

Hacking for Defense in Silicon Valley - chwolfe
http://steveblank.com/2015/03/31/hacking-for-defense-in-silicon-valley/

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616c
For a fun anecdote, I once heard a very cool Red Hat employee talk at the LUG
in Washington, DC.

This was years ago, when Iraq was even worse than now (ironically "the first
second time" I would call it). He said there were a handful of techs,
ironically maybe reservists stateside who were sysadmins, who became very high
demand individuals. They would, for instance, go to a base with very poor
network connectivity, and would set point-to-point wifi systems so duty
soldiers could communicate with each other on the far ends of the base about
shifts and operational intel. The other story he had was they used Red Hat or
Fedora, I forget which to make a homebrew PVR system for a base on the Iraqi-
Kuwaiti border because this inspection station had a FLIR thermal imaging
system, and thousands of trucks were coming through this point. Two soldiers
on shifts would sit all day and watch footage, making sure all of them were
free of what might be contraban or explosives. Prior to these Linux rockstars,
these dudes would hold the whole line of trucks to take a leak, answer the
phone, anything that involved taking their eyes off screen. After they set up
a PVR using a Linux box, they could pause, and the line could keep going, as
the base was miles wide in the middle and the flow of traffic meant with a PVR
they could flag it on exit with more than enough time with bathroom breaks and
everything thanks to this. This RedHat guy gave these and other examples,
IIRC, and said they were being flown in C130s a few times because their
solutions, as simple COTS ideas, always worked and cost almost nothing.

God, do I want to meet want of these dudes. They are perhaps, despite the
layer of filth their services' collective activities abroad have done to
tarnish their rep as org and reps of the US, the only dudes in the military I
respect, the FOSS Special Forces.

Now that is a TV series, no matter how bad, I would watch.

EDIT: I wanna say, after some difficult archive searching, the Red Hat guy was
Greg Dekoenigsberg. Was anyone there? Maybe he frequents here and he could
chime in.

[http://dclug.tux.org/200907/](http://dclug.tux.org/200907/)

[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gdk?rd=GregDeKoenigsberg](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gdk?rd=GregDeKoenigsberg)

