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Archive for December, 2009

Seccubus.com website is online…

December 13th, 2009 No comments
The new Seccubus logo

The new Seccubus logo

Last month our coworker Frank Breedijk rechristened his vulnerability management tool Seccubus. Today he has launched his new website Seccubus.com

With the new website author Frank also unveiled the new logo for Seccubus drawn bij Schuberg Philis collegue Robert Heuvel.

Lisa 2009 #3

December 4th, 2009 No comments

Most of the information about lisa09 is already mentioned by my colleagues Adam and Sjoerd in lisa-2009 and lisa09-02.

I want to mention some training sessions I attanted

  • Dtrace course by Jim Mauro and a lot of extra information came from Richard Elling and 1 other Sun employee. Together they provided a lot of real world examples on how to use Dtrace. And nice details about how it works in the kernel. Everyone knows Dtrace from the youtube movie by Brendan Gregg more info on his blog. So now I should enable all Dtrace probes and start screaming in the datacentre and see if I was loud enough :)YouTube Preview Image
  • ZFS by Richard Elling, I never had time to look into this FileSystem before, so a great way to learn all about it in one day. One of the nice features is the buffering of disk-writes which gives a kind of breathing or heartbeat towards the disks. And with ZFS you can buffer writes to a solid-state drive before sending it to the “slower” disks.
  • Jquery given by Tobias Oetiker,an easy way to build spiffy webpages that look the same on each browser. Like this demo . Got a really great explanation about the problem with the scope of variables in Javascript especcially because JQeury uses the “$” as a variable and how to get around it using a function. And there is a nice page with a lot of Jquery plugin material http://plugins.jquery.com.
  • Nagios Advanced Topics by Sellens , I discovered that the feature I am still missing in Nagios isn’t build yet , having two nagios hosts loadbalance the load and keeping each other in sync. We already build our own solution of nagios hosts keeping eachother in sync only the loadbalancing part needs some work maybe I need to spend some time on reading the nagios mailinglist.

The Sun guys were really pushing or should I say selling opensolaris , well they were giving away a lot of opensolaris dvd’s and they mentioned the website http://www.solarisinternals.com/ a lot. Really cool to see all the buzz about an open system.
In the hotel I had breakfast with Mike Ciavarella, we spoke about his training session about documentation and how it would secure your job and even helps getting a better position.

Attended a lot of BOF Session , one of them was with D.Brent Chapman from Netomata. About the automation of network Configuration and Management it brought back a lot of memories of the times I was managing systems that configure and monitor ADSL modems. People just turn of their modem and I needed to figure out if this was an outage or a Human action, that was fun.

Sjoerd already mentioned the national democratic institute, what really stayed in my mind is that everybody is trying to encrypt as much as possible, and think about social engineering to get information. The people at ndi need to work different, they make sure never to encrypt stuff and be as open to the world to get their Institute accepted by getting trust from governments and groups in the difficult areas where they work. Every time when I use GPG to keep others from reading my data I think about the guy we met at Lisa09.

During a Google-Wave sponsored drink met some people from Research in Motion (RIM) that manage the linux servers that make all connections from the RIM towards google , msn etc possible.

So had a lot of fun at #lisa09 , and nice weather too.

Categories: Conferences, Lisa Tags: , ,

LISA09 #2

December 1st, 2009 No comments

LISA is for sure is sort of event where every geek will find himself like home. It is really good feeling to be surrounded by people who know stuff and enjoy technology everyday.

So LISA09 took place between 1 and 6th of November, 2009 in lovely Baltimore, MD. I chose to follow more the tutorials (trainings) path. Got five tutorials – one bad, two medium and two nice ones. The problem with tutorials is that sometimes they are very basic which I really didn’t expect to be a case on such event.

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Categories: Conferences, Internet, Lisa, Unix Tags: