Juggling 30 is well, 10 times as hard?..

It’s actually not as bad as it seems sometimes.  Things usually have a way of working through their cycles regardless of your input.  Obviously if you care about the results you want, there will be participation on your behalf though.

SecuraBit is getting larger, but the cool thing is that we have an amazing selection of people behind it, and that really helps because no single person has to think of everything, run everything.  It’s a group effort, which makes for less pressure on each individual.  We’ll be doing our bi-weekly shows as usual, but also some spontaneous shows whenever we get the itch, such as the show Rob and Anthony ran the other night to get some timely comments in on the whole DNS fiasco that’s gone public.  If you haven’t heard about it, and you’re in some way or another involved with IT, I would highly suggest doing some quick reading on the matter and either patching your stuff, or getting the word out to your staff to do it.

Hak5 is about to start hitting full force again.  I’m looking forward to participating in creating some more technolust for all who are interested to enjoy.  We have some pretty good ideas kicking around so far, one of which involves possibly stomping all over the warranty on my 2008 highlander, and boy do I ever love voiding warranties on things.

I’m torn between staying in the area, and moving a few hours away.  There are some pretty kickass jobs up towards DC that would be VERY rewarding professionally, yet I hate the idea of being so far from the people who make life fun, my friends.  I’ll know more in a few weeks as I edge closer to the time in which I must make an absolute decision.  Either way, I already drive at minimum an hour each way on most weekends, so 3 hours wouldn’t be that much more painful.

I’m pretty happy with what we’ve managed to do with the SecuraBit show so far.  Other than some audio issues and getting too drunk, I think we’re on the right track.  For the next show I plan on changing the format slightly to have a better flow to things.  I think the correct mix of alcohol to show was Ep 2 though.

I do still manage to jump on Tabula Rasa here and there, although my subscription will be ending soon and I won’t be renewing.  Another MMO bites the dust for me, I can never actually keep playing the things for any length of time, and when I do it’s an hour a week if I am lucky.

The job search is on.  I think one of the more important things for me when I look at companies is what sort of management structure is in place for what they are doing, how well communication flows up and down, and whether there’s been any thought put into the actual environment people work in.  I wouldn’t mind getting into something with a lot of R&D-esque work, provided there was a proper setup for it, space/equipment/etc.

Christine will be moving down soon, which should make the summer a lot more fun, and probably less costly on gas as well. :) 

Thursday afternoon I ended up going into the hospital again for more post-tonsillectomy bleeding. It wasn’t as bad as it was on Monday but I still had to go under and they put another stitch in, along with the cauterization. I went from having 0 surgeries in my life to 3, all in the last 2 weeks. Hopefully this last one actually fixed the problem, but from what I am told the bleeding is purely random.

I picked up a couple more flash drives to replace the cheap ones I lost. A Patriot 8GB and a Sandisk 4GB (with U3). I was playing around with the U3 apps on Thursday before I had to abruptly head into the emergency room. I’ll be doing more of that today, and also fooling around with the Windows Server 2008 installation I did on a partition on my T61p. I used the guide at http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ to convert the install into a workstation with the full Aero experience along with wireless network connectivity. I haven’t created a virtual machine using the Hyper-V beta yet, but I did enable it, and will be doing that today.

I’ve been VERY busy, between stuff with Hak5, work, personal life, and playing some games here and there.

First and foremost, I will be getting rid of this blog as it is right now, and putting a new site design online, to better represent myself in a professional manner.

Along with things I do with the Hak5 crew, I am undertaking a new project based upon some work I did this past week. Essentially I want to build my own CentOS 5 kernel to include EFI support for Apple Xserves.

Beyond that, I’m out for now.

It’s been awhile since I have had time to login and post on here.  Hak.5 Live is in full swing and so far I have been on every show.  The most recent one was tonight, and consisted of Darren and Wess deathmatching it up in UT99.  Matt Lestock and I provided the commentary and Jester from the IRC was here holding the mobile camera.

My desktop has been having some issues, and I need to put in the new northbridge cooler that I purchased.  I’ll have a review up as soon as I get everything working again.  There is some thought into perhaps building a quad-core based desktop.

Peace.

I started working Mon-Fri the week before this one and it’s been pretty much what I expected so far.  Lots of challenges, lots of opportunity, and I am very much enjoying it, despite the heavy workload.  I am getting a lot of experience with policy oriented work, lots of paperwork and understanding of the higher level functions that drive how a business is run.  The fun stuff should start soon enough.

Tomorrow evening will mark RC3 of Hak.5 Live, and hopefully this is the last “RC” episode.  I think most of the kinks have been worked out, so this one should be even better than the last show’s improvements over the “trainwreck”.

I tried to sit down and write a couple of times during the week, but I was just too busy.

The Enterprise Fiasco from Hell

The family came down and spent 5 days with me, which was a blast for the most part. We had a horror story worthy of an entirely separate posting, but I will summarize it a bit here: Read more »

As I will be having a lot more hands on with Snort once I assume my new role at work in a couple of weeks, I decided I needed to beef up my library, so I picked up Jay Beale’s Snort Toolkit book off of Amazon.

It starts out explaining what IDS/IPS are and then jumps into Snort 2.6 covering everything from installation to advanced deployment and rules. The entire kitchen sink.

I’ll post a full review of the book once I read it cover to cover.

Family

I will have my family in town for most of next week, which should be relatively fun. They’re definitely going to get a major tour of the area.

CISSP

I had to delay my CISSP exam until the end of July due to an unscheduled trip that came up last week. On the upside I get to cram some more before I drive up to Northern Virginia and take it.

This past Sunday I obtained my SANS GCIH certification. That brings me up to four, with two more left in queue (Linux+ and CISSP). I am proud of my 92/91 test scores for it, and plan on taking it Gold along with my GSEC sometime in the next year or so.

I’m presently working on some slides for a course that the command is going to send new personnel through. I will be teaching for a good couple of hours according to the current plan it appears, which is fine by me. I like teaching.

One interesting thing that popped into my mind a little earlier was regarding the knowledge that we all collectively have and share. It’s a little hard to put into words, but the basic premise is that regardless of our level of intelligence, or individual wisdom and experience, there are certain things that we all know, and strangely they are things that at the same time, we don’t know.

We are the masters of our mind and body, yet introspectively know little about how we actually tick. We know how to think and breathe, but we don’t really understand how these actions are actually performed from within ourselves. Obviously there are theories that cover this, like Freud’s Id, but it’s fun to think about being able to know and do things, and yet not at the same time.

I went awhile without an update. The Ubuntu article before this was actually written about a week ago, but I had not gotten a chance to get on and publish it, and did end up publishing it a little incomplete, which is why I am going to do another update in a few weeks on Ubuntu.

The past two weeks have been pretty busy for me, both professionally and personally. I’ve been studying for Linux+, GCIH, CISSP, and now CEH. The basic plan is to have CEH and GCIH done by the end of next week if I hear back from EC-Council soon enough. I’m also looking at switching to AMU from Strayer because I feel their program will be a better fit for me.

I did a little packet analysis at home the other night for someone in an IRC room I frequent. A sysadmin from a university came in and was having trouble identifying some traffic on his network. A quick check of the pcap file that he sent me revealed it was simply CUPS traffic, whether or not it was authorized was another story since he did not appear to know what CUPS was, but did mention that his network had both Windows and Linux workstations. It was fun in any case.

Among the many projects I have, is a desire to setup another computer dedicated to running some virtualized servers in VMware Server, probably a bunch of Ubuntu LAMP setups from their server cd. The idea would be to go a route similar to how LSO (learnsecurityonline.com) does their capture the flag contests. Perhaps I will email them and ask how they set their boxes up, whether it is in a VM or not.