It's hard to believe it's already Tuesday. The conference has certainly kept me very busy, and there have been numerous topics on which I've meant to write, only to find myself exhausted and in desperate need of sleep before I found the chance to do anything about it.
Sunday's Perl class focussed on a topic that seems really popular among a certain group of hardcore Perl programmers. They all seem to really enjoy hacking on the language itself. (Look at modules like Coy.pm, which outputs error messages as haiku, or Language::l33t, a l33t-speak interpreter.) We spent a fair bit of time talking about accessing the various symbol tables and namespaces and that sort of thing. It was actually quite interesting, though I don't know how useful it'll ever be for me.
Monday was divided between two classes. I spent the morning in "The Latest Hacking Tools and Defenses", an interesting class that focused largely on web vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL injection, and code injection. The afternoon session was "Documentation Techniques for Sysadmins", a class that I felt had the potential to really be applicable to TIG.
The hacking class was interesting because a lot has changed since I last paid close attention to the security scene. A few older players like Nessus have gone closed-source, triggering forks of the previously open code, such as OpenVAS. There are a number of new packages out there that look either interesting or disturbing, depending on your perspective. BiDiBLAH is a good example of such a tool. It combines the scanning capabilities of Nmap with the probing of Nessus and the exploit framework of Metasploit. Damn. We also covered Bluetooth vulnerabilities and scanners, as well as some really far out stuff like the use of keystroke audio analysis to "sniff" passwords simply by recording the sound of somebody typing. (OK, it's more complex than that, using statistics and neural nets to learn what each key sounds like, but it has been accomplished, and the accuracy is impressive.)
The documentation class was interesting as well. It covered things that I have always had some sense of, but never quite though out in depth, such as document lifecycles and presentation issues. It was pretty much all stuff that I'd learned in the technical writing class I had to take at Northeastern, if not even sooner, but it's good to refresh that memory, and hopefully I'll be able to take something back to work from that class.
One of the topics we discussed was the use of wikis to organize, manage, and present documentation. The topic was interesting enough that we decided we'd have a BoF later that night where we could discuss wikis in further detail. About 40 people showed up for over an hour and a half. That sort of event is what makes LISA so valuable. The discussion was active for the whole time, and we got to share loads experience with wikis in various different environments, used by different sorts of people, solving different sort of problems. We discussed the various social barriers that sometimes get in the way of wiki adoption, different ways to use wikis, and the technical details, features, and drawbacks of various wiki implementations. I was somewhat surprised to find that roughly half the people were using TWiki, which powers the TIG web site, while the rest were a mix of Confluence, MediaWiki, DocuWiki, and Moin Moin. I had never even heard of Confluence, which is apparently a commercial product, and was somewhat surprised to see relatively few MediaWiki users given its popularity within the lab.
I spent today in David Blank-Edelman's "Over the Edge System Administration" classes. They were fun, with a focus on creative problem solving. Examples include the now famous lpd jukebox (which I can't seem to find using google... am I retarded, or just over tired?) and the use of IRC or various IM services as automated alert channels.
Tomorrow begins the technical sessions and invited talks, which I'm really looking forward to. I need to sit down with the schedule and try to work out which ones I can go to. It sucks when multiple really interesting sounding sessions overlap.
I've already got a number of interesting ideas to take home. I just hope I get them all written down and organized so I remember them...
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