a blog…

RAID on a Remote Debian Box

I am addicted to RAID. If there are 2 disks in a computer - there needs to be at least 1 RAID partition. If there are 2 identical disks - well then it almost begs to be a full RAID1 - grub, root, home, swap. If this box is a server - then it is a must.

The fun part is doing this on a remote box to which you have limited physical access. And by limited I mean - you can call a guy who may or may not be able to read the console and push the reset button when you can’t boot.

So I decided to do this… and I took some notes… I added a some comments, but otherwise it is a complete no-fluff doc of commands and output you should be seeing to get a non-raid system moved a raid1 with grub, root, home and swap ready for a failure of one disk.

The tricky bit is initrd and grub config, but I got it working in a couple dozen or so commands.

Hope this helps.

Resources:

Nice looking Mac

Who said that Apple’s Intel switch is a slap in the face to IBM?!

OSX running in VMWare

There has been lots of people reporting OSX running on PC hardware and in VMWare, but it is never enough until you see it for yourself: screenshot.

I am not going to say whos fully legal, for-demo-purposes-only, screenshot this is - but it boots, it works (sort of slowly) and it is OSX.

The only question remains - is this part of Steve’s Intel switch plan? Or a side-effect of hackers who can’t sit still? I think it is a little of both.

Extreme Ironing

Just read about this interesting new sport. At first seemed like a joke on some guys’s site (Extreme Ironing) but a quick Google images search turned up a whole lot more:

Google Images for EI
BBC Article

“Extreme ironing is the latest danger sport that combines the thrills
of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt.”

Bro Intrusion Detection System

This is something that I have read about and thinking about trying out:

Bro Intrusion Detection System - Bro Overview
Bro is a Unix-based Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Bro monitors network traffic and detects intrusion attempts based on the traffic characteristics and content. Bro detects intrusions by comparing network traffic against rules describing events that are deemed troublesome. These rules might describe activities (e.g., certain hosts connecting to certain services), what activities are worth alerting (e.g., attempts to a given number of different hosts constitutes a “scan”), or signatures describing known attacks or access to known vulnerabilities. If Bro detects something of interest, it can be instructed to either issue a log entry or initiate the execution of an operating system command.

Bro targets high-speed (Gbps), high-volume intrusion detection. By judiciously leveraging packet filtering techniques, Bro is able to achieve the performance necessary to do so while running on commercially available PC hardware, and thus can serve as a cost effective means of monitoring a site’s Internet connection.

I’ll post more about it once I give it a spin…