Of course, the real reason we were in Seattle was for business, and the business this time was the USENIX / SAGE LISA '99 conference at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center. These were the highlights of the conference as seen from Chris' eyes.

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We started the week on the sunday with a tutorial by Evan Marcus from Veritas Software on "Designing Resilient Distributed Systems - High Availability". An interesting session, if a little lacking in technical details.

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Marc Staveley from Sun Microsystems gave a great tutorial on monday about "System and Network Performance Tuning". Heavily Solaris oriented, it was very worthwhile.

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The third tutorial Chris attended was "Advanced Solaris System Administration Topics" by Peter Galvin from Corporate Technologies, Inc. This tute also provided a lot of interesting technical tidbits, Solaris oriented of course.

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Wednesday to friday consisted of the conference proper, with many talks, bofs, workshops and other sessions. Chris attended a few talks, including "Enhancements to the Autofs Automounter" by Ricardo Labiaga and "The Advancement of NFS Benchmarking: SFS 2.0" by David Robinson, both of Sun Microsystems.

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On the final day, kc claffy gave a very interesting talk on "State of the Art in Internet Measurement and Data Analysis: Topology, Workload, Performance and Routing Statistics" based on the work being done at CAIDA.

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LISA '99 was attended by about 2000 people. The management of such a large number of people was handled fantastically by the organizors. Have you ever seen 2000 computer geeks eating lunch in one place at one time?!

The conference ended with an amusing gameshow which proved that SysAdmins do have a sense of humour (if a little warped!)...