Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 9, 2010
by sjvn01
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DDoS: How to take WikiLeaks, MasterCard or any other Web-site Down

I can’t tell you who’s attacked first WikiLeaks and more recently MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa with Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) assaults , but I can tell you it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even, as such things go, that bad. Just ask Google if you want to know what a real DDoS attack is like.

WikiLeaks was buried under attacks that threw up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) at its servers. We don’t know exactly how hard MasterCard or Visa were hit, but at an educated guess, it was probably an order of magnitude worse. Few sites can handle that level of cyber-warfare.

What’s behind these attacks? People tend to think of DDoS as causing havoc by jamming network bandwidth with useless traffic. While that’s certainly one kind of DDoS attack, others work by devouring server resources. That means it’s possible for a successful DDoS raid to be made no matter how much bandwidth you have because it attacks your servers’ resources. To really protect a network against attacks, both your Internet connection and your servers need defenses.

Usually, DDoS attacks are aimed at your network’s TCP/IP infrastructure. These assaults come in three varieties: those that exploit weaknesses in a given TCP/IP stack implementation; those that target TCP/IP weaknesses; and the tried and true brute force attack.

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December 9, 2010
by sjvn01
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Arch Linux for Linux fundamentalists

Most users like their operating system to be like their cars. They stick in the key, turn on the ignition, and off they go. For these users, I recommend Ubuntu. But, if you’re the kind of person who likes a car with manual transmission and getting your hands dirty under the hood, then Arch Linux deserves your consideration.

You can, of course, just build Linux from source code, or use a distribution such as Gentoo or Linux from Scratch (LFS) that relies heavily on Linux source code. Those distributions though are best left to developers and other people who know their way around programming. Arch Linux, on the other hand, is suitable for Linux power users who still prefer the command line interface (CLI) to GNOME or KDE.

Believe it or not, there are still people who find the CLI to be the most comfortable way to get the most out of Unix or Linux. I should know. I’m one of them. It’s not that Arch doesn’t let you use a GUI; it’s just optional.

I strongly suspect that’s why Arch is as popular as it is. Arch Linux is currently, as of early December 2010, number eight on DistroWatch’s Linux distribution page hit list.

You see, Arch Linux, without requiring you to master kernel compiling 101 gives you an enormous amount of control over how Linux will run for you. That starts from the get-go.

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December 8, 2010
by sjvn01
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Verizon gets into the Business IPv6 Market

Some of the major ISPs are finally getting a clue and realizing that they need to help their corporate and government customers move to IPv6. Verizon, with its new Verizon IPv6 Transition Professional Services, has announced that its ready to help organizations navigate through IPv6 omplexity to assess and ensure their readiness for the IPv6 Internet.

It’s about time! The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced at the end of the November that we’re down to 2.73% of the Internet’s available IPv4 addresses). In short, we’re running out of IPv4 addresses even faster than the experts had predicted.

According to Waliur Rahman, Verizon’s Professional Service Manager of its IPv6 Practice, the new Verizon IPv6 Transition Professional Services will span the IPv6 implementation lifecycle and comes in three divisions:

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December 8, 2010
by sjvn01
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Well-known, open-source advocate Matt Asay leaves Canonical/Ubuntu

In an unexpected move, Matt Asay, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be leaving Ubuntu.

In an e-mail to me, Asay, former VP of Business Development at Alfresco, the open-source enterprise Content Management System (CMS), told me that the news of his depature from Canonical would be be announced internally at Canonical today, December 8th.

Asay is leaving Canonical, because “Basically, I needed to get back to a customer-facing role but hadn’t realized that until my good friend, Bryce Roberts, pinged me about a company he had invested in (Strobe). I hadn’t been looking around but agreed to meet with Charles [Jolley], the founder.”

Strobe, has already raised $2.5M from Tim O’Reilly’s venture fund, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures (OATV) and Hummer Winblad. The company is using the money to build a platform for delivering touch-driven web applications, based around the open-source SproutCore framework and HTML5.

Asay continued, “It’s a very early stage company (founded in July) and as we talked, I realized that much of what they needed was what I had enjoyed so much at Alfresco: early spadework with customers and partners, plus figuring out business models and evangelizing new ways to be open. It didn’t hurt that that company’s early focus is on the publishing industry, a market and challenge I love.”

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December 8, 2010
by sjvn01
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Google’s Chrome OS is here… sort of, kind of

Ready to get a copy of Google Chrome OS and test the heck out of it? I was. But, neither of us is going to be able to do it anytime soon. Feh!

Unlike some people I could mention-cough, Zack Whittaker, cough-I do think Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS is far from being redundant and does matter. Potentially, it will matter a lot for business users. Unfortunately, I can’t tell for certain yet.

I can’t tell because instead of releasing a CD or DVD image of the operating system, or even source code for those of us who aren’t afraid to compile operating systems. Google just announced today, December 7th, 2010, that in its Chrome OS “pilot program” that a beta netbook, the Cr-48, will be available to a select group of beta-testers.

Boo! I wanted a beta I could slap on my netbook, an older Dell Mini 9, or into a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM). I think Google is missing a trick here. I, and a few thousand other Linux users who change operating systems and Linux distribution at the drop of a Red Hat, would love to take Chrome OS out for a ride. Most of us would then be more than happy to report back what we found and how it could be improved.

Oh well, so much for that idea. Instead, I’ll just have to petition Google for one of its un-branded Chrome netbooks along with everyone else.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/googles-chrome-os-is-here-sort-of-kind-of/7930

December 6, 2010
by sjvn01
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The Internet’s IPv4’s Clock is Ticking Down

We all know that the Internet’s supply of Ipv4 addresses is running ever lower. What you may not know is that IPv4 exhaustion, when we’re completely out of available IPv4 addresses, is approaching even faster than the experts expected.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced at the end of the November that we’re down to 2.73% of the Internet’s available IPv4 addresses. In case you haven’t been watching, that indicates that the long expected run on IPv4 Internet addresses has begun.

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