and to run for director.

The LOPSA Leadership Committee, of which I am chair, is responsible for not only running the elections but developing the slate of candidates. We look for people who not only have the drive and willingness to help LOPSA grow, but have the time and energy. To be honest, LOPSA board members work their tails off, but they have all said how rewarding they find the effort.

If you are a LOPSA member, and think you might be interested in running for the LOPSA board, please get in touch with me at mizmoose at gmail.com. We'll be announcing our schedule soon.


Elections will be held in June.

It's that time of year again: LISA 2008 registration is open.

The following announcement went out to LOPSA members today:

As you may have heard, we have been made a party to litigation between Association Headquarters (AH) and USENIX. In September 2006, AH filed a breach of contract suit against USENIX, for AH's loss of revenue as a result of the contract between AH and USENIX. We currently use the services of AH for the staffing needs of LOPSA.

Recall that USENIX has planned to allow SAGE to spinoff as its own entity. Various members of that SAGE Board created LOPSA as an independent entity from both USENIX and SAGE. When we created that entity, we negotiated a new deal with AH which included substantial savings to LOPSA as well as different services. AH's breach of contract claim stems from the original agreement with USENIX, not with the agreement with LOPSA.

LOPSA had not been involved in the litigation until last month, when USENIX brought a Third-Party action against LOPSA bringing us into the litigation. USENIX has claims against us for contribution and indemnity. Our legal counsel has indicated that this means, in laymen's terms, that should a judgment be rendered in favor of AH, USENIX would seek monies from LOPSA to pay for the judgment. We clearly disagree with USENIX's claims and will defend this claim.

Our attorneys have spoken with the attorneys handling the case for AH, who have indicated that they are not seeking any damages against LOPSA and simply have no claim against LOPSA. AH would have no reason to sue LOPSA, a client in good standing, and in no way has taken hostile action against LOPSA. AH is not suing LOPSA, even though court documents list AH as plaintiff and LOPSA as a third-party defendant.

We are hopeful that USENIX will fail in its suit against LOPSA. Unfortunately, it will still be expensive to respond, especially as our general liability insurance company has declined to accept the claim on our behalf.

LOPSA has taken the initial steps to respond, as has been documented in our public minutes. At this stage, the Board is weighing the strategies in defending the suit. Our fundamental cause for concern and worry is that this action may threaten the progress, or even the existence, of LOPSA. We simply cannot afford the legal fees that USENIX can in this matter. We have been advised that the legal fees can be expensive and the litigation process is very slow. This matter inevitably will draw resources away from our mission.

Some of our choices ahead will likely be between unsavory alternatives. We're weighing every decision against what best will fulfill our mission and duty to our members, which remains our first priority. Due to the nature of litigation, we will be unable to discuss many of the details of the litigation. But note that we will endeavor, as always, to be as transparent as possible.

For now, the Board has appointed a committee of our officers — Trey Harris, Philip Kizer, and Stephen Potter — to handle the legal proceedings and day to day concerns. Our goal is to make sure multiple people can work together and cross-check each other, but also not permit this matter to consume the attention of the entire Board to the exclusion of the rest of our programs and mission. We had hoped this episode was entirely behind us, but at the very least we can ensure that our mission is being pursued while we deal with it.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact the Board. We may not be able to answer every question, but we'll do so to the extent we can. Thank you for your continued support of LOPSA.

— The LOPSA Board of Directors

This announcement is also available on LOPSA's website and the court documents are available here (PDF).

As previously announced, the #lopsa IRC channel has moved from its old home on Cognet/Byxnet to its new home on freenode. Details and instructions for setting up your freenode environment are at http://lopsa.org/IRCmigration.

Please note: If you used to connect to any server other than irc.lopsa.org directly, you'll need to change your client connection to either irc.lopsa.org or to irc.freenode.net (where irc.lopsa.org points as old DNS caches expire).

The official announcement came out today, but long story short, the LOPSA IRC channel, #lopsa, is moving from Cognet/Byxnet to Freenode on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, beginning at 11am (US) Eastern time.

The United States Internal Revenue Service has confirmed and approved the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) as a §501(c)3 entity, meaning LOPSA can accept charitable donations. For more on what this means, see the IRS website and Wikipedia.