October VAGUE meeting
Last night the VT Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE) had a meeting on the UVM campus. There was a quite-nice security presentation from Chris Adams; he went through SNORT and BASE, including setup and basic configuration, including some really good tips regarding legal issues in a corporate environment.
After most of the presentation, we had pizza and Chris finished a more open-ended section of the presentation, where we were able to trigger some alerts in real-time from another machine in the lab by doing nessus and nmap scans, which is always fun. After that we talked around for a while about the group’s recent history and directions forward. I wanted to emphasize the importance of regular meetings, and we talked about having a mid-November meeting focused on mini-presentations: short (10-minute) mini-coverage of a narrow area or topic.
We also talked about the notion of doing more install-fests, and generally decided that we should play down the install piece, and play up the and how do you want to use it? piece, which is more engaging.
It’s really nice to see the same faces coming back to the meetings, and to meet the new people (3!) who showed up to this one. Hopefully that’ll increase even more over the next year.
If you’re a Vermont Linux/Unix geek, or just generally a tech-head, you might want to subscribe to the moderate-traffic mailing list, or at least the VAGUE RSS event-announcement feed.