BlogHASH » Unix/Linux

Sun releases latest version of OpenSolaris and plans laptops in future

Raj — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:14:49 +0000

Sun Microsystems announced today the immediate availability of OpenSolaris 2008.11. The new features in OpenSolaris include Time Slider that provides an interface to the ZFS functionality to all users. Developers are given expanded access to respositories to be able to get innovations from all the users through the updated package manager.

Sun has also announced a strategic relationship with Toshiba to deliver pre-configured OpenSolaris on Toshiba laptops in early 2009. Both users and developers will then be able to buy notebooks that pre-configured with the latest version of OpenSolaris on them. The laptops will be intially available in US but later expand to worldwide.

source

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Hard Drive Data Recovery Made Easy with Unstoppable Copier Software

Raj — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:06:04 +0000

Recovering files from disks of your laptops, servers and personal computers with bad sectors, badly damaged disk, scratches and boot sector failures has become easy with a free tool called Unstoppable Copier. The tool does its great job of recovering files and folders from bad disks by ignoring all the error messages that one would have otherwise encountered while using standard ways and tools to retrieve data from damaged disks. The advantage of using this approach is that some types of files can still be used even if some parts at the end of it could not be retrieved due to extensive damage of sectors on the disk. You may no longer have to look for a data recovery service.

This free data recovery tool has some great features which are not even found in some professional tools.

You can change the level of data recovery, from extensive to skipping damaged files completely.
The data recovery process can be paused and resumed.
Logging can be enabled to record details on transfered files, their integrity and offsets of any errors.
Multiple directories structures or single files can be dragged and dropped onto unstoppable copier for transfer.
Support for multiple foreign languages such as English,German, Italian,French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Hungarian and Polish. However, the Linux version of this data recovery tool does not support these many languages.

» Download Unstoppable Copier for Windows or Linux | Visit the website

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XPde: Make Your Linux Desktop Look Like XP

Raj — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:00:38 +0000

New users often face problems understanding the Linux desktop environment when they start using it, the problem grows to become a challenge when they have no prior understanding of Linux. Many quit using Linux after few weeks of numerous attempts to get used to the desktop environment, needless to say the desktop of XP is much simpler than Linux.

XPde is a desktop environment for Linux (on x86) which makes it look like the desktop of XP system. It does not offer much functionality other than just being a Linux desktop environment, also it does not provide any emulation to run Windows application.

XPde is not a replacement for KDE or Gnome, it’s just a desktop environment which resembles very close to XP to help the users of XP transition to Linux without much difficulty.

» [XPde Homepage] | [Screen shots]

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Remote Boot Diskless Clients in Linux with DRBL

Raj — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:30:01 +0000

DRBL is a small piece of software using which you will be able to use your old hardware to remote boot into a central Linux server and perform several tasks with ease. Specially useful for large networks where lots of diskless clients can perform variety of tasks, can also be used at your home for pure learning purpose too.

DRBL [Diskless Remote Boot in Linux] is one of its kind of software that uses distributed hardware resources and makes it possible to utilize the local hardware of the clients. It works on RedHat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora and CentOS. DRBL offers a diskless environment for the client machines and also has a disk partitioning tool called Clonezilla that has similar features to that of Symantec Ghost.

For those interested in understanding how DRBL works, it’s a NFS and NIS server that offers authentication and boot services to the clients. Once clients are authenticated, the DRBL server loads the packages onto the clients and from thereon the clients use their own hardware for further processing of the loaded applications. The client systems must have necessary hardware to run the packages you want them to. A typical application of DRBL would be in a lab or a classroom for teaching Linux.

» [DRBL Homepage] | [Download DRBL] | [DRBL FAQs]

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How To: Run Internet Explorer on Linux

Raj — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:29:19 +0000

Yes, this post will show you a small tool/script that will let you run IE on Linux machines. The script is called IEs4Linux and can run IE 5/5.5/6 and IE 7 in beta mode on a linux system (or any OS running Wine).

This is very helpful for those individuals who want to test their applications on different browsers and also for those who run IE specific applications or work on websites that are functional only in IE. Thankfully, the size of IE that you install using IEs4Linux is comparatively smaller as it does not come along with outlook and media player or other add-on components. There is one catch though, you may not be able to use this free software if you do not have a valid EULA for an “OS Product” from Microsoft.

» [Download IEs4Linux] | [FAQs]

» Found via [Dan Martin's Blog]

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How To: Create Your Own Linux Distribution

Raj — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:39:39 +0000

That’s right! It will be your own Linux distribution that you can name after yourself or any one else. If you have not heard about it already, it’s called LFS [Linux From Scratch] project that will let you create your own Linux distribution.

What are the advantages of LFS?

Learn the internals of Linux: If you are new to Linux, you will find it very useful. Creating your Linux distribution will teach you a lot about how Linux works internally.
Build it your way: Since you will be building Linux from scratch and from source, you can include packages and applications of your choice and customize almost everything as per your requirements.
Make it Secure: You will decide which packages should be installed and how it will work. And since you are creating your Linux, security of the overall system depends on how you create it!
Small Size: You can create a very compact Linux distribution that could be as small as 50MB in size or even less.
Most up to date: Since you will have complete control of the process, compile and install the latest packages along with their patches to have most up to date system.

I am sure, it will be quite a challenging task to build your own Linux distribution but at the same time also a rewarding experience in terms of knowledge and expertise.

» LFS [Linux from Scratch]

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How To: Access Linux Partitions from Windows Explorer

Raj — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:00:57 +0000

Have you installed Linux and Windows on the same machine? Do you want to access your Linux partitions from Windows?

People who are still in the process of learning Linux will find this software very handy that lets you access the Linux partitions from within the Windows Explorer. The software is called “Ext2 Installable File System For Windows“, is under 500KB in size and free!

Features of Ext2 Installable File System For Windows

Supports Windows NT4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 (x86 processors only).
Supports reading and writing operations, also supports most other file system operations such as listing files/directories, changing labels etc.
Support for files larger than 4 GB in size.
Manage the drive letters assigned to Linux partitions using “IFS Drives” from within the control panel.
Ext3 volumes can also be accessed using this software.

The software currently does not support LVM partitions, so you will not be able to access them using the current version.

» Download Ext2 IFS for Windows

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Red Hat Launches Enterprise Linux 5

Raj — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:40:05 +0000

Redhat today launched much awaited version of their next release of Enterprise Linux, RHEL 5. This version had been under development since last 2 years and with lot of ideas and inputs from its users, the new release features some of the much needed technologies for making our lives more easy. This release included 1200 components which were developed in last two years and here is a quick run down of some of its features:

RHEL 5 is based on the Linux 2.6.18 kernel
Virtualization is provided in all Server products and also available on client products.
Virtualization management tools such as virt-manager, libvirt/virsh are included in this release.
Multi-core processors and broader range of hardware is now supported.
Supports Intel Network Accelerator Technology (I/OAT).
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS is now known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform.

How well the current release is received by the industry is for time to tell and I hope the virtualization feature is easy to implement. I think it’s time for me to consider upgrading my current RHCE certification from RHEL 4 to RHEL 5.

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The Ultimate Tweak for Your Internet Connections

Raj — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:08:17 +0000

I often find it difficult to browse Internet sites with my current broadband connection from the local ISP. Sometimes the URLs does not resolve and often it takes lot of time to resolve the addresses. Searching Google for some solution to run a DNS client on my own PC resulted in discovery of [OpenDNS] and I am glad I found it and since it solved all of my DNS related issues in no time, I think it can help you too!

What is OpenDNS and how does it work?

OpenDNS is a free service that offers you with addresses of its free DNS servers that you can use on your system to browse Internet sites. The DNS is on a geographically distributed network managed by OpenDNS and is very fast, free for all. I personally found it to be much faster than current DNS servers of my ISP and when tested it on some of my friends systems with different ISP connections, it was indeed faster than their current DNS servers too!

What are the advantages of using OpenDNS?

» It’s Safer – Since OpenDNS can identify and blocks sites that are known to cause phishing attacks, you are in fact much safer than before. Here is a screen shot of what you see when you try to open a site known to cause phishing attacks.

» It’s Faster – With a really BIG cache of addresses and geographically distributed network of DNS servers, you will find OpenDNS to be much faster than your current DNS server. Give it a try and you will feel the difference.

» Nothing to download – To use OpenDNS you don’t have to download any software on your system. All you have to do is make small change in your network connection and that’s it. Since you don’t download any software, you are free from risk of getting some spyware getting installed along with the software.

» Use it at Home and Office too! – Yes, OpenDNS can be used on your home PC and also for your Office network. You can even manage the DNS servers for your office connection. Brand the logo in the page that appears when it can not resolve the URL or when it encounters a phishing site, decide which internal network uses which DNS server entry etc. For more info, OpenDNS at Office.

» It corrects because it’s Smart – If you mis-spell a URL, the OpenDNS will automatically correct the address for you. All in no time.

How does OpenDNS make money?

By displaying contextual advertisement on results page wherein OpenDNS could not correct the mis-spelled URLs. It’s that simple!

Note: You may also be interested in the dynamic IP address announcement service from OpenDNS. Read more about their dynamic IP address service.

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A Guide to Better and Secure Passwords for Your Accounts

Raj — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:19:31 +0000

Almost everyone of us who uses Internet has at least one online account that requires a username and password. While some of us choose to use complicated passwords, others give least importance to it. Every now and then many websites surfaces on Internet with loads of new services and requires that you to register with them to be able to use their services. A few days ago, I sat down thinking about different websites with whom I had an account and started to count them. I had 25+ such websites where I was registered and for over 10 of them, I don’t remember the password and username combinations. That’s bad! Isn’t it? In process, I also realized that I was not only using a very weak password for many of these accounts, but also indirectly vulnerable to very easy password hacking. It would not take lot of time for a tech savvy person to guess my password and I wanted to put an end to it. I did it and I thought it might save your day if I were to share the techniques that I adopted towards a better and secure password management of my accounts.

What is a secure password?

Any password which can not be easily cracked or hacked! Having said that, one thing you must understand is that a person directly trying to guess and type your password on a website such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN or GMail to gain access to your account is different when compared to a person who is trying to decode your account’s password directly from a password file. Security from an end user’s perspective is up to the point where he/she can secure password in such a way that another person can not guess it at all! A hacker might somehow gain access to a server which has your account credentials and in such cases the password file might still be encrypted. Hacker then may run a software which will use combination of common dictionary words, numbers and special characters to decode your password from the file. If your password is weak, it’s much easier for a hacker to decode it by using such applications. Some other common things where you use a password to gain access to resources are administrator passwords, rar or zip password, system passwords such as on Windows XP, passwords on forums, online casino, excel sheet etc.

NEVER use ANY of the following in your passwords:

1. Name of a place such as city, country, street etc.
2. Name of a person – your name, anyone from your family, friends, your favorite artist and people whom you know.
3. Name of your company – Current company, previous company etc.
4. Name of your pet(s) – Don’t use this because most of our pets are named after common English words.
5. Verbs and Nouns etc must be avoided in the password.
6. Don’t rely on free passwords that someone can generate for you. Generate your own password for extra safety.

How should you change or select your new password?

No matter if it’s a password that you want to select or change for your email account, shopping account, credit card related accounts, banking accounts or password manager software, a single and effective password policy can put lot of security in place. A secure password must follow the mentioned below:-

1. A password containing at least 6-8 characters.
2. Must contain at least 2 numbers in between first and last character of the password
3. May contain special characters such as #, $, &, (, ), @ etc.. between first and last character
4. Must contain at least one upper case alphabet such as A, B, M, H etc.

If you follow the above 4 points while changing your password or selecting a new password, consider it to be much secured than ever. Some example passwords are:- Ajh83htr, uYt886&u, Gy78y etc..

How will I remember such complicated passwords and I have so many accounts?

The trick is very simple. If you know of a good quote, use the first alphabets of the words in it, and use them in your password. Embed 2 numbers in between and make the first alphabet upper case. That’s it. Another easy way to remember your passwords is by associating them with something that you carry everyday with you. These may be your cell phones, some words that you see everyday etc. Example: You can select a password associated with your Nokia cell phone as Ia89&nok ['Ia' the last two letters of word Nokia with 'I' in upper case, followed by 2 numbers and one special character, then followed by first three letters of word 'nokia'] Isn’t that simple?

For people who have many online accounts can use two different passwords. Primary password for your banking accounts, credit card accounts, shopping carts, email accounts and the secondary password for all free services such as newsletters, bookmarking sites etc.

Change your password frequently

It’s suggested that you change your password at least once every month. You can just increment the number that you have in between the password or add a 2 digit number to existing number in the password so that people who knows that you are incrementing the numbers in your password will also not be able determine your current password.

Example: If my current password is ‘Abdf86j&h’, next month I will add 12 to 86 and my next password will be ‘Abdf98j&h’. From then on, I will add 12 to existing numbers every month to make the new password. This way it will be easy to remember the password and I will also be able to remember it.

Password Recovery

Almost every website that has a registration process also has a password recovery feature. Many of us rely on this feature to recover our forgotten passwords. But have you ever thought about this – many of these websites has very common questions such as color of your first car, your favorite teacher’s name, street you grew up on, name of your first employer etc. Do you think others many not know such things about you? It’s not difficult to find the color of your first car or your first employer and then use that information to retrieve your account’s password. So friends, when you select such hint questions, don’t give the exact information. Consider typing in your cell phone number as an answer to the question – ‘color of your first car’. It will be almost impossible for someone to think that you would use your cell phone number as an answer for your car’s color. You may try some different information for such questions as long as you remember it.

Conclusion: Some of us think that people will never try to hack our accounts because not many know us. But for a hacker, it doesn’t really matter. You must think of using a better and secure password for all your accounts and pro-actively guard yourself against any such attempts by someone hacking into your accounts.

Recommended reading – [Simple Trick to Safer Logins in Internet Cafe]

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freeNX – A Better Remote Desktop Control Software for Windows and Linux

Raj — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:00:28 +0000

You must have heard about VNC, a remote desktop control software in XP and many other remote desktop control softwares that are available in the market. Each of those tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. While some are very fast but overly insecure, other remote desktop control softwares are secure but are very slow to operate such as remote desktop web connection activex control based softwares.

A tool which is similar in function but is much faster that other remote desktop control tools is [freeNX]. It’s is not only faster but also much secure when compared to other desktop control softwares/tools. freeNX uses its own protocol called NX that runs on Linux, Windows and allows you to remotely control a desktop system, remote control linux desktop, server without compromising on either speed or security. There are even commercial offerings of this product from [NoMachine], that are packed with many advanced features. The core libraries that run freeNX are provided by NoMachine under GPL license.

You can download your free copy of NX software from [NoMachine NX] and for screen shots visit [Screen shots page @ NoMachine NX]

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Open-Source Disk Encryption Software for Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux

Raj — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:15:56 +0000

Disk encryption softwares have been available since quite long, but their usage has increased since last few years. Using an open-source software such as [TrueCrypt] saves a lot on your pocket and even does an on-the-fly encryption of your disk volumes.

The main features of this software are:

On-the-fly encryption [data is automatically encrypted and decrypted]
Entire filesystem/disk is encrypted including all its files and folders
Create a standard or a hidden TrueCrypt volume

Encryption Algorithm

TrueCrypt volumes can be encrypted using the following algorithms:

AES
Blowfish
CAST5
Serpent
Triple DES
Twofish
Cascades

Download your copy of TrueCrypt and give it a try!

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Using Open Source Software to Reduce Investments and Operating Costs

Raj — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:27:30 +0000

By the time you finish reading this article, you will realize some of the many benefits of using Open Source software, how it dramatically lowers your investments by reducing the cost associated with licensed software and its support.

We will look at existing uses of licensed software and how Open Source software can replace them while maintaining same level of productivity and reducing cost associated with licenses. Some of these implementations can provide greater level of stability and productivity without affecting your running business.

Intranet Services – Many medium and large companies have an intranet portal and other intranet applications, that are primarily used by only its employees. The cost associated with the Operating System and hardware is significantly very high when there are hardly couple of hundreds of hit on those web servers on a daily basis. Instead of using licensed software for the Operating system and the web server, switching to Apache and other free application servers [such as Tomcat] can reduce the cost associated with hardware and software licenses. Some companies have 50-100 such intranet servers only meant to serve internal content to its employees. Leveraging the free Apache web server which requires less powerful hardware will help in cutting down the cost.

File and Print services – Consider the example of a large media and publishing company. They might require frequent printing and file sharing services. Replacing Windows based servers with Linux and Samba will greatly reduce the cost associated with Operating System and offer better efficiency.

Email services – Instead of using propriety software where both the mail server and clients keep exchanging information for no apparent reason, if replaced with open source client softwares such as Thunderbird will greatly reduce the network traffic and also save on cost associated with client access licenses required to use email client software.

Spreadsheets – Not every user needs lot of features of MS Office and thus it can be replaced with a free license of OpenOffice product. People with experience of using MS Office products will require minimal training to start using MS Office. You might end up saving thousands of dollars just by replacing the MS Word and Excel with equivalent OpenOffice products. A computer that can run MS Office can also run OpenOffice thus eliminates the need of upgrading the hardware for using OpenOffice suite.

The TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] is always lower in case of Open Source Softwares, provided they are properly deployed. Evaluation of hardware, existing software, services, prior planning for deployment saves lot of time and increases the TCO associated with Open Source softwares.

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Linux Resource: Best Linux Books

Raj — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 03:56:27 +0000

Here is my recommendation of Top Linux Books. Some of these are recommendations based on my personal reading and rest are a result of search on Internet. These books are very helpful for newbies and also for people who want to build expertise in Linux. For a complete selection of best selling books on linux, see best linux books or continue reading the recommendations below.

Linux: The Complete Reference, by Richard Petersen. – This may well be Richard Petersen’s best Linux Reference book to date as it is well written and appeals to the novice as well as the system administrator.

Running Linux, by Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Lar Kaufman and Terry Dawson. [Publisher - O'Reilly & Associates]

Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder. [Publisher - O'Reilly & Associates]

Linux Quick Fix by Peter Harrison

The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source by Martin Fink

The Book of Postfix: State-of-the-Art Message Transport by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter

Linux Firewalls – [2nd Edition] by Robert Ziegler

Linux in a Nutshell -[Fourth Edition] by Ellen Siever, Aaron Weber and Stephen Figgins [Publisher - O'Reilly & Associates]

Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! by Marcel Gagne [Publisher - Addison Wesley Professional]

A Practical Guide to Linux: Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming by Mark G. Sobell [Publisher - Prentice Hall PTR]

Building Secure Servers with Linux by Michael D. Bauer. [Publisher - O'Reilly & Associates]

Linux Pocket Guide by Daniel J. Barrett. [Publisher - O'Reilly & Associates]

» If you are specifically looking for books about Redhat linux, I recommend that you first download the redhat manuals available on their website and if those manuals do not help then buy redhat linux books.

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Virtualizaton: Better Resource Utilization and reduced Total Cost of Ownership

Raj — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:45:50 +0000

A virtual machine is like running a PC on a PC. You can run Linux on Windows XP or run Windows Server 2003 on a Windows XP system, as simple as that. A VM [Virtual Machine], enables IT professionals and developers to test and evaluate their applications and other tools without having a need to install it on separate physical servers or systems. Imagine a developer who would like to have 20 desktops to connect to his centralized application and test it. Under ideal conditions, he should have 20 desktops and 1 server or a high end system, on which he will install his application, then connect the desktops to the server [over the network] and perform his tests. This translates into hardware worth 21 systems.

Using virtualization, you can quickly deploy these desktops [as Virtual Machines] on a system with powerful hardware and test your applications. Effectively, instead of spending 21 x $1000 = $21,000 [assuming each system to be $1000], you consider spending $10,000 to buy a powerful, multi-processor system with more RAM and it will suffice your testing requirements. This approach saves over 50% in hardware and testing costs. Not only that, you will also be able to install hundreds of virtual machines on a single server depending on the hardware you are going to use.

In bigger organizations with several hundreds of servers, virtual machines or server virtualization can significantly reduces hardware costs associated with testing and deployment. You can leverage virtual machines instead of traditional hardware to cut down on cost incurred towards spending on hardware.

Main advantages of virtualization are:

Cost savings on Hardware and Software – Since you are running your infrastructure in virtualized environment, you not only save on hardware but also save a lot of money in software licenses.
Less downtime – It’s very easy to move an application from one server to another. In an event of a scheduled maintenance or unexpected hardware failure, an application from one virtual machine server can easily be moved to another server and the application will start running right away.
System Management and Administration – Since it’s very easy to manage the deployment and recovery of virtual machines, it not only saves lot of time for system administrators but also that IT Managers who will have a simple environment to manage.
Effective utilization of resources – If 10 servers had average CPU utilization of 5%, with server consolidation the effective utilization can be increased to 80%.

Let’s look at some example that will demonstrate advantages of using virtualization over extra hardware.

Example #1 – Company ABC Corp, uses 10 servers to host 10 different applications and each server having its own database instance as well. Each of these server has 1 processor, 1GB RAM and 80GB Hard Disk. The maximum utilization on any server, at any given point of time is not more than 10%. If they consider 1 server with 4GB RAM, dual-processors and virtual machine based solution, it will not only bring down the number of systems but also increase the utilization from 10% to a little over 80%. What do they save? Well, they save on hardware cost, management, hardware support contracts and overall they achieve effective utilization of their resources.

Example #2 – Company ABCD uses 100 servers for its intranet based applications. There are 20 servers running only databases, 20 of them used for backup [NAS] and storing application related data and 60 servers for running only applications. These servers have variety of hardware including servers with 1GB RAM, 1 processor and two 80GB hard-disks. Consolidating them onto less number of servers with virtual machines will bring down on hardware costs. The company can put all the databases on 2-4 high end servers within virtual machines, instead of running applications on 60 servers they can put all of them on 10-12 high end servers and instead of 20 servers dedicated for backup, they can buy 3-4 servers with more hard disk capacity. Imagine the savings in hardware costs they might achieve!

Virtualization can be used for various purposes. Some worth mentioning are software virtualization, application virtualization, server virtualization and NAS virtualization.

TCO Comparisons for Company ABCD	Without Virualization	With Virtualization
Number of Physical Servers Required	100	20
Total Hardware Costs	$500,000	$50,000
Hardware Maintenance	$50,000	$15,000
Virtualization Software	$0	$0
Total Hardware and Software Costs	$550,000	$65,000
Total reduction in TCO		Over 88%

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