Today is my birthday. It is also the day I have decided to start writing things down.
I have spent the last year breaking, fixing, and slowly understanding a small Slackware box that lives under my desk. It has been my first proper introduction to a system I can actually own — not in the bought-it sense, but in the I-know-what-every-process-on-it-does sense. The cost of that ownership has been every spare hour I had, plus a few I did not, and I have already lost enough of those hours to forgetting things I had previously worked out.
So this is a deliberate decision. A notebook, but in public. Mostly so I will write it carefully.
Why publish at all
There are private notebooks for this kind of thing. I keep one. The trouble is that nobody ever rereads their private notes, and the act of writing for an imagined reader forces me to actually finish a thought instead of leaving it half-formed in pencil.
There is also a quieter reason. The corner of computing I am drawn to — the one that keeps boxes from getting owned — is full of people who write incredibly generously. Bugtraq lands in my inbox every day with people patiently dissecting holes in software for the benefit of strangers. I have no useful contribution to that conversation yet. But writing my own working-out is the cheapest way to start contributing later.
What this is going to be about
Mostly Slackware. Mostly the Linux side of small networks. Mostly the parts that have to do with keeping things from going wrong, which is not really a discipline yet but feels like it ought to be.
I will write about firewalls, about logs, about the strange new ideas coming out of the academic side — Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit, the noises about something called intrusion detection, the way mailing lists are slowly becoming the central nervous system of an emerging field.
I will probably write about getting things wrong, because that is most of what learning this material consists of.
A small promise to whoever ends up reading this
I will try to write in plain English. I will try to explain the thing properly rather than mention it knowingly. I will try, when I do not understand something, to admit it instead of hiding behind jargon.
The other thing I will try to do, and this is more for me than for the reader, is to keep coming back. Half-finished blogs are worse than no blog at all.
New year, new notebook. Let us see how this goes.