OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking…. “Hello where has he been?” when I’m talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but…. in spite of all I’ve done supporting desktop systems and even small business servers I’ve never had an opportunity to setup a raid array. First it was because “you don’t want to do software raid” and I didn’t have a card to support hardware raid, then when I first was seeing people raving about how good linux software raid is, I didn’t have two free drives of equal size to work with. Well, the other day in working towards a storage system for a client I’ve got an ubuntu system (dapper 6.06.1) setup with software raid and wanted to poke and prod and test some things out before it goes into a useful role.
Category: Computers
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Freenx on Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)
NX server and client is a GREAT remote X approach that can tunnel over fairly narrow links well and does phenomenally well over a LAN. I frequently use NX in place of VNC when working with Linux based systems because the performance seems much better and the client has a nice way to choose from preset sessions. (You can also do individual applications, etc…) One of the benefits over X tunneling is the compression…. Anyway, I’ve gone through setting this up several times on various ubuntu 6.06 installs and thought I’d go ahead and document this on the web page so I didn’t have to keep hunting links each time….
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More rogue security software
Wolves in sheeps clothing…. from Sunbelt blog…. Watch out for pestcapture and “friends” (using dlls from spysheriff). Thanks to sunbelt for keeping their eyes open on the threat of wolves in sheepdogs clothing…. It’s so frustrating having to explain to someone that the software they downloaded to solve their problems has become part of the problem…..
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Software raid under linux (Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake)
First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, but is doable and seems relatively solid as a system. First off, what is RAID (redundant array of independant/(*inexpensive) disks) So, several cheap hard drives put together in an “interesting” way. Now, increasing storage size isn’t something I’m too interested in, after all there are myriad other ways of expanding storage in a linux system (not to mention huge drives getting cheaper by the day.) My goal here is redundancy, I want to be able to lose a drive and still have the data, so RAID1 is what I’m setting up. We won’t get sidetracked into the other types.
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Flashing bios pain in the neck….
One of the “project machines” I’ve had that’s been retired from other service was to become a “storage server” this week. The twin 250GB drives had arrived and I was ready to setup a RAID1 array (mirroring essentially…) in software and use Ubuntu 6.06 as the base operating system. I had already wiped the other drive and removed the drive, plugged in the new ones (master on the primary and secondary channels) and…. BIOS only reads 136GB. Shoot…. it was a relatively recent system (maybe 3 years…) SO…. BIOS update was my best bet I thought.
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Vmware launches beta of real to virtual converter
Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.)
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Exploits in wild for recent Apple vulnerabilities
If you’ve been delaying on updating with the recent Apple Mac OS X updates…. don’t, there are exploits in the wild now for at least one. It’s speculated that this code may have been in the wild before Apple released the security updates.
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Watch what things you store in public places…. part 342
Not too long ago there was an article about how people reveal too much about their lives in Google (or other web) calendars AND MAKE PUBLIC…. well I think this takes it a step further. Gmail let’s you access your mail through an RSS feed…. well there are online services that let you subscribe/watch feeds and apparently the feeds are put in the public access folder…. (oooops.) Be careful what you make public….
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Mandriva 2007 download now available
Several days ago there were announcements of the release of Mandriva 2007, only thing was, the download wasn’t available yet. Well, today the download appears available. I haven’t looked to see what differences there are between the free and the powerpack download (powerpack can be downloaded by club members as well.)
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Multiple Apple updates as Mac goes to version 10.4.8
Apple is fixing 15 security flaws with the 10.4.8 version upgrade of Mac OS X. (There is a second update as well…. Security Update 2006-006). In typical fashion there are a bundle of issues in these updates. Several address remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.