An audience of two

Tuesday October 03, 2006

DTrace and Security
Having missed John Haslam's usual stand-up routine yesterday I made sure to catch his presentation on using DTrace for security. The great thing about his presentations is that they do things live, which is also a drawback; if you weren't there then even with the slides and the audio you're only getting half the story.

cec2006 Permalink | | | | Comments [2]
Tags:

DTrace Approaches to Real-world Problems
With everything apparently running smoothly I got to sit in on a few breakouts. James Fiori's talk on DTrace was pretty intense. He rattled through the presentation at a fair rate, covering several real performance issues and suggesting ways to debug them with DTrace. There was a lot of information and he skipped over many slides, so I plan to download the presentation to review at leisure and keep it as reference material.

cec2006 Permalink | | | | Comments [0]
Tags:

Damn, I missed Andy Bechtolsheim
While I'm out hunting for toner cartridges I've missed probably the most important presentation of CEC. I've seen a couple of short videos on YouTube on the SunFire 4500 and 4600 but had hoped to see him in person.

cec2006 Permalink | | | | Comments [1]
Tags:

Wireless Issues at CEC
This year CEC has embraced wireless in a big way. There are WAPs everywhere. But I'm still hearing about problems. The two biggest complaints are

• Punchin doesn't work over Wireless. Yes it does. Look around you; lots of people are using it. I'm not sure what Sun's official policies are regarding unsecured wireless, but I promise not to tell anyone. Of course this assumes that you have a wireless card that's supported in Solaris.

• I can't get connected. There are a few things you can do here. One is to move; coverage can be patchy in places. It's just the way things are with wireless. Also I'm not sure how DHCP is working; I didn't set them up, but typically each access point has a block of IP addresses that it "leases" out, so it may be that the access point is full.

Be aware that a few people seem to have set up their own private point-to-point networks, so make sure that you're not trying to conect to one of those. I think the official SSID to look for is CEC2006

Oh, and if you do set up your own private network please remember that everyone can see it. So do us all a favour and set your SSID to something unique and personal; if I catch you using something like WIRELESS or LINKSYS or anything with CEC in it I will confiscate your laptop. And if it's an Acer Ferrari, I'm keeping it.

cec2006 Permalink | | | | Comments [0]
Tags:

Sharing
This year the tagline is SHARE, so that's what I'm doing. I've lent my laptop to one guy and my WiFi card to another. I gave up my weekend to set things up and right now I'm sharing my car; I'm out and about on a mission to seek out some paper and toner for the printers. Whatever it takes to ensure that everything runs smoothly.

I sure wish the convention staff would share some coffee with me.

cec2006 Permalink | | | | Comments [0]
Tags: