Posted on

Citrix Makes XenServer available for free

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939

Obviously, this step is taken in order to battle VMware and its free ESXi server.

Compared by the XenServer vs. ESXi feature set, Citrix offers enterprise level technology such as Live Migration (Xen Motion compared to VMotion for ESX) and many others features for free. Also, Xen is teaming up with Microsoft on Hyper-V in deploying Virtualization Management software.

But VMware is also teaming up with Cisco (Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Unified IO Nexus Hardware ), Emulex (Fibre Channel over Ethernet Host Bus Adapters, CNA ) and EMC²

Last week I attended a presentation event by VMware and its peers (Cisco, Emulex, EMC²) and we can expect quite a few cool features & technology to come.

Posted on

IBM releases 2008 Trend & Risk report

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/iss/xforce/trendreports/

In addition to standard vulnerability, malware, spam, phishing, and web threat statistics, the 2008 X-Force Threat and Risk Report features the following special topics:

  • Exploitation Economics. Why some “critical” vulnerabilities may not be so critical.
  • Web applications. The Achilles heel of corporate IT security.
  • Better Browsers. More secure (if you update) but still the main exploitation target.
  • Bad Web Links. More prolific for spam, phishing, and the delivery of malicious code.
Posted on

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!

Posted on

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…

Posted on

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…

Posted on

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