I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too.

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am

It’s been released. Use this with NIST::NVD 1.00.00 and you will be able to perform immediate look-ups of CVE and CWE data given a CPE URN. For instance:

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl -MNIST::NVD::Query -MData::Dumper -e '
$q = NIST::NVD::Query->new(store    => q{SQLite3},database => q{t/data/nvdcve-2.0.db});
$cve_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => q{cpe:/a:microsoft:ie:7.0.5730.11} );
print Data::Dumper::Dumper { cve_list => $cve_list, first_cvss => $q->cve( cve_id => $cve_list->[0] )->{q{vuln:cvss}} }
'
$VAR1 = {
          'cve_list' => [
                          'CVE-2002-2435',
                          'CVE-2010-5071'
                        ],
          'first_cvss' => {

I’m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST’s NVD database.

The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It’s on my TODO list.

I’m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I’ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission.

http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2

don’t forget to check the cryptographic signature:

As you may expect from open source world thingy, almost every Linux distribution has developed it’s own way to manage our favourite RDBMS service. Yet none is perfect, or even some of them seems to not work in real server scenario1.

In this post I’m trying to compare and point out most annoying aspects of initialization scripts that I had to face in production.

In ‘old days’ probably all Linux distributions used to start and stop services using so called init scripts usually written in Unix shell (sh or Bash). But situation is not so simple these days anymore.

Folks started to think about improving things, like making

I’m in the process of getting the tests passing for the 0.03 release of NIST::NVD::Store::SQLite3 wherein our hero imports the CWE data and cross-indexes it with CVEs and CPEs.

Follow along and suggest some patches. I’m developing on Debian Wheezy, but I would very much like input from devs on other platforms.

http://git.colliertech.org/?p=NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3.git;a=summary

cjac@foxtrot:/tmp$ time git clone http://git.colliertech.org/git/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3.git
Cloning into 'NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3'...

real	0m32.757s
user	0m0.200s
sys	0m0.088s
cjac@foxtrot:/tmp$ ls NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3/t/data/
cwec_v2.1.xml  nvdcve-2.0-test.xml

Publish your patches and I’ll fetch them, or you can submit them in udiff format and I’ll review/apply. Thanks for playing

Preface: The following post is a backup from a post first published on the Moviepilot Techblog, which is going to be replaced by the Moviepilot Labs Blog. The content is a bit outdated, as the way to go today is using MariaDB instead of OurDelta. The very content about the UserStats plugin and using it for detecting and removing unused indexes is still valid, though – and a nice way of getting rid of performance killers…

MySQL performance depends on a balanced usage of MySQL indexes. While it is easy to add an index and identify queries not using indexes via EXPLAIN during development or slow.log it is a lot harder to get rid of unused indexes. Finding and

I published an SQLite3 storage back-end to NIST::NVD on the CPAN. It’s pretty quick. About as fast as the DB_File one, but without the down side of being tied to DB_File. It shouldn’t be too difficult to re-factor this code to any DBI-based database. MariaDB anyone?

I know it works on Debian. The nightly CPAN test results should come back shortly and I’ll find out how well it works on other platforms.

Ok, Debian Squeeze is out for a while and now it`s time to setup a new FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) install server. In this tutorial, I will describe, how to setup FAI with dhcpd3 or dnsmasq for bootp and DHCP.

This document describes how to set up a FAI install server 3.4.8 on Debian Linux 6.x with dhcpd3 or dnsmasq

• fai project

• PXE network boot of grml rescue system
• Tutorial: booting SystemRescueCd with PXE/NFS

As announced, I held a short talk on switching from MySQL community edition (especially 5.1) to MariaDB (currently 5.2.6) at this years LinuxTag in Berlin.

Here are the (German) slides for reference:

(In case you cannot see the embedded presentation, you can also click here)

Please note: There are a lot of good English slides around. If you want give a talk on MariaDB, the “Beginner’s Guide” might be a good start:

A Beginner’s Guide to MariaDB Presentation

If you happen to be around at this years LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin/Germany, you are invited to attend my short talk on MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. The talk focusses on differences between MySQL Community Edition and MariaDB (e.g. XtraDB, Aria, userstats), shows some features live and explains how to switch. I’ll probably post the slides here afterwards.

The talk will be held in German and is scheduled for Friday, the 13th of May, 16:30. The official announcement can be found here.