SSl challenge - it was fun!

[Sherry Mayo <scmayo@rschp1.anu.edu.au>]

> Hi
> 
> Someone asked about the SSL challenge. Well  if you're interested
> here is a personal view from a "client" participant. 
> 
> Despite criticisms posted to this 
> list I think it worked pretty well for a first attempt,
> mainly due to Piete for hacking out new code and fixing things
> pretty quickly when things went wrong.
> 
> There was very little time to test software initially and
> get problems ironed out. I couldn't get brutessl to compile
> without tinkering and had timeout problems with brclient 
> due to the sometimes slow
> link from Austalia. Later versions of client software (that I didn't
> get till half way through the challenge) seemed to run without
> any problems and without losing ACKs. But my old client had failed
> to ACK quite a few of its earlier keyspaces and due to lack
> of a logfile I ended up writing a script to redo them and
> ACK them with the new version of the client software.
> 
> One problem with being in Australia was that I was asleep when
> new software updates were announced and tended to get them later
> than everyone else, and because of this an auto-update would
> be particularly useful to me if we do this again.
> 
> In the end it needed a bit of user intervention to get all
> my keyspaces ACKed but the problems were sorted out by the
> time the challenge was half way through and I think the next
> time we try this (and I hope we will) it will run much more
> smoothly. It was a good "learning" experience for all of us
> (especially Piete!) and should be regarded as what it was:
> an experiment that didn't run completely smoothly but was
> ultimately successful.
> 
> Taking part in the challenge was fun and I hope we can do
> another challenge sometime soon.
> 
> One gripe though - my ACKs don't appear on the credits list ;-(
> 
> Sherry
> 
>