Security for a day

Spent the last two days bonding with IIS 6, finding out how it works, then how it should work and keeping it working despite loonie applications attempting to stuff it up and shoot it down in flames.

The training was split in to day one of the architecture of Windows/IIS 6, the features and components of IIS 6. Day 2 cover the tools for debugging and analysis IIS.

The class was taken through it paces by Tristan K an Ms Escalation Engineer in the Sydney Global Technical Support Centre.

The poor bugger.

Training isn’t his day job, but despite some baaaad jokes, he made complex topics understandable, avoided putting the class asleep, kept things zipping along and kept it enjoyable. We had a couple of topic major detours, but they were pretty darn interesting diversions and well worth the visit. Tristan nailed the questions thrown at him and elaborated on them without blinking, sadly, that impressed me no end.

The first day topics cover a few things I didn’t know and went a lot deeper in to the wacky world of IIS 6 than I normally consider sane. Picked up a couple of pearls of wisdom that will make some things easier in the day job.

Day 2 was going well and picked up some awesome details on SPN’s when the topic turned to debuggers. It was like taking a stepping off in to deep water with several large bricks tied to each limb.

The journey, plummeting to the bottom, was fascinating, if some what incomprehensible and full of hex. Attempting to reach the surface, things weirdly started to make sense or sort of. Tristan ran through the core free debuggers provided by Ms and how to use them to pull useful info out of applications and their operations. The value of this is vast, if I can make the time to learn the Win32 architecture and fit the pieces together.

I was a bit disppointed that we didn’t have any take away practice labs to play with once the course had ended

It made me realise how much there’s still to learn out there. Foolishly, our trainer gave us his email address. Mu-ha-ha. I give him a week after I send my first email on how I stuffed up something with a debugger and what does it all mean anyway but he puts me on the spam filter…..