LOPSA Sysadmin Days is coming!

Just like last fall in Phoenix, I am teaching all four classes at this year's event.

Those classes are:

• Disaster Recovery: Will you survive?
• Change Management: Why suffer the paperwork?
• Advanced Security: A self-assessment study
• Communication for IT: A broad spectrum analysis

I hope attendence is as high in my classes as last year (or higher!). Last year they were the most attendended classes except, of course, for Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, a course based on his popular book of the same name.

We have some top notch instructor's again, and I wish I could take four classes instead of just teach them.

Please register today!

The BBC News reports that IBM is building a new supercomputer, nicknamedRoadrunner, for the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Clearly I'm behind on my BBC newsfeed reading, but I found this gem from September 6, 2006. The article is about a group that has recreated the Bletchley Park code breaking operation from World War II.

Knowing our code making and breaking history helps us understand the work we do today.

The Washington Post published an article about how the HP Board of Directors used an outside agency to obtain phone records of board members and journalists. This is a fine example of how social engineering is still one of the most effective and dangerous methods of breaking someone's security.

Last Tuesday, The Washington Post published the story"The Electronic Eavesdropper on the Line" about what happens when companies record customer service calls "for quality assurance" as we've all heard a time or two. The article tells us that what we say to these companies recording systems could be processed by a 3rd party firm.

Be careful what you say. It could come back to you.

The Washington Post tells us of a scary new FBI Counterterrorism Database. Be afraid, very afraid.

This level of data aggregation will continuously get more frightening as we go forward into the future, so be careful how organizations of various types store, manage, and utilize your private information.

Recently, a new web browser got some press since it was supposed to be more secure than the rest. Unfortunately, this browser is nothing of the kind, according to

Web3.0log, which says, "it’s just [a] 264K addon to Microsoft Internet Explorer that [any] beginning programmer would easily make."

Not all new software packages are what they claim to be, so be careful when something new comes out, even when it gets lots of press.