- Roundtable - muug.ca

significant SSL certificate screw-up
by Adam Thompson 24 Mar '11

24 Mar '11

FYI… http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/prg/em/ccirc/2011/av11-025-eng.aspx Basically, Comodo re-issued certificates for several popular web sites to someone posing as Microsoft, as Yahoo, as Google, etc… so there is now a possibility that even if you’ve connected using SSL/TLS ton a site like https://login.live.com, if someone has managed to redirect your browser (using DNS attacks, say), even if you check the SSL certificate and it looks right, it might be not be legitimate anyway. Microsoft, Google, and the Mozilla Foundation have all released updates for their browsers that explicitly black-list the affected certificates; if you’re doing any computing in a high-assurance environment and would ever rely on any of these certificates for any reason, you should consider black-listing them in your software. -Adam

1 0

UG News: Free to Choose Deal - Save 50% - All revenue goes to Japanese relief effort.
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

3 2

Fwd: Hot-ICE '11 Workshop Is Approaching
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Hot-ICE '11 Workshop Is Approaching Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:49:15 -0700 From: Lionel Garth Jones <lgj(a)usenix.org> To: info(a)muug.mb.ca, gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca We're writing to remind you that the first Workshop on Hot Topics in Management of Internet, Cloud, and Enterprise Networks and Service (Hot-ICE '11) is just a week away. There's still time! Register today and join us in Boston, MA, on March 29, 2011. Hot-ICE '11 will bring together researchers and practitioners working on network and service management in the Internet, cloud, and enterprise domains. The scope of Hot-ICE includes all aspects of network and service management. The program includes sessions on cloud and resource management, service management, network management, and datacenter networking. In addition, a mini-panel will close each session. Check out the full program at: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotice11/tech/ Hot-ICE evolved from earlier Internet Network Management (INM) workshops, which more recently combined with the Workshop on Research on Enterprise Networking (WREN). As such, Hot-ICE, while a new workshop, is serving an established community, but with a broader scope, in recognition of the evolving concerns of the community. Hot-ICE '11 will be co-located with the 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '11), which will take place March 30-April 1, 2011. Find out more and register today at: http://www.usenix.org/hotice11/progb On behalf of the Hot-ICE '11 Program Committee, Anees Shaikh, IBM Research Kobus Van der Merwe, AT&T Labs--Research Hot-ICE '11 Program Co-Chairs hotice11chairs(a)usenix.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Workshop on Hot Topics in Management of Internet, Cloud, and Enterprise Networks and Services (Hot-ICE '11) March 29, 2011 Boston, MA, USA http://www.usenix.org/hotice11/progb Sponsored by USENIX ------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

vsftp not connecting
by Kevin McGregor 22 Mar '11

22 Mar '11

Maybe someone can throw in their two cents on this: I installed vsftpd on my Ubuntu 10.04 server, and I set local_enable=YES write_enable=YES When I FTP to the server, I get prompted for a username and password, but it seems to just reject it and ask for username/password again. What else do I need to do? I just want one account to be able to FTP upload files to this server. Kevin

5 12

2011 Mingling & Munchies Meeting
by Kelly Leveille 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi All, I know it's waaay too early to think about Xmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/etc. but this just might just be the perfect way to break the ice for the December 2011 "mingling & munchies" meeting: http://sysadminspot.com/entertainment/http-status-code-drinking-game/ http://statuscodedrinkinggame.com/ You bring the booze, I'll hit refresh!! :-) Kelly

1 0

Fwd: USENIX NSDI '11 is just two weeks away
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: USENIX NSDI '11 is just two weeks away Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:28:13 -0700 From: Lionel Garth Jones <lgj(a)usenix.org> To: info(a)muug.mb.ca, gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca We're writing to remind you that the 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '11) is just two weeks away. There's stil time! Register today and join us in Boston, MA, March 30 - April 1, 2011. http://www.usenix.org/nsdi11/progc This year's program includes 27 technical papers carefully selected out of 157 submissions. These high-quality papers represent a diverse range of hot research areas including data-intensive computing, energy and storage, debugging and correctness, and more. In addition, NSDI '11 will feature a poster session where attendees can discuss emerging ideas in networked systems design by talking with leading researchers who are introducing their ongoing work. Submissions are due March 20, 2011. Find out more at: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/activities.html#poster We look forward to seeing you in Boston for the latest innovative networked systems research. Sincerely, David G. Andersen, Carnegie Mellon University Sylvia Ratnasamy, Intel Labs Berkeley nsdi11chairs(a)usenix.org P.S. Don't miss these workshops, which will be co-located with NSDI '11 and will take place on Tuesday, March 29, 2011: -- 4th USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET '11) http://www.usenix.org/events/leet11/ -- Workshop on Hot Topics in Management of Internet, Cloud, and Enterprise Networks and Services (Hot-ICE '11) http://www.usenix.org/events/hotice11/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '11) March 30-April 1, 2011 Boston, MA, USA http://www.usenix.org/nsdi11/progc Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGOPS Early Bird Registration Deadline: March 7, 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

Parallel curl from the command line
by John Lange 16 Mar '11

16 Mar '11

I have some code (written in PHP) that checks on the status of a single "server" but I need this code to scale up to hundreds of parallel checks. For example, you call the script like this: http://mytest.com/checkserver.php?ip=10.11.12.13 where the ip=X.X.X.X is different every time depending on which server you are checking. And the PHP looks something like this: <?php $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://".$ip."/status.html"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $output = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?> To my way of thinking, this should scale easily. Lets say 200 people hit the page at the same time all passing different "ip=" values, this should check all 200 different servers in parallel and return results. It doesn't. I wrote this little bash script to test it (yes I'm using command line curl to test php-curl, please don't be confused by that): --- #!/bin/bash IPS="10.18.136.20 10.18.136.21 10.18.136.22 ... ( a hundred more IPs)" for IP in $IPS ; do curl -s http://mytest.com/checkserver.php?ip=$IP & done --- All the curl commands launch into the background as you expect and I see all the apache child threads startup, but the results return one by one. I can't for the life of me figure out how this can be possible. Each apache thread should run it's PHP in a separate thread and return in parallel. The only thing I can think of is that php is tracking all the requests as being part of the same session and imposing some limit on the outbound curl requests... Or maybe it's apache blocking it? Just thought someone might have had to do something similar in the past and run into this. By the way, if I go direct like this: for IP in $IPS ; do curl -s http://".$IP"/status.html & done It works just exactly as you'd expect, all results return in parallel so it's got to be a problem with either PHP or apache. -- John Lange www.johnlange.ca

3 3

Speech recognition
by Mike Pfaiffer 15 Mar '11

15 Mar '11

I've been thinking of something which may make my job as a writer a little easier. The end result is I'd like to bring up Open Office/ Libre Office and dictate what I want into a microphone. This way I can concentrate more on the information and less on the typos. There is some system software which will do this for the Mac (I'd prefer something for Linux) and there are some problems. Namely the small vocabulary and inaccuracy of recognition on some words (eg. Off --> On). There are a number of commercial products out there but being cheap I'd like something free. A half hour under Google produced a couple of suggestions. Pocket Sphinx and Julius. Both were apparently a little tough to get running and had sparse documentation (at least as of last year). Both are available in the Mint/Ubuntu repositories. Any comments? Later Mike

3 4

Solaris backup
by Kevin McGregor 15 Mar '11

15 Mar '11

I've been asked to find a way to backup a Solaris SPARC machine. The request was: Suppose you have a fresh install of Solaris, and you want to back it up completely such that if you got a brand new machine you would be able to "just restore" this backup image of Solaris to a new hard drive and boot the new machine without having to re-install Solaris. How would you go about doing this?

4 3

Re: [RndTbl] Solaris backup
by athompso＠athompso.net 15 Mar '11

15 Mar '11

dd(1). And that would also need a boot cd, which is non-trivial under Solaris on SPARC. AFAIK there's no really good way to do what you want with that HW/SW combination. Sent from my Nokia phone -----Original Message----- From: Kevin McGregor Sent: 2011-03-15 14:07:58 Subject: [RndTbl] Solaris backup I've been asked to find a way to backup a Solaris SPARC machine. The request was: Suppose you have a fresh install of Solaris, and you want to back it up completely such that if you got a brand new machine you would be able to "just restore" this backup image of Solaris to a new hard drive and boot the new machine without having to re-install Solaris. How would you go about doing this?

1 0