Lately, through my involvement with AUUG and more specifically AUUG-Vic I've been doing papers whose main purpose was to talk about something interesting and fill a speakers slot in either the Chapter Summer Conference or more recently the larger Winter Conference. These are those papers, collected together in one easy to find location.

Network Self Defense

AUUG Winter Conference '06
Linux Conf AU, Security stream '07


Having played with various forms of passive network defenses over the years I had started experimenting with re-routing of attack traffic and other forms of what I termed "network self defense".

Note that this paper has not yet been put online






Bit Torrent: under the covers

AUUG Winter Conference '06


The intent of this paper was to serve as an introduction to BitTorrent for the AUUG community and with their technical bent offer some insight to how the protocols that make it up interwork. By way of extension a mechanism for ISPs to cache Bit Torrent traffic is also offered.

Note that this paper has not yet been put online






Real-world experiences with Challenge-Response email filtering

AUUG Winter Conference '05


A paper which attempts to describe a real-world Challenge/Response based spam filter and how it might behave, why it should be desirable and how it can form the basis of a reliable mail delivery system.





Measuring and Tuning Apache

AUUG Winter Conference '03
AUUG Systems Administration Symposium '03


This paper is a discussion of how to go about measuring the performance of an Apache webserver and tuning such a server for maximum performance. Special reference is made to the hitmeter applet I wrote to display the real-time preformance of an Apache webserver.





Observation: It should be noted that as time passes a lot of older work becomes less relevant, especially in the world of computers. As such, I would suggest that while the papers below this point, now some 10 years or more old, (dare I say out-of-date) are not completely without merit, they may no longer be completely current either. Caveat emptor.






Embedding FreeBSD

AUUG Winter Conference '99


This paper is a discussion of how to go about using FreeBSD as the embedded operating system for a consumer device, including a discussion of requirements (such as instant ON and no shutdown time) and how to achieve those with an operating system that is targetted at a quite different environment.





Java Serialization in parsable ASCII

AUUG-Canberra Summer Conference '98
AUUG-Vic Summer Conference '98


This paper is a development of one of those intriguing ideas we all have at work from time to time. In this case the Java E-Commerce project we've put together at work uses some complex configuration in some areas. The need to maintain this and an investigation of the serialization facilities in JDK1.1 and JDK1.2 have led to this approach to maintaining such information.






Data Mining on the World Wide Web

AUUG Winter Conference '97


Well, having done what I thought was a fairly poor Python paper (above), I decided to do one that did the language more justice. In the event, it sort of wandered off on a tangent of its own, but that usually just means you found something worth saying along the way. If the comment on the previous paper about using Python to access Web based resources intrigued you, this one can give you the basics of what to do.





Python: Yet Another Object Oriented Interpretive Scripting Language

AUUG-Vic Summer Conference '97


My Python experience, paralleled my Java experience of the year before. Like Java, Python has staked out its corner of the machine universe and performs sterling service in that area. Its fair to say that Java's patch is much larger and growing quicker, but don't let that deter you. If you need a good solid scripting language and in particular one that "does the Web" reasonably well, you can do much worse than Python. As it happens, the people running the Python.org site found this paper some time ago and keep a link to it from their documents page too.





Embedding Java

AUUG-Vic Summer Conference '96


Well, this was my excuse to learn Java. This paper shows some of the signs of being early in my understanding of the subject. These days, it also shows more than a few signs of being from the early days of the language too. Nevertheless, it still seems to pick up more than a few hits from all over the world. Most recently, Javaworld magazine referenced it in a January '98 article on Java and consumer electronics.