Thanks to everyone! You did it, Nordsec 2021! We hope you liked it! I know I had a blast. That last stretch was intense. So first, I'd like to acknowledge the teams that have, that ended with more than 100 points. So that's Coldroot, Shopify, DCI, X-Men, Zendesk, Colonel Space Invaders, We Buy Zero Days, Panico Village, X-Ray Troop, Shared Sec, Okiak, and Gildarus Tigers. Now, I know you're alluding to know this year's winners, but you'll have to wait a bit more because Nordsec is not only a CTF, it's also a lab for a pretty impressive LXD deployment from our incredible infrastructure team. So I'll pass on the mic to the virtual mic to Stéphane Graba, that has a few things to say about that. All right. So, yeah, I'm the head of the infrastructure team at Nordsec and we obviously run everything for the CTF and infrastructure needed for all the folks throughout the year and then during the event. But we also run things like the public website and all that stuff, so we're a bit of a year long type thing, a bit different from some of the other teams at Nordsec. So, bit of a bit of a view of what we're doing. So, Nordsec is based primarily on Ubuntu, LXD, and Ceph these days, with pretty fast networking, that's taking a bit bounded effectively, using Ubuntu 24 LTS everywhere, with the current HWE channel and live patch. Now, for those who are not very familiar with LXD, LXD is a system container manager and virtual machine manager that's developed by my team at Canonical. So, LXD uses that, Nordsec uses that quite extensively and has been for years. It lets us very easily run, you know, well, virtual machine all containers, that's kind of, that's the whole point of it, but pretty large scales, including clustering, including advanced networking and storage and all that kind of stuff. So, in the case of Nordsec, we're running three levels of LXD these days, one level at the bare metal, across eight physical servers, and then on top of that, we're running a bunch of virtual machines and then running a secondary cluster on there that's just used for the CTF, and then each team gets their own LXD server that runs the actual challenges. The things we can unchange this year, so we moved to 2004, we used to be on 1804, so we're pretty much reinstalled and redeployed everything. We changed some hardware, so we used to have dedicated machines that would run just infrastructure services. We've now moved to a unified set of hardware that runs both CTF and infrastructure services that gives us a lot more resources and like, monitoring margin, we can easily move things around. We don't have specialized hardware, we've got less stuff in the rack, so we've been doing that this year. As part of that, we've also, we used to have dedicated machines that would act as the firewalls of everything.  So in past years, we would run like two DNS servers, it would give you two addresses, but everyone would always hit the first one and nobody would ever hit the others. This year, we just had a single address, which actually would hit three servers, and that's completely transparently balanced inside the infrastructure. If one server goes away, you won't even notice it, and we had a perfect split between all three DNS servers and all three HTTP endpoints throughout the entire event, which really made things a lot simpler. It also means that if we notice something going slow, we can just deploy another one of them and just get some extra capacity that way. So again, as far as scale, so each team had up to 20 participants this year. We had 38 challenge containers for each of the teams, we had these two Windows virtual machines as well. In total, that means around 854 participants, 88 teams, six physical servers in the past year, as I mentioned, running 50 infrastructure containers, so those are like all of the main services as DNS, HTTP, the discourse forum, and all that kind of stuff. We also had 52 virtual machines that would run the actual challenges, and inside those, we effectively had 88 very large containers, one per team, 176 virtual machines, so those are the Windows virtual machines, and then within those 88 containers, if you count for every single team, that you end up with 3,244 challenge containers running across the entire cluster. As far as hardware, that means 208 CPU cores and 416 CPU threads right now, and we have quite a bit of RAM, so just shy of 2 terabytes of RAM right now. The other thing we cannot change this year other than removing some servers is that we started moving from Intel to AMD, so I don't know how much you managed to get out of your Windows VMs, but those were actually running on very shiny new AMD Epic servers, so we're starting to move over to that. Those machines give us two CPUs for the total 64 threads each per chassis. We've got two of those, so 256 threads effectively that we can use across those two machines. We also started moving from conventional SATA-based SSDs over to enterprise NVME SSDs, because we were just killing the SATA SSDs too fast. At NOVSEC they would usually die within about a couple of years, which was a bit annoying, so hopefully the enterprise-grade drives will fail better. We're still using our old six Intel servers, so those were actually running all of the internal services and all of the Linux things as well. That's going to be moving away, and we plan in the next year or two to be pretty much everything on the AMD Epic. That also has some nice advantages around hardware vulnerabilities. Currently, AMD is in a bit of a better spot than Intel in that regard, and that's definitely been saving us a bunch of resources by not having to mitigate quite as much as we used to. As far as the remote setup, obviously we were not in person this year, it's the second year we're doing that, so the physical infrastructure was hosted at my place here in Montreal. Everything is UPS backed, so if we had some kind of short power outage, it was all fine. The public internet was routed over BGP to my home network using effectively two internet connections, one symmetric gigabit fiber, which was the main one, and there was a cable link as fallback, because something would go wrong. As far as what you would connect to, you were actually being load balanced between eight different VPN servers, so each of them would handle 11 teams again, so we can spread that across the infrastructure and not get the issues we had last year where we just ended up, everything just cannot die at the beginning because the VPN server just hit some kind of kernel issue with too many active neighbors or something along those lines. This year, we had no chance of having that because we were actually spreading that load way better, plus we actually had the kernel bug fixed too, so that helped. As far as how you had connected, the teams would actually land in the exact same VLAN as you would if you were on site, so that makes it very easy for us, like next year when we're going to be in person again, there's nothing weird really, we can use the exact same setup and just not do VPNs. So what went wrong? That's always kind of an interesting one. So before the event, we noticed a bug in OpenVPN Linux and OpenVPN Windows that two different bugs on Linux, it ignores the fragmentation command, so it just doesn't fragment, and on Windows, it forgets to set the do not fragment flag on the other layer, so we have to work around both of those issues in different ways by changing config's kernel last minute to avoid really weird MTU issues during the CTF. We also found a bug, well, not so much as it. It's an upstream weird design weakness that we had to work around in our NAT64 gateway, which was also kind of hard coding a very low MTU, so we had to bomb that so that VPNs would not get needlessly fragmented. During the event, we noticed that Asgot Discord, which is one of our own piece of software, had a bit of an issue. It was processing posts multiple times in parallel. That's why we had to take out the forum for a little while at the beginning, because we just had posts showing up like three or four times, which obviously was not good. We also had Linux soft CPU lockup show up on a few of the virtual machines. We think it was another hardware glitch or firmware glitch that triggered that, but that effectively took out something like 16 teams, which is why we had to suspend the CTF for, I don't know, a half an hour or so, I guess, to go and fix that. We also found that NetworkD has a bug when we deal with a lot of interfaces. It just doesn't know how to cope with that, and we were losing connectivity as a result. And lastly, if you go to as we had scheduled tasks, not spreading over time properly, which includes log rotate, PHP session, key ring, and sys start, all triggering at the same time causing a bunch of issues. Queue in queue, VLANs, so if you do VLAN in VLAN, also had some issues with the picket MAC addresses, and our switch is not playing dance with that, so we had to change all the MAC addresses just before the CTF, which was a bit of a pain. And we noticed, and you probably also noticed that one, very high memory pressure would cause the VFS cache to be emptied, which means that then every single file had to be fetched again from the remote storage, and that would just cause massive load spikes. All right, almost getting to the good stuff. As far as metrics, we were recording a whole bunch of stuff. We started doing that last year quite a bit, we're doing even more this year. These days we're tracking statistics on all the physical servers, network, DNS, HTTP, databases, Asgard, and challenges. So anyone trying to brute force a DNS, we usually know it within 10 seconds. Same thing with Asgard or anything else. We're getting a lot of, we're actually running two premiere databases now, one just for the CTF challenges, one for the internal infrastructure. All right, so the stats. We ended up reading 100 and three terabytes of data from remote storage. We wrote 402 gigabytes, so it's extremely read heavy, obviously. At peak, we were doing about 28,000 IO per second from the remote storage. Peak rise was just 158. The issue I mentioned earlier with the VFS caching was causing quite a bit of load. So we recorded a load of rate of 755 at our peak, 271 as far as what the team would have noticed. We had four teams that didn't show up, which was kind of interesting. And we had a peak of 720 participants collected on the VPN at the same time. As far as public internet traffic, we did really not a lot this year compared to past editions. So downloaded 115 gigs, pushed 394 gigs to you folks. And for the flags, the team with the most duplicates was Zeras InfoSectame with 24 duplicate submissions. And the team with the most invalid flags was CSIC Saint-Jean with 120 invalid submissions. Most of our stack and tools are open source. They can be found on GitHub. We've got Asgard. It's got Discord. It's got WebUI. The badge code is there. And some of the tooling we've got around like these is all on there as well. And that's it for me. So this was quite a bit longer than usual. But yeah, hope you thought it was useful to your folks and pass it back to whoever is next. Actually, Serge was going to talk a bit about the next part. Hi, people from all around the world. Actually, we had people from about 25 countries who registered for the CTF this year, which is not bad. I hope you had a hard time. That was intended. A hard time, but a good time. And by the way, you never really get used to it. You just eventually get to enjoy it. So CTF is hard. But that's fine. You just have to start enjoying solving these kinds of these kinds of challenge, which leads me to feeling that a lot of my fellow InfoSect workers and just tech workers feel a lot. It's the imposter syndrome. And just want to say that it's normal to feel overwhelmed by this. There is a lot of stuff in InfoSect and you cannot know all of it. So just surround yourself with people that know better than you in many different fields. And this is how you build teams and get to solve these kinds of challenges. So I just want to give a big round of applause to all the team that work extremely hard. You have no idea the amount of hours that were put into it. You just saw the little presentation from Stéphanie Rabar. We have a team of volunteers that are world-class elite in what they do. And it's a real, real, real pleasure for me to be able to work with them. So if you can right now give a round of virtual applause in the Discord, these, these person work so many hours to provide you with this kind of experience. So it would be an honor for them to know that you enjoyed it. And also consider doing write-ups. I know challenges are really, really loved to see and know how people have solved their challenge, especially if it's in an unintended, you know what I mean, the way that was not intended. So thanks again. And I hope I see you in person next year. If you never came to Nordsek in person, it is an extremely interesting experience because it's super intense on site. So thank you very much. And see you next year. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Serge. So now it's time to announce the winners. But I know you might be a bit tired of this. We have some honorable mentions to share with you. First of all, team Summer Jedi that solved the, the challenge in a quite an interesting way. They used FFMPEG on the Ackers movie to extract all the frames, used OCR on them, and they were able to solve seven flags that way. So that's pretty good. Besides that, team Hackers and Pajamas had four people use Go Buster at the same time, and they failed their hard drives with 16 gigabytes of logs. So that, that created some issues. And shout out to Indy Chickser from Cyber Ages that streamed their CDF on Twitch most of the weekend. So that was a first for us. And also a shout out to all the teams that tried their very best to find what the kind of toothbrush brand was in Hackers. So now the winners. First and third position with 221 points. Skitties as a service. And second place with 223 points. So only two points difference. Huberts hacking. And you might have guessed, but in first place with 243 points. Pwned the winner of Nordsec CDF 2021. So I'd like to send a heartfelt thank you to all the volunteers that made this event possible. Celsior already touched a bit on that, but for the participants that are looking for a new kind of challenge, we're always looking for new challenge designers. Palme, now that you have your first place, I'm calling you out. I expect you to reach out. Thanks all for playing and we hopefully, hopefully, we'll see you in person next year.


What would you think if I said taking a painkiller would actually kill you? I don't mean like an overdose but just one capsule equals death. It would make you think twice about taking one right? Well imagine not knowing this, that taking over the counter medicine would be a roulette wheel of death. This would be the case if you so happened to get a headache in September 1982 in Chicago and you decided to take a Tylenol. It is January 2023 and news outlets throughout the United States are reigniting interest in a 40 year old unsolved case. This new spark of interest has been caused by a request for DNA testing of evidence from a crisis that gripped Chicago and the wider United States in 1982. Although hopeful the new round of news reports and articles represent just another chapter in a senseless and chilling crime spree. The event changed the way medication is packaged across the world. It created fear and worked its way into urban legends that even here in the UK cause a moment of pause for thought. Unknownly the terror caused 40 years ago is the reason why I was told as a child to always check everything I buy is sealed. Showing how much this event illuminated just how vulnerable the things we consume are from tampering. Today I will be looking at the Tylenol tampering crisis. A chilling, bizarre and cruel case of seven acts of cold blooded murder. An innocent looking bottle.  It's not sold here in the UK. And the thought of unsealed medication is a real head scratcher to me. But at least a latter can be chalked down to me being a product of my time. A time post for Tylenol murders. I remember last year or possibly the year before feeling disgusted at the trend of ice cream licking in shops. Remember when people would open up ice cream tubs and lick the top pure nightmare fuel for a germophobe like me. Although disgusting as long as the liquor didn't have any oral born diseases it was relatively harmless. But it shows that tampering with consumable products is alive and well. But back in 1982 today's case of tampering wasn't for likes on TikTok. But an act of cold blooded murder with a little bit of extortion thrown in. Tylenol is probably very familiar for those in North America. But its main ingredient, paracetamol is always readily available over the counter across the globe. Tylenol was introduced in 1955 by McNeil Laboratories. Over the years the brand has released various medications with different ingredients effective in pain relief. One such was Tylenol extra strength. This product has 500 milligram capsules with the active ingredient of acetaminophen also known as paracetamol. In 1959 Johnson and Johnson bought McNeil making the company a subsidiary. Roughly one year later the drug was made available over the counter and prescription free. And from there it took over as one of the most popular pain relief medications available without a prescription. By 1982 Tylenol had a 35% market share. Many have it as their first choice for colds, flus, headaches, toothaches and migraines. And the Tylenol extra bottled capsules are a popular choice. Capsules are especially popular. They are made from gelatine and because of this they are slippery and easy to swallow. But capsules are also easy to open and close. An anti-tampering protection on their packaging was minimal. The bottles that held the capsules came in a paper box with an unglued lid. The red cap on top of the bottle was easily flipped open with only a little piece of cotton left to cover the contents. Confidence in the brand is high. The product works. But the public perception during a deadly period of a few days in 1982 would be shaken to its core. A deadly few days. It is early in the morning of the 29th of September 1982 and in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, Mary Kellerman, a 12 year old girl, is suffering from a runny nose and a sore throat. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. People get cold symptoms all the time. Usually if the symptoms are a bit too much, one takes a painkiller. Mary goes to her parents and explains her symptoms to them. They offer her one capsule of Tylenol extra strength. By 7am in the morning, she is dead. In a Chicago area hospital, Adam Janus, a 27 year old postal worker, also died of a suspected heart attack. Upon hearing the news of Janus's death, his sister-in-law and brother rushed to the family home. Grief often brings a headache. Both took capsules of Tylenol from the same bottle that Adam had earlier in the day. Within hours, Adam's brother, Stanley, aged 25, was also dead. His wife, Teresa, would pass away just two days later. Following days, three more unexplained deaths occurred. 35 year old Mary McFarland of Elmhurst, Illinois. 35 year old Paula Prince of Chicago and 27 year old Mary Biner of Winfield, Illinois. Now unexplained deaths of apparently healthy individuals usually sparked concern amongst the authorities, especially in the case of the Janus family where three died within days of one another. They had all done one thing in common however, taking a Tylenol. In early October 1982, investigators made the link between the victims and Tylenol. Was there an issue with the factory? Once the link was discovered, tests were undertaken on the remaining capsules in the victims' bottles and a worrying ingredient was found, cyanide. Stranger still, the capsule had come from different batches from two different factories, one in Pennsylvania and another in Texas. This suggested the unthinkable that the cyanide had made its way into the capsules after leaving the factory. The victims had another similarity, the Tylenol they all had consumed were in capsules and not tablets. It was quickly becoming apparent that the contamination was deliberate and done after delivery to shops. Interestingly, the bottles involved in the deaths of the Janus family members and Mary Kellerman had come from the same batch, named MC 2880. Johnson and Johnson initially recalled this lot nationwide but as more of the victims' pills were tested, it was apparent that lots 910MD and MB 2738 were also involved and this expanded the recall. This would become one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls in history. Tests from pharmacies across the United States localised the cyanide to the Chicago area. The recall was wider in the Chicago area itself with all extra strength capsules pulled from the shelves. Initially, it was thought that only the victims' bottles had cyanide, this totaled 5. But tests pulled from bottles found several more also contaminated. Many of the tested bottles were dropped off by the public at police stations. In total, 8 bottles were found to have been tampered with. Bizarrely, around the same time on the 5th of October, a man was poisoned with strychnine, which had been added to a Tylenol bottle. This was in California. Luckily, the man had survived but confidence in Tylenol capsules had collapsed. Trying to reassure the public, Johnson and Johnson distributed warnings to hospitals and wholesalers as well as halting Tylenol capsule production, advertising and broadening the recall nationwide, costing the company roughly $100M. Johnson and Johnson also issued a nationwide offer to replace customers' capsules with their pill variant and on top of that, the company offered a $100,000 reward for the information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders. The police were starting to form a theory. But after arriving on the shelves of local grocers and drugstores in the Chicago area, random bottles of Tylenol were removed from the shelves, then the capsules were adulterated with 65mg of potassium cyanide and then returned to the shelves to be purchased by any unknown victim. The reference, the amount of cyanide was 10,000 times over the average amount to kill a person, but although the police had an idea of the method of the poisoning, they had no real leads, until Johnson and Johnson received a letter. On the 1st of October 1982, a letter was posted to Johnson and Johnson, demanding $1M be sent to an account at the Continental Illinois Bank. The letter was traced to James W. Lewis via a positive match of fingerprints and a postage mark from Lakeside Travel, his wife's previous employer. The police now had a suspect, but it was taken till the 13th of December 1982 to apprehend Lewis in New York, and thus Lewis would be forever intertwined with the Tylenol case. This wasn't Lewis's first running with the law, just a few years earlier he had been charged with murder in 1978 in Kansas City, but the case was thrown out of court due to a technicality, strangely in that case he had also written a letter. Lewis claimed innocence, stating the reason for the letter was to shame his wife's former employer. Lewis was the only suspect who had described how a culprit could have added cyanide to the bottles. In a method he called the drill board method. Lewis even said someone could drill holes into a plywood contraption, put the bottom capsule into a hole, put cyanide on top of the board, scrape it across with a bread knife, clean up the excess, put the tops of the capsules in, load them into the Tylenol bottles and put them on to store shelves. But there was no concrete evidence showing his part in the poisoning and instead of being charged with murder he was charged with extortion and held on a 5 million dollar bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre until the 16th of October 1983. Although no watertight evidence, Lewis had a striking resemblance to this person of interest from a CCTV still. The image showed victim Paula Prince buying a bottle of tainted Tylenol. His defence at trial claimed he was innocent of extortion because the money was to be paid into a bank account of a defunct company his wife had formerly worked for in order to try and frame his wife's old boss. Needless to say, this bizarre defence and another charge of credit card fraud netted him a 20 year prison sentence, of which he would serve 13 years. But Lewis would always stay as suspect number one for the next 40 odd years. Although someone was now behind bars, no one had been charged with the murders and the case would continue to go on unsolved. Two other suspects were also well suspected during the Tylenol case. These were Roger Arnold, age 48. He was arrested in mid-October 1982 after a Lincoln Park bar owner told officers. Two customers said Arnold had purchased a large quantity of cyanide. After searching his home a number of books on explosives and poisons, laboratory vials, beakers, test tubes and a number of weapons were found. But interestingly no cyanide. His link was that Arnold's wife was in Central DuPage Hospital at the time of the poisonings. Across the road was a grocery shop, Frank's Foods, where one of the victims had bought their bottle of tainted Tylenol. Arnold had also worked with one of the victims' fathers at a warehouse. Bizarrely Arnold would go to prison for murder, but not the ones you might think.  The only problem was he killed the wrong man. And thus the case went pretty cold. Lewis was in jail, Arnold was also in jail, but Lewis was released in 1995 and would remain a top suspect, although constantly attesting his innocence. During a 2007-2008 undercover sting operation run by the FBI, Lewis stated it took him three days to write the extortion letter. This combined with the postal date being forensically proven under the letter's ink of the 1st of October meant that the letter was written before the public knew of the Tylenol case. Lewis, although at the time of his apprehension in New York, was living there. He and his wife had been living in the Chicago area until early September, roughly around 20-24 days before the crisis began. Strangely, in 2009, Lewis was interviewed by the press, where he again denied all accusations against him. There's also a weird case that happened in 1978 with Raymond West, who ended up dead in his attic. And you were the prime suspect as the guy who did that, who killed him, who murdered him. But the guy was dismembered and stuffed in a plastic bag in his attic. How does somebody dismember themselves and stuff themselves in a plastic bag? You got it. Come on. Around the same time in 2009, FBI agents searched Lewis' apartment, who was now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But again, no arrests were made. In 2010, Lewis and his wife had their DNA taken. One of the other suspects, Roger Arnold's DNA, was also taken. But due to Arnold being dead for two years, his body was exhumed and a sample was taken from a femur bone. Sadly, none of the DNA samples created any movement in the case. They even took DNA in 2011 from the unibomber, Ted Tysinski, but again, alas, no luck. As of the end of January 2023, more DNA tests have been undertaken, but no news so far. Aftermath Even though the killer hasn't been identified, the crisis changed the pharmaceutical industry permanently. Johnson and Johnson within two months had Tylenol back on the shelves, but with an improved triple seal. Their market share had plummeted from 35% to just 8%, but amazingly, this was turned around in just under a year. The event cost the company over $100 million in the recall alone and an undisclosed 1991 settlement with the victims' families. The crisis spawned, unsurprisingly, copycat murders, most notably in 1986, where three people died of cyanide poisoning. New federal laws post-crisis now made product tampering a federal crime, which even attempting to tamper with a product can carry a 10-year sentence. So for my ratings, today is only going to be a legacy rating, and I'm going to give this one a 9. All videos on the channel are Creative Commons Attribution Share Light licensed. Played before videos are produced by me, John, in the currently wet and windy suburban corner of southern London, UK. I have Patreon members and YouTube members as well, so thank you for your financial support, as well as the rest of you for tuning in every week to watch your dose of disaster. I've got Patreon, Instagram and Twitter, so check them out if you fancy, and if you're enjoying this outro song, please feel free to check it out on my second channel made by John. And all that's left to say is thank you for watching and MrMusic, play us out please.


So, Tony, thank you so much for agreeing to do this for us. If you could please briefly start by describing who you are, your position, and what Kia is as an organization. Sure. So, I'm Tony Traslav and I'm the Chief Executive of Kia New Zealand. We are headquartered obviously in Auckland, New Zealand, but we have operations within China, within the UK, Europe, and also within the US. So, Kia has been around since 2001, so almost 20 years now. It was originally started with the intention of maintaining contact with Kiwis who were hitting overseas at a time when there were a large number of our most talented workers hitting overseas for greener pastures, and it was a period within New Zealand's history that we commonly refer to as the brain drain, and Kia was set up so that New Zealand could maintain contact with these people and make sure that they were still connected and able to help support the country with their perspectives and with their networks. Thanks. And how big is Kia today then? So, Kia has a global community of just under half a million Kiwis around the world that we stay connected with across a range of digital channels, as well as some in-person events where we're able to. We've got 13 staff, as well as a voluntary board. Great, thank you. Can you describe maybe what you see as some of the more successful programs that Kia operates to achieve your objectives? Sure, so Kia's mission is really to build knowledge of exploring Kiwis. So what we refer to as exploring Kiwis are those who have gone overseas for a period of time. They may still live overseas, or they may actually have come back to New Zealand. We see this migration as really circular, so often Kiwis or New Zealanders, once they leave once, they may come home and then leave again. So the mission of Kia is to build knowledge of these exploring Kiwis so it can be leveraged for the good of New Zealand. And we do this through goodwill, the goodwill of the New Zealanders who want to stay part of our country and want to stay connected via Kia and also through all important connection. So we have three key strategic pillars. Within Kia, the first one is around people. And that's really about ensuring connected and valued Kiwis living offshore and integrated and thriving returnees. The second pillar is around business. So it's about how we leverage those Kiwis living overseas to empower New Zealand businesses who would like to export or go global. And then the third one is around how we leverage, explore a Kiwi thinking and perspective to build a stronger New Zealand. So that is how we connect in a number of our real world leading New Zealanders and to help build new industry and innovation within New Zealand. So those are our three key strategic pillars that we focus on in order to deliver to our mission. And then there are three key programs that our community and our audience may see visible as a result of those strategies. So the first one is the Kia community. So that is where we support Kiwis wherever they are in the world to stay connected to New Zealand, its people and its business. And we largely do that through digital channels. So we have obviously our website, which is very rich in content. We are active on social channels such as LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. And then we also run a number of email newsletters to keep people connected and inspired, as well as virtual events and in-person networking events where we can. The second product is Kia Connect. This is our business connection product. And as I mentioned, this is where Kia harnesses the minds and the networks of Kiwis living over shore overseas to power up New Zealand businesses who would like to export globally. So we run a connection service that is run off our website where individuals or businesses who would like to export into global markets can register with Kia and we will endeavour to put them in touch with Kiwis living in those markets who may be able to support them with market intelligence, market networks or mentorship. And then the third program is Kia X. And this talks to our country strategic pillar. And that's really where Kia brings together New Zealand's most successful onshore and offshore innovators to help build industry and connect into government initiatives and private initiatives within New Zealand. Great. Thank you. Those are three very ambitious programmes you just mentioned. I'm sure you face your fair share of challenges in implementing those types of activities. So could you tell us about some of the key challenges Kia faces within its operations that you have to address? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think the biggest issue for Kia, particularly in our operations right now is that there is so much that can be done to better support our Kiwis overseas. And as a small charitable organisation, it's always about how do we prioritise and how do we use our resources to get the biggest bang for our community and for New Zealand. And so I think that prioritisation and focusing on the most impactful things is a challenge along with securing ongoing funding to keep doing the work that we do. Great. Thank you. And can you tell me more? I mean, you mentioned that Kia operates with a fairly small staff of, I think, 13 people. You said, how is Kia structured as an organisation? Is it reliant on a lot of volunteer work? Or does it have external funding to manage its operations as well? Yeah, so we have a blended funding model. We are lucky enough to receive some support from three or four of the larger New Zealand government organisations. So they fund us primarily to support international trade development development. And then we also get support from amazing private funders, businesses and individuals within New Zealand who really see value in the work that we do, but who also, you know, see good synergies with their business to be aligned with us. So we have a blended funding model that allows us to have 13 paid employees, most of full time, but some are part time as well. And then we have the support of amazing ambassadors around the world. So I wouldn't necessarily call them strictly volunteers, but on an ad hoc basis, we have Kiwis around the world who are incredibly passionate about the work that we do and will help open doors and make resources available as and when needed. And then alongside that, we have an amazing voluntary board made up of business leaders within New Zealand who help guide and govern the direction of Kia. And are there membership fees as well to be a member of Kia or not? No, our community service and also our business connection service is all 100% free. And we do that to make sure that we can help and support as many people as possible. And we instead look to receive our funds through partnerships. OK, great. So you had mentioned that you get funding from both the private sector and from government. Roughly what ratio is government and what ratio is private sector? That's a key question, maybe. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of just a little over 50-50. OK, great.  So no doubt those priorities change from time to time. So how does Kia determine, either on an annual basis or on a longer term basis, what your priorities as an organization should be? And how do you ensure that you're really meeting the needs and the expectations of not just your funders, but of Kiwis living abroad as well? Yeah, so look, we spend a lot of time working with stakeholders and listening both to country and government priorities and also to our community. And the short answer to your question is that we ask to make sure that we're aligned. So we have a number of programs and initiatives underway with some of our key funders to make sure that we are tied in and proactively contributing to their initiatives. The New Zealand government has a number of economy growing plans at the moment and recovery plans and Kia looks very closely at how we can support and align with those so that we are pulling in the exact same direction as our funders on that side of things. In terms of our community, we try to run regular surveys to ensure that we know what the challenges are that they're facing and how we can be of most benefit to them. So the most recent example of that research was the Welcome Home Survey, which we ran in August. That was quite a large body of field work. We spoke to over 15,000 Kiwis living overseas and some who had recently returned home to New Zealand. And we sought to understand what their experience had been, particularly around COVID and the impact that the COVID era has had on their migration back to New Zealand, but also looking to understand what they need if they are coming back to New Zealand to really land and thrive here to be able to find work and, you know, suitable living and childcare and education for their families, for example, as part of that, we also sought to understand Kiwis who are not choosing to come home at the moment, what they might need for us from us. And so that really goes into our program planning for the year. And then we have three groups of management metrics that myself and my leadership team review on a monthly basis to make sure that we are regularly delivering to all of our stakeholders' needs. And so those three key areas of metrics, the first one is around our Care Connection Service. So that's the International Trade Development piece. And there we look at the number of connections that we are making. So we have an annual and a monthly target that we seek to reach. So we're looking for numbers, but then we are also looking for quality of connections. And so we look to tie in with one of our partner funders, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, to look at some of their milestone metrics for business growth to make sure that we deliver in quality connections. And then we also look at a net promoter's score from the businesses and individuals that we connect to make sure that our service is as helpful and positive as possible. So that's sort of one group of key metrics. Then the second area is around community growth and engagement. So we are constantly measuring the quality of the content, the resources and the events that we invest in for our community. And we like to make sure that our community is both growing, but that it's highly engaged. And alongside that group of metrics, we also go back out on a regular basis and run surveys and questionnaires so that we are constantly gathering that feedback. And then the third area is around, you know, are we maintaining our funding? Do our funders and our partners really see value in the work that we're doing? And therefore, are they continuing to invest in it? And we also run a bit of a net promoter's score measure there to make sure that our partners are happy with the work that we do. Great. So you've got sort of, I guess, three buckets of priorities that would be considered of equal importance when you're looking at your own metrics or is there one that takes priority? No, I think they would be of equal value. I think the business connection service or the international trade development piece is probably our most longstanding program of work. And so I think that is much more established and that is a really cool focus for us. The KIAX work, which is connecting the industry, leading Kiwis into new industry build, that is slightly newer and more in development. And then the KIA community focus has changed slightly with COVID to be much wider. And that is really to recognise that Kiwis around the world are incredibly important to New Zealand, whether they are able to assist businesses to export or whether they have other skills and perspectives that are beneficial to New Zealand. For example, they might be a health care worker or a teacher currently living overseas, wanting to come back to New Zealand. And those are skills and industries that are that we do lack in New Zealand, the population of our size. We don't often get the numbers of health care workers, particularly that we need within New Zealand. And so those members of our community are equally important, but for a slightly different reason. So that community piece for us has grown slightly greater over COVID. Great. I think one thing that we find where usually government led initiatives in engaging in diaspora tend to struggle is in really developing a solid communication strategy with the diaspora that has a sense of longevity or sustainability to it beyond just an annual conference. KIA seems to have defied all odds and has this incredible capacity to reach out and to communicate with the Kiwi diaspora. So do you have a defined communication strategy that you implement in order to maintain contact? Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And it's growing and evolving every day. So this seems to be, as I'm talking about, Kia, we seem to like the number three, but we also we also have three narratives that that we like to push through within our communications. And we look at how we can best land these narratives with our stakeholders and with our communities and also how we can measure them and and optimise them. So the first one is really focused on talking about how we connect and grow businesses, making the leap offshore. So again, that's tied back into that business pillar and that KIA Connect service. And really what we're wanting to do is to inspire more Kiwi businesses to think global from day one. And so a strong theme throughout our communications case studies around Kiwi businesses and individuals who have done amazing things on the world stage with business ideas that have originated here within New Zealand. Then the second narrative is around how we can connect and support Kiwis offshore. So looking at what kind of content they might need in terms of resources, particularly. So, for example, when COVID-19 sort of really became widespread around the world, we were looking at what our communities might need, really practical resources if they were looking to come home, aggregating links to New Zealand government websites and support networks. And then also we started to branch out into case studies again. So doing interviews with individuals who have come home and what they experienced, what it was like to fly into New Zealand and find yourself in a managed isolation facility for two weeks with small children. So we looked at really human stories as well to try and sort of support on that emotional level. And then the third area around supporting Kiwis returning was working with our partners around resources, practical resources in terms of tax and pensions. How might you bring one of your pension funds back to New Zealand? And then also if you were looking to bring your business home to New Zealand, what are some of the tax implications there and how might you do that? So we worked with a number of our professional services partners to make sure that there was really high quality advice and information available on our site and through our social media channels there as well. And then the third pillar that we focus on is celebrating Kiwis making a difference. So again, a real inspirational and celebration piece around the amazing things that Kiwis are doing overseas. And that's also tied into we have an award ceremony in March every year where we celebrate what we refer to as world-class New Zealanders. And that is an amazing night of inspiration and drives a lot of our content sharing for the rest of the year. Can you give us an example of who would be a world-class New Zealander? What would they be doing on the global stage? So they would be someone who is successful from a business perspective, but importantly is really willing and able to give back to communities. So, you know, it might be someone who has launched an amazing business and something really innovative or it might be an academic who is doing amazing work or a scientist or someone within the arts who has just really delivered excellence in their field. And that is coupled with their strong desire to build community and to use some of their success and some of their profile for the good of New Zealand and its people. Great. Thank you. What are I mean, you mentioned earlier that you use, as you said, LinkedIn, Instagram, also, I think a week or an email newsletter you mentioned. So you're using a lot of different tools for communication. What are, in your experience, some of the more successful tools for reaching out and what makes them more successful? Well, I think there's two key areas from a comms channel perspective that are interesting. The first one is reaching out to your diaspora and platforms where they are already. So looking at LinkedIn and Facebook, Facebook is actually our largest subscription channel, possibly because it's been around the longest.  But then equally encouraging that audience as they kind of grow in their preference for your content, encouraging them to sign up into a CRM system is really valuable as well, because obviously not only does that give you data and insight on your audience, but it allows you to start to personalise some of the messages that you're sending back to them. So we do both for slightly different reasons. But, you know, if we, I suppose, could have our absolute way, it would be to get all of our care members integrated into our CRM so that we could be offering them really personalised and valuable communications. So you do operate a CRM system in order to maintain those various contacts, I guess. Absolutely. And it's the most crucial part of our business. So we have, you know, someone who solely focuses on making sure that that CRM is up to date and that it obviously adheres with increasing privacy laws around the world and that we're using it in a really valuable way to our community. Great. One last question for you, Tony, and then I'll let you go.  Would you have any words of wisdom for for organisations that are just starting out and just trying to to to reach out to their diaspora in order to establish cooperation? Yeah, absolutely. I really see the secret to Kia's success is the goodwill of the of our diaspora community. So without that goodwill, they wouldn't stay connected via us. They wouldn't support our programs and, you know, they wouldn't help drive a lot of the missions and outcomes that Kia is looking to drive for New Zealand. So I think my biggest piece of advice would be for other organisations to get really clear on what it is you will offer to a global population, a global community and why this is of value to them. And oftentimes in order to define that, you have to really ask, you have to take the time to sit down and understand, you know, what is of value to them and then also to think about from a wider perspective, once you have this community built, how will this community actually enhance your country's economy or objectives? And so just taking a, you know, doing that strategic thought place up front to be clear on your proposition for your community, making sure that it's actually what they want and that it will drive goodwill and then secondly, that it will drive the right and meaningful outcomes for your country. Perfect. Tony, thank you so much for for taking the time to talk. Lisa, thank you.


We are conducting urban breaching training. The purpose of it is to allow mobility for inventory by explicitly breaching doors and other obstacles. A perfect historical situation recently is Fallujah, Sangin, stuff like that. We actually had a breach in getting the compounds clear. So that's basically the mission of urban breaching is to gain entry into a building. Clear left! Clear right! Door right! CEB is basically in support of 2MAP in the 2nd Marine Division. So our job is to get entry to Italian, whether it be platoon, squad, fire team into the building. So that's the whole range to sustain that. So we can actually accomplish our mission and support mobility. Clear! Clear!


Hi, my name is Elizabeth. I work for Yolo County Library and this is my COVID-19 diary. I just arrived here at our admin building to open up and it is my job to start answering our phone line which we've kept open, one phone line to help people with online services and keep the website updated, technology issues and things like that. I just wanted to show you what the library looks like during this COVID-19 shelter in place. And yeah, it's pretty empty. We have a link plus interlibrary loan service waiting to go. We have a lot of books and summer reading prizes waiting to go. And I imagine that we will get back to things at some point in some fashion but right now we're kind of just in a holding pattern and I just feel like it is a little isolating. It's a lot of unknowns but I feel like we can get through this and we're gonna get all these books going again and people are certainly enjoying reading and I can see that we're gonna make it through this together.


Okay, hello again to my job about RHQ, job on system management is that. My name is Heiko Wupp, I work for Red Hat and you see my contact data here. Now when this talk, when I was asked about giving the talk, I submitted my proposal as system management with RHQ I got an answer back, ah you are talking about job on, yeah that's cool, let's do that. And now I come to RHQ here and JVOS operations network. What it's actually about is we have these open source management projects, RHQ and job on. And then we have we, Red Hat or JVOS, a commercial tool called JVOS operations network, which is built of those two other worlds, bus worlds. Now in the past, the members show some history slides later on. We have had Project RHQ as a foundation and on top of that we had job on, which were the JVOS management bits. And on top of both is built JVOS on. And since last September we are in the lucky position that we only have RHQ anymore. So while you will still see the term job on out there, it is being phased out. RHQ is the open source project. And RHQ is living on RHQproject.org. So that's the main wiki documentation side of the whole project. We don't have to write that down or you cannot process it. I will post my slides at least to my blog and this gets syndicated to the JVOS blog screen. I guess first then we'll have them somewhere linked as well. So it's RHQproject.org. We are using some other infrastructure for a few services, like the Fedora host that get a repository for all of our source code and also the Vaxilla from Redhead from our audience. We did have in the past two separate G-RA instances, one at RHQproject.org and another one at JVOS.org slash job on. But this was always a little bit of pain for people to decide if they wanted to report a Vaxilla feature in which issue tracker should that go. So that's also gone now. The job on JVOS is, but it should no longer allow you to post new Vaxilla. So everything in that area here in the Github repo, you will also find the source of all the bits from RHQ and we don't have to go to two different repos as in the past. It's now completely integrated. But before I continue with those boring slides, let's go off for some demo and have a look at the application itself. So it's about monitoring and management of systems, of servers from where we come from, it's mostly targeted at JVOS services and servers like the JVOS application server, JVOS cache, hibernate, and Tomcat or embedded Tomcat, but it's not exclusive. I will show you later a list of plugins that are available that isn't even complete and it's simple to write a new plugin for a new resource to manage. So this one here is the start page, the dashboard. You see information about what you have in inventory. There's a thing called the platform that's basically a machine where services run on. So one Linux machine is one platform. Another Linux machine is a second platform and so on. So this is currently my laptop here. It's one platform with 10 servers and 289 services. I'll show you the means. So just take it for given at the moment.  So it's an art grouping. We don't have any groups defined and we're currently getting 100 on seven metrics which is measurement values in per minute from the measurement subsystems. Up here we have an order of discovery portlet.  So for example, if you just fire up a new Chamber's application server for testing while the discovery run is coming in, it will be discovered and shown up in this portlet like that guy. And when you say, no, that's not my production when I just wanted to test something and I don't want to monitor it, you don't take it into inventory but you can't ignore it. Then you have some recently added resources so you see a history of what's got added to the system, can define some favorites. You see here about recent alerts, which alerts got fired. I will talk about alerts more in detail later on. Here you can see operations on resources that were triggered recently or that are scheduled to be triggered. So it's possible, for example, for a system that will be fine, reboot my J voice AS server every night because I know it has a memory leak or my application has a memory leak of the server itself and you can just reboot it like that. And here we also have hasn't also currently unavailable list of things, so it's solved a list of things to look about. So now when you let's have a look at one platform, for example, that's my laptop and you see a bunch of icons. When I go to the server list, it's even more impressive. I guess these items stand for some subsystems within the system. So you have this little icon here that looks like a monitor with a six-axe curve. That's about the monitoring subsystem. Then you have this little notepad. Yes, thanks. That's about the inventory. I will show you the subsystems again in the moment. The flag for alerts, this play button for operations. This thing which looks like an explorer icon, this mini explorer icon is about a content subsystem. This one I don't recall at the moment. So you can also see here the range is about configuring the source. You can see not every resource has all of the icons. That depends on the plugin that you write and how much you want to support in the plugin. Sometimes it makes no sense to configure a resource because for a platform, for a Linux machine itself, not for a search, like if you see hosts, but for a machine itself, it very often makes no sense to configure it. So if it's a hardware chip that you just are monitoring and has no machine to upload values into it, you don't have a configure icon. So let's go back to my platform. So I think I get many of these unavailable icons, the red icons, are due to the new network address that I just got from the THCD system because the system expects the same host to be in the same place. Some of those effects normally in a production environment you would have fixed IP addresses for that. So this summary page, each resource has a summary page so you can sort of dashboard for that resource to see recent measurement values and for the last one that got measured and a little graph on how it developed in the past. You see a list of alerts and how severe they were. So it's medium, low or high priority. Some part of bound metrics. I'm going to show that in a minute. So configuration updates. You see those, so nothing happened here. Our packages are uploaded in these other events. So let's go here for the used swap space. For each metric you can have graphs, you have the small graphs and then the large ones like this. And the system is calculating bounds between those metrics normally are measured or the default values sort of. So it takes the last n days of data and computes the bounds. And now when the value is going over or below the bound it will trigger an out of bound exception sort of. And this is shown because very often you know the active thread count is between for your application between 70 and 80. And if this one goes up to 120, you know it's in error condition. It's even possible to alert then on this being out of bounds or out of bounds by a certain percentage. So this is the default monitor tab. So by default for the monitoring system subsystem you implement in the plugin that you want to monitor your values and then you implement a little bit of code and all the value is back and these get automatically graphed in here. This is relatively generic. We have algorithms to compute the right percentage. So that you don't write value range but it's sort of default in the resistance. We can also have tables. If you say well I'd rather want to know the exact minimum and maximum values than the graph. And now we have something in addition to the pure numeric values. These are the so-called trades. Trades are always considered as string values and when the system is taking them it compares them with the previous trade value and the two are the same. Nothing, no new record is still stored in the database and the database only stores an updated version when this trade changes. So for example when operating system update comes in from 10.62 to 10.63 this trade value will change and you will see when it has changed. About the database size for monitoring data anyway we are compressing the data so we have one hour aggregate, six hour aggregates and one day aggregates and we can keep that by default up to a year. So your database won't explode. You're purchasing the raw data and keep the compressed one so you get still a very good overview of what happened in the past without all the huge amount of data. Okay, then we have here a little sub-tab about availability so you see when did your resource go up and down and how many failures are up for how many and things like that. It's also per resource. And the last one, that's the tab about the schedules on this tab. You specify which of the metrics that the plugin offers for this specific resource type for this Mac OS platform for example you want to measure and how often in which interval. If you have 10 platforms you can either set a default so that gets applied to when you import a new platform or do that a complete group of resource you don't have to go into each one of it but you can still override on a per resource level. Okay, then the inventory tab here that's the overview here about what's the name of your resource and then which direct children does it have. That's probably not that much of interest for the platform. One thing that's more interesting is down here that you can manually add resources that you don't get already discovered. In my case here on my machine is the Postgres database server because the plugin expects some default values which are just not straight to my machine but I can still go in say okay add a Postgres server and then on the next page here you specify connection properties and when you did the right thing it will just be taken into inventory and all its child resource which are the databases on the database server plus all the tables also get pulled into inventory. So on the left I'm going to show later so for the moment operations will be the last sometimes but again per resource type various operations that you can execute so for example a new process list for a unit machine the next step is specify when picture is gone either you can execute immediately this is then triggering an action on the actual resource a remote resource so it's all in the same box of course but if I had two boxes it would really reach out on the other box and execute the operation on the other one you can also specify a difference time and recurrence how often do we want to take that and when should it end so it's really like in Chrome you can just say okay do that every hour or every day or whatever then you click on schedule do that just once click on schedule you have completed operations and you can go in click on it and here you see the results it's probably in a different format than what you would expect we just know the output of p.s. minus whatever but it's still useful and it's just one example of what you can do when I'm going back here on the summary tab you also see it now listed here this recent operation and then there is this timeline in here where you can also see on a more graphical view what happened with your system so the scene was down here the red bar, the light red bar here we did have an operation with the green check mark which means it was successful and when you would get events in they would show up or alerts would show up in here that's actually the simile timeline project from MIT it's very cool on your display you also get timelines it's really helpful it's written in java script so it's sometimes a bit hairy when you supply the wrong data or not exactly in the format that it expected especially when you have those strange things like journal downloads in your system or time zones which are not US but when you work around that it's really cool I believe here on the tree that we are currently working on you can again browse through your resources here it's only this one platform that you see when you want to go to another platform you have at the moment to go to for example your resources menu you can go to an error in the current version that I'm having here in the developer version and then just select servers or other platforms when you go on a resource in here like that one for example you can also right click now that doesn't this one doesn't support right click let me define a different one okay so we are currently working on this tree and revamping it so it looks like the right click support is currently disabled so it should work in the next version that you get out there so one other thing that we have you have seen we have this summary page per resource and we have this dashboard but often that's not enough so if you want to know about other bound resources all about your system or which one if it's the worst outlier it's a bit hard to click on each resource and to compare them by hand so what we also have here are so-called system views where you have for various things like configuration changes metrics operations a view about this subsystem over the whole system so here that's about a suspect metrics which are these outliers they are now sorted by the out of range factor and the one which is the worst outliers is just on top so you know on what to concentrate so it's easy and here you can also go and for operations you see all the operations that happened during some time submitted where you can filter or on resource what happens it's only this one so no big deal at the moment this is the first of the two history slides that I was talking about in we started actually in 2006 with the current line of programming and in early 2008 we released RHQ-1 which was the framework and most of the bits of it but not the drop-off part which was which was the closest source at that time then here in end of 2008 we released RHQ-1-1 Jamers-on Tool-up-1 Jamers operations network product and after that also the drop-off bit so this one plus that one sort of gave this one and then we had these two lines of development one of the results that came out of that was also the embedded drop-off which many of you probably have seen as the embedded console in application server 5 and currently we use RHQ-1.3 and in September last year and finally able to put those drop-off Tool-up-3 plus bits into RHQ-1.4 so it's one unified source line we released a community release of 1.4 built 01 and in this build we had some issues with people that wanted to upgrade from previous versions of drop-off to that version because our plugin system considered the 2.3 version plugins as newer than the 1.4 version plugins so we decided in the process first we are putting some different emphasis and more emphasis on the whole development and also about just the compatibility with the version numbers that's the next version of RHQ will be RHQ-3 and last week we released the second community version of it RHQ-3.0 build 2 which has the plugins and this is now the mainline development RHQ-3 we don't have a release date yet but we plan on giving out community releases every every 6 weeks for 2 months and it's expected that from RHQ-3 you will also get the next version of Jebus which will probably be Jebus-3 as well so after this history review give a quick architecture overview the central thing that we have here is the RHQ server or a class bomb thereof so when you want to do load balancing or failover you can have one or more servers in your data center it's even possible if you have two data centers to have one each or two each and then have so called affinity groups that when an agent come to that in a minute is talking to one data center and or one server in one data center and this server is going down that we will try to talk with the other server in the data center before switching over to the other data center which is normally not wanted so on the server we have the access for the administrator it's the GUI we have the user interface as I have just shown we have command line interface on it that's also in Java and it uses javascript as its language in javascript we can write expressions in javascript with complete control structures it even has auto-completion for for some terms for resource names and for and other stuff so it's quite comfortable and quite powerful and then we have experimental support for web dev so you can mount your resource tree as a web dev directory in your explorer or finder or whatever the server hosts also the database connection before database for us our Postgres and Oracle there is some support for H2 database that's an embedded one which basically the successor of what was called hypersonic in the past this is mainly used for demoing or testing purposes it's not for production and then there is some experimental support for SQL Server or for one version of SQL Server and we have a big component that we have here that you need is the agent this dot dashed line shows a platform so on each platform that you want to monitor and manage stuff you need an agent and this agent gets all the agent plugins and only these agent plugins talk to your managed resources so in a firewall scenario you only have to the communication between agent and server but never between server and a target manage resource so yes please I was talking a lot about resources our definition of a resource is everything that can be managed or monitored I've written a plugin that monitors a terminal chip so it's just a terminal terminal sensor like a transistor that size begins on the one wire bus so here it's only monitoring and not managing but a resource could also be any process or a sweat count or a memory setting or anything like that and then each resource has a corresponding resource type a resource type for example Linux or Mac OS it's a AWS it's Tomcat it's an individual data source it's a database table things like that and the last thing which we have is the resource category this sort of shows the place in the resource hierarchy you have seen before platform which is the machine then the max level is the server which could be for example a javas application server it could be a Tomcat this whole thing is sort of recursive server can host a server javas AS has this embedded Tomcat server so that's recursive and then usually below a server you have the services which is a data source in javas AS which is a web application in Tomcat there is you know how to on when to use a server or when to use a service usually like that you that when you have a subsystem or complete process you model it as a server and when it's individual parts of the subsystem you model it as a service but it's really like as you can see where it's just finished okay that's this and this is again showing this hierarchy which who hosts what there are even platform services that are not hanging on the server but directly on the platform like never in the faces okay then we have those subsystems I have shown it already in the in the UI box so I'm not going to mention it a lot again it depends on what your plugin defines which of the subsystem is available for a specific resource type usually you want to do monitoring availability is technically also a known subsystem but it's it's your fault I know to monitoring sort of so you always have some inventory but many resources just don't have any connection properties know nothing so you don't need to implement anything in there so I'm going to talk about the accessibility of the whole thing we have now perspectives or magic in power you can you can write server-side plugins that are running in the server that extend the server functionality one of those is the perspectives which give you a new UI look or you use it to the UI and then we have the alert plugins that are alert senders and then you can write for the agents those agent plugins it only goes through all of those now perspectives that's like UI plugins so it's possible to write a complete new UI screen that's hosted on a tab like this monitor inventory that you have seen just next to that in a new arm tab this can be written in Java just a normal war file or it is or will be possible to even host a complete application that's written in PHP but that gets some information when it's called and that can even also link back into the main UI or call UI we have various extension points so it's it's possible to to change entries in the top level manual you can add new tabs and you can write new pages or exchange existing pages then the agent plugins that's basically the functionality those guys that talk to the managed resource that work with the managed resource only those talk to the resource that's important again so it's basically metadata plus some Java code the metadata defines the capabilities of your plugin so when you say I want to monitor out those 234 values only those 23 values will be shown in the GUI in the Schedules tab or the Monitoring tab no matter how many data the plugin could provide otherwise the metadata also wires the Java classes together the plugin can auto discover resources so it's possible when a new resource of that type is coming up that it gets automatically added to the inventory and there's a generator available that can help you with writing a plugin there is a big list of plugins available right now many of those add our HQ project in the gift report but also from third parties and I've written a script plugin that can even defer the measurement taking to some scripts in jruby or javascript so many administrators don't like writing Java code but they know scripting languages like Ruby are well enough so even that's possible okay our final is the 3 boxes so you have to plug in the script you need to write that that's a bit of XML you have to write a discovery class that's only to implement one method that in the shortest version just sort of returns its input and then the component class that defines all the facets for all the subsystems that you want to implement and yeah so this is a quick run of the plugin generator it's a standard Java archive it asks a few questions here do you want platform server service of your resource tree from that plugin where should it live in a package hierarchy where should it live in the file system so which are the class names and now what subsystem do you want to support do you want to support event do you want to support monitoring etc etc and when all of that is done it will write out a POM file from the formation and also a skeleton plugin descriptor with a few to-do tags in there and also skeleton Java classes that are fully stocked out for all the subsystems that you want to support so you can directly compile it and deploy it it won't do much of course but it's already made plugin I have created a video which I hope will be online soon about how to do that there are also a lot of online articles out now on how to write a plugin so there should be a lot of resources and of course there's the source code of the existing plugins that's just a list of available agent plugins I don't want to go through that in detail this list is not exhausted so I think the source is I'll look it up for the source of knowledge but there is you see big support for just Java software, Java's LS AS5 support, Java's hash we have an S&P trap key so other devices like routers can send traps to the system which can then incorporate into the event subsystem we have a generic JMX server here which allows you to monitor any Java 5 resource I've written a blog post in the past on how to monitor your eclipse IDE with the help of this JMX plugin so even that's possible and then outside of our domain there is a finished fan for the successor of Java's cache monitoring for mobile sense for various parts of mobile sense support, Java's ESB my proctor just told me that they have for their truth some support and I'm sure there are more plugins out there that I don't know about so after the agent plugins and the managed resource and monitor resource I'm coming back to the server side plugins about how to expand your server those server side plugins live in the server as the name says and they basically have access to all server side methods so it's possible for you to write a plugin that's for example doing reports on all your resources or when in inventory you could write a report about how many Windows 2003 servers do you have in inventory or things like that Google import very cute I really record the engine sometime in the future hopefully but you could use it for those purposes again it's some metadata plus Java code and there are some different kinds of server side plugins all of them have different worker that expand a base of server plugin XML in format one of the most used for my side is the alert sender that I'm coming to all of the plugins are content sources we have for example in javas a javas patch feed where customers can get updates to the javas as servers and this is also a server side plugin that's contacting the customer support model a feed with the changes and the customer can then say in javas on please apply those changes to my application source that's also supported by the server side plugins the alert plugins are a specialized form of server side plugins basically what you have to do is again write a little bit of XML and then implement this one method alertSender.send and the argument that you get alert that just got fired and then you have to react on it I will show an example on the next slide nice thing is we have preferences in the UI for the whole plugin so it's possible if you have let's say an IRC sender plugin that is sent as a preference although you want to contact and perhaps some credentials on how to contact that and then alert specific will be for example a channel this should go to I will show that in the UI in a few minutes and these get just injected you don't have to do any work to get at those values they are just there for free port the UI is just driven by the data you have a configuration system and this just renders the input fields for all of that which is powerful enough in many many cases but sometimes it's not enough for example when you want to do extensive searches or list paper boxes then it's still possible to write a custom UI you write an XHTML a facelet plus a backend in Java package all of that together and then you have a custom UI also here we have a script language alert sender where you can define those methods or the implementing method in JRuby or in Ruby and have this delivered by Ruby instead of having to write Java code so it's again appealing I guess to administrators this is a list of available alert sender plugins subjects and roles subjects are just the user who is in the RHQ server and roles are things like javas operators or system operators or business people or something like that and they will just send emails to those then we have RubySense support so the plugin is talking to a RubySense server which is then initiating a voice call to you and reads the error message on the phone I did have in the past a version where you were even able to do touchstones to answer back to the server for example to reboot a resource this is currently not available in this alert sender plugin version I still need to look for a good idea on how to integrate it so you are free to help short message via developerground.com they have a wrestling interface where you can talk rest to an endpoint to send short messages then microblock that's Twitter or status net feeds that's interesting I guess that's the status net server within your enterprise and people can just have their Twitter client talk to that status net server and get the updates from there as well email is just email sending to anyone we can then send SNMP traps and also talk to IOC have a board on IOC that's reporting alerts and again the script language and one thing that we did have an older version but which currently vanished in the operation in the alert plugin version is the operation sender that you can trigger an operation like we have seen on an arbitrary resource in your inventory so it will be possible if you find out that the data source is running at full connections for the whole time even if you only expect five open connections at a time you can for example re-boot the whole application server if you think that's a good idea to fix this problem okay that's a quick alert plugin example so that's the wiring you write this alert plugin the script door it's a bit short up there because of all these XML namespace headers that you have to implement which I don't want to show you so basically you have to define the name and you can define a package that's just a java package where your code lives in and you don't have to specify it here on the plugin class later on here in this block server plugin code on plugin configuration you specify the preferences that's global for all instances of this alert sender and then down here alert configuration these are the properties that are specific for one instantiation of the sender I will show it in a minute what's meant here we need to provide a short name of this sender which gets shown when you want to define a new alert notification you select from a list of senders and that's the short name that you will see the java code for the whole thing here is again this package public class URL sender we have that guy we have this method send here you just define the java code I'm getting my data from preferences so the preferences value is there for you you say get simple simple value hostname is the one we defined here in metadata and this second argument is the default value if the operator or the user did not enter anything you just specify default value the same here and you have parameters next to that part so the data is just here you have only this one method call to get it here I'm opening my htp URL connection to that host and port I'm getting an output stream and writing my messages with simplified of course and at the end when you're done you need to withdraw sender result object the sender result object expects that you specify if it was successful or failure and a message and then there's a search date not shown on this slide which is deferred email which means this plugin just computed a list of email addresses that should be sent off but it's not able to determine if sending will be successful later because that's only done after all the email addresses have been collected so this plugin kind of know it and luckily it does not have to implement this sending because it's just available for free it's close to the end but it's okay you can see here that's in this plugin that part I have just my alert notifications I have this MobySense sender I can show that outside later on if anyone wants to see it here that's the alert configuration that was down here on the XML snippet so that's just a default rendering and here you add your value for this loads plugin we have this custom URL to see if not as nice as the provided one but this is a little bit more complex with those pickups where you can put stuff from left to right and it disappears on the left list and gets the right one so this is not so you can just write it as you want and then the last thing system configuration plugins so here is a list of ancient and server-side plugins let's just go into one a little MobySense one configure so here that's this box this global configuration section that was up in the XML snippets again, render for you some URLs for you rhqproject.org it has pointers to all of the others of course then my blog I'm often writing about rhq and how to extend it on how to do things so if you are interested it's something that you might want to follow and then we have jampers.org this RSS aggregator so all of our feeds including mine about rhq will be fed into that one so thanks for listening and I will take questions but before that one more thing the sum of code is coming we are planning to participate in that if you are interested in that contact me please


Dear friends, as you can imagine, I am among the tallest prime ministers in the world. And so the temptation to talk about the world is very big. But my country is among the smallest in the world. So the need to speak about it is also very big. And I'll try to resist the temptation and to fulfill the need without being boring. And I hope with your patience to have a certain success. I very much believe globalization is here to stay as long as we live in the same planet, as long as we are warmed by the same sun. As long as the deepening of our interconnections has become unstoppable. Our genuine interest in across the board and beyond the boarder's cooperation is growing bigger despite reluctances and rejections. And multilateralism is and should remain the instrument for cooperation. The problems we are dealing with today are every day more interrelated. Take climate change. And by the way, we all know that global warming is not just a climate issue. It is a development issue, a security issue, an issue that affects the strength or the weakening of world peace as a whole, and of peace in various regions. An issue with long-term impact. Therefore, the more effectively we deal with it, the better to prevent natural disasters, fires, floods, droughts, rising water levels, loss of land, etc. It is not today the COVID-19 pandemic a global issue, which has taken so many lives compared to the loss of our world war. Are we able, as isolated nations, to fight against this plague of modern times? We saw it, and the answer is, of course, we are not. The same logic in my view goes for security issues, for the fight against international terrorism, for the cyber war, for supply with drinking water and food for all, for the attainment of sustainable and long-term development with the aim of leaving no one behind, and so on and so on. In these times of global challenges, which are also times of trust challenges, a global approach is required. The commitment of all of us within the structures we have set up is required. But for sure, adopting these structures to meet today's challenges is a must. And not in a hegemonic, but in a harmonic way, I might say. Albania believes that the renewal of a profound commitment to effective multilateralism is more necessary than ever, so as to deliver on peace, democracy, human rights and development. In this frame, we strongly support the vision and the ambitious reform agenda of the UN system, and that of the Security Council as well. With a firm commitment to the principles of multilateralism, Albania successfully chaired last year the OSCE, making an enduring and long-lasting contribution to peace, human rights and equality. Under our leadership, the OSCE Ministerial Council agreed several new commitments, on combating transnational organized crime, countering corruption and preventing torture in the OSCE region. We delivered much-needed progress in all three dimensions of the OSCE security. As a believer of multilateralism on a global level, Albania will be, for the first time, in its UN membership history, a member of the Security Council of the United Nations for the term 2022-2023. Fully aware of the responsibilities trusted upon us by the United Nations family, we will bring to the Security Council the perspective of a small country with a constructive foreign policy and a consistent commitment to multilateralism. With a group of like-minded, we have undertaken the initiative to launch a treaty against pandemics in order to face successfully in time such kind of costly pandemic situations. We are concerned also about negative consequences of infodemic in the context of the COVID-19, which can heighten the risk of conflict, violence, human rights violations and mass atrocities. We need greater integration on a sustainable development agenda, with peace and security as well as human rights. Albania considers that the achievement of sustainable development goals and the implementation of the 2030 agenda is a shared responsibility. We are in full track with European Union policies and international documents and decisions to develop energy sector in full harmony and friendly with the environment. The Albanian government has started to reform the sector of electric energy since 2014 through actions undertaken to complete the legal and regulatory framework in compliance with the European Union third package of energy and in full compliance with the new directives on energy. We are focused on the diversification of the power production based always on renewables like water, sun and wind. This will reduce the high dependency on the weather conditions and as currently almost all the production is based on hydro sources. The government is developing the national energy and climate plan according to the new policy guidelines and energy community agenda on decarbonization in the energy sector. This plan will forecast the total power production based on domestic installed capacities for the period 2021-2030. So Albania is expected to be a net exporter of electric energy within this decade. But talking about the challenges of our times in this city, I cannot avoid to speak about the role model of the UAE regarding peace, multilateral cooperation and human solidarity. The signature of the Abraham Accords between UAE and Israel was a shockingly positive development of discontinuity with ages of stalemate in one of the longest and deepest conflicts of our world. Under taking the huge step of reaching out to the historical enemy, UAE led by example towards a completely new direction of addressing the future, not by forgetting the past, but by forwarding the future. And by doing so, making the future the base of dealing with the past and not let the past dictate anymore the future. This major development in the history of peacemaking, it is a true source of inspiration for the world as well as for us in the Balkan region.  On the other hand, we, Albania, have experienced firsthand the UAE human solidarity after the devastating earthquake of November 2019, when 15,000 families lost their homes in less than a minute. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed was among the very first to weigh in among a vast number of foreign leaders who express the solidarity not just in words but also in deeds. And thanks to him and to the government of UAE, whole brand new neighborhoods is being built today for families that lost everything in that tragedy. I'm very proud to conclude here by telling you that Albania stood strong in protection of the Afghan people at risk. Following the course of events back in Afghanistan and the spirit of solidarity, I talked about a little while ago, we Albanian government took right away the decision to host in Albania up to 4,000 Afghan citizens. It's a very big number compared to much bigger and richer countries, which contribution did not reach the bar of the challenge. And during all these days, many people have asked me why. And my answer is very simple. First of all, by doing so, we've honored our history and our tradition. One of the pages, the most beautiful page of our history being the Salvation of Jews during World War II, when Albania was the only country in Europe with more Jews after the war than before the war, because no one Jew was given up to the Nazis. Secondly, we may not be rich, but our memory cannot be short. We were the Afghans 30 years ago when leaving our own hell, escaping our own talibans. They were not fundamentalists of Islam, but they were fundamentalists of Stalinism. We had to cross the sea and to appear on the shores of Italy and Europe like aliens of which nobody knew how we looked like. And if we were not sheltered and given help and hope 30 years ago, we would not have been here today a country with EU candidate status aspiring to become one of the Union's members. And thirdly, maybe most importantly, we did it because we owe it to our children. They should not be erased in an environment where they are told to shut the door, to live in fear, to turn the back to them in need, but they should learn by deeds, not by words, that in this life there is a time to ask and there is a time to give. Thank you very much.