Today was the final day of the AUUG 2007 conference [1].
Yesterday I gave a talk about SE Linux for about an hour (not sure exactly as I forgot to make an MP3). AUUG is well known for having conferences with very technical delegates and I wasn’t expecting an easy audience. At the start of my talk I asked for a show of hands as to who has used SE Linux before, about 1/3 of the delegates raised their hand. Someone requested that I poll the audience as to who had used SE Linux involuntarily, it wasn’t what I had planned to ask but it’s best to get these things out in the open so I asked the question. More people raised their hand as being unwilling users of SE Linux than those who had firstly admitted to using it!
A theme of the AUUG conference was quality, and I had planned to cover some of the ways that SE Linux improves the quality of code by making certain classes of bugs show up (EG file handle leaks) and by allowing the developers and sys-admins to know exactly what programs are doing. But I ended up explaining why you want to use SE Linux, the concepts of policy analysis tools (as compared to the absence of such tools for Unix permissions), the benefits of MAC and why SE Linux is worth using.
I believe that the talk did some good and conversations with delegates afterwards revealed that some of them had done some positive things with SE Linux.
Today I wore a T-shirt advertising the root password for my new SE Linux Play Machine [2] which will be online shortly (hopefully tomorrow) which got some interest (AFAIK I’m the first person to wear a root password on a T-shirt). When I have my play machine online I plan to wear the shirt whenever I visit an electronics store or any other location where geeks are likely to congregate. ;)
After the conference finished about 1/3 of the delegates went to Ginza Teppanyaki [3] for dinner. Some of the guys wanted to photograph me wearing my shirt.
Finally, the conference went pretty well, the delegates and speakers all seemed to enjoy themselves and learn some useful things. Congratulations to the AUUG conference organisers!