Lafayette College Information Technology Services is hosting a gathering of higher education network engineers and systems administrators on June 1st and 2nd to discuss and solve current technical problems at our respective institutions.

In the past we’ve all attended conferences and sat through presentations that leave us unsatisfied due to the lack of technical detail.  When we’ve tried to speak with representatives from some school that is doing something innovative or interesting, we often get the response, “Oh, you’d need to talk to my engineer.”

Dubbed Expert Knob Twiddlers, the goal of this event is for engineers and systems administrators to present technical challenges they face and have the other attendees provide the answers.  Everyone participates.  All attendees should go home with solutions to, or at least more insight into, their technical problems.

For example, suppose you recently turned up a second Internet feed, but you’re dissatisfied with static routing and don’t know how to configure BGP.  Or maybe you’re having trouble developing a robust identity management system that will enable you to join a Shibboleth federation.  Or you need advice on best practices in tuning your Nagios monitoring system and integrating it with Cacti.  These are the types of problems we’ll look to solve, or at the very least, brainstorm together.

If you’re interested in attending, please email knob-admin [at] lafayette [dot] edu with some technical problems with which you are struggling.  Also, please include your areas of expertise and interest.  The EKT program committee will find intersections between the set of problems presented and set of expertise of those interested in attending and put together a program based on the results.

Submissions will be accepted until  Friday, April 17th, and an agenda will be posted by Friday, May 1st.