Last Saturday and Yesterday (updated)

Several items of business here: I've got gaming night on my calendar for Saturday at 5pm but don't know if that's on (I'm out of town, unfortunately). For those of you wanting in on that triumphant return of the LAN party among us, contact Allan. As for me, I will repeatedly and rudely kill you all next time, particularly if I come up with my own, good monitor to bring.

Last night's regular Wed. meet was terribly inconvenienced by my lack of attendance; I was called in to work. I did notify Rick in case somebody needed something from me...

The previous Saturday meeting was delivered by me and as announced, concerned the 1st Mitnick book. His point (largely the one of his second book as well) is that if we could get the lower-echelon people just a little more paranoid, then we would get much better results than if we sent the IT people to $1000-per-day seminars and then had them send out global best-practices emails that most would ignore.

Next meeting (happening next year, since the 4th Saturday is during Hal-PC's Christmas holidays) the subject is to be announced, but several things are suggesting themselves, like the matter of Open Source Gaming in general. I, a nongamer or even antigamer, have been dragged kicking and screaming into this lately by certain parties, and we may have to delve deeper into the subject (on matters like where to find the game rules, what minimum hardware to run, what might be the best servers to hang out on, etc.).

Gaming Night

Allan's Gaming Night idea seems to be catching on. I will hereby positively review last night's event in spite of having being killed hundreds of times.

In a mix of Unreal Tournament and Urban Terror, about 8 of us saw the difference between bringing your own (good) monitor from home and relying upon old club CRT's to avoid death. In general, the idea was reminiscent of earlier times at Hal-PC; all we had to have to remain at the monitors after official closing time was a responsible party and so things went well. Pizza was ordered, new games were learned, shortcomings of keyboards were discovered and the lab area became more like it was.

Coming up in Linux at Hal-PC on Wednesday will be the regular 6pm SIG meeting (although a few of the board members will be absent but down the hall at a different meeting) and on Saturday at 2pm, I'll be delivering a report on the first Mitnick book as earlier announced, which should bring us up to date on his main published works (in short, about how certain types can BS their way into places they shouldn't be).

Profuse Fantasticalness

The show on Logical Volume Management with Encryption was nice and COMPLICATED, but far more simple than having to slog through it without the effervescent capabilities of Mr. Adams. Russell's presentation is now available in the form of a file under "Presentations" at

ADAMS INFORMATION SERVICES

It's a .pdf; I've tried the download and it's good.

The next HLUG meet at Hal-PC (second Saturday of December) will be from me, and on another Mitnick book. I'm not totally enamoured with his story, but it's interesting and relevant to current computing issues and I... just can't break up a set.

What I mean is this: the book I reviewed a month or two back was his second (The Art Of Intrusion). His first (The Art Of Deception) was a chopped-down version of what he wanted to say - and was heavily "hypotheticaled" since a judge edited the situation. Now, the judge put a time limit on what Mitnick could publicly say about his former activities (terms of probation or something) and when that time expired, Mitnick would be free to give more specifics on what he had done. That will result in Mitnick's forthcoming third book.

In preparation for the release of this third book, I'll review the first book. The Art Of Deception describes in circumspect terms how it's possible for a knowledgeable person to essentially fake their way into organizations (from an electronic perspective). Both technical matters and outright con artistry are involved in this class of methods, mostly the latter.

So when the third book comes out (the second book catalogued others' war stories, not Mitnick's own), we'll be up to speed on the matters for which he gives more specifics than originally allowed to. Bad English, but you understand, I guess.

Also, no meeting on the fourth Saturday, due to the holidays.

Well, hello, Ed

- and all the others who showed up for the presentation on the Waingrow book. I set myself up to be put through the wringer for having had the audacity to do a show on an admin book that was 12 years old. My angle, as stated earlier, was to examine some of the old ways for relevance to our age. I was rightfully challenged on most (such as "find" searches for default passwords, now that password aging is a common OS inclusion). But I had a solid point on the issue of "cleaning up" old home directories of former employees. Waingrow's day saw little wrong with outright removal but in this Sarbanes-Oxley age, I recommended offloading to an archiving machine via removable media. That gives you a "live" copy, plus a backup on your cartridge or thumb drive or whatever... (pats self on back).

And now we forge ahead to Logical Volume Management...

Arg. Darn. Fiddlefaddle.

I didn't make it to the Wed. night meet at Hal-PC due to having had to work a double. So... I was not able to get Carlile to fix one of my busted computers. Again. But next week he will be around, so as to recommend another part for me to break.

Incidentally, if you aren't currently a member of HAL, consider it, due to the option of using HalNET, the only ISP in town offering little content filtering problems (unlike being ComCastrated) and up to THREE (semi-)static IP's if you wish! Such a deal.

(The IP's aren't technically static but only change in very infrequent cases, like a reboot).

Schedule is still current - me this Saturday on the Unix book and two weeks after that Russell on LVM!

Next Show (November 8th, 2pm at Hal-PC, Houston)

Some of you might already be familiar with Mr. Waingrow's book:



I'll do not a review but a survey of this book by Kirk Waingrow, which was perhaps the first of its kind to include a section on the "business of being a system administrator". In other words, it not only offered script code and chron tips but took account of the sysadmin's professional predicament (responsibility creep, scalability and expansion issues, budgeting, etc.).

It's a bit long in the tooth, but the more things change, the more they don't. Some problems have long lives in computing and we'll see which ones have remained from the days of Unix Hints And Hack's first editions to now.

Yeah Baby

Mr. Lewallen's program was fantastic. He detailed a testing environment for us that kept his government clients from having to test alpha stuff on production systems.

We should have been shot.

But we weren't. We were Entertained and Illuminated...!!!!!! And provided with links within vmware.com for future reference.

Stay tuned for future stupendousness from HLUG.