Quote:I actually read your WHOLE presentation and must say I love your dedication!
For someone who's been nixing for 6 monthes only, you look really interrested and motivated, which is really refreshing to see. We mostly see people that are (way to much?) into ricing, and I'm glad to see some fresh blood that's actually more into using their computer than making it look good.

I should have mentioned that somewhere: Ignore the first part completely, including the six months timespan. I've been using Linux (or, if you are an ideologist, GNU/Linux) for a number of years now. So I don't reeeeeally count as fully young blood anymore. Not even fully by age-standards. (Which is a bad thing. Having to act like a responsible adult being is exhausting.)

Quote:How many boxes do you actually run overall? Are they all dedicated to your "malware detective" tendancies?

The number of physical machines outside of my home is, if I did not forget a box, nine. The number of virtual machines is .. I have no idea. But since most of my hardware is idling around probably no bigger than 20, including my VPS, with maybe three of them actually being used. Only one of them runs a honeypot (plain kippo with a marginally modified fake filesystem) which automatically forwards all samples to me - which then spend weeks in my mailbox without even remotely being looked at. Procrastrination is fun! 'not-so-malware-infested' was actually just a workaround to describe my job, which is relatively difficult to describe. My dealings with malware are mostly on an intelligence / IOC base, rather than on a technical level.

Quote:You say you try a lot of obscure softs (something I love to do myself!) What's your latest discovery? Also, did you try multiple VPN software, or simply openvpn because of the "criticallity" of your network?

I like alternative networks such as Tor, i2p, GNUNet, Freenet (which is unfortunately infested with content displaying child abuse) and so on, and I have taken a greater interest in meshnets lately - which has lead me to cjdns. I plan to join Hyperboria,which is the biggest cjdns network out there, soon (Admitedly, not _that_ obscure.).

Concerning my own VPN: I tinkered with tinc (pun, pun, pun!), Openswan and Debian's own implementation of IPSEC, but stuck with OpenVPN since I, at least somewhat, know my way around with it. On 'criticality': I could pull the plug on all my boxes out there today and the impact would be minimal. So no criticality here, the joys of a hobbyist!

Quote:Also, how's your current backup working? What would you want to achieve in a dream world?

For servers and more important stuff such as documents it works alright, four different, physically separated locations. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly backups which would get me up to five years of backups if I can manage to make the boxes run long enough. I've only briefly tested restoring stuff, but that worked fine too. My problem is that I've got 'a lot' (well, for me it's a lot. Probably not more than 200GB) self-ripped music, which would be a pain in the butt to re-rip - and the backup solution for those is somewhat shaky. They currently reside on a RAID-1 for availability and are mirrored to an 8TB archive disk that resides on my backup NAS. But.. there is huge room for improvements. In a dream world? Way too many things. :3