old habits die hard

Two Mondays ago, I came back from Brussels together with good friends (… I posted here about our trip to FOSDEM and  you can find another Igalians‘ posts about it here, here, here and here too!) so in this post just only I’d like to talk about the technical talks which I could see there.

In the first place I could attend to Magnus Hagander talk about what’s coming in PostgreSQL 8.4. It was a very really interesting talk covering practical examples and cutting-edge SQL showing the new features.

Regarding to database track I had selected Replication, Replication, Replication, by Simon Riggs, and Filesystem I/O From a Database, by Selena Deckermann, but I couldn’t attend due to the extreme parallelization on FOSDEM. OWASP Testing Guide v3 and Secure Software Development was my second talk indeed. This speech showed the OWASP testing methodology and how it can be used in order to implement a software development lifecycle with security in mind. Matteo Meucci gave us a tour all around the project with focus on web application security.

My next choice was Lenz Grimmer who talked about HA with his talk called MySQL High Availability Solutions. He showed some topologies, tips, pointers and so on. I liked this talk really.

With Upstart and its future roadmap I reached Ext4 where Ts’o discussed about the history of ext4, its features, advantages and some really interesting benchmarks. Maybe in this presentation I’d like to highlight his comments on multi block allocation, delayed allocation and extents. Amazing speech!

Arrived in Brussels after a long trip due to some unexpected delays in Madrid. At last among airports and flights it went by six hours

After checked in at the hotel we visited Grand Place, had dinner in a belgium restaurant and went to the beer event where we tasted the flavour of different beers with good folks. Now it’s time to sleep, it’s 4:40, so see you in FOSDEM tomorrow!

Information security, network attacks, network defense and vulnerability management were the main topics this past weekend at Master on Free Software. Two days talking and playing with advanced networks attacks and defenses together with vulnerability management at Vigo (great city!)

As you know, the last year we handled different attacks and techniques showing practical countermeasures in order to get more secure configurations for our systems, so this year we decided to complete this approach including the best security management practices for persons in charge of security strategy and tactic in organizations.

In detail, we covered the following topics:

• Benefits of good security practices
• Security methodology
• Risk analysis and defense models
• Network architectures
• Network device security
• Integrity and availability architecture

Vulnerability management was a hot topic too. We introduced responsible disclosure and how it relates to the free software community …