RiderX

This past weekend I attended (and my company provided sponsorship for) the CPOSC. For the price it was a great conference. I was both surprised and underwhelmed that it was held on a Sunday. The central PA technical community has a decent percentage of hobbyists. I gather this was the reason for it being held on a Sunday.

While all of the talks were good, my two favorite talks were Using Drupal by Christian Pearce, and Network Introspection with Open Source Tools by Brad Lhotsky.

Christian prepared a tremendous amount of material on Drupal. His informal and accommodating presentation style resulted in a generous level of audience participation and dialog. This made for a very interesting and informative class. A few of the attendees were folks either using or trying to use other systems like Joomla. As such the discussion was pretty informative.

Brads talk was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I figured we’d hear a bit about nmap and other OSS tools. Not so. I don’t think nmap was even mentioned. He talked about a large collection of tools he uses to keep very tight controll of his network. He does this by writing a lot of code to tie tools together, storing a lot of event data in a PostgreSQL database, and doing a healthy amount of reporting on that data. A good talk covering an unexpected breadth of material.