The System Administrators Guild of Australia

Welcome to the official website of the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU). SAGE-AU was formed to advance the profession of System Administration by raising awareness of the need for System Administrators, and educating System Administrators in technical as well as professional issues.

SAGE-AU concerned with conclusions drawn in ACMA Internet Filtering Study

The System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) has raised strong concerns regarding a report issued on 28 July 2008 by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) entitled, "Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering".

The artificial conditions of the testing methodology, together with unacceptable limitations in the test's terms of reference, combine to reduce the usefulness of the report for real-world conditions. Read on...

The Australian System Administrators' Conference 2008

The sixteenth annual Australian System Administrators' conference (SAGE-AU 2008) was held in Adelaide, at the Holiday Inn Monday 11 - Friday 15th of August 2008.
Visit our conference website for more information.

This year, we had two special international guests: Tom Limoncelli and Elizabeth Zwicky.

Tom Limoncelli

Tom is an internationally recognized author and speaker. His books include the (recently released) 2nd edition of "The Practice of System and Network Administration" (Addison-Wesley), "Time Management for System Administrators" (O'Reilly) and "The Complete April Fools RFCs" (Peer-To-Peer). Tom works at Google's NYC office and previously worked for large and small companies including Bell Labs and Cibernet. He is the joint recipient of USENIX/SAGE's 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He blogs at www.EverythingSysadmin.com.

Elizabeth Zwicky

Elizabeth has accumulated experience, if not wisdom, in more than 20 years in and around system administration. She has worked as a system administrator in education, government, and corporate environments, has worked in three countries and two languages, and has been an author, educator, developer, manager, system designer, and consultant. Her smallest employer had under 10 employees, and her largest over 10,000. She is a founding member of SAGE-AU.

Conference program

The first three days of the conference consisted of our training program, which was made up of a series of half and full day presentations on a variety of subjects, and presented by both locally and internationally recognised experts in the field of System Administration.

The conference technical program then ran on the last two days, made up of a number of shorter (30 to 60 minutes each) presentations covering topics from basic time and task management principles to overviews of new/interesting technologies and their use within the practice of system administration.

Our Annual General Meeting and Conference Dinner was also held on Thursday, with the dinner being held in the National Wine Centre, and providing attendees with a great opportunity to network with their peers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere.

Conference close

The conference closed once again with Simon Hackett's "State of the Broadband Nation" presentation, in which Simon presented his take on the current state of broadband and Internet connectivity in Australia, as well as giving some insight into what he believes lies ahead for us in this area - a particularly interesting topic given the Federal Government's current stance on broadband Internet access in Australia.