I recently had to do some throughput testing on a firewall using TRex. What should have been a pretty simple process honestly took a little bit of troubleshooting.
Defensible Security Architecture Certified
On Friday, I sat for the GIAC Defensible Security Architecture (GDSA) exam. The certification is brand new and is based on the SANS Sec 530 course. While I passed, it didn’t go the way I had planned
Net Neutrality
Earlier this week, the FCC, “lead” by Ajit Pai voted to repeal its policy of Net Neutrality. The policy was put into place in Feb 2015 after the FCC (at the time under the Obama administration) made the decision to classify ISPs as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. For a lot of people (myself included for a while), this doesn’t make a lot of sense what any of this means so let me try to take a few minutes to explain (at least my understanding of it).
Splunk .conf Day 2 and 3
So when I last left you guys I was attending Splunk .conf. My plan was to write each day but I quickly realized how long the day was when you included 9 hours of conference, plus commuting to and from DC each day so screw that.
Splunk .conf2017 Day 1
So today was day one of Splunk .conf2017. This being my first time at .conf, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The morning started off with the keynote address by the CEO of Splunk, Doug Merritt. A couple of interesting numbers to start with. 7,187 people were regestered to attend .conf this year from 65 countries who traveled a combined 65 million miles to get to Washington DC (enough miles to go to and from the moon over 100 times).
Splunk .conf
Today was the first (well sort of) day of the 8th annual Splunk .conf convention here in DC. .conf covers a range of topics, is three days (well really 2.5) long, has over 200 technical sessions, and includes over 6,000 participants. In short, its a bit of a data science nerd orgie.
Keeping Time Without a Source
A while back I wrote about the importance of using a standardized time source. Keeping accurate time across devices is essential so that you can easily correlate events within logs across the network. But what do you do when you’re operating on a closed network and there is no time source that you can pull from?
Where the Hell am I?
As anyone who has spent more than an hour or two driving around the box at NTC knows, it can be pretty damn easy to get lost in the desert, especially at night under blackout conditions. After 3.5 years there, I got pretty good at knowing my way around the box but during each rotation there was always at least one or two times where I would get turned around and have no idea where the hell I was
The Fight to Keep the Net Neutral
Today Signal-Chief.com is joining the likes of Github, Google, Amazon and host of countless others who are protesting the FCC’s proposal to end its current policy of Net Neutrality.
I Know Nothing….and am proud of it.
I was looking through Nixcraft on Facebook yesterday (if you haven’t been to it before, check it out) and came across the graph. As a warrant officer, we’re supposed to be experts in whatever field it is that we happen to be in. But what exactly does that mean?