This is the story of my afternoon yesterday, Friday 12/5/08. It's a case where the simple act of "keeping an eye on things" caught an anomaly that would've attracted a lot of negative attention from the business and scaled it down to a slight inconvenience.

A colleague here at LISA told me yesterday that he had observed approximately a 50% drop in traffic on his E-mail servers. Naturally, this was first a cause for concern, but then he learned about the disconnection of McColo - a major botnet command and control hosting site in Northern California, USA. Their two up-stream ISPs pulled their plugs on Tuesday afternoon. See the story in the Washington Post.

Naturally, I experienced an immediate urge to check $employer's anti-spam system for its observation on the situation.

"We are still fighting the Global War on Terror with Solaris 2.5.1"
--Andrew Seely

After a few weeks of holiday season distraction, I've finally finished writing Thursday's notes. This is a time when I wish I could make it look like I posted the blog entry a while ago. ;-)

Here are my notes from Wednesday afternoon...

Site Reliability at Google/My First Year at Google

Tom Limoncelli opened his talk by discussing three ground rules. It turns out that ground rule #2 was the most important - there were certain details he simply could not talk about. In fact, rule #2 turned out to be the theme of the presentation. The result was a very high-level summary of some of the techniques used by Google to deliver their services in a fast and reliable manner. Much of it was info that I had seen at previous talks by Google folks, but a few items were new to me.

"While I am an attorney, I am not your attorney."
--Alex Muentz

This posting covers aspects my activities on Wednesday morning that I consider to be noteworthy.

Keynote: Hollywood's Secret War on Your NOC

The keynote, presented by Cory Doctorow, was basically a pep rally for the EFF. It seemed to be carefully formatted to toss out a few things that could happen followed by something equally as concerning that actually has happened. The strategy seemed to recognize the need to keep the audience's sense of urgency from drifting too far in to the background. He hit topics such as the DMCA, Sony rootkits disguised as music CDs, DVR retention limits, remote control of home entertainment center outputs and various other DRM tactics. For my part, I can only hope that the free market realizes that people like having fewer encumberances on their media and finds it can make more money by offering competitive products with fewer liberties stripped out. It is, of course, more important for the latter to become true.

"Look! He has a rave mounted to the roof of his car!"
--Murray, noticing a DC police cruiser

Sadly, LISA '06 is just over 24 hours away from coming to a close. As usual, it has been a very rewarding experience, filled with great moments and great knowledge. In an effort to preserve more of what I've taken in, I'm making some notes here.