Much digital ink has been spilled over the Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard (PCI-DSS), the standard security rules that any vendor that accepts credit card payments agrees to follow. Many of the articles try to find a way to criticize the standard. "PCI wouldn't have stopped this breach, it's worthless!" being the normal battlecry….
The recent announcement of a third major retailer that has lost credit card information drives home several points I've tried to make over the years. Security cannot be an afterthought. Some of the complaints I've heard many a time is that security "gets in the way", or "doesn't make money, we can just absorb the…
The 2014 Cascadia IT Conference schedule has been published. We’re ready to welcome people to another great conference. Join us for two days of training and technical presentations on lots of IT-related topics. If you do any kind of IT support this is a great conference for you. Head on over to the registration page to sign…
So, yesterday I published a book via Amazon's direct publishing program for the first time. It's fiction, has absolutely nothing to do with system administration, but it works for me. I consider it a pointer to how sometimes a project can take a very long time. I worked on this book for around twenty years….
Just joined and milling around. Hello everybody…
Kali Linux Cookbook by Willie L. Pritchett & David De Smet (2013) is a useful book. I have been using parts of Backtrack, the precursor to Kali Linux, for years, and so when Offensive Security released Kali Linux, I got the distro and started playing with it. The Kali Linux toolkit is large and varied….
Many people have asked me about how I started and how I run LOPSA-ETENN, so I decided to compile everything into one document. If anyone has any questions, feel free to email me at mike@mikejulian.com. I'm more than happy to help anyone start a chapter, or grow an existing one. http://mikejulian.com/startinglopsachapter.pdf
For me there were two primary take aways from LISA’13. The first is that because of the “internet of things”, the fact that we carry phones with us everywhere, and that data collection and storage costs become much smaller than the costs to sort through data to determine what data to keep; we have ubiquitous…
Just a reminder, https://sites.google.com/site/educatingsystemsfolks/home/university-programs lists degree programs in system administration.
Sparked from a thread[1] (well, a series of threads actually…[2]) on the LOPSA Discuss list, there's going to be a BoF session at LISA on Thursday night[3] on the topic of what it would take to move the field of Systems Administration (or, Network Administration, or IT Operations, or DevOps, etc.) from an occupation to…