ShmooCon Videos -- Backbone Fuzzing by Raven

I was watching some of the 2007 ShmooCon video's and came across one about Backbone Fuzzing.

This one caught my eye, I have been hearing quite a bit about fuzzing lately and I got interested in it, since it applies to the field of Network Security and Software Engineer. Since any data I would be receiving over the wire could be fuzzed I would need proper input validation, studying what one is will be subjected to could help avoid mistakes.

I also believe that if she does find real flaws in Cisco's IOS and other implementations it could mean big problems for the internet. She is going after the core protocols that run the internet, and would cause it to die a pretty harsh death if they suddenly stopped working.

Looking forward, the MPLS stuff ought to bring up very interesting results!

Physical hardware for testing, a thing of the past?

I am starting to question wether these days we need to even have physical hardware lying around to do testing on. I ask this question because I have been playing with VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X, and I love it. I have several images of different OS's that I can boot in a virtual machine to do certain tasks, mostly testing of software.

Normally I would have grabbed an install CD for my OS, walked up to one of the many machines I own, and installed the clean OS with the software and tested it. If I screwed something up badly I would start from scratch, no harm done. These days I do my testing after I create a quick snapshot of the OS as it currently stands, so if I screw up, I hit another button and it all gets undone. No more long waiting time to install an OS, quick snapshot and we are back to where we were.

I for myself have been trying to justify keeping the machines I have, especially since every single last one of them has been used because I needed machines to test something on, with Virtual Machines that has become a thing of the past and they are mostly neglected. One of them is still used for the lan parties at UAT, but that is just one HD, which I could pop into any machine with two interfaces and have it up and running. Thinking about it now, I could technically run that in a VMWare session as well without losing functionality by getting a second interface for my Mac OS X, and exposing that to the underlying Guest OS as well.

In a business environment I think VMWare machines would come in very handy for testing of new software that is about to be deployed. Is virtualization the way of the future in terms of testing? Or even for machines that have to do real work? Let me know what you think by commenting on this post.

Birthday -- I am now 19!

My birthday was really good fun. Did not do much all day other than part of my homework, then later that night me and 4 others went out to Outback (all expenses paid for me! Awesome, thanks Kris!). We were planning to go watch a movie but could not find anything we could all decide on.

Instead we headed back home, sat on the patio outside, smoked Hookah and watched TV through MythFrontend on Mark's laptop. It was a great night :D.

Looking for a Job

I am still looking for a job, if you know anything or anyone that is looking for a Linux/FreeBSD systems administrator, programmer or anything of the sorts that would be great. I am located in Laveen, AZ and have limited mobility as I don't own a car.

Will get a resume back online soon.

Signed up for Google Summer of Code

I have signed up for the Google summer of code submitting two applications. One is off course bsdPanel, and hopefully that will be the one that is accepted, the other is the creation of BSD licensed text processing tools. Diff, grep, and sort. Entry on the FreeBSD website.

I am really hoping for bsdPanel though. If I don't get accepted for bsdPanel or the BSD licensed text processing utilities then I will be looking for people to sponsor me working on bsdPanel. If you want the chance to sponsor me, or know someone that is willing to sponsor me, please contact me at xistence [at] gmail [dot] com. It would be in part to cover some of my tuition cost, as well as money for books for school.