One of the most common questions we address here at the Nationals is “how do we get involved in CCDC”?  Well the answer is “it depends” - on who you are and what aspect of CCDC you want to be involved with.

Student/coach:  If you are a student or a faculty member interested in starting a team and competing in CCDC events, head on over to www.nationalccdc.org and take a look at the Competitors menu.  There you’ll find information about the rules (including topics like team composition and eligibility), regional events, the competition schedule, and so on.  Be sure to download the Team Prep Guide in the FAQ section of the Competitors tab.  CCDC is a tiered competition structure – there are qualifying events, leading to regional events, which lead to the national event.  If you win you keep progressing up the competition ladder.  To start competing in CCDC events you’ll need to contact the POC responsible for your qualifying or regional event (see the CCDC Regional map under the CCDC Regionals section of the Competitors tab) and register your team for competition.  CCDC competitions start in January but don’t wait to register – many CCDC events have a limited number of competitions spots and they fill up fast.

Sponsor:  CCDC events are an excellent place to showcase IT or security related products to the next generation of professionals.  Looking for some outstanding employees?  CCDC events are an excellent place to recruit.  Every CCDC event accepts sponsorship donations of software, hardware, and funding in return for recognition and access to some of the best talent colleges and universities have to offer in the IT space.  For more information on sponsorship opportunities please visit www.nationalccdc.org and click on the Sponsors menu or contact the POC for the CCDC regional in your area.

Volunteers:  CCDC events have some excellent volunteer opportunities and are a great way for you to support your local schools (while possibly earning CPE credits).  For volunteer opportunities please visit www.nationalccdc.org and click on the Volunteers tab or contact the POC for the CCDC regional in your area.

Media:  CCDC events do offer access to credentialed media personnel.  If you are interested in covering a CCDC event, please contact the POC for the CCDC regional in your area.  For media coverage of the National CCDC, please contact the CIAS at 210-842-0509.

One of the challenges many CCDC teams face is finding enough power, space, and equipment to build out a practice network. To address this issue, teams are increasingly turning towards virtualization – which is a great solution for competition practice sessions. Virtualization gives teams the ability to build out practice servers, workstations, or entire networks using the same core equipment again and again. Virtualization gives teams the ability to reset images back to their original configuration quickly, save images in various states of modification, share images between team members, and re-use images over and over while testing different ways to solve an issue or find the fastest way of securing a given application or operating system. Sounds great, right? So how do you get started?

How you approach building out your virtualization capability will depend on what hardware you have available. If all you have available is a system with 2 GB of RAM then you’ll probably want to use a product like VMware Player (http://www.vmware.com/products/player/). VMware Player is free and allows you to create and run virtual machines on your Windows or Linux system. If your resources are limited, you may only be able to run one virtual machine at a time, but VMware player will give you the ability to create and practice with 32 and 64 bit Windows and Linux operating systems without wiping out and reloading your system every time you want to switch OSes. If you have a powerful system with plenty of RAM you can even run multiple virtual machines at the same time. Virtual machines created with Player are portable as well – you can copy a virtual machine and hand it to a team member to practice with and you can upload images built with player to a dedicated hypervisor like VMware’s ESXi. If you have a number of machines with limited resources you can still build a practice network of systems – just run VMware Player on multiple machines simultaneously.

If you have a spare server lying around, you can create a dedicated virtual machine server. The ideal candidate has one or more multi-core processors, 4 GB or more of RAM (the more the better), and at least several hundred gig of storage. In general, the more memory you have available the more virtual machines you can run simultaneously, but you’ll be more satisfied with the performance if you give each virtual machine access to at least a gig of RAM and only run 3 or 4 virtual machines per core. For example, if you have a quad core system with 16 GB of RAM you can probably get away with running 12 to 16 virtual machines at the same time so long as you’re not running an AV scan or patching all the systems at the exact same time. Once you’ve located your hardware you need to select a hypervisor – the virtual machine manager that will let you create, run, and manage multiple virtual machines on a single hardware platform. There are several free hypervisors (virtual machine managers) to choose from including VMware’s ESXi (vSphere Hypervisor http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html), the Xen hypervisor (http://xen.org/), VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/), and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3512). Be sure to check the hardware requirements and compatibility lists before you choose a hypervisor and feel free to experiment – just because your hardware isn’t “officially approved” doesn’t mean it won’t run that hypervisor with a little tweaking.

Once you’ve built out your virtualization capability – start building virtual machines and practicing. Be sure and check out the Virtual Appliance repository at http://www.vmware.com/appliances/. There you can find pre-built virtual machines with everything from servers to firewalls to PBXs.

Ever wanted to play with a Network Attached Storage device?  Is your team looking for some place to store files, images, injects, VMs?  Have an old desktop/server and a few drives lying around and nothing to do on them?  Consider building out your own SAN.  While you can easily pick up some lower end SAN devices for less than $1,000 there are at least two solutions  that will allow you to build a dedicated SAN using hardware you already have laying around:  FreeNAS and Openfiler.  FreeNAS and Openfiler are software solutions that allow you, in most cases, to take your existing hardware and turn it into a full-featured network storage solution supporting iSCSI, NFS, SMB, AFP, etc.  And you can get them for free.

FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) is a free, open source, network-attached storage operating system based on FreeBSD that includes a web interface, command line interface, support for 10GigE devices, snapshots, replication, and so on.  The software is downloaded as ISO that you than burn with your favorite burning software to create a bootable CD.  Openfiler (www.openfiler.com) is available in both free and paid versions, includes a web interface, support for 10GigE devices, replication, and so on.  The software is available as an ISO as well as pre-built VMWare and Xen virtual appliances.

Both products are fairly simple to install from their ISO versions.  Burn the CD, boot from it, and follow the prompts.  If you’ve ever installed an operating system, this process will be very familiar to you and you can have the basic system up and running in very little time.  The big question you’ll need to answer is what will you use your newly created SAN for?  Let’s face it, network storage is fun to play with but it can also be useful.  Here are some things to consider:

• iSCSI target for ESX server:  Both products support the creation of iSCSI targets that are can be used as datastores for ESX servers.  This is especially useful when storing many VMs or using VMs with multiple snapshots.
• NFS:  Both products support NFS which would give your team a network storage capability to share files, folders, and so on.  You can even share CD/DVD drives via NSF.
• Directory Services:  You can configure your NAS to use authentication services such as LDAP or Active Directory.

Of course performance of your NAS is heavily dependent on the hardware you are using.  Neither solution is very CPU or memory intensive but performance for each is heavily influenced by the NICs and hard drives you are using.  The good news is that even with a single 7200 RPM SATA II or III drive and a gigabit NIC you can get acceptable performance out of either of these products.  And both options support capabilities such as NIC teaming to increase throughput.  So if you’re looking for a network storage solution to use in your CCDC preparation activities, consider giving FreeNAS and/or Openfiler a try.