I’m about to make some major database changes. Afterwards, you’ll see a few useful new features and one ambitious blog post.

Amazon offers some pretty cool services: S3, EC2, Alexa Site Thumbnail, and others. A while back I wanted to use AST with Django, so ended up writing the Python bindings to the REST API (they didn’t previously exist. I even wrote up a quick tutorial. Update: Amazon no longer maintains AST. I’ve decided to archive a few of the old sites, so no longer need to take thumbnails. However, a few other thumbnail services seem to have crept up, including SnapCasa", and WebSnapr.

A normal internet connection gets attacked, a lot. The majority of attacks are of the form “hello, anybody there?” – where most people just don’t answer. But sometimes, just sometimes, the question gets an answer. Depending on the answer, the attacker will start to explore. A few weeks back I was a little bored and started fiddling. I wanted to play with my Cisco, but also wanted to play with OSSEC, but also has a GIS craving. In the end I decided to create a map of the people who ask, “hello”.

I’ve been side-tracked on another little project, and keep coming back to NetFlow. For this project I’ll need to access NetFlow data with Django, but this is a bit tricky. First, I’m sort of lazy when it comes to my own project; maybe not lazy, I just like taking the most direct route. The most up-to-date NetFlow collector I noticed was flow-tools, and there is even a switch to export the information into MySQL. Sweet! However, I wanted to insert the flows into MySQL automatically, or at least on a regular basis. I first started writing a python script that would do the job, but after a few minutes noticed flow-capture had a rotate_program switch, and started investigating. Since I somehow …

I’ve evaluated Zenoss before, but forgot the default password, and searching for it didn’t come up with anything quickly. I tried everything under the sun: password, 1234, admin, God, Sex, but alas, grep to the rescue: kelvin@monitor:/usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/etc$ grep admin * hubpasswd:admin:zenoss Update: it is listed on page 4 of the Admin PDF :)

My little server doesn’t have a cdrom, but I didn’t want to actually run ESX from a USB (i.e. esx-on-a-stick). Here are my notes of configuring a flash disk to boot the ESX installer (so you can install it onto a local disk). For this demo, my USB is /dev/sdb Install the syslinux utils to your computer (apt-get install syslinux mboot) Install the MBR sudo install-mbr /dev/sdb Copy all the files from the ISO to your fat32 formated partition Install syslinux sudo syslinux /dev/sdb1 Move isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg, and try booting. If it doesn’t work, edit syslinux.cfg says something like: default menu.c32 menu title ESXi Boot timeout 100 label ESXi menu label Boot VMware ESXi kernel mboot.c32 …

I recently had the need to move a rather large (450GB) VMDK file from an external hard drive into ESXi. Since ESXi doesn’t support external hard drives, this makes things quite a bit more difficult. At first I tried using SCP to copy the file over (after enabling SSH access for ESXi). However, when I tried to do this the time left was almost 20 hours – a tad too long!

I’ve had issues before with OpenFiler where doesn’t update the permissions, although they appear correct in the UI. To rectify that, I stumbled upon a one liner that fixed it. Let’s say you have a group called “Trusted” that you want to have full access to your music folder. Here’s the one-liner: [root@files data]# pwd /mnt/openfiler/data [root@files data]# setfacl --recursive -m u:nobody:rwx,g:Trusted:rwx music

I found VMWare Server to have very slow I/O, and sought to improve it. Below are a list of tests I performed, the change, and the results. ### Host OS ### /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 220 MB in 3.05 seconds = 72.17 MB/sec kelvin@gorilla:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 266 MB in 3.01 seconds = 88.33 MB/sec kelvin@gorilla:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 310 MB in 3.01 seconds = 102.99 MB/sec ### Before Changes ### /dev/mapper/openfiler-data: Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.36 seconds = 2.38 MB/sec [root@files etc]# hdparm -t /dev/mapper/openfiler-data /dev/mapper/openfiler-data: Timing buffered disk reads: 24 MB in 3.63 seconds …

I’ve been a little delinquent in sharing my life stories, so hopefully this weekend will make up for the past few months. I decided it was time to go camping again, so on Friday night I met Remko and Daisy and drove north towards Colo: the middle of nowhere, yet only 45 minutes from the outskirts of Sydney. I set up my tent and started cooking dinner: curry! That’s right, I was not exactly roughing it. Soon after dinner, I curled up in my new two-person tent and quickly fell asleep.