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.

The Daily Logger

Well this week ought to be interesting.  Since it's my last week on this internship I thought I'd have to keep myself busy but Jason seems to be doing a pretty good job of that.  Today started off quietly enough when I started settling down and trying to figure out how to install a package called "acidbase" onto our AlienVault IDS.  After some time Jason arrived and took everyone down to the datacenter for "the cleaning."  After some probing I was told it would be a surprise.  Boy was I surprised!  "The datacenter room" is divided in half with one half actually being the datacenter the other half apparently being junk nobody wanted to deal with.  We spent an hour sorting it and picking it and clearing it out and replacing it appropriately.  Later we were carrying empty (but inordinately large) boxes from the BHS administrative offices down to the Technology division where they presently sit in the hallway.  Considering how many boxes we cleared out of the datacenter I am quite certain where those boxes will end up.  For the rest of the day I plan on avoiding box duty and brushing up on my linux-fu so I can finish my task related to AlienVault.

My currently assigned objectives are actually available at the D87 website.