You’ve been using tools like Puppet and cfengine to corral the complexity on your servers. You revel in the scalability, reliability, and ease of maintenance of doing it The Right Way. You don’t fear the next change because you know the tools will just get it Right. But you still tremble at an “enable” prompt, hoping you remembered all the bits that need to be twiddled, on all the networking devices everywhere. Is your DNS tied on straight – both ways? Is it all *really* being monitored by Nagios? As your network’s complexity increases, so do the errors, inconsistencies, and omissions caused by manual configuration, and brokenness abounds. But wait – there’s a way out of the swamp! Come hear world-renowned networking expert and popular BayLISA speaker Brent Chapman as he reveals methods and tools for automating the mind-numbing task of configuring network devices and services. Among other things, he’ll talk about his cool new open source “Netomata Config Generator”, which addresses some of these problems.

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Brent Chapman is the founder, CEO, and technical lead of Netomata, Inc. He is the coauthor of the highly regarded O’Reilly & Associates book Building Internet Firewalls. He is also the founder of the Firewalls, List-Managers, and etwork-Automation Internet mailing lists, and the creator of the Majordomo mailing list management package. In 2004, Brent was honored with the annual SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award “for outstanding sustained contributions to the community of system administrators”.