LISA05 Thursday: Cost models and wiretaps

I went to the midday configuration management theory session as well as to Matt Blaze’s plenary. (I missed the invited talks as I lost track of time during a late lunch.)

The talk I enjoyed out of the theory session was by Alva Couch and colleagues from Tufts, who presented steps towards a cost model for system management. They worked through over a year’s worth of RT logs from their site, working out the background effects of holidays and weekends, and then being able to model alternate staffing choices and their impact on response time. Alva also made some provcative statements about best practices; with respect to a time-sharing/interactive user dominated site, these statements likely hold. (Less applicable to server farms, though.) It was pleasant to see some math; I plan to work through this paper carefully to see what might be extracted.

Matt Blaze gave an energetic talk about his team’s recent work on wiretap technology and how the various implementations can be evaded or confused. There were complimentary copies of the issue of IEEE Privacy and Security that contained the full article, which was a nice touch.

[ T: LISA05 ]