On Mother’s day I realized my email had stopped working. Looking into it, my hosting provider had disappeared, which stopped all DNS (including MX) and web sites from working.

I had some advanced notice that this was going to happen, but spending time on transitioning kept moving to the bottom of my TODO list.  I ended up setting up with DigitalOcean as a provider (starting at $5/month for a reasonable Linux server) and copied my site content over.

I spent some time experimenting with the Ghost blogging platform.  Ghost’s focus is on content delivery just as a blog, not as a CMS.  I’ve had my share of struggled with WordPress before, so I decided to give Ghost a shot.

Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform

Ghost uses Node.js for serving up server-side JavaScript code.  It was cool to spend some time learning about how to setup Node.js servers, how to maintain them and serve content efficiently, but in the end I realized that I need a CMS, not just a blogging platform.  Thus, I’m back with WordPress.

Thanks to all the people at the SANS Security West 2014 conference this week taking the SEC575, SEC617, and SEC660 classes, who patiently waited for me to get my site back up and running so they could grab tools, papers, and presentations from my site.  If you see anything broken, please let me know.

Thanks! -Josh

David Cash, one of my fabulous Ethical Hacking Wireless students in my SANS vLive! class, has been diligently working every week to maintain a comprehensive index and table of contents for all 6 days of course material. Not only is he a whiz at pwning wireless, he’s pretty good at indexing, too.

David agreed to share this resource with his fellow students as a GIAC GAWN testing aid. For the GIAC exam for the Ethical Hacking Wireless class (GAWN), you are able to bring in any printed resource to the testing center. This includes all your books, hand-written notes, reams of whatever you printed from Wikipedia, etc.

With this resource, you’ll be able to leverage your time answering questions more effectively. Organized by day/module/page#, this is a must-have resource for anyone taking the GAWN exam.

My sincere thanks to David for putting this resource together, and for being an awesome student in the vLive! SEC617 class. You can download the index material here.

-Josh

NB: This index will be useful for anyone taking the exam who has *already* taken the class on the date this note is posted (8/6/2010). Students taking the class after this date will get an updated version of the course with new material, making the topic references inaccurate. Thanks!

Admittedly, I can’t design a web page.  I understand the mechanics of HTML and CSS, but making something actually look good, that’s beyond me.

Formerly, this site was powered by iWeb, which is very limiting and awkward to use (what iWeb couldn’t do for me, I did in a shell script which was run before rsync’ing to this site, but regex for HTML is really painful).  So that I can start getting more frequent posts and updates with useful information, I’ve switched over to WordPress.

Comments, questions, concerns?  Drop me some feedback.

-Josh