A Decade With My Head in the Clouds
From Flash and .NET to Cryptography
My software support route for my teaching has gone from Macromedia Flash (aa-ah!), through Windows with .NET/C#, and then onto the Cloud (with ASP.NET MVC). The first jump was the most difficult, but the rest has been easy.
Before I taught cybersecurity, I taught networking. In order to support my students, I created a Cisco emulator with Macromedia Flash using ActionScript 1.0. This allowed them to get hands-on experience in using Cisco devices without the need to access the hardware. But, these where the days before JavaScript integration, so Flash was the only way to run code in a Web browser. And, so, rather than upgrading to ActionScript 2.0, I ported the whole thing to Microsoft .NET and rewrote with C#.
This was a good move, as .NET was so easy to port later to the Web, and than Flash was eventually dumped by Adobe. And, so, in 2007, I moved my Flash Cisco Simulator to the Web [here]:
These pages ran on a bare metal server in 1&1, and it cost a good deal of money to run it. But, there were many times it went down, and especially difficult to make backups. I spent so many hours on the phone to 1&1 Support. The greatest problem was that the master boot record was corrupt and that the whole system would eventually fail, and where I spent hours in the recovery mode for remote console access — and which is a stressful time, as any sys admin will tell you. This remote console access comes from the days when we used to plug an RS-232 console into the server, and get root access to the system. It is not a nice place to be, as you don’t know if you will be able to fix the boot partition, and in getting the OS to boot up.
And, so, I made the move to AWS in October 2011, and the performance improved significantly, and it was so much easier to make backups. In those days, though AWS was rather basic:
These days, it has grown so much:
My great port of the software happened when Macromedia moved from ActionScript 1.0 to 2.0, and which made my code incompatible. So rather than rewriting I ported it over into Web pages. So, in Feb 2013, I created Asecuritysite.com, and which ported some of my teaching material and the Cisco Simulators:
This brought a whole new world of openness to the Cisco simulators:
I had to learn a whole lot of JavaScript for capturing key strokes, and then redirecting them with ASP.NET actions. It all worked very well, and made it easy for me, with improved version of the simulator:
And, as, AWS has grown, so has my site [here]:
And, so what comes around, go around. Ten years is a long time in the Cloud, and I was the first person to present at the AWS User Group in Edinburgh in 2013, and where I outlined how I was scaling my teaching into the AWS Cloud. Now, I’ve been invited back 10 year later to provide a presentation at the event [here]:
So, from 2014 to 2024, our world has changed so much. In 2014, the cloud was virtually a baby and where it was unusual for anyone to build anything in the cloud. These days, it is the default.
Conclusions
Here’s another 10 years in the Cloud. My site has grown from just a few people accessing it per day, to over 1.2 million unique users per year, and over 30 million accesses. Overall, there is no way I could have supported this growth with AWS. So, I thank them for supporting and scaling my teaching. Here’s the Cisco simulators:
Please note, I have updated the code in years, but I hope they are still usable. I spend most of my time on my new love … cryptography, and you’ll find lots of examples here:
