Abe Singer, San Diego Supercomputer Centre's open systems security expert, will lead tutorials at two Australian Unix and open systems user group (AUUG) seminars in Melbourne and Sydney next month.

Singer will discuss logging infrastructure analysis which describes how to build an infrastructure to collect, preserve, and extract useful information from computer operating systems and application logs. Log analysis helps system administrators learn more about what is happening on their systems and networks.

The tutorial is aimed at computer security and system administrators who deal with Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems, and particularly for those managing heterogeneous networks.

Singer is a respected open systems security expert with the Security Technologies Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. By providing operational security support for the Centre, he manages incident response and forensics, and is expanding the SDSC's logging infrastructure. His research interest is in pattern analysis of syslog data for data mining and he is writing a book on log analysis, to be published by O'Reilly and Associates in early 2006.

Singer has served as an expert witness for the US Department of Justice in cases of illegal intrusion and has been named "Investigator of the Year" by the High Tech Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA).

He will also present a paper at the systems administration symposium (Sydney only) entitled "Security Without Firewalls" that challenges the industry-wide preoccupation with firewall security. He can back his claims with real experience in managing networks with thousands of machines.

AUUG's systems administration symposium will also feature speakers from Ac3, the University of NSW, and Sun Microsystems.

The tutorial will be presented at the Australian Institute of Management in North Sydney on Tuesday, July 5, and in Melbourne at the Australian Industry Group on Tuesday July 12. The symposium will be held in Sydney on July 6.

More information on the security events is available online at http://www.auug.org.au/events/2005/sysadmin/