AndreasB.Net

The second day is half way through. Not so many interesting tracks today, although it was interesting this morning.

It started with Jørgen Leknes from the Norwegian FAD-department talking about government, e-government and open standards, following by a very interesting network security lecture from the chief of network security at the Dutch ISP XS4all. He was quite good when it came to talking about what he did (and I would gladly have listened for 45 minutes more), and looking at the tools and issues when it comes to network security, the averages users faults, the need to download porn and/or play world of warcraft, and how his tools were designed to quickly catch infected spambotted or otherwise compromised computers belonging to his customers.

Next I followed a track about the needs or not for full 24/7 availability of computer services. The oldschool way of handling things is to fix them when they break, and otherwise let sleeping dogs lie. Some might buy redudant hardware, but still only act reactively.A more efficient way of getting full 24/7 availability is handling things proactively, fixing things before they break, monitoring systems for signs of imminent breakdown, and the like, and perhaps even coupled with redundancy to further try to ensure that systems survive breakdowns.

Availability is a cost/effect issue, and at least for higher education, extreme availability is not always needed. Who cares if the webserver is down while everyone is sleeping? One or two insomniacs perhaps? But is the price of 24/7 staff worth the effect? For an international buisness, probably yes? For a local college, most of the time, no.

I also took the time to walk a bit around in Trondheim during daylight, my first chance to do so. It appears to be a nice city, with more the cozyness of a town than the urbanness of Oslo, I liked it. Seeing Nidarosdomen, the only church in Norway perhaps worth being called a cathedral was also a nice sight.

Well, now I am going to rest a bit in preparation for tonights galladinner. Sleep might not be that common tonight, but I am looking forward to it all the same

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 16:43 and is filed under Thoughts from work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.