The panelists will discuss what it means to have a career in system administration, the types of problems faced and how to keep up with changing technologies and ideas. This is your chance to meet and mingle with experts from various sectors working for companies of all sizes.

Panelists include:

  • Damion Alexander, Bard College - Damion Alexander is Manager of Networks and Systems at Bard College. Combined with his past experiences at Vassar College, Decorative Product Source and Marist College he has a background in a variety of databases, email systems, high availability solutions and storage environments.
  • Derek Balling, Answers.com - Derek Balling has progressed on a career-path from helpdesk minion to perl programmer to systems administrator and on to managing one of the finest teams of system administrators. He is presently the Data Center Manager for Answers.com, building an infrastructure to withstand their continuing needs in terms of growth and reliability.
  • Jim Doherty, IBM - Jim Doherty supports High Performance Computing Software for IBM, in the past he has supported AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and Linux for IBM, UUNET, and ANS. Doing systems support for a variety of UNIX like systems he is a Perl fanatic. He has also supported a variety of applications, including databases, webservers, Ad software, e-Commerce software, and many open source applications and standard protocols. He has used Linux or UNIX at home since 1990.
  • John Lesica, Red Hook Central School District - John Lesica is a Microcomputer & Network Support Specialist for the Red Hook Central School District. His job involves management of all district IT resources across 3 schools with 2500 students including: 1000 Win & Mac PCs in a hybrid Active Directory / Open Directory environment, a pilot of 100 mixed iOS mobile devices, Win & Mac servers, wired & wireless networks, PBX’s and video distribution systems. Oh God, about 200 printers as well. The horror… In his spare time he enjoys movies, sushi and wine, often simultaneously.

Lightning Talks

  • Clonezilla and Clonezilla Server - Matthias Johnson
  • Virtualization with Proxmox VE - Al Jachimiak