And justice for all...

Looks like hackers strike again to deface a government page... Guess it doesn't matter what type of target you are. Even the "High Court of Cassation and Justice" has something to worry about.

Disk monitoring and tuning with dd and S.M.A.R.T. - Reallocating bad sectors and predicting disk failure

What is S.M.A.R.T.?

Modern disk drives will automagically reallocate bad sectors on the fly, as soon as they encounter some kind of R/W/ECC error. But in order for this to happen, it must first access that sector. This is why you never see surface errors on modern disks.

Modern hard drives (ATA and SATA) have S.M.A.R.T. - Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Once you have that enabled in BIOS (assuming you have a S.M.A.R.T. capable disk and controller) you can monitor a number of disk health and performance parameters.

What you should keep an eye on is the Reallocated Sectors Count (if the drive has a problem with a R/W/ECC error it will mark the sector "Reallocated" and transfer the data to a spare area on the disk). This will result in some performance decrease, and is a sign of imminent disk failure.


Monitoring S.MA.R.T.

ATA and SATA disks:
To monitor S.M.A.R.T. data you can use HDTune on Windows or SmartMonTools (smartd, smartctl) on Darwin (Mac OSX), Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, or eComStation systems. If you're up to it, you can also use SmartMonTools on Windows.

USB Enclosures:
While in most cases you should have no trouble using HDTune or SmartMonTools, some USB drive enclosures may be resilient to monitoring with S.M.A.R.T. programs and will require vendor software. In such cases, you can download vendor software to perform monitoring, like "Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics".

iPods:
You can also get S.M.A.R.T. info on your iPod. You can either configure it to act as a pass through device (regular USB media) or boot your iPod in diagnostic mode. You can check S.M.A.R.T. disk data and perform more test on your iPod. To do so, you must reset your iPod and hold REW + Select (5G) at the Apple boot menu. For other iPod models, see here (or Google Apple Diagnostic Mode your iPod Model).

Forcing the disk to remap damanged sectors

Now you should know that if you see any problems with Reallocated Sector Count, Reallocated Event Count, Seek Error Rate, Offline Uncorrectable, UDMA CRC Error Count, Multizone Error Rate, Hardware ECC Recovered values, you should consider getting a new disk. These are all signs of a failing disk. Learn more about S.M.A.R.T. attributes and their meaning here. Note that depending on vendor, there may also be enhanced or propriotary S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Read your HDD vendor documentation.

But sometimes you just need to get a bit more life out of a disk, and force the disk to reallocated damaged sectors. You can do so easily by performing a full raw disk read and write operation. For this, you can use the UNIX "dd" tool. Make sure your target disks aren't mounted (Type "mount" to list mounted disks then use "umount disk").

You can perform a disk read operation (reading the whole disk) using a syntax similar to:

# dd if=/dev/disk of=/dev/null bs=2048

You can perform a disk write operation (zero out the disk, this WILL result in data loss) using syntax similar to:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=2048

Now you may wish to perform both a read and write at the same time, and not wipe out your disk data (zero it out). You can perform such a "disk refresh" using syntax similar to:

# dd if=/dev/disk of=/dev/disk bs=1m

This will read and rewrite the data to disk in 1MB chunks to prevent presently recoverable read errors from progressing into unrecoverable read errors.

Of course, you should read the dd manpage for your OS (on Windows you could use a dd for Windows implementation or resort to some sort of Linux or BSD LiveCD). Replace /dev/disk with your disk (make sure you're using the right disk). On Linux you can find out what disk you need to use from "dmesg" or /proc/partitions:

# cat /proc/partitions

You can also use "fdisk -l" to list partitons on your disk, see if that's the right disk

# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Do note that you need root permissions for all of this activity, so on some Linux systems you may need to use "sudo -i" to get a root shell, or precede all operations with "sudo".

While you're doing this rewrite operation, you should monitor the kernel log (dmesg). You can monitor /var/log/messages for this:

# tail -f /var/log/messages

You usually watch out for "DriveReady SeekComplete Error status=0x51 DriveStatusError error=0x04" or some other error.

You should also keep an eye on the Reallocated Sectors and other Interesting Parameters in smartctl:

# smartctl -A /dev/hda

Do this every now and then, and note the values before you've started the operation.

Once you begin the "dd" operations you can send dd a SIGINFO signal (use pkill / kill / whatever) to make it print out I/O information (progress). Some shells / TERMS also respond to Ctrl-T by sending SIGINFO.

# pkill -SIGINFO dd

Once you're done with dd and S.M.A.R.T. tools you should also perform a filesystem check (fsck / chkdsk / whatever).

Conclusions:

1. Monitor S.M.A.R.T. data with smartclt, keep an eye on Reallocs. Consider getting a new disk if you see reallocated sectors
2. Perform a disk refresh with dd in order to prevent recoverable read errors from progressing into unrecoverable errors. You don't need fancy tools like SpinRite.
3. You can use a simple Linux or BSD LiveCD to perform the disk refresh.
   
4. This is NOT a data recovery procedure. If you're doing data recovery, use something like dd_recover to a separate media.
5. This is NOT a step by step tutorial. Read your OS manpages to make sure you're not wiping out the wrong disk or something.
6. Always monitor S.M.A.R.T. parameters in order to spot disk failure before it happens.
7. Always keep backups.
   

Links and resources:

• Linux Harddisk Monitoring with SmartMonTools (smartctl)
• HDTune - S.M.A.R.T. tool for Windows
• Wikipedia S.M.A.R.T. page (good links)
  

Vista Vulnerability Report

Security professional Jeff Jones published a Windows Vista security report for vulnerabilities between Nov. 2006 to Nov. 2007. It also does a side by side comparison with Windows XP, RedHat and Ubuntu Linux and MacOS 10.4.

It looks like the Microsoft security features, tools and approach are finally starting to pay off.

Jeff Jones was also the author of the (somewhat controversial) Internet Explorer versus Firefox report.

Anyway, before you start criticizing, look at the quoted sources (secunia, NIST, securityfocus, securitytracker, ubuntu security notices, rhel security notices, ms security bulletins, etc). The man has a point.

PostgreSQL not for sale

Here's why PostgreSQL is NOT for sale.

Change Windows drive letter

I get asked quite often about changing the drive letter in Windows. Here's how:

Start - run - "diskmgmt.msc"

Right click your drive - Change Drive Letter and Path. You can also use this to create dynamic disks, delete / create partitions, format disks, create RAID arrays, shrink or grow volumes, etc.

For a command line tool, use diskpart.

Crazy EEE modding

And I thought the touch screen mod went too far...
http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades

Then run MacOS X on the EEE :-).

Sun buys MySQL: So far, so good... so what?

Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz answered some questions on his blog regarding Sun's future involvement with PostgreSQL, JavaDB Oracle relations and their plans with MySQL.

Sun also release a "Press Kit" on their webpage.

Some people on the other hand aren't too excited about the Sun - MySQL AB deal. Some even think this is a plot mastered by Larry Ellison to destroy MySQL (tinfoil hat, anyone?). Here's what Marketwatch has to say on the subject:

"BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Sun Microsystems Inc. gobbling up MySQL is perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions."

WinDirStat - KDirStat graphical disk usage utility clone for Windows

If you're familiar with KDirStat (or even Baobab) Disk Usage Analyzers in *NIX, you'll be happy to know there's a clone for Windows (yes, WinDirStat is the clone). Makes disk cleanup so much easier.

Just grab WinDirStat from the SourceForce page, and run it. You'll get a nice graphical view of disk usage.


Anyway, if you use Linux/BSD/whatever just use Baobab (Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer - part of gnome-utils package), KDirStat part of KDE or Filelight.

You can also get Scanner if you like that Baobab / Filelight PIE chart view, get Scanner on Windows.

Sun Microsystems buys MySQL for 1 billion USD

" We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB." - Jonathan Schwartz - CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Read more here. Sun & MySQL AB press conference here.

I'm also not quite sure on how will this impact Sun's long term policy on PostgreSQL. Sun offers PostgreSQL support (PostgresSQL on Solaris even has native DTrace probes), and was a big contributor to the project. I don't think they would drop PostgreSQL support though. Maybe port PostgreSQL to MySQL as a storage engine? :-).

I'd still like to know how Sun expects to make money off MySQL. Well, enough money to justify the 1 billion investment. Sun does tend to make money off support contracts, services, hardware and all that, but MySQL AB hardly managed to pull in $50 million last year. And they have around 350 employees. And besides, nothing stopped Sun from selling MySQL support and all that before.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:JAVA

Sun Microsystems also released the Preliminary Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2008 Report:

"Sun expects to report revenues for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 of approximately $3.60 billion, an increase of approximately 1 percent as compared with $3.57 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2007. Net bookings for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 were approximately $3.85 billion, an increase of approximately 7% year over year."

I'm waiting to see how Oracle (who already bought Open Source databases Berkeley DB2 and the MySQL InnoDB engine) will react to this one. Remember what Oracle did when RedHat bought JBoss? Shortly after, Oracle "Unbreakable" Enterprise Linux (based on RHEL sources) "just happened". What now? OracleSolaris? :-). Oracle also tried to buy MySQL AB before.

On a side note, Oracle bought BEA today, for $8.5 billion, after BEA turned down their original offer of $6.7 billion. Here's the Oracle Press Release. A nice addition to their "strategic acquisition" list, which already gathered almost 40 entries since 2005.

Macbook Air - Razor Thin Computing

Razor thin MacBook
64 GB Solid state drive and 1.36 kg is awesome for a 1.6-1.8Ghz machine with 2GB of RAM.

Most Oracle Admins don't patch security flaws

As of January 2005, Oracle provides Critical Patch Updates on Metalink every quarterly schedule to address significant security flaws and recommended updates (required for security fixes). So, how is this all working out? Well, see for yourself...

"Complexity of task makes admins not want to bother":
This research shows that "Two-thirds of Oracle DBAs don't apply security patches"

2/3? IMHO it's more like 9 out of.. 8.

""In fact, a good two-thirds of all Oracle DBAs appear not to be installing Oracle's security patches at all, no matter how critical the vulnerabilities may be, according to survey results from Sentrigo Inc., a Woburn, Mass.-based vendor of database security products.""

Windows Security Features, Securing Microsoft Products

Microsoft has become very security conscientious since that whole Code Red / Nimda business back in 2001. They've added features like Mandatory Integrity Control, Windows Service Hardening, User Account Control, BitLocker, Windows Firewall, Data Execution Prevention (DEP), ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), Signed Binaries and LKM (Loadable kernel modules), Windows Defender, Malicious Software Removal Tool, Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, Windows File Protection - WFP - and System File Checker - sfc.exe (just run sfc /scannow or /scanboot etc. to check and fix broken system files), Security Configuration Wizzard (scw) in Windows Server, etc.

Features that can easily compete with similar products in UNIX and *NIX systems, like chroots, jails (Windows Service Hardening), RBAC / su / sudo (UAC, MIC), GELI/GBDE GEOM classes on FreeBSD , crypto-loom/dmcrypt on Linux (BitLocker), IPF/IPFW/PF/IPTABLES (Windows Firewall Advanced Security -> wf.msc / WFAV in mmc), OpenBSD W^X, SSP, Linux PaX / Exec Shield (ASLR, DEP), IPSEC, Signed Binaries / LKMs, chkrootkit/RootKitHunder (Windows Defender, RootKitRevealer, StriderGhostBuster), Bastille (a UNIX hardening tool like Security Configuration Wizzard - SCW on Windows Server. Available for Linux, HP-UX, etc) and so on.

Even with development tools, GCC has ProPolice / SSP, Visual Studio has the /GS switch to protect against buffer overruns.

It's pretty clear, the security features are there, it's up to LAYER 8 (you!) to put it in practice.

The key idea here is *mitigation*. Don't abuse the Administrative accounts, read and apply those security guides and above all, use common sense. After all, Microsoft runs Windows on their servers (they even run 2008 while it's still in release candidate stage), and they're one of the biggest targets for abuse. There goes the argument that you "can't secure Windows".

Here's some links (they try to point to the more technical guides):

• Here's an overview of Vista security features, at a glance.
• Windows Vista Integrity Mechanism Technical Reference
• Windows Vista Security and Data Protection Improvements
• Microsoft Security Center
• Microsoft Security Development Center
• Microsoft Security Research Group
• Microsoft TechNet Security Center
  
• WSUS - Microsoft Windows Server Update Services
  

They have also started releasing some very good hardening guides:

• Windows XP Security Guide
• Windows Vista Security Guide
• Microsoft Office 2007 Security Guide
• Windows Server 2003 Security Guide
• Windows Server 2008 Security Guide
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Security Hardening Guide
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Message Security Guide
• Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Security Guide
• Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 Security Guide

Microsoft has also started it's own line of security products, with:

• Microsoft Forefront - Client / Server / Edge - security (Antivirus)
• Microsoft Antigen - E-Mail (Exchange or SMTP gateway) Antivirus / Antispam, Sharepoint security
• Microsoft One LiveCare - Antivirus /Antispyware
• ISA - Internet Security and Acceleration Server
  

Internet explorer vs. Firefox shows it's not that peachy "on the other side" either. And the response time from both is fair.



What about the whole "open source" - many eyes concept? Doesn't this mean Microsoft is horribly insecure? What about 3rd party code reviews?

That whole concept is highly overrated. 99% of open source users never seen a line of code in their lives. Simple as that. Just because you can install Ubuntu doesn't make you a kernel developer. Don't get me wrong, I love Open Source software, I'm just not rushing to make any claims about how the opens source development model adds security (remember, you can have a whole lot more malicious people look at the code then developers).

Anyway, Enterprise customers can still get access to Windows and other Microsoft sources through various Shared Source programs:

•Enterprise Source Licensing Program (ESLP)

"The ESLP allows eligible enterprise customers access to Microsoft Windows source code for internal development and support purposes, including debugging. This enables customers to develop and support their internally deployed applications and solutions that run on Windows."

KDE 4.0 Released

KDE 4.0 was released.

Cell accelerator boards, NVIDIA GPU servers and HPC

This is pretty interesting considering your basic CPU does something like 30GFLOPS (something around 16 GFLOPs per POWER 6 cores, 10GFLOPS for a Itanium cores). A cell board like this does 180GFLOPs.
(Don't take this is a benchmark or anything. This is just some RAW data).

Some NVDIA something like 500 (technically the G80 has 128 fp32 ALUs @ 1350MHz with MADD - about 350 GFLOPs), a R600 is supposed to have like 500 and a Realizm 800 (Dual Wildcat VPUs) about 700 GFLOPS :-). So yeah, with 16 or so of these cards used right, you could score yourself a place on TOP500 SuperComputers. "Hey, my 4 graphic stations can beat your 1000-node Xeon cluster!".

And this is no joke, since GF8 series and the whole NVIDIA CUDA thing, NVIDIA has also started making... erm.. servers.

NVIDIA Tesla S870 GPU computing system peaks something like 2TFLOPS.

While one of those "low powered MIPS 64 CPU's" in the SiCortex, about 1GFLOP :-). But they have clusters of up to 5832.

PCI-E Cell accelerator board:

• Cell BE processor at 2.8 GHz
• More than 180 GFLOPS in PCI Express accelerator card
• PCI Express x16 interface with raw data rate of 4 GB/s in each direction
• Gigabit Ethernet interface
• 1-GB XDR DRAM, 2 channels each, 512 MB
• 4 GB DDR2, 2 channels each, 2 GB
• Optional MultiCore Plus™ SDK software

A WildCat 800:



There's an awesome potential HPC market here... GPUs, Playstation 3s with Cells, Cell PCI-E cards... exploited properly, it can make some pretty fast clusters. See Folding@Home for example where where GPUs count for 58.3 and PS3's count for 18.1 average computations per client.

Eating your own dogfood

A quick look on netcraft reveals that Microsoft is running Windows 2008 / IIS 7 on their main webservers. I must say, they must have a great deal of confidence in the thing... microsoft.com is a *very* loaded website, and tends to be a big target for various attacks.

Microsoft Corp One Microsoft Way Redmond WA US 98052 207.46.19.190 Windows Server 2008 Microsoft-IIS/7.0 9-Jan-2008

Even the ones marked "Unknown" are Windows 2008 / IIS 7. A simple telnet / netcat on port 80 and a GET / HTTP/1.0 will reveal that.

HTTP/1.1
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: /en/us/default.aspx
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
P3P: CP="ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI"
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:50:57 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 136

eComStation - a modern OS/2 Warp

eComStation is an operating system based on IBM's OS/2 Warp. They are soon about to launch the 2.0 version containing bootable JFS and SMP support. It also contains interesting open source software such as OpenOffice 2 and Firefox 2.

Overall, it is a very polished OS/2 with new features to bring it in the 21st century. They also have a server version of eComStation.

Just like OS/2, it seems to dislike VMware or VirtualBox, so it runs a bit better in Microsoft's VirtualPC (which seems to have been made for OS/2 in the first place).

VisualLogParser - A LogParser GUI - Parsing logs using SQL syntax

LogParser is an awesome Windows application for parsing through system logs (event viewer, Registry, Active Drectory, IIS, etc) using a somewhat SQL-like syntax. It can also generate detailed reports, graphs, etc. Also makes a nice starting point for various Data Mining operations on your logs.

VisualLogParser is a GUI for LogParser. It is available on Microsoft's Open Source project page, Codeplex.

Here is the discussion board for Visual LogParser.

Latest ZFS binaries and source code for MacOS available

The latest binaries and source code of the Zettabyte Filesystem for MacOS are now available:
http://zfs.macosforge.org/

Why I don't trust software that puts 3rd party drivers in my system

Here's something fun I found on somebody's computer... it kept crashing.. I wonder why :-). Let's check what WinDbg !analyze -v has to say of the minidumps:

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: DRIVER_FAULT

Probably caused by : SYMTDI.SYS ( SYMTDI+ab3f )


STACK_TEXT:
WARNING: Frame IP not in any known module. Following frames may be wrong.
a74c1aec a73b874e ebe44589 863d4220 00000e20 0xd04d8dda
a74c1b1c a73b855d 86cd0034 a74c1b58 863d4220 SYMTDI+0x1174e
a74c1b60 a996bfbf 885f7700 863d4220 00000e20 SYMTDI+0x1155d
a74c1b64 885f7700 863d4220 00000e20 00000000 vsdatant+0x40fbf
a74c1b68 863d4220 00000e20 00000000 00000034 0x885f7700
a74c1b6c 00000000 00000000 00000034 a74c1b9c 0x863d4220

OK, here' s another one:

STACK_TEXT:
WARNING: Stack unwind information not available. Following frames may be wrong.
8a3e1a30 a7899aef 88c908b8 88bbef00 00000000 SYMTDI+0xab3f
8a3e1a50 a789c490 88c90404 88bbef00 00000000 SYMTDI+0xaaef
8a3e1a68 a78a99ab 88bbef00 00000000 8a3e1aac SYMTDI+0xd490
8a3e1a94 a78aadb3 89826688 8275b620 89826688 SYMTDI+0x1a9ab
8a3e1aa8 804ef095 89826688 8275b620 837bfb58 SYMTDI+0x1bdb3
8a3e1b10 a9ebc5e5 89429488 0103fd04 a9ebc5e5 nt!MiCheckControlArea+0x103
8a3e1c5c 8057f1fd 869af238 00000001 0103fc48 afd!AfdFastIoDeviceControl+0x415
8a3e1d00 805780c2 00000340 000002d4 00000000 nt!KeInitThread+0x101
8a3e1d34 8054086c 00000340 000002d4 00000000 nt!RtlCreateAcl+0x1d
8a3e1d64 7c90eb94 badb0d00 0103fc14 baccfd98 nt!RtlIpv4StringToAddressExA+0x149
8a3e1d78 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 0x7c90eb94

3: kd> lm kv
a788f000 a78b9dc0 SYMTDI T (no symbols)
Loaded symbol image file: SYMTDI.SYS
Image path: SYMTDI.SYS
Image name: SYMTDI.SYS
Timestamp: Sat Aug 24 23:54:56 2002 (3D6800B0)
CheckSum: 00038527
ImageSize: 0002ADC0
Translations: 0000.04b0 0000.04e0 0409.04b0 0409.04e0

No point bothering with Driver Verifier at this point, this is cleary caused by Norton Internet Security - Norton Dispatch Drivers. First few google hits confirm this:

Random BSOD's and reboots. - TechSpot Troubleshooting - Probably it is caused by SYMTDI.sys (Norton Internet Security Filter) or faulty memory

MSFN Forums > Server 2003 Blue Screen with SYMTDI.sys

Windows Home Server - A simple Media and Backup Server

Windows Home Server is a new Microsoft "family" friendly media and backup server. 120 trial available, so worth a check out for setting up a _very_ simple to use server you can't afford to administer or support yourself (like for a non-technical family member or friend).

It's got an interesting feature called "addons". They are like "packages" for various servers (or templates): DHCP, uTorrent, Wake on LAN, iTunes streaming, etc.

http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows-home-server-add-ins/

Installing Quake 3 on Solaris, fixing lib issues

Want to play some games on Solaris? You can grab Quake 3 + data (demo) here. pkgadd -d the packages (data first).

This is also a way to troubleshoot various missing files or LD issues on Solaris.

Run /usr/local/bin/ioquake3.sh

% /usr/local/bin/ioquake3.sh
ld.so.1: ioquake3.i386: fatal: libGLU.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory
/usr/local/bin/ioquake3.sh: line 39: 1678 Killed ${EXEC_DIR}/${EXEC_BIN} ${EXEC_FLAGS} $*

Well, that's no good. Let's find libGLU.so.1:

% grep libGLU.so.1 /var/sadm/install/contents
/usr/X11/lib/GL/amd64/libGLU.so.1=../../mesa/amd64/libGLU.so.1 s none SUNWxorg-mesa
/usr/X11/lib/GL/libGLU.so.1=../mesa/libGLU.so.1 s none SUNWxorg-mesa
...

Well, this should do it. What is that script running though? A simple grep for EXEC_BIN and EXEC_DIR in /usr/local/bin/ioquake3.sh gives us the location: /usr/local/share/games/quake3/ioquake3.i386

% ldd /usr/local/share/games/quake3/ioquake3.i386 | grep "not found"
libGLU.so.1 => (file not found)

So, now all we need to do is add libGLU.so.1 to the proper library path, and we're good to go:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/X11/lib/

Use /usr/local/bin/ioquake3.sh to start Quake 3.

Enjoy :-).

Getting detailed system information on Windows: PC Wizzard 2008, AIDA32, SiSoft Sandra

There are a couple of cool Windows tools for getting detailed system information and monitor temperatures and S.M.A.R.T.

Some built in Windows tools are systeminfo.exe (run in cmd: systeminfo > file && notepad file) and msinfo32.exe.

A cool free tool is PC Wizard 2008 from CPUID (makers of CPU-Z).




There is also AIDA32 and SiSoft Sandra which give detailed system information and can perform various benchmarks.

BgInfo from SysInternals is another interesting tool that displays systems information as part of the wallpaper background. It's quite nice if you're part of a large network and need to quickly identify what system you're on and easily view various network settings. It's somewhat similar to torsomo on various *NIX systems.

Magic Rescue - File Carving tool

Magic Rescue scans a block device for file types it knows how to recover and calls an external program to extract them. It looks at "magic bytes" in file contents, so it can be used both as an undelete utility and for recovering a corrupted drive or partition. As long as the file data is there, it will find it.

It may have problems on very fragmented filesystems.

ReviveIT (Revit) - smart data recovery tool (file carving).

Performing digital forensics or data recovery can sometimes be problematic, and you will eventually need to resort to file carvers.

Revit (Revive IT) is an advanced file carver thta uses file structure based carving, originally developed for DFRWS 2006. This means you can carve files right out of raw disk data, even in the lack of a filesystem or partition table.

It is a noteworthy tool alongside Foremost and Scalpel.

SLiM - Simple Login Manager - replacement for xdm

Tired of bloated or ugly xdm kdm gdm Entrace or dtlogin? Try SLiM - the Simple Login Manager. Small, light weight, easy to theme and best of all, good looking.

DragonFlyBSD - HAMMER Filesystem

The DragonFlyBSD HAMMER Filesystem has made progress. DragonFlyBSD 2.0 is expected shortly, so it may well be worth a look.

Unconventional Oracle Database installation in a straitjacket

Bored? http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2008/01/03#a1182

Emacs.NET

"Imagine if someone wanted to write something like Emacs.Net. Actually don't imagine it, it is happening."

"We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as "Emacs.Net"."

^^ duglasp at microsoft dot com

Well, this should be interesting to watch. Hell, notepad could use a rewrite :P.

Using GNU screen as a terminal emulator for serial null modem connections

Don't have tip / cu / minicom / kermit / hyperterminal / securecrt / an old vt100 / whatever around or just love GNU Screen? Here's a cool tip:

Start a screen session on the serial console at 9600baud:

$ screen /dev/ttyS0 9600

Too slow and your setup can handle it? Use 115200 baud:

$ screen /dev/ttyS0 115200

So, how do you send a break? C-a B. Just use Ctrl-a ? for help.

Sun Project Caroline - load balanced VMs connected to a backend database

Sun Project Caroline is an interesting research project:

"Provides a dynamic virtualized grid of language-level virtual machines (VMs), networks, and storage. The principal VM is the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but others can also be supported, such as for Perl, Python, and Ruby."

"The system makes use of multiple features of the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS): Zones are used for VM isolation and network binding control. Resource pools and the Fair Share Scheduler are used to manage processor allocations. IP Filter is used in network connectivity control. Extended accounting facilities are used to account for CPU time and network traffic. ZFS file system features such as snapshots and clones are available to developers."
(Sun)