If you within travel distance to New Brunswick, NJ, there is a great conference (LOPSA-East) occurring on Friday May 3 and Saturday May 4th.

Keynoting the conference will be Marcus Ranum, one of pioneers in the firewall, VPN, and IDS systems.

LOPSA-East features technology specific training covering:

• PowerShell
• Windows Clustering
• Puppet
• Chef
• CFEngine
• IPV6 and DNSSEC
• Working with SSDs

If you are trying to drive technical change (introducing configuration management in your environment for example), check out Tom Limoncelli’s Evil Genius 101 class.  Tom is the author of The Practice of System and Network Administration, which is THE book that helped me really become a sysadmin.  Tom also has a class on Advanced Time Management focusing on team efficiency.

David Blank-Edelman will be talking about Building A SysAdmin sandbox.  I’ve been bumping into David at a few conferences and I finally had the chance to hear his keynote at the Cascadia IT Conference this year which was entertaining and thought provoking.  David also has a class on implementing Wordpress for SysAdmin 

And, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight my co-worker Peter Grace’s class on the Care and Feeding of Windows Servers for Unix/Linux Admins.  One thing that’s come out of my classes has been a request for more transitional training.  I’ve had a number of sysadmins who have primarily been in the Unix/Linux world and are now being required to deal with Windows systems as well.  Pete lived that experience, and shares his thoughts on what you need to understand, troubleshoot, and maintain Windows servers in a way that is familiar for Unix/Linux admins.

Find more about the training and talks at LOPSA-East.