royans

WMF 0 Day exploits are surfacing already. Some of which look like worms. Link

Funny thing happened... I had a directory with 2 dmp files. One was compressed using gzip, and one was un-compressed. When I typed gzip -d and pressed tab, it listed the only compressed file which had a name ending in gz. No matter how many times I pressed tab, it didn't pick the other file which I know exists in that directory. So obviously, me being me, typed gzip without -d on the shell and pressed tab... and voila, it listed the uncompressed file and didn't list the other file which was already compressed. I've been working with bash for a long time, and haven't noticed such a feature before... I was pleasently surprised to find it.

Here are 18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging: Blog Tips at ProBlogger .

Introduction My interesting project for this quarter was writing a search engine to index blog entries. The experience to do something like this without knowing anything about resources required would probably be risky and stupid. But since this was just an educational project to undertand search technology and to learn java, capacity planning was last thing on my mind. Based on the resource I had, it was pretty clear to me that I can't build another yahoo or google. Besides who needs another one of those anyway. Also when I started working on this project, google hadn't released thier blog search engine. Needless to say indexing blogs looked pretty interesting. How difficult could it be to build another Technorati anyway ? A few servers running a crawler and a few database servers is all one needs with a nice front end written in pretty php. Crawling If search engine was all just about searching a text from a database, then it would be called a database. To build a search eng

This is an interesting movie of the space shuttle launch.

RSS hijacking is probably unavoidable in short term. Here is an interesting discussion on this topic

Some of you probably know what a Root Server is. But did you know that they had a site dedicated to it. Ofcourse internet won't exist without it, but I thought this information would be burried under one of the sites like ICANN or the US MIL site. You can download the latest named.root file from this location.

The pleasure of first post :)

Introduction Archiving files to tape is still considered one of the cheapest way of making backups. However with the prices of disk storage and solid-state storage decreasing rapidly, it won't be long before users make the switch to the faster disk storage for all thier backup needs. The problem, however, is that if you want to do anything more than mirroring data on a remote storage, there aren't too many good freeware tools to do it. This writeup explains one of the interesting ways to do incremental backups with snapshot cabability using a popular tool called rsync. Traditional Backup Traditional backup applications not only support backing up and restoring of files, directories, partitions and drives, but also allow incrementally backups to reduce time taken to backup large file systems. Since its not practical to restore the complete data from tape just to apply minor changes to it, most tape backup software store the differences in a seperate file or location on tape whic

When King Danish Harald Blåtand, united Norway and Denmark, little did he know that a technology named after him ( Blåtand translates to blue-tooth) will have a chance of becoming a corner stone of the telecommunication industry. This industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in todays world, and whether you'd like it or not it is constantly changing the world around you. If it were not for the cell phone industry, we would still be hooked to our wired phones, and had it not been for the internet E-mails would just have been a fantasy. And in this fast changing world one protocol which is growing very rapidly is 'bluetooth' . And just like everything before 'bluetooth' wasn't created in a day. In fact it went through some rough times before its started catching on again.The telecom industry today is not very different from what it was 1000s of years ago. There still are many different ways to communicate and some are more popular than others. But

Introduction My desire to own a PowerBook grew out of few failed attempts at switching to laptops running linux. It's been a month since I ordered a 12inch PowerBook G4 and this seems to be a good time to write down my thoughts for those of you who are still on the fence. Being a unix systems administrator myself, I was more interested in the things inside the Operating System rather than the jazzy user interface outside. Though this write-up doesn't do justice to the feature-rich OS which we all know as Mac OS X, hopefully it would give some of you an interesting perspective of what I noticed when I switched to it for the first time. Background I've always surprised myself at how engrossed I get every-time I lay my hands on a new toy. I remember looking for things which others miss (sometimes by breaking it). As a Unix systems administrator by profession, I officially have a job of hacking OS, scripts and looking for performance tune-ups wherever possible. Interestingly

Two weeks ago I did some thing which I didn't think I'll ever do. I'd always thought Apple/Mac were worse than Microsoft because they were not open enough. I thought, that if they were open, there would have been atleast 10 times more Apple users as there are today. Since I wasn't ready to drop $$$ dollars down the drain to buy a sleek little Mac laptop I never got around actually check it out. Well, two weeks back after I lost a laptop in a disaster, I made a choice to switch based on few logical reasoning I still believe in open source Microsoft is worse than Linux But Linux is not fully supported on laptops I like I also have problem getting support because there are 2000 different distributions out there now I've grown out of compiling/optimizing Linux kernel every day I need access to realworld office application which my organization uses (MS Office, PGP, Checkpoint VPN I know Mac can do most of these... OS X has a BSD backend Should be fun hacking so

BackupTape technology pretty much kept up with the Moore’s Law. Here's the history and future of current tape technology which I compiled from various sources Type Format Vendor GB/Hr GB/Hr compressed Storage Compressed Storage Date Travan Traven 20 Certance 3.5 7 20 10 Travan Traven 40 Certance 7 14 40 20 AIT AIT-1 HP/Sony 14 37 91 35 1996 AIT AIT-2 HP/Sony 16 43 130 50 1998 AIT AIT-3 HP/Sony 33 86 260 100 2000 AIT AIT-4 HP/Sony 200 TBD * AIT AIT-5 HP/Sony 400 TBD * AIT AIT-6 HP/Sony 800 2008 * DAT DDS-4 Certance/HP/Sony 10 20 40 20 DAT DAT72 Certance/HP/Sony 12.6 25.2 72 36 DLTvs80/160 DLT vs80 HP/Quantum 11 22 80 40 DLTvs80/160 DLT vs160 HP/Quantum 29 58 160 80 DLT 1 DLT 1 HP/Quantum 10 20 80 40 DLT 4000 DLT 4000 HP/Quantum 5 10 40 20 DLT 7000 DLT 7000 HP/Quantum 18 26 70 35 DLT 8000 DLT 8000 HP/Quantum 22 44 80 40 Super DLT SDLT220 HP/Quantum 39 78 220 110 Super DLT SDLT320 HP/Quantum 54 108 320 160 2002 Super DLT SDLT600 HP/Quantum 130 260 600 300 2004 Super