ResNet Symposium Conference 2009

From June 26-29, 2009 I attended the ResNet Symposium conference that was held at St. Cloud State University this year. There were fewer participants in this year’s than in past years, but there were still plenty of informative sessions to attend and plenty of colleagues from other institutions to talk with. I attended the following sessions:

• Pre Conference Professional Development Session: “ITIL Foundations”
• Pre Conference Professional Development Session: “Being the Boss, it is not a 4-Letter Word”.
• “From Crisis to Calm: Disaster Recovery Planning and Communications Strategies” — Presented by Lousiana State University based on their experiences with Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita
• “Network Neutral Traffic Shaping using Linux” — Presented by Gustavus Adolphus College about their home built traffic shaping solution.
• “Organizing a Cyber-Army: Modern Botnet Architecture” — Presented by Brandon Enright a Network Security Analyst at UCSD.
• “Upgrading your DSL infrastructure” — Presented by Purdue University about an upgrade of the DSL service they provide to approximately 1000 students in Married Student Housing apartments.
• “Google Apps – One year Later” — Presented by Oberlin College. Similar to us they’ve switched to Google Apps.
• “Web Application Firewalls/Application Development at SCSU” — St Cloud State told about their implementation of web application firewalls to help prevent the possibility that their web applications could be exploited to release data that they shouldn’t.

The conference also included a vendor fair, and a key note speach by Paul Glen. Paul Glen wrote a book called “Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology” and also writes a monthly column for Computerworld.