Presentations

Discover how bootc revolutionizes OS management by packaging entire operating systems as OCI containers—bringing atomic updates, rollbacks, and version control to infrastructure workflows.

Learn how to recognize, recover from, and prevent burnout through real-world experiences and lessons learned from over three decades in the workforce.

Explore the hidden power of network booting—from Intel’s cost-saving innovations to legacy workstation tricks—while uncovering arcane protocols and confusing jargon.

Learn everything about SSL certificates—their function, types, and how they protect your publicly facing websites.

Come join us for our annual July social filled with friends, beer, and food!

Explore the world of AI with World Wide Technology and ETSA, from practical prompting techniques to agentic AI and the data center innovations powering the AI era.

Demystify the cybersecurity standards landscape with a data-driven scorecard comparing frameworks like ISO 27001 and CIS Controls, and discover a practical "Cyber Rosetta Stone" for informed security decisions.

Learn to create tiny JavaScript scripts as browser bookmarks to automate repetitive tasks, from clicking buttons to searching lists, and simplify your non-coder work life.

Explore methodologies for tracking botnet software, victims, operators, and servers while diving into malware analysis and threat hunting techniques to combat the $180 billion annual damage from botnets.

Master the art of communicating technical information to mixed audiences with foundational tools and strategies for tailoring presentations to different expertise levels and navigating complex scenarios.

Join us for our January social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Cyber risk and security are different concepts—learn methods for cyber risk and security practices, and how to develop metrics to better manage your team.

Learn about business logic vulnerabilities in web applications through foundational theories and detailed technical demonstrations of real-world exploits.

Cloud-dependent IoT devices are just bots controlled by a trusted C2—learn how to take control of your smart home with Home Assistant and local control methods.

Taking over a major infrastructure project 1 year overdue with no end in sight—learn how to work backwards to define outcomes and reorganize teams for effective execution.

The xz-utils backdoor was a near miss for global cybersecurity—learn why linking OpenSSH against SystemD and GNU IFUNC made this attack possible.

Join us for our July social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Explore Home Assistant, the gold standard for home automation—learn about its event-driven architecture, local and cloud integrations, and everything you can do with it.

Cost optimization and control in the cloud are important skills—learn the scope of the AWS Free Tier and how to monitor your costs to avoid surprises.

The Internet has changed greatly over 40 years but kept the same address system—learn how to prepare for IPv6 with practical guidance on addressing, applications, and security.

PowerShell has revolutionized automation for system administrators—learn the fundamentals of PowerShell security and best practices to safeguard your scripting environment.

Phishing is the most common form of cyber crime—learn how to set up Gophish to help your users recognize and detect phishing emails before they become another statistic.

Join us for our January social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows allowing you to quickly and easily install and manage software—but it's built on PowerShell, so it's WAY more than just software.

A Linux origin story—from Memphis in the 1990s to ORNL, explore how Linux became more than a computing tool but a journey companion with unlimited opportunities.

HPC security has different challenges than private industry, often prioritizing performance—learn about innovative solutions and security career paths in STEM.

Stop chasing your tail troubleshooting—learn how developing a diagnostic routine like automotive shops can save you countless hours bug hunting.

Panel discussion on LLMs and Deep Learning—explore business use-cases, vendor landscape, building LLM environments, and company policies around ChatGPT.

Join us for our July social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Learn how AWS CDK lets you create infrastructure in your favorite programming language with high-level constructs, sensible defaults, and reusable modules.

Kubernetes is a buzzword, but what does it actually do? Learn the good, the bad, and the complex—and whether your organization needs it.

Layoffs are in the news daily—learn tips and tricks on how to avoid them, deal with survivors guilt, and be prepared when forced to change jobs.

What makes a good resume? Learn how to make powerful first impressions, match your resume to specific jobs, and avoid common mistakes that eliminate candidates.

The great #twittermigration is underway—learn about ActivityPub, the protocol underpinning Mastodon that interconnects the entire social media Fediverse.

Explore the high performance computing center network for a leadership class facility—learn about design challenges, performance limits, and monitoring in supercomputing networks.

When Mystery Guest sees a problem, they take a different approach—learn about the misadventures and hundreds of hours spent setting up a deployment pipeline The Mystery Guest Way™.

Technical and business roles do different work but must work toward the same goals—explore what works, what doesn't, and how to ensure alignment regardless of team differences.

The cloud is a game changer, but when is it better to keep systems in your office? Explore when on-prem makes sense and whether hybrid cloud is permanent or transitional.

What happens when cloud services become unreliable? Learn from Atlassian's incident that permanently deleted customer data and how to strengthen your infrastructure management.

Ever struggled to track which Lambda code version is running? Learn how to use git commit SHA to track code through production in your software release workflow.

Ever wondered how you got this far without knowing IaC? Learn Terraform from the ground up with live demos from resource blocks to modules to dynamic commits.

Discover how sharing a side hobby/project caught someone's attention and turned into a career—an unexpected path to professional success.

Ransomware has evolved into a substantial geo-political and economic threat—learn about unique tactics, threat actors, and strategies to protect your company's assets.

Explore AMD's public CPU and GPU roadmaps as a framework to discuss current datacenter topics including workload comparisons, parts binning, multichip designs, and open source tools.

Three lightning talks covering clouds and IaaS, career paths in IT, and jump-starting an IT career—rapid-fire insights from three experienced professionals.

Ever felt intimidated by a job description? Learn how your future promises more than your past, and why the job you want is the job you deserve.

PowerShell is incredibly versatile—learn how to interact with web APIs, automate website interactions, and create beautiful web-based front-ends for your scripts.

Explore highlights and insights from the 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report—the world's most comprehensive analysis of security threats and breaches across industries.

Explore DevOps anti-patterns that keep organizations from attracting the best engineers and discover true DevOps organizational structures for collaborative work without silos.

Learn from the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group about making your AWS bills smaller and less horrifying.

DevOps and cloud have transformed technology—explore the hard split in the security community and how the "new" security practitioner differs from the "old."

We all know how to setup a website with GoDaddy, but how much do you really know? Learn how to over-engineer it with traditional IT concepts.

Many have redefined community in the last 18 months—is community different now? Let's define our community and move into the future together.

Looking for a job or thinking about it? Join representatives from several IT recruiting firms for tips, insights, and the inside scoop on positioning yourself for success in the current IT job market.

Financial scammers are evolving—learn why invoice scams are so effective and how IT can help prevent companies from losing money to these sophisticated attacks.

Explore the most extensive cyber attack in US history—walk through the chain of events and technical logic of the SolarWinds attack that created backdoors across government and industry.

Stop relying on institutional knowledge—learn quick and simple methods for writing sane documentation that makes life simpler and keeps your team out of padded cells.

Join us for our January social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

From the White House to presidential campaigns—hear the story of the first CISO in presidential campaign history and a career dedicated to cybersecurity in public service.

A high-level tour of blockchains from a sysadmin perspective—explore the tradeoffs, goals, and how these systems compare to traditional storage and execution systems.

Move beyond boring reports and email opens—learn to use data science techniques and statistics to measure what actually matters for security posture and organizational culture.

Being great at customer service is NOT why most entered technical fields—learn why this skill matters, common mistakes to avoid, and how to handle typical people problems.

Peek behind the curtain of containers—understand the fictions needed to create these stages and how different operating systems combine them into compelling reality.

Learn what CMMC is, why the US Department of Defense is implementing it, the assessment process, and what will be assessed from a security standpoint.

In days of pandemic-driven isolation, explore how to define community in new ways and build connection in a post-pandemic world.

Wearing many IT hats? Learn how to overcome time-consuming tasks by taking advantage of scripting and APIs—real examples from a systems administrator's automation journey.

Master both sides of the interview—learn what to do, what not to do, what to look for, and how to avoid common mistakes that technical professionals make.

Buying a domain is easy, but there's so much more—explore the intricacies of Domain Names and DNS, from ccTLDs to fun with TXT records.

Windows Admins aren't left behind in DevOps—learn how Ansible fully supports Microsoft Windows and how to use it to deploy and configure Windows workloads in Azure.

Modern IT operations has changed dramatically—explore what "operations" looks like when anybody can provision anything, and whether "NoOps" really means nobody does operations.

Discover DTrace, a tool for safely debugging live systems with insight into both application and kernel behavior—now available for a very popular "Not Unix" operating system!

What does HPC really mean? Explore the history, reasoning, and technical considerations of High Performance Computing—how it differs from enterprise IT and its future direction.

New head of a one-person ops team for rapid software development? Learn strategies for making the latest versions instantly available while preventing broken code releases.

Avoid "death by Powerpoint"—learn good and bad presentation techniques to make Powerpoint a great tool for supporting your presentations, not replacing them.

Flying solo as the only IT person? Learn how to turn a technological nightmare into a functional environment—real experience, strength, and hope from the one-person IT department trenches.

Join us for our July social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Infrastructure as Code is so 2017—now it's Everything as Code! Learn how to use HashiCorp Terraform to provision AWS resources and manage non-infrastructure services with no manual intervention.

Infrastructure as Code is so 2017—now it's Everything as Code! Learn how to use HashiCorp Terraform to provision AWS resources and manage non-infrastructure services with no manual intervention.

Discover phpIPAM, an open-source web-based IP management application—learn about installation, configuration, and benefits for Enterprise IT from a real-world internship project.

Explore the unique challenges and rewards of running your own IT business—learn from real-world experience about entrepreneurship in the technology sector.

Discover the power of Bash as an interpretive language—learn how builtins can make scripts faster, portable, and more fun, including sending emails over TCP sockets without external commands.

Explore email security from SPF and DKIM basics all the way to DMARC—learn how to protect your domain and identity, complete with live phishing demos.

Join us for our January social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Get back to basics with the new CIS Controls Version 7—learn about the first 6 Basic CIS Controls that form the foundation of effective cybersecurity programs.

Just hired to manage a thousand Macs? Learn the basics of Mac Management, Software Distribution and Security from an expert managing 2500 Macs at ORNL.

Discover how soft skills can matter as much or more than technical expertise—learn from real experience about the difference training in communication and teamwork can make for your career.

Navigate the evolving cyber threat landscape with a multi-layered defense strategy—learn about modern endpoint security solutions beyond traditional antivirus and lessons from real-world implementation.

Explore ORNL's application that consolidates data from multiple management and security systems into a high-confidence repository—building a holistic view of devices in a dynamically changing landscape.

Join us for our July social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Discover how being part of a close community of personal connections provides powerful support for technical professionals—learn why networking and community building is easier than you think.

Learn how Azure Automation enables you to automate creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in your Hybrid Cloud using PowerShell & Python runbooks with secure credential management.

Explore the state of IoT security in 2018—learn about unique security considerations for low-power infrastructure devices and best practices for organizations that leverage them.

Dream of scripts that write code for you? Learn how to use PowerShell metaprogramming to rebuild AD infrastructure, generate T-SQL statements, and create dynamic functions with minimal code.

Discover how GitLab's open-source platform with integrated CI/CD offers the same powerful single user experience to sysadmins as it does to developers—a low-cost, easy-to-use tool for infrastructure management.

Supercharge your IR capabilities by preemptively collecting forensic evidence as baselines—learn actionable techniques for capturing artifacts BEFORE incidents occur and actions to take WHEN they happen.

Master common Linux tools to work efficiently and effectively—build powerful command lines using pipelines, regular expressions, find, grep, awk, and sed to save time and execute complex tasks with ease.

In a world of hurry-up projects and make-it-happen demands, learn to identify and deal with potential risks in your daily IT work—from standing up servers to moving services across the network.

Explore how East Tennessee State University is contributing to the ever-evolving question of how to prepare students and early-career sysadmins for success in the field.

Ansible brings simple, agent-less automation to sysadmins who didn’t sign up to be programmers—making your job easier and more enjoyable.

With PowerShell Core now running on Linux and Mac, join Wesley Kirkland to explore cross-platform automation in the next era of scripting convergence.

Join us for our July social gathering - no formal presentation, just networking and community building!

Hear from co-founder Jesse Trucks about the transformation of ETENN into ETSA—a new beginning born from challenge, change, and community resilience.

As Serverless and NoOps gain traction, this talk explores what these trends mean for careers built on server administration—and whether ops roles still have a future.

Bridge the gap between DevOps and Security with InSpec—bringing compliance into the pipeline so everyone can join the adventure (even Security).

Go beyond basic uptime checks with functional testing using Cucumber and Watir to ensure your systems and applications are truly working as intended.

Think your résumé is flawless? This brutally honest, hands-on session will reveal the hidden flaws keeping you from the interview and show you how to stand out for the right reasons.

Get introduced to PowerShell and explore how its object-oriented design makes it an essential tool for scalable automation in Windows environments.

Discover why Rust is gaining momentum in systems programming and DevOps, offering modern solutions for safety, concurrency, and developer productivity.

Rob Barker shares his experience deploying and supporting SharePoint at ORNL, including a look at roles, responsibilities, and a live SP 2016 dev farm demo.

Join co-founder Jesse Trucks for an open discussion on the past, present, and future of LOPSA-ETENN as the organization faces pivotal decisions.

Gain a practical understanding of SAML, its differences from OAuth, and how ORNL implemented and tested it to enable secure, seamless authentication.

See how ORNL leverages Microsoft SCCM to streamline software deployment and updates in today’s complex enterprise environments.

Dive into the evolving world of DevOps, cloud computing, and the shifting role of system administrators in an industry moving from pets to cattle.

Discover how to engineer trust into your systems and teams—an essential foundation for scaling infrastructure, organizations, and hybrid cloud deployments.

Learn how ORNL navigated the Windows 10 migration journey, tackling deployment challenges and unlocking new opportunities for security, support, and user productivity.

Meet Vagrant and Packer, the dynamic duo from HashiCorp that streamlines and toughens up your VM provisioning and deployment workflow.

Explore the power of Out of Band management tools like DRAC, IPMI, and BMC, and how they enhance automation, monitoring, and root cause analysis.

Dive into the evolving world of DevOps, cloud computing, and the shifting role of system administrators in an industry moving from pets to cattle.

Uncover the surprisingly complex and captivating process behind how key decisions and figures are determined—no global conspiracy required.

Explore the strengths, challenges, and real-world lessons of deploying CFEngine, a lightweight yet powerful configuration management tool.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at the daily work of a Sword & Shield consultant, from audits to ethical hacking and navigating key compliance frameworks.

A retired Cray cabinet at a local hackerspace near Oak Ridge sparked a bold quest to resurrect a supercomputing legend.

Discover how IT Operations teams can boost agility and reduce burnout by applying Kanban principles originally developed by Toyota for lean production.

There's been a lot of talk surrounding the changes RedHat has made in the latest release of it's flagship operating system. This talk will focus on separating fact from FUD by highlighting some of the key differences between RHEL 6.5 and RHEL 7.

This will be a fast-paced, highly interactive discussion to find new ways to describe modern sysadmin jobs. The point is to learn about the most common ideas about our roles, qualifications, and career paths.

In this discussion we will talk about best practices for managing access and permission to files and devices using Active Directory Groups to simplify administration and reduce the headaches caused by access issues for users.

This talk will attempt to detail multiple real world attacks (ones that actually get you owned) in a "lessons learned" format, cutting through the hype and focusing on practical security threats.

We'll spend a short hour tinkering with and learning about Docker, which, unlike most technologies that get this much hype, will actually probably will change your life for the better in the next five years.

ARM, as of 2013, is the most widely used 32-bit instruction set architecture, and is used approximately 95% of all smartphones. After some brief comments on the history ARM and the differences between ARM and x86 architecture, she will talk about current ARM developments and some cool projects.

The creation and maintenance of specific and intentional communities is far more difficult than most people realize. Trucks will talk about how these communities are formed, nurtured, and sustained through time.

Shane will describe his experiences in the design and deployment of Ouroboros, a log management system for a large enterprise environment. Topics include requirements definition, system design, implementation, and monitoring.

Les will be discussing the types of disaster recovery, methods, and techniques; and how they are implemented at UT with lessons learned.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is becoming a common buzzword alongside Agile Methodologies and Cloud Computing. We will discuss at a high level what SDN is and how it differs from traditional networking.

A dive into the minds of your systems and understanding what makes them tick and, more importantly, break. This talk will cover CPU, network, IO, and memory issues that can make a system seem like it's "gone crazy".

Windows Management Instrumentation is the Microsoft implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) standard. Dale will attempt to clear the fog and provide an understanding of WMI that every SA managing remote systems should understand.

How we chose VMware over competing hypervisors, network and storage design, and growth issues to look out for.

Syslinux and Grub2 are two of the most popular bootloaders used by the Linux community. In this talk we will compare feature sets, explore the parts of the bootloader, and look at atypical installations.