Improved Smartphone Application for Remote Access by Network Administrators

Modern computing systems are complex and difficult to administer, making them more prone to system administration faults. Faults can occur simply due to mistakes in the process of administering a complex system. These mistakes can make the system insecure or unavailable. Faults can also occur due to a malicious act of the system administrator. Systems provide little protection against system administrators who install a backdoor or otherwise hide their actions. To prevent these types of system administration faults, we created ISE-T (I See Everything Twice), a system that applies the two-person control model to system administration. ISE-T requires two separate system administrators to perform each administration task. ISE-T then compares the results of the two administrators' actions for equivalence. ISE-T only applies the results of the actions to the real system if they are equivalent. This provides a higher level of assurance that administration tasks are completed in a manner that will not introduce faults into the system. While the two-person control model is expensive, it is a natural fit for many financial, government, and military systems that require higher levels of assurance. We implemented a prototype ISE-T system for Linux using virtual machines and a unioning file system. Using this system, we conducted a real user study to test its ability to capture changes performed by seperate system administrators and compare them for equivalence. Our results show that ISE-T is effective at determining equivalence for many common administration tasks, even when administrators perform those tasks in different ways.

Cloud services that provide virtualized computational clusters present a dichotomy of systems management challenges, as the virtual clusters may be owned and administered by one entity, while the underlying physical fabric may belong to a different entity. On the physical fabric, scalable tools that ldquopushrdquo configuration changes and software updates to the compute nodes are effective, since the physical system administrators have complete system access. However, virtual clusters executing atop federated Grid sites may not be directly reachable for management purposes, as network or policy limitations may prevent unsolicited connections to virtual compute nodes. For these systems, a distributed middleware solution could permit the compute nodes to ldquopullrdquo updates from a centralized server, thereby permitting the management of virtual compute nodes that are inaccessible to the system administrator. This paper compares both models of system administration and describes emerging software utilities for managing both the physical fabric and the virtual clusters.

The ever-changing nature of IT demands a changing role for both system administrators and database administrators. Being system admin personnel will require more knowledge, broader skillset, and more tools on hand to be able to adapt to the cloud computing culture. The cloud computing has changed the way for IT Operations. The future system administrator will thus have to help configure, implement and manage the applications that run on cloud platforms. The same thing happens to database administrators as well. The role of DBAs will shift to cloud DBAs, and adding to their responsibilities will manage the cloud based database and NoSQL databases in serverless settings. Cloud DBAs will have to deal with data protection and play a key role in providing data compatibility across the cloud platforms and maybe migrating data storage from one cloud service provider to another. In short DBAs role moved from tactical infrastructure caretakers towards a more strategic role of being an advisor for other developers. In this poster, we describe changes of roles of system administrators and database administrators in the era of cloud computing.

Chapter IX focuses on the role of system administration as an IT-profession and system administrator as a person who does the administrative (managerial) activites on servers and server operating systems. If server goes down for any reason or server operating system crashes, in most cases it is up to this person to “recover” the server from the bad situation and make sure that business – critical applications continue to run and provide services to end users. HP-UX as a server operating system platform is selected in order to demonstrate most commonly used techniques and features that may lead to higher levels of system availability.

Systems administration is a common career path for tertiary computing students, but it is difficult to take classes in the topic, especially at more advanced levels. Most of the classes that are available focus on specific tools and practices, often tied to particular vendors' systems. A set of topics around which to build a systems administration curriculum has not been clearly identified. At Otago Polytechnic we have developed a class that builds the specific knowledge and skills required to produce work-ready Systems Administrators.. The staff organised the class around a simulated workplace model rather than a more traditional lecture/lab model. This model emphasises having students perform tasks that are, as nearly as possible, identical to the tasks that they will eventually perform in a workplace. While the first instance of the class was generally successful, some issues, especially with assessment, were noted.

Over the Virtual Top. Digital Service Value Chain Disintermediation Implications for Hybrid Heterogeneous Network Regulation

: Today's technology base is becoming increasingly large and complex. Networks are growing, and applications are being migrated from centralized systems to client-server environments. In addition, organizations are connecting their networks to those of other organizations and to the Internet at a rapid rate Network 96. All of this added complexity presents a challenge to administrators who are responsible for managing these systems. The growth in the number of networked systems has accelerated demand for qualified administrators, and the increasing complexity of networked systems has raised the threshold of expertise required of these administrators. At the time of the birth of the Internet, systems administrators were typically well-versed and experienced in the technology they were charged to manage. There is ample evidence that the average level of expertise demonstrated by the fast-growing number of systems administrators today is considerably lower, and insufficient to allow them to configure and manage their complex systems in a survivable manner. This lack of adequate expertise is seen daily at the CERT(tradename) Coordination Center. The continuing growth in the number of courses, seminars, and conferences directed at managing technology in the Internet environment reflects heavy demand for training and development in network systems administration skills. At the same time, a quick look at popular press publications reveals that many organizations now provide business products and services over the Internet, and that they are becoming increasingly concerned about the security and reliability of their technology. All these observations illustrate a dangerous gap between the need to secure systems and the supply of individuals capable of implementing adequately secure information technology environments.

User‐level operating system transactions allow system administrators and ordinary users to perform a sequence of file operations and then commit them as a group, or abort them without leaving any trace behind. Such a facility can aid many system administration and software development tasks. The snapshot isolation concurrency control mechanism allows transactions to be implemented without locking individual system calls; conflicts are detected when the transaction is ready to commit. Along these lines we have implemented a user‐space transaction monitor that is based on ZFS snapshots and a file system event monitor. Transactions are committed through a robust and efficient algorithm that merges the operations performed on a file system's clone back to its parent. Both the performance impact and the implementation cost of the transaction monitor we describe are fairly small. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite a slow pace, Nuclear Power is undergoing a global renaissance. Small modular reactors (SMR) and microreactors are in various design and commissioning phases. These are designed to be built in factories and installed onsite, providing a means to rapidly deploy nuclear power while controlling for uncertain capital expenditures and cost overruns. The OECD (2016) is projecting that by 2035 we could have 21 GWe of new nuclear electricity capacity installed globally with 3.5 GWe in the United States.Simultaneously, renewables such as wind and solar are growing exponentially and battery electric vehicles are gaining traction in the energy sector. If vehicles transition to battery electric vehicles (BEV) our electricity consumption would roughly double. The energy grid as a whole is evolving as numerous point source generators come online and smarter grids enable better resource management and dynamic pricing. The result will be a distributed energy market where individuals and utilities both buy and sell resources in a fast-paced, brokered market. Or perhaps more accurately, autonomous agents will buy and sell resources on behalf of utilities, individuals, and intermediaries.The pertinent question then becomes how do we have human oversight of resources to maintain safe, secure, and reliable operation?A reasonable approach is to examine assets as three general classes. The first class comprises commodity consumer-oriented devices such as home solar, battery storage, and BEVs represented distributed nano-scale devices. The capital expenditures of any single device or installation are relatively small, and the potential consequences of a single installation failing are relatively small. Minimal regulatory oversight is required for individual installations. The second class comprises distributed micro-scale devices like nuclear micro-reactors and small modular reactors. These will have substantial automation compared to existing Generation II reactors. They could incorporate remote operations and monitoring at the fleet scale, with the ability to shut down systems locally. Disruptions would have costly impacts to an organization or municipality.Lastly, at the other end of the spectrum are high-value assets with the potential for low-probability high consequence events. These would include gigawatt-scale nuclear/solar/hydro plants that might also have flexible operations to support onsite data centers, hydrogen production, or cryptomining. These assets would be high-value targets and distruptions would have the potential for severe economic, environmental, and functional consequences at large geographic scales. When we start thinking about human oversight, participation, and decision making, the first class is consumer-oriented. Consumers will be enabled to become prosumers (producers and consumers) sell excess or optimize energy usage and storage based on dynamic rates.The third class of high-value assets resembles how critical infrastructure is managed today. These high-value assets are conservative and slow to evolve through the adoption of automation and operational changes. They would still need to maintain high degrees of human vigilance compared to the other systems for regulatory adherence and maintaining cyber-physical security and reliability.The second class still has high regulatory requirements. However, it is a bit of a clean slate to conceptualize operations and monitoring from first principles with high levels of automation and mixed-initiative monitoring and control (AI/human teaming). In this paper we explore those possibilities.New SMR and microreactors incorporate passive safety and modern engineering modeling and analysis that wasn't available during the design and commisioning of Generation II reactors. The result is reactors that have significantly reduced risks of catastrophic melt-down events like Fukishima. This dramatically expands the possibilities for how they can be monitored and controlled. When we ponder what modern nuclear control rooms should look like we envision multiple operators monitoring dozens of screens to maintain situational awareness and readiness to respond at a moments notice. However, this is unlikely and perhaps even undersired. Once reactors, in particular microreactors, have the demonstrated capability of operating hands-free with minimal oversight it becomes misguided to install humans to maintain constant vigilance (e.g. Level 4 to 5 self-driving). The key performance indicator should be system performance not situational awareness. Having "operators" permanently installed in a control room when no action is required 99.9% of the time becomes a superficial level of vigilance. Take system administration as a corollary. System administrator's primary responsibility is to maintain the availability of infrastructure, but their primary tasking is not to sit idly by and actively monitor.

In system administration, the languages of choice for solving automation tasks are scripting languages, owing to their flexibility, extensive library support and quick development cycle. Functional programming is more likely to be found in software development teams and the academic world.This separation means that system administrators cannot use the most effective tool for a given problem; in an ideal world, we should be able to mix and match different languages, based on the problem at hand.This experience report details our initial introduction and use of Haskell in a mature, medium size project implemented in Python. We also analyse the interaction between the two languages, and show how Haskell has excelled at solving a particular type of real-world problems

Trusted detection of ransomware in a private cloud using machine learning methods leveraging meta-features from volatile memory

MDSplus remote data access over high latency connections

This paper describes the laboratory projects developed in a system and network administration course in an Applied Computer Science Master's program. When teaching such a course, one often faces th...

This handbook is for technical staff members charged with administering and securing information systems and networks. It targets a critical training gap in the fields of information security, computer forensics, and incident response: performing basic forensic data collection. The first module describes cyber laws and their impact on incident response. The second module builds understanding of file systems and outlines a best practice methodology for creating a trusted first responder tool kit for investigating potential incidents. The third module reviews some best practices, techniques, and tools for collecting volatile data from live Windows and Linux systems. It also explains the importance of collecting volatile data before it is lost or changed. The fourth module reviews techniques for capturing persistent data in a forensically sound manner and describes the location of common persistent data types. Each module ends with a summary and a set of review questions to help clarify understanding. This handbook was developed as part of a larger project. The incorporated slides are from the five day hands-on course Forensics Guide to Incident Response for Technical Staff developed at the SEI. The focus is on providing system and network administrators with methodologies, tools, and procedures for applying fundamental computer forensics when collecting data on both a live and a powered off machine. A live machine is a machine that is currently running and could be connected to the network. The target audience includes system and network administrators, law enforcement, and any information security practitioners who may find themselves in the role of first responder. The handbook should help the target audience to * understand the essential laws that govern their actions * understand key data types residing on live machines * evaluate and create a trusted set of tools for the collection of data * collect, preserve, and protect data from live and powered off machines * learn methodologies for collecting information that are forensically sound (i.e., able to withstand the scrutiny of the courts)

Juniper® Networks Secure Access SSL VPN Configuration Guide