Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

The CUWiN folks spent some time recently adding new equipment to the Homer mesh network. My company Metrix has provided them with all the gear for this project to provide the Village of Homer with a low cost tubes.

Recently I have been getting all the stuff for Shmoocon Labs off the ground. In case you don’t know Shmoocon Labs is an event held one day prior to Shmoocon. The basic idea is as follows. Get 30 or so geeks, a handful of vendors with cool gear and spend a day hammering out the production network for Shmoocon. This includes the network that supports registration, the hacker arcade, and of course conference attendees. In addition we attempt to eat our own dogfood and build a tight network that will hopefully hold up against all the potential tomfoolery that happens at hacker cons.

There are couple of things we try to achieve by doing this:

• Give people an opportunity to get hands on experience with the latest security and networking products
• Get the vendors to show us their chops when it comes to rapidly deploying their gear in a real world environment
• Create an open environment in the NOC where people can come by and check out the network, ask questions, etc…
• Do yet another thing to make Shmoocon a unique experience when it comes to security conferences
• Of course have fun doing it

Last year was the first year we did this and it was a success. It seems like every one had a great time, we actually did get the network up and running in time. We implemented and/or played with various technologies including but not limited too:

• IPS
• NAC
• Vulnerability Assesment/Auditing
• Centrally managed wifi using a controller and light weight AP based wireless system
• Network Monitoring including availiblity, utilization, etc…
• Centralized logging

And probably more that I can’t recall at the moment.

So anyways its time to do it again. If you have any suggestions or ideas for things that might make it more interesting this year, please let me know. This is includes things like:

• Vendors interested in participating
• Interesting open source tools to use
• Local network services to offer
• Ideas for contests and or games

Of course if you are going to Shmoocon and interested in participating go to the Labs web page.