Dublin Talks

Turlock

Hi,
After working in IT for the last ages of years I've noticed something that I think especially in the Irish market is completely lacking. There doesn't seem to be any good forum for people working in the industry to share methods of doing things / general information. I personally find when I've to tackle some big project in work e.g. manage a few thousand desktops, I've to search through the web to try and find a good solution. In this example after a load of research and trying various ideas I finally nailed it using Symantec's Ghost application which has saved a huge amount of effort. What's killing me is that a 15 minute chat to someone who'd tackled this before would have cut out all the messing that I had to go through

Most of the google searchs for any administrator tasks just return vendors pedalling theirs good with a big sales pitch of how great each of their products are :rolleyes: Same goes if you get vendors in onsite, their views are completely biased.

What I'm thinking of doing is setting up a meet with four 20 minute talks from random people (hopefully found here), initially it'd be a once off to see how popular it might be but if there's interest then I'd get them organisied every few months.
I'd organise booking a hall and a sort out a website so we can put recordings of the talks up for people to view. There'd be a charge on the door but this would be just to cover costs, so whatever the hall cost plus website hosting, it should be negligable.

What I'm looking for here is feedback to see if people would bother going, if so what's the best location and what would you like to hear about?

I'm also looking for anyone who'd like to show off their skills and give a 20 minute talk infront of a few people about any given subject.

Examples of what I'm thinking (but come up with your own!)

• How people manage their desktop infrastructure for multiple PC's (rebuilding, deploying software, etc)
• A demo of various tools that someone couldn't work without (Ghost,Ms SMS, Easy Recovery pro)
• Something a bit more fun could be practical Examples of how to keep your servers locked down to stop unauthourised access
• How you build and maintain your servers (Install OS, stop x,y,z services, add virus guard, patch to latest level...)

These are just examples so as I say throw up something you'd like to hear about or if you think you've something worth sharing let me know!

And feedback or anyone who thinks they could help at all let me know:D

Cuddlesworth

I don't really mean any offence by this, but every subject you described above are in my opinion relatively basic concepts for a Sys Admin learnt within the first week or two.

For what you want, you need the annoying problems both software and hardware. And the problem lies with the fact that in a small group of people you will most likely never encounter the same problems. A large audience like the net will, but a small group will not.

We did try to kick off a servers forum a while back so that basic questions like imaging, server hardening etc plus the harder stuff could be asked but I don't think it went anywhere.

Tallon

Good idea on paper, but dont think it will work

Turlock

Cheers for the feedback so far There'll never be any offence caused as I'm really just trying to figure out whether this is worth my while organising.

I know what you mean when you say that what I've mentioned above should be complete basics but the fact is that they're not. Alot of the places that I hear about don't have standardised templates in place, if a PC breaks they head down with an XP cd and a load of app cd's and waste their day rebuilding a single PC, when we get the same job done in half an hour.

Last year I was working on a project to COMPLETELY automate rebuilding PC's remotely, although we might consider this ground breaking I'm sure it's been done before.

Same goes for a project I'm currently trying to finish up which is rolling out standardised remote monitoring to 160 Unix servers. The only software which I've fond so far is the one that was bought in previously, it's a bucket of **** but I honestly don't know any others out there, I've come up with all my own standards on how our monitoring should be done, After a year I think it's looking ok but has anyone ever had to monitor Unix before?

How to harden servers would be a great one to see, most IT teams just outsource all this work and you never really see the practical use for keeping your patches up to date. I'm sure it's straight forward but these security vendors blatently just make it out to be a black art that we the mere mortal will never understand:rolleyes:

I don't see this becoming a forum for specific isolated problems, I see it as more of an unbiased review of what good software is out there and what solutions people have come up with for general sys admin that every admin has to face.

I'm sure both of you are quite competant in what you do and even at this I'm sure there's something you'd like to see demonstrated live?

Also just out of interest what would your teams strongest areas be, how do you patch large bunches of servers, how do you address desktop maintenance (Citrix, virtualised software, ghost?)

Again thanks for the feed back I sersiously appreciate it:D