2006 Open Source Symposium

Today (well yesterday as of 30 minutes ago) I spoke at the Open Source Symposium in Melbourne. This is an event sponsored by Red Hat. The first day was the business day and the second day was the Red Hat developers day.

I attended both days and spoke on the second day (today). My talk was about designing and implementing a secure system on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (the Inumbers system for gatewaying SMS to email which is currently in Beta at the time of writing). I covered the issues of designing systems for least privilege via a set of cooperating processes under different UIDs. Secure coding principles, and SE Linux policy design. My presentation notes are HERE (in OpenOffice 2.0 format).

The talk seemed to be well accepted, so I'll probably offer variations of it at other venues in the near future. I'm thinking of making a half-day workshop out of it.

While at the symposium one of the SGI guys mentioned that an XFS expert was in Melbourne temporarily. I suggested that such experts should be encouraged to give a talk about their work when they are in town. As a result of that I arranged a venue for a talk on XFS, I had the venue arranged in about 4 hours, which resulted in about 24 hours notice given to LUV members. I wasn't able to attend the meeting due to prior commitments, so I'm not sure how it went.