Met Irongeek at an OWASP Meeting

Got to meet Adrian Crenshaw of Irongeek.com.  Adrian is truly a notable figure in the infosec community. 

CISSP CPE

Logstalgia: The Next Step In The Network Security?

Ever since the release of Hackers and Johnny Mnemonic, I've longed for a stylish way to represent computer networks. I've always dreamed of having a visual interface that displays network data in a practical manner.  In a sense, I wanted someone to blur the lines between video games and network information.

Has that time finally come?

Logstalgia creates a beautiful visual representation of web traffic.  Logstalgia creates a real-time "pong" like representation of traffic being sent or received by a web server.  The beauty of this plugin is its simplicity.  Even though it's an Apache plugin, it can support multiple log formats. The Google Code website also recommends running Logstalgia on a workstation rather than a web server itself.  It appears that Logstalgia could create a considerable amount overhead in regards to computer resources.

This open source application provides a high level overview of real time web traffic.  Although incredible, I don't believe that this application is 100% practical.  I wouldn't place this application in any type of network operating center.  I believe the bright flashes and colors could become very distracting.  And although the GUI could provide an easily digestible representation to a layman, this visual representation wouldn't yield enough information to someone like an administrator.  With that being said, I would still install it on my web server if I were running one.