From Chaos to Placidity

I try to dedicate 1 hour a day to reading trends, tutorials how-to’s, etc.  I am currently enrolled in the Masters of Computer Science program at DePaul university.  I attend conferences and workshops.  I invest a lot of time in knowing what is happening, and sharpening my tools and skills as often as possible.

For one, when I started consulting 4 years ago, I had clients running Fedora Core 2 and Server 2000.  These clients now run Fedora Core 12 and Server 2008 R2.  Virtualization wasn’t even on the radar for CIO’s.  I remember when working for Argonne that I predicted that organizations would eventually user high performance computing, and low and behold 5 years later we have the “cloud” and commodity clusters.  Next week I am working on setting up a Hadoop distributed file system for a small client.

In addition to this, we are dealing with the rapidly changing environment of security and networking.  WAN and VPN technologies are making networks more distributed.  I am also seeing a trend with clusters of systems using network links like the bus inside of a motherboard.  What I mean by this is now distance isn’t a bottle neck, the network links are used as bus links between systems, and the computer functions have become much more distributed.  Securing these systems therefore has become increasingly complex, and therefore the associated technologies have become complex as well.  Attacks have gotten much more sophisticated as we security experts try to thwart and mitigate ever changing risks on a daily basis.

Also you will most likely not find a technology book that has been published in hard cover that isn’t out of date in a year (with the exception of some Cisco books).  Why am I ranting all this and how does it relate to reading an hour of IT articles a day?

I can sum it up in a few tips of why investing in gaining knowledge everyday can help your overall success at tacking IT issues.

1. Knowledge helps you stay in the game.  If you back off for one day or one minute, someone is going to out think or outperform you.
2. Read how-to’s and tutorials.  Increasing your skills helps you lead the pack and might give you an additional advantage for tackling a new problem.
3. Ask Questions.  I knew nothing about LDAP until I read about it.  I tried it out and ran into issues.  I asked questions on the support forums and found answers.  This leads me to my next point…
4. Don’t throw in the towel.  Just because you can’t seem to get your TLS VPN working doesn’t mean that you can’t.  It took me 6 months to get the CAGEE appliance working, and 5 of those months was working with the developers at Citrix to get a working firmware build for the device.  If I would have thrown in the towel, I never would have gotten the firmware that finally worked.  (more on that horror story later)
5. Knowledge is like carrying double sided sword at your side.  Not only does it benefit you but it gives you the ability to teach it to someone else.  Teaching what you learn is just as beneficial as learning yourself so we can arm as many good experts as possible with the information they need to beat the bad guys.

I’ll leave you with a few things I looked at today so you can also ramp up your brain!

http://hadoop.apache.org/chukwa/docs/current/admin.html - Admin guide for Chuckwa/Hadoop distributed log handling system

http://www.cfengine.org/manuals/cf3-tutorial.pdf - CFengine configuration management system tutorial

http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/ - Basic Metasploit tutorial

http://www.darkreading.com/database_security/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222400172 - Good article on Google breach

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/ - Great security expert, I check here often

S.B.