Due to a change in our school’s licensing, I’m tasked with switching some of our CentOS 5 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. While there’s a number of guides on how to switch to CentOS, it’s not quite as obvious on how to switch back. »Read More
« Posts under software
Converting from VMware to Linux KVM
Many environments are either using virtualized servers, or are planning to convert. However, not every install needs all the features of VMware. Or perhaps you want to add a test VM server to augment your production VMware cluster. KVM, included in Linux distributions using kernel 2.6.20 and later, may meet your needs. »Read More
Generic marketing
This morning, I found the following tidbit in my email. Without doing a web search, can you figure out what product they’re selling?
While COMPANY PRODUCT A sets the standard for mission-critical
enterprise operating systems, COMPANY PRODUCT B raises the bar. In
this next-generation release, COMPANY continues the pattern of
innovation, building on the many groundbreaking technologies
introduced in COMPANY PRODUCT A. At the same time, COMPANY preserves
the long-standing guarantee of binary compatibility – applications
that run on previous COMPANY PRODUCT releases can still run unchanged
on COMPANY PRODUCT B within the same processor architecture: Y or Z.
The problem with antivirus
Despite my warnings, a friend of mine doesn’t use any antivirus program on his home computer. He’s in good company, as only 58% of Americans have a software security suite installed. And yet, over 58% of the U.S. computers are infected some type of malware. What’s wrong with antivirus software, and what needs to be done to fix it? »Read More
“Sidejacking” wireless users
A new Firefox addon known as Firesheep can allow someone snooping a public WiFi spot to steal many social networking connections of the other WiFi users. The addon relies on an unfortunate practice used by many websites to switch to insecure methods to transport the data content after the secure username/password authentication. Combine this vulnerability with the ability to see other computers’ traffic in a shared media environment (such as WiFi), and you can “sidejack” any web session that relies on the authenticated user’s cookie. »Read More
Desktop Security
The vast majority of computers run Windows. This doesn’t make it superior, but it means that I tend to focus on what I can do to secure systems running Microsoft Windows. »Read More
Technology Resources
Yes, there’s Google. All hail the mighty search engine. However, there’s times when I’m looking for specific answers, and unfortunately not all sites are weighted like I think they should be. But when the search engine fails me, there’s always my bookmarks. »Read More