Let me throw my two cents in here.  I have a bachelors in Software Engineering.  There have been times in the past two years that I wished that it had more programming in it.  However, it did give me a greater view of how projects and software comes together.  I stayed in school when I finished that and earned my masters with a concentration in IS.  I now work in that field as an auditor and enjoy it.  This is why I wish I had more programming though.  There have been times when it would have been nice to write a quick script or other to aid in the testing process or writing exploits. I would suggest, that you look at IA since you already have a bit of a CIS background.  Good luck with whatever you choose.

Oh, I did both my bachelors and masters in online programs.  That worked out well for me since I had a family and a full time job that I could not just drop to go back to school.

You have no idea how true that statement is Jordy.  The answer is always no until the question is asked.

I've played around with it a bit and I like some of the features, but I don't know it near well enough to be useful with it.

One of the guys I work with theorized that you got paid more for having more on your shelf.  I'm not sure how true that is, but I will admit that you look like you know more.

Way to go guys!!

Are any of you familiar with the DISA STIGs?  I am working on a development project and am having issues with report services on a STIG compliant box.  Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks Don,

My wife just called and mine is at the house waiting for me.  Of course the kids want it almost as much as me.  Thanks Don for such a great forum and some really awsome give aways.

lol and who said crackers don't have a sense of humor. 

Thanks Don

Good luck.  It may not be v2, but syskey may be enabled on the target system and that could be where your problem is.

I would concentrate more on a scripting language like Perl or Python.

You could delve into the registry.  Windows tends to store that kind of information there.  Cain & Abel could probably help you with that.  Good luck.

Run it through your favorite cracker and see what comes out.  If it pukes its guts out, then it is probably NTLM if not LM.

lol! Looks like this could be kinda fun and different.  I'm looking forward to seeing what Ed comes up with.

We do this kind of thing as consultants and we are time limitted.  We use a laptop running Gentoo (I didn't pick this) with a 2.2 GHz dual core processer and 2 Gig of RAM.  We get most results back in far less than eight hours.  We have hit some large networks doing this.  But it all depends on what is going to work for your budget. 

For internal, I would imagine that you would be able to get your own server rather than an appliance.  An appliance limits you to that vendor and can make changing later an issue or running multiple products.  Happy hunting.