A Letter from the Program Co-Chairs

We are very pleased to present you the program for SANE '98, an international conference on System Administration and Networking, focused on UNIX. Going through the program, you will find renowned speakers for many interesting topics. SANE '98 is the place where you will hear, discuss, then put to use the latest research, well-thought-out approaches, and tools and techniques for practical system administration and security.

We find ourselves in exciting times where e.g. the daily e-mail loads rapidly increase (can your ISP's mail transfer agent handle zillions of messages day by day?), where spamming (also called unsolicited commercial email or UCE) burns valuable resources, where security attacks become more sophisticated and where the Open Source movement shows remarkable progress.

The conference kicks off on Wednesday with your opportunity for in-depth study! Choose among three tracks of tutorials, covering performance tuning, security, IPv6 and general UNIX systems administration and led by experienced and respected instructors: Bill Cheswick, Adrian Cockcroft, John van Krieken, Walter Belgers, Hans van de Looy and Evi Nemeth.

During the second and third day of SANE '98 you will (after the provoking keynotes) be able to choose from two tracks of interesting presentations of both refereed papers and invited talks. Hear about experience reports, (b)leading edge developments, the use of open source software, commercial uses of UNIX and so on. You will find a remarkable line-up of speakers, including Wietse Venema, Rob Kolstad, Eric Troan, Phil Zimmermann, Brad Knowles and many, many more.
In the late afternoon of the second day of the conference there will be Birds-of-a-Feather sessions where you can meet colleagues with similar interests and even the widely acclaimed guru's.

Thursday and Friday you can also stroll along the exhibition area, where vendors will demonstrate their latest hardware and software products they hope will help you do your job more efficiently and effectively.

Of course, it is also important that a conference is not only informative, but also enjoyable: meeting other people, sharing views, solutions, even jokes. To enhance the human factor, there will be a social event on Thursday. There will be food, drinks, music. You will find it a most enlightening evening (even more literally than you think!)

SANE '98 is hosted in the Maastricht Exposition and Conference Center, MECC, close to the medieval center of the city of Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands, close to the borders with Belgium and Germany. Maastricht has excellent train connections with Amsterdam-Schiphol airport (and even the International airport Maastricht-Aachen is close), so reaching SANE '98 from all over the world seems to be pretty easy.

Our special thanks go to the secretariat of the NLUUG and the members of the program committee, who have invested so much time and effort in getting the program settled and conference organized. Of course, we also want to thank USENIX and NLnet Foundation for their support.

Please join us. We hope to see you in Maastricht on November 18 through 20 at SANE '98!

Edwin H. Kremer, Program Co-Chair
Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University
(on the right on the picture)

Jan Christiaan van Winkel, Program Co-Chair
AT Computing
(on the left on the picture)

For The SANE '98 Program Committee.