Title: Ottawa Area Security Klatch
Location: Microsoft Canada, 100-152 Queen St., Ottawa, ON, Canada
Link out: Click here
Description: Talk #1: DNS Security: The Seven Deadliest Sins

Speaker: Derrick Webber

A vulnerable DNS allows attackers to compromise everything else in the organization: your web sites, servers, SSL, VPNs, even desktops. This short presentation covers the very worst mistakes in the design and operation of the Domain Name Service and how to fix them.
Talk #2: Log-based Intrusion Detection (LIDS) using OSSEC+Splunk

Well, not so much fun…

Tuesday last week, I guess there was a power bump or some such event and my main drive on my mac decided to take a nose dive. I should have expected this, as the power is not exactly the most stable in this neck of the woods. I do have backups, but I was lazy the past 2 months and didn’t do a backup. Time machine isn’t quite suitable (no real control) and I haven’t bothered anything beyond a full dump at intervals and that takes time.

Well, registration for the site doesn’t automatically give you the ability to create articles, just to comment. As I didn’t have to register, I didn’t notice. I have upgraded access for the current members and if it doesn’t work, leave a comment for me.

I have a friend who has decided to get a new computer. The old one just doesn’t seem to be able to handle the load on it.

This is rather amusing, as the “load” is the use of a web browser. I asked and that is pretty much the sum of the computer use. I guess there may be a game of solitaire in there somewhere, but that is supposedly the entire sum of the computer’s existence.

Matt Simmons sent a tweet this morning regarding today’s xkcd comic. His observation was that it would make a large number of sysadmin blogs and I’d have to agree. The rest of his commentary from his blog is also quite apt. I remember having this discussion at the LISA conference multiple times, specifically the hero complex and how dangerous it is to stability and reliability for all the reasons listed.

In our profession (yes, it is one), invisibility is the name of the game. This unfortunately has the side effect of no one really understanding what you do or why they employ you. If you are good, there are no problems, so why do they need you? On the other hand, you get the person who isn’t as experienced yet and who runs around fixing the symptoms rather than the problem and, due to the visible results, gets praised. This leads into the hero complex and it’s a difficult thing to turn around, as everyone likes to know they are doing a good job.