Somewhere out there!

I was trying to find out how to prevent users for accessing the VMware tools in a Windows 2003 Terminal Server. Seems this is actually a security bug.

I’m running Windows Terminal Server on top of Debian with VMware Server. My solution was to add an explicit DENY permissions to the WTS_Users group I had added to the TS machine’s “Remote Desktop Users” group. I changed these permissions in the locations mentioned in the securityfocus message.

Technorati Tags: vmware, tools, windows terminal server

Amiga and Civilization in javascript.

Technorati Tags: javascript

Truphone for the Nokia S60 series looks interesting, especially as it works with GTalk.

Technorati Tags: voip, S60

Discussion on the pros and cons of raid-z vs mirroring: WHEN TO (AND NOT TO) USE RAID-Z from Bizarre ! Vous avez dit Bizarre.

Technorati Tags: zfs, solaris, raid

Useful zfs guide: ZFS Best Practices Guide.

Technorati Tags: zfs, solaris

I just installed Nexenta and I’ve been playing around with zfs. I must say the basic replication system is very cool. Seems to work for zvols as well. Remotely replicated iscsi volumes and nfs data sets, is going to make my backups trivial.

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# ls -l /tank/test2/
total 104
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104000 Feb 24 00:54 random
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104857600 Feb 24 01:00 random2

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# rm random2
root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs snapshot tank/test@10:00pm

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs send -i tank/test@9:59pm tank/test@10:00pm | zfs receive tank/test2@10:00pm
cannot receive: destination has been modified since most recent snapshot

root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs rollback -r tank/test2@9:59pm
root@hzsilo:/tank/test# zfs send -i tank/test@9:59pm tank/test@10:00pm | zfs receive tank/test2@10:00pm
root@hzsilo:/tank/test# ls -l /tank/test2/
total 103
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 104000 Feb 24 00:54 random

For those of you who might have missed it, the send receive pipe could have a ‘ssh -C’ part as well. Brilliant. Plus because of the snapshots the deleted data is still there. The whole rollback thing is probably because of atime from the ls.

Some other stats from Wikipedia:

• 2⁴⁸ — Number of snapshots in any file system (2 × 10¹⁴)
• 2⁴⁸ — Number of files in any individual file system (2 × 10¹⁴)
• 16 exabytes (2⁶⁴ byte) — Maximum size of a file system
• 16 exabytes (2⁶⁴ byte) — Maximum size of a single file
• 16 exabytes (2⁶⁴ byte) — Maximum size of any attribute
• 3 × 10²³ petabytes — Maximum size of any zpool
• 2⁵⁶ — Number of attributes of a file (actually constrained to 2⁴⁸ for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
• 2⁵⁶ — Number of files in a directory (actually constrained to 2⁴⁸ for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
• 2⁶⁴ — Number of devices in any zpool
• 2⁶⁴ — Number of zpools in a system
• 2⁶⁴ — Number of file systems in a zpool

With that many snapshots possible you could almost have continue data protection. Even with 100 objects to snapshot at one per mintue; 144,000 snapshots, per day, it will be a long time before any limits are reached.

Technorati Tags: solaris, zfs

This is quite clever. Using flash to build a zero-install voip  phone. No doubt we’ll be seeing phones this on corporate helpdesk pages in due course.

From: jkOnTheRun: Gizmo gets Flashed, makes calls from the browser

Technorati Tags: flash, voip, web

Maybe in 5 years they’ll be cheaper, but affording one of these guys in the short term is going to be hard:

Okay, you know me well enough not to leave you hanging like that: a single 128GB Zeus SDD will set you back $50,000. Seriously. No word yet on discounts for bulk buying!

From: How about a 128GB Solid State HDD? and SimpleTech’s super-thin 64 GB SSD for those tight places.

Technorati Tags: ssd, hardware

From jkOnTheRun: Polymer Vision to offer rollable eBook reader. One of these will certainly make it easily to give an ebook to my mother.

Technorati Tags: ebooks, hardware

A little rant in following from: Red Hat vs. Microsoft: Who will win

The question I ask is why does Red Hat have to be as large as Microsoft?

Open Source allows everyone to share from each others work. It understands the implicit contract in computing that value creation in information is only occurs when it shared, a version of Metcalfe’s Law. In constrasted Closed Source understands that smaller groups controlling the flow and access to information and innovation allow these groups greater potential wealth.

After all how much would the network cost now, if we were running Microsoft or similar on our routers, servers and phones. Without Linux or BSD the freedom for choice, the ability to choice who innovates and thus allowing the market to decide who is better is removed.

So the innovation that is occurring and been driven in IT at the moment is because of OSS.

A clear example of this is Vmware, Xen and rPath.  Before the advent of Xen a company like rPath would likely have less reason to exist. There would be no software appliances. Vmware would still be printing money for its stock-holders. And for the man in the tench the vision of deploying a enterprise grade mail system like Zimbra in 30 minutes on a rPath platform would be hopeless.

It is not to say that I think huge companies are bad, but that freedom of choice it more vital. I think in the end on the balance of things, it is US all who will win.