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GNU ddrescue – Recovery Enhanced dd

Creating images of a drive prior to the recovery processing is always a good idea. If you will be expecting a lot of I/O errors, ddrescue might be interesting for you.

http://freshmeat.net/redir/addrescue/55349/url_homepage/ddrescue.html

GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. GNU ddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps. The basic operation of GNU ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile feature of GNU ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.

Combine this with a cheap USB2IDE or USB2SATA adaptor and keep it in your geek bag!

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Camera Phone Predator Alert Act

Found on slashdot

A new bill is being introduced called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which would require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the phone’s camera. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone.

As usual, the reason for this act is pointed at children that need to be protected from perverts rather than the public perhaps documenting unlawful behaviour by employees of the federal government such as the police. Footage like this has taken a new step forward with thousands of blogs and video plattforms like youtube.

Since almost anyone nowadays carries a mobile phone that may have a phone integrated (even Blackberries) the potential is much larger than any government surveillance system…

So how is this going to stop perverts and stalkers from filming?

Maybe there should be a bill enforcing storage capacity on cell phones as well…

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Uber Geek of the Universe retires CSI

CSI was one of the very few TV shows I ever bothered watching in the last six or seven years (on DVD and the tubes). Since Miami and NY are lame ripoffs.. I dont think Laurence Fishburne (“Stop trying to hit me and hit me”) can keep me hooked….

It would have been funny if a fictional character actually beat the US Presidents farewell speech in terms of viewer ratings…

Btw. I love science but hate math… so Numb3rs is not really an option…

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Debian Testing crashing at 00:00 UTC

Oddly enough, one of my servers running Debian Testing (which has been running for about 4 years now without any freezing issues or such) had a hard crash at 01:00 CET which would be the exact time for the year switch in UTC. Not sure if this was just some stupid coincidence but i might as well look into it…

Update: There seems to be a bug with 2.6.21 causing this problem

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=746976a301ac9c9aa10d7d42454f8d6cdad8ff2b

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Personal 2008 IT highligts

Debian & the predictable random number generator

Ok this proves that even the best server OS out there has some lame security implementations. Lucky for me I only had to replace about a dozen SSH keys…..

Debian was awarded the pwnie award 2008 in the category EPIC FAIL for this one at BlackHat 2008.

Exchange 2003 and the Greylisting Bug

This one actually pissed me off so much, that I will never ever trust a Microsoft MTA again…. The worst part was the lacking acknowledgement by Microsoft… At least they decided to release a hotfix after the bug was first reported to them in 2006!!!

On the other hand I dont regret putting a lot of time and effort into postfix afterwards.

Netbooks

Starting out as a cool little gadget for computer geeks – the insanely fast development has turned these little machines into a serious alternative for mobile computing. Im very happy with my Aspire One 110L running Ubuntu 8.10 so far combined with my mobile phone for 3G connectivity. My EEE 701 however only lasted for 2 Months.

Might take a shot at the 10 Inch generation this year.

Back to Intel

After more than 10 years of AMD-CPU dominace in my personal and custom assembled machines (since my Intel Pentium 60) i finally chose an Intel based system again. I guess the price has been an important factor to me all those years. Just for the records:

  • AMD 486 SX25
  • AMD 486/100 DX4
  • Intel Pentium 60
  • AMD K6-2 350 Mhz
  • AMD K6-2 500 Mhz
  • AMD Duron 750 Mhz
  • AMD Athlon 1,2 Ghz
  • AMD Athlon XP 1,6 Ghz
  • AMD Athlon 64 XP 3000
  • AMD Athlon 64 x2 3600
  • IntelCore 2 Duo E8400