At last, time for a short break. I'll be off starting tomorrow until July 27th, down to the "Costa del Sol" with my beloved girlfriend, in order to get some sun, beach and Tintos de verano.

The rest will be more than needed, since the next 1/2 year will be stressing:

• The nessus feed means loads of work, tho we've got around 4k new plugins going for the launch at 2008/07/31.
• Upcoming Installer update/release, we've neglected it somehow and need to catch up with some bugfixes and new features.
• We plan on opening another office in the US and maybe somewhere in Asia.
• Random stuff which will jump in for sure and randomly get on my nerves.

So, for all of you who're planning holidays too, enjoy them, for those who stay, well, enjoy it too ;-).

I'm writing these lines to cheer at my co-worker (@AlienVault) Santiago "Santi" Gonzalez, who went to Bogota for a couple of weeks in order to implement OSSIM as security event and information monitoring solution at Campus Party in Colombia.
I know this place is lacking some "useful" content lately, but I expect to have a bit more time in a couple of weeks; have had a huge workload lately.

Back to the party. You can check out some pictures at Flickr, it's quite of a mess but I'll try to update this entry tomorrow with some interesting pictures.

So, as always this is a nice place to test ossim, do some benchmarks and improve some stuff. The party in Valencia is due to the end of this month and we hope we'll be there too :-)

Last but not least, a big hug to my friends in Turkiye. Another co-worker (Juanma) has been there a couple of weeks ago doing some training; he's enjoyed it alot and I hope the people undergoing the ossim training too.

Edit 2008/07/10: removed links to sites that contain information about AlienVault customers.

I've got some tests to do with a Cisco 6513 ACE-10 card. My testing environment is very limited and I'd greatly appreciate getting some feedback from someone knowledgeable with that thing.

Having someone help me setup a quick test environment with two hosts balancing http would be awesome of course, but any help is greatly appreciated.

Should you have any feedback please contact me at dk@ossim.net. TYIA.

We just switched offices, the old one was getting too small. Here is a picture where we're still setting up everything, taken from my seat holding up the pc, showing various AlienVault staff testing wifi, hanging around or just tryting to avoid the hard work :-)

After having spent five days in this nice city I wanted to say goodbye through a post. It's the second time I went here (sadly both times I had to work but I'll come back for fun someday, that for sure) and I really enjoyed the stay.

This time I had a nicer Hotel than last time, right in the city center. Although I didn't enjoy the breakfast at the hotel a single day (I'd rather sleep 15 mins longer) I'll remember these days again for the food: unending mountains of food at all hours.
Last night we went to the Garibaldi which was a delicious goodbye dinner with live music. Besides that not much more to tell, intense but fun work, some WoW, some traffic jams, missing my girlfriend a real lot and kebaps, kebaps, kebaps...

A hearty greeting to my friends in Istanbul. You've tried to make me explode with food but again you didn't succeeed.
Which reminds me, this time I've learned the trick. It's considered bad manner to refuse a dish when getting it offered, and you get it continously. But if you offer back insistently then they'll think about it twice when feeding you up.

While I write these lines the Muezzin are calling to prayer. It's an interesting sound and reminds me that although very similar to our city, it's still quite a different culture. (I'm pretty sure I've heard that article ending before, inside a "Lonely planet" issue or something like that :P)

Happy new year to everybody.

After moving together with my lovely girlfriend, spending some time with the family during the holidays and getting my undead warlock to lvl 54 it's time to get back to work.

We've got many exciting things in mind involving ossim for 2008 and quite a bit of surprises (positive ones of course :-) ). During the next couple of months we're going to focus on:

• Releasing a new installer version. Starting with 1.0.4 we'll also supply upgrade tools so no worries, it won't be necessary to download and reinstall the whole thing again.
• Further improving documentation. We intend to release online courses soon for remote training, including vmware laboratories.
• Improving ossim. Fixing bugs :-)

Some time ago, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend to a conference where one of the leading SIM vendors (according to gartner's magic quadrant at least) talked about their product. Although my opinion will always be biased and I tend to compare all that I see on this area with OSSIM, I also believe that I've got a solid base to judge others.
Anyway, since I know myself and making a review comparing more than five years of work with a 5 hour demo and some document browsing isn't fair, I won't say the name of this product.

We've just posted a new document at http://www.ossim.com. You can see it on the right, it's a case study about a deployment we've done this summer.

The environment was very interesting, around 6000 people doing all sort of weird things on a very high traffic and throughput environment. Get the actual document, it's marketing focused so it does have some very nice sounding phrases in it ;-).

In a couple of months there's another campus party, this time at Sao Paulo, Brazil. I'm pretty sure OSSIM will be present there too and we'll be having fun again. (Not forgetting the hard work, I only were a couple of days there, before the event, but my two co-workers Juan and Roberto did a great job working 14-hour shifts).

Following are a couple of pictures I took at the last event:

For many years I've been bitching about blogs, about people writing useless crap just to caress their egos, merely filling google with worthless references to biased content. I always promised I'd never write one.

Well, I guess I've changed my mind now. It might be presumptous but I think it's a good moment to write about things around me since I sincerely believe it might interest someone (work issues to a broader audience, personal stuff to family and friends since work doesn't leave me the time I'd like to spend with them).

So this is it, my first try of a personal log. English is not my first language so there might be misspelling and grammar errors herein. My apologies in advance for that.

Happy reading ;-)

Dominique