OpenVPN workshop

Today there was an OpenVPN workshop at the Hackerspace Brussels. The workshop was given by Christophe Vandeplas. The first part of the workshop was the theoretical part. The nice thing about the setup was that you did not need any knowledge about networking or VPN.

Christophe took us all through the basics, starting with "how 2 systems talk over a switch" over "how to machines talk over a router" and then going to firewalls, NAT and of course VPN and everything that goes with it.

The second part of the workshop was actually setting up an OpenVPN system. It was really a step by step walktrough.

It was was a great afternoon where I learned a lot. The presentation can be found here. Christophe has also a how-to about the Belgian eID and OpenVPN.

Python workshop at HSB

Yesterday I went to a python workshop organized at the hackerspace Brussels. We gathered at the void*pointer around 14 hours. fs111 gave us a very nice introduction to python.

There where programmers and people who who had not programmed in ages but it was ok. You could ask any question you had and there were some exercises, classics like the number guessing games, to get you up and programming.

We have a home work assignment, writing a very simple port scanner :). Have a look at the hackerspace website if you want to join for the follow up.

My conclusion is simple python is a very powerful language, easy to learn (that is the credit of the instructor) and it is worth to sit down an afternoon and learn it. It will be certainly become a weapon of choice to handle some of my day-to-day admin problems.