Day Two, IVNUA

I spent the morning of the second IVNUA day in Loyal Moses’ sessions learning what he had to say about situational awareness.  Having situational awareness in Information Security is about being aware of the network, the users, the threats and the tools. Loyal warns us to use caution to avoid information overload, overkill or over-focus. All of those things reduce our situational awareness. Using automated tools can help avoid overload, overkill and over-focus.

I attended 2 of 3 sessions presented by Loyal Moses

During a break, I asked Loyal what he thought about Suricata, and he replied that Aanval is already written to work with Suricata, and that most applications that are built around Snort can work with Suricata with just a few tweaks.

My first afternoon session was a session on iBook publishing. The instructor was Jerry Johansen, from the Rock Island Regional Office of Education. Yeah – this isn’t an information security session… but I am working on a book, and exploring possibilities for publishing. I’m thinking iBook is not suited to my book. For teachers who have students using iPads in the classroom, the iBook can be useful. But the books can only be read on Apple products, and unless the book is to be distributed for free, it has to be sold through the iTunes store. My audience should be able to view the book on any product, and I would like to be able to sell it both as an ebook and as a hard copy. But the session was informative – and I can see how iBooks can really open new avenues in education.

The final session of the day was Kevin Remde’s “How I built my Private, Private Cloud”.

Kevin gave a good (if not fast) run through of setting up a virtual network using Windows server and Hyper-V. In fact, the entire private cloud was built using available free evaluation software, and he used older hardware for his builds. Of course, there are some minimum requirements for virtualization, so the hardware can’t be super old… but it is possible to build a virtual network for evaluation purposes from available free software, on available hardware that is virtualization-capable.

This year’s IVNUA Spring conference was a huge success. The sessions were amazing – I know I had a hard time deciding which to take there were so many good choices. There were so many great presenters all under one roof. The vendor hall was brimming with great information. Keynotes at mealtimes rocked! The food and the casino night were stellar! I arrived home with a head full of ideas, a computer full of notes and an exhausted body.  

Let’s do it all again in October!