The past week

I've just been working with Andy on getting a Snorby and/or Backtrack install up and running on a server.  It's actually kind of funny.  Servers are supposed to be so reliable and well-engineered and linux is supposed to be an exceptionally good fit for servers but we're having the worst luck with ethernet drivers!  We've tried 2 different servers and 2 different distro's with the same result!  Hi-larious.

Working hard

Today got off to a slow start.  First, I had to wait for someone to give me an assignment.  Then I had to wait for Tracy to set up an email account for me.  Then Rick arrived.  He's always trouble.  I spent the rest of the day sorting shirts for SIT.  If I find time this week I'll be checking out some documentation on Vimp for Jason, otherwise it'll have to wait until Friday.  :(

Hey, at least I got a stupid shirt!

Meetings

It seems like that's all this week has been for me.

Today at D87 I walked straight into lunch and a meeting.  :(  We were going over some statistics about the technology being deployed and future budget planning so I went ahead and did my taxes online.

After that little ordeal we had a much harder to ignore (read: sleep through) presentation by a company selling a video portal to automatically aggregate and distribute video in multiple formats.

Three problems with vBrick:
1)  They kept the lights on during the presentation >:(
2)  Cost was "under $50K" and budget was *maybe* $15K
3)  No way to "push" notifications of new content to users (e.g. RSS feeds)
Actually, make that four.
4)  The name.  srsly?

Since then I've been working on homework because everyone seems so busy.  I'll update if I get any other assignments from Jason today.

Richard the Menace

Today I was told to expect Rick to have a job for me to do dealing with the SIT conference.  He walked in carrying a box of rubber-banded papers.  We were to make stacks of 10 of one type and 1 of another.  I spent the entire day doing this but it was surprisingly enjoyable.  It was very low stress and laid back and Rick and I were having fun chatting.  Honestly, that's a lot more rare than it might seem to most observers so I appreciated it and enjoyed my day, techno-babble free.

Just another day in the life

Today I started off without anything to do.  I basically spent a couple of hours figuring out that Shelia will not perform reasonably on the hardware D87 provided and finding a replacement and then starting all over again installing it.  Then Utah (Dave) and Jason got back from lunch and gave me a job!  I spent the remainder of my time fetching and configuring a Cisco 2911 router.  I did not finish the configuration.  My main issue was understanding what was wanted out of SNMP.  I might suggest adding some kind of SNMP section to the Cisco courses actually because it seems like the single largest interaction anyone at D87 has with the networking gear.

Meet Gary

On Friday I spent almost the entire day waiting and screwing around with Gary.  At some point we did some silly jobs like retrieving a bunch of TV's from a dark, dingy, possibly asbestos infested cave full of very low hanging pipes.  Seriously, they were almost lower than my waist.  The little else I did was get QEMU running and Windows XP installed in a VM on my D87 laptop.  I plan on spending some time next week finishing up my Shelia install and customizing it to do malware detection on links and attachments in emails.  Of course, that means learning Python.  :(

Sloooooow day

Today I got in and within a couple of hours had my assigned task (install acidBASE) finished.  Unfortunately everyone's been in a meeting all day so I've just been doing things like analyzing traffic logs.  For example Andy has a server here at techbrittin.district87.org that he uses for P2P which is unsurprising.  What's surprising is the variety of IP addresses he's contacting (Portugal, Malayasia, China...).  I also need to talk to him about getting a laptop to test software (e.g. Shelia) on and a friend at ISU who's offered to roll out FOG for the district as a free internship project.