A Passion For 'Puters

I started off the morning with YET ANOTHER fall, this time on my outside steps which were icy, but much shorter than the basement steps I fell down last month. Besides a honkin’ big bruise on my hip, I’m all right.
The conference began with a keynote which I’ve already summarized and posted about, so I won’t do that to you again – other than to note that keeping a machine that is used *only* for online banking duties is a great idea, but I’m wondering about the software we use and if a Linux machine (which we could keep safe) will work with the software. Something I need to check into when I get back home.
I also blogged about the morning’s session – centralized logging with Windows – so I won’t go into that either.
Lunch was excellent – just sandwiches and cole slaw, but I was ready for it when it came – and the conversation at my table was better. We began with discussions of the state of cartoons and the fact that cartoons today are so much worse than those of years ago (and I think someone actually said “get off my lawn” at one point, too… Even though it may be considered violent, who can forget Elmer Fudd singing about killing a rabbit to the tune of Wagner’s operatic compositions? This segued (somehow) into the #hcod (the issue of Harper Collins capping ebook checkouts at 26 – do a quick search on the #hcod tag if you aren’t familiar) problem and then into the fact that librarians often act as the copyright police, even when we often disagree with the rules (this last bit may just be my opinion…). It was an excellent discussion that ran into the next session, so I ended up missing that one.
The geek out at the conference session has also been blogged about here, so I won’t say much other than it was an interesting idea – get everyone into a single room to discuss any issues they are having while a very knowledgable MORENet employee (Randy Raw) introduced us to people who could help us with that issue or were going through the same thing and would commiserate with us. It was assisted networking and it was a really good idea!
The exhibit/reception was nice – I got to talking to Lee Cushing during the geek out session and we continued the conversation in the exhibit hall. We decided to sign up for a “librarian issues” roundtable tomorrow night as a way to get the few library types who come to this conference together to talk about the stuff that effects us. I’m looking forward to it. Mike showed up during the reception and we walked around the exhibits together before heading outside to talk and wait for Jason Long – the IT person for the local library system – to join us.
Jason is just starting to offer Overdrive (as in, it goes live on Monday) and he had questions. He’s been using Centurion for a while and I had questions. It was a great conversation and a nice way to catch up on what we’ve been doing since last chatting at MLA (though he reads this blog – Hi, Jason! – so he has some idea of what I’ve been doing).
Now it’s time to start to hunt down dinner, as soon as Mike finishes his meeting with his co-presenters and wind down for the day – ready to start all over again at the 7am breakfast tomorrow!

Geek out – short talks, comments on what’s going on at our orgs, questions to geeks who are doing the same sort of stuff.
First – thin apps on VMWare View for virtualized desktops
New MS licensing for edu, not sure about libraries
Moodle – provisioning second pipe to Morenet to keep from using all the bandwidth of main pipe for hosted stuff like Moodle
Discussion of burstable bandwidth from Morenet
Talked about what’s coming from Morenet -lots of cool stuff…
Replacements to illuminate – Morenet is looking at big blue button, an open source adobe connect type of content presentation software
Moving from Novell to Windows
Question about filtering mergers and how it’s going to work
Discussion of packet shaping vendors
IPv6 issues – remember logging software (and other software) needs to be able to parse it, too, so check both hardware & software purchases.

With Steve Massman and Travis Reddick

KiwiSyslog and SNARE client as well as Logcheck & other open source utilities.
Could get emails every 30 mins that you have to read. Download and read OS security guides!
Log everything – everything. Success and failures both.
Use 2003 or 2008 and use an existing machine if it’s not heavily used, use a software firewall allow only your machine to RDP, lock down ports to only logging servers. No virus software necessary.
Kiwisyslog -$300ish – separate log files by machine
SNARE – free, log sys and security, domain controllers add directory service, DNS and file replication logs, look for new events in Kiwi
Log check – for 2003, logcheck.ignore is what you use to filter your logs to keep from being overwhelmed, examples of what goes into logcheck.ignore file, Case matters, be specific
Configuring scheduled task – in 2008, disable “network access: do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication” or the task won’t run.
Splunk? Can manage ASA files – useful for us!
Downloads – FTP://FTP.more.net/pub/s_P/massmans

Demo time!