With our wireless networking class, being that it’s the first time being taught, most of the students in the class are former graduates auditing the class. All of us are in the field working in the IT or Networking area in some form or fashion. Security experts, IT admins, web admins, so on and so forth.

Our schedule is pretty regular I suppose, one night is lecture, the next is labwork. So what else is there to do in a class that is scheduled for four hours, and we get it done in less than two?!? Talk about our jobs and share information with one another of course! What else is sharing of knowledge but teaching and learning.

We each have our own little specialties as far as what we do or what we know. Thankfully we all work in a day and age when portable storage is abundant. Flash drives, portable hard drives, even the occasional CD come flying out. There is of course one common theme between all of this chaos, FREE software. Whether it is open source and protected under a GPL license, or closed source and simply freeware, we all hunt for the best tool for the job, and then for two nights out of the week, we’re traders that have met at crossroads somewhere.

Instead of beaver pelts and bear furs, we’re dealing with bits and bytes, sniffers and scanners. Of course, last night in particular we were able to come together using some of our collective tools to hunt a rogue wireless network that shouldn’t have been there. Change the scenery and it would have been four hunters tracking an elk through the forest. Everyone is a scout, everyone carries a weapon should that chance show itself to kill their prey.

Instead of killing it though, we simply maimed it and left it to have it’s wounds tended once found lying helpless on its shelf, err ground. Of course then we all went outside for the smokers to suck on their cancer sticks and all of us stand around silently patting ourselves on the back for a good hunt. Or do I mean mingle?