July 2024: Automated Building and Deploy Testing — Using Zeek as an example

At ESnet, we pride ourselves on being cutting-edge, even if it causes a few scratches. Every new branch of Zeek is automatically built and tested in Gitlab CI. Then, every night, the latest successful 'master' build is deployed, along with all of our packages and scripts, to a test system via Ansible. As time permits, we roll out the latest build, in production, to over 40 servers.

Through this process we've both been able to provide early feedback to the Zeek project about potential bugs and give ourselves an early warning system when changes impact our production plugins and scripts.

Zeek is an open source network security monitoring tool. This does not focus on the use of Zeek itself, but rather the care and feeding of our installation footprint.

Speaker Bio: Michael “Dop” Dopheide has spent the majority of his career working in the R&E community specializing in systems engineering, security research, incident response, and network intrusion detection. He especially enjoys helping coworkers debug problems at the packet and protocol levels. In addition to his operational security role, Dop helps support the open source Zeek community and volunteers every year to beta test the SANS Holiday Hack challenge.