OpenWest Conference 2013
2 - 4 May 2013 at Utah Valley University

Great Lecture

A good introduction to Shorewall, which generally takes a lot of the mysticism out of iptables. Shorewall organizes the complexity iptables into a more "application" approach, similar to commercial products such as Zone Alarm. And Doran did a great job putting the complexity into terms that are likewise less intimidating.

Lance is clearly very well versed in IPTables. I think the audience was a little overwhelmed by the abundance of specific table manipulations. It was more "meat" than the attendees were expecting.

The presentation provided a wide variety of examples and corresponding details. So much if this is taken for granted by sysadmins and security experts. netfilter is not for the faint of heart. Yet Lance was able to make it a little less intimidating.

Thanks for sharing your passion and your skill, Lance.

Fabulous, really. Very thought-provoking. I took some interesting personal notes that will serve as some persistent take-aways from this presentation. E.g. PHDs don't write languages that pervade the industry; and, "work on things that matter."

And I also appreciated his compliment about the snow-capped peaks in May.

Very nice presentation, Rasmus. Thanks for coming.

I was really hoping we would get into so more of the strategic details and tactical implementations of ARM; the struggles and victories of ARM + Linux. The presentation was a little too high-level and not at very technical. I liked the brief discussion of the varying vendors, and the challenges of getting the kernel to recognize and use the varying implementations.

Although not at related to the quality of Jared's presentation, I can't help but mention how cool this stuff continues to be, but how hard it is to get the good stuff in the USA. Jared made good mention of this frustration. He had a really cool Marvell box to display which isn't generally available in the USA.

I really like Justin and his presentations. I was a little disappointed in this presentation, only in that his description indicated that he would talk about gearman: I really wanted to hear his thoughts and see his work regarding gearman workers. Never the less, the presentation was great, including his impromptu approach to taking the discussion in the direction that the attendees were leading him.

I'm only giving 4 stars because of the misdirection with gearman. The presentation was 5-star quality in all other ways.