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Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Developer tools
BalaBit has grown quite a lot in the last 9 years since it was founded, these days there are about 60 employees and more than 50% of that is working in the development field (give or take a couple, I’ve lost count some time ago). As we currently work on 4 products, support 5-6 CPU architectures and a host of different Operating Systems, automation in development is a must.
We try to automate everything and that means a lot. Some examples:
- preparing the development workstation for development/testing work in 15 minutes for any of our products
- building source code for tens of CPU/OS combinations by issuing a single command
- creating bundles of intermediate components when generating setup packages
- doing releases
- test automation
- and a host of other things
Some of these solutions are completely our own development, others are derived from public projects, and as BalaBit tries hard to be a good friend of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) we try to contribute back to projects that we use.
A couple of weeks ago, I published our modified version of dogtail, a test automation framework for AT-SPI based applications. We maintain our own dogtail in-house and since our patches were not accepted, we published our changes in a public git repository.
Earlier, one of our developers contributed to WAF to support building with Microsoft Visual C++, we’ve been using his work in two of our internal projects.
And this time, we published cccl a wrapper for MSVC to make it compatible with the gcc command line, in order to compile autoconf based projects under MSVC.
As you could guess, BalaBit is primarily a UNIX/Linux shop, but we need to support products aimed at Microsoft Windows, however with some heavylifting combining the best of both worlds is possible. And we’ve never been afraid of challenges. 
Hopefully you can use some of these results, maybe even contribute back.
6th Netfilter workshop
I’ve spent my last week in Paris, where this year’s Netfilter Workshop was held. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Eric of INL for the organization. It was a wonderful and useful event, and I enjoyed it a lot. It is always nice to meet these wonderful guys.
Here are some blog posts about the same event:
- INL: http://nfws.inl.fr/en/
- DaveM: http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2008/10/05#nfws2008
- Patrick McHardy: http://people.netfilter.org/kaber/weblog/
Finally we could get Transparent Proxying merged, now queued for 2.6.28.
Infosec in London
I spent the last week in London, visiting InfoSec Europe. It was a great fun, I liked the exhibition as well as the city itself.
I have not been to London before (except for a single-day business trip two years ago, but that does not count), and I liked the city very much. I walked about 40-50km on these three days, I had my legs completely worn out. British people are quite strange I would say. Everything is completely in the reverse: the cars, the direction the trains arrive from, the way the taps need to be opened, I think even the screws must be unmounted in the reverse direction. I hated these non-mixing taps, one tap for cold another for hot water, no way to mix something tepid. Beside this strangeness I liked the atmosphere of the city, I visited all the important places, I even spent two hours in the British Museum, but it was nothing but a scratch on the surface.
The exhibition was also interesting, met a couple of interesting persons, like the Watchfire guys who invented HTTP request smuggling and some real computer forensics guys. We were talking about the problems with encryption vs. forensics and what possible solutions there are to this problem.
All in all it was an exhausting week.