What follows are some notes taken on vmware server. Most are related to an install on ubuntu-server (NO GUI INSTALLED)…. the main point of this is to have the host system take as FEW resources away from the guests as possible.
This requires a few x libraries – but not full blown X gui.
What follows are some notes that I’ve taken on the Vista beta that I installed into a VM. I’ve got a lot of toying around yet to do with it (and at least one Internet Explorer bug I want to mention.) But… I’ll go ahead and post this. [warning – rambling and long text…]
A few days back I undertook an effort of self torture. After finally getting the Vista Beta 2 downloaded and having Vmware server up and running I thought I’d give a go at installing and see what things looked like. I did NO pre-googling for tips and so this is a pure “discover as you go” process.
I’ve heard rumors of how the 802.11 pre-n wireless networking hardware really KILLS nearby 802.11 wireless b/g networks. Today George Ou has some details. I really think this is a serious problem with the equipment coming out as it will force people to move to another wireless standard. (Somehow, this is all starting to make sense now – wait – maybe it ISN’T a problem “from a certain point of view”.) Anyway – it sounds like it’s really problematic to troubleshoot because it only kills the other networks when transmitting, so symptoms of the problem would be sporadic network drops. (Ouch wireless is going to be getting tricker ESPECIALLY in high density areas.)
The last couple days, there’s been a virus spreading making use of yahoo mail’s interface. Usually web mail is considered a fairly safe way to get email, but in this case all that was done was the user clicking on a malicious email and the virus ran. It appears that javascript/AJAX/Web 2.0 applications are going to have to get closer scrutiny. In the Sans diary, they mention that they’ve analyzed javascript from several web applications and there are some that are vulnerable. (They’re contacting vendors.) They also point out web designers should keep this in mind as well..
The current worm could be readily modified to spread across many systems that do not escape javascript when displaying data from a foreign source. Many web developers should reexamine their code, and make sure that display functions do not deliver potentially malicious code.
After spending about 5 days using wget to resume the download of the vista beta 2 .iso file (which is a bit over 3 GB). I finally gave up seeing as how that 5 days had netted me about 2-3 MB of data. As I started looking around online, I found that Chris Pirillo had got a site up vistatorrent.com where he is hosting a tracker for a bittorrent download of the vista iso. Of course, Microsoft recommends that you order the dvd and wait, but Chris has provided md5sum information so you can check your download. I’m up to 25% done now *(I discovered the torrent about 24 hours ago, although last night I didn’t download.) I let it download part of the afternoon and then remembered to restart this morning. So, it’s making pretty quick progress.
A while back there were rumors of Google Payments, a Paypal competitor on the way. Well, if this is right, it will be named GBuy and will be launched June 28th. Also, it sounds as though there may be no fee for merchants during the test. After that, there will be a percentage fee on each transaction – they’re saying 1.5-2% which is less than paypals rate currently.
Sounds like things could heat up quickly between Ebay/Paypal and Google this summer. Google Base, with an integrated GBuy….
According to reuters data on US Nuclear Safety Administration employees (*some 1500) was stolen in a computer cracking incident.
These days, big inventions aren’t entirely new creations, but improvements on an old idea. This latest in a string of interesting science/technology breakthrough stories is about just that. Researchers at MIT (how many sentences have I started like that this week?) have developed a new way of constructing a capacitor. One of the limiting factors with HOW much charge a capacitor stores now is the surface area of the “plates” that hold charge. The greater the surface area, the greater the charge. What they’ve done is laced the surface with nano-tubes, greatly increasing the surface area. One writer compared this to a fuzzy bathroom towel soaking up more water than a flat cloth. Probably not a bad analogy. What makes this significant….
For anybody that didn’t notice, the World Cup has gotten underway in Germany. (For those that haven’t heard – every 4 years there’s a world football championship (here in the US we call it soccer).) The US National team is scheduled to play the Czech Republic Monday (the US side is in a tough group this time around.) Anyway, currently Germany/Costa Rica are tied 1-1 and I just tried out Google’s World cup results search. Just searching for world cup at Google yields current match scores and gives info on what match is up next. I was impressed that the update was within about a minute of Costa Rica’s equalizer goal….
It went un-noticed by most people for a few years. After all, the ones that were affected were just those that were “asking for it”. Where to start. Let’s see, back in the day there were some that sent out messages to other peoples computers and even when people tried to stop getting the messages they kept coming, so a few sites decided that if they could “blacklist” the places that these messages were coming from, they could help people deal with the mass of messages. So they did, and the people sending the unwanted messages were a bit frustrated and improved their distribution a bit, taking over virus infected pcs for sending their messages. The defenders matched and started blacklisting dialup addresses as mail sources. It was frustrating for those doing legitimate mail servers on a dynamic internet address, but there were legitimate ways to fix the problem. But the senders of the messages got mad.