Category: Technology

For years I have been using an autoclave floppy to securely delete my hard drives. Well, autoclave is no more but its creator is recommending another linux-on-floppy formatting disk known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke (aka DBAN.) The author of Autoclave has this to say about it:

If that was not high praise enough, it should be pointed out that DBAN is used by the National Nuclear Security Administration to safely delete old hard drives.

Developer Works has another great Linux/DB2 article titled DB2 memory and file cache performance tuning on Linux. Article covers the tight integration that exists between Linux and DB2; and how to best leverage it for improved performance. For those of us who suffer live with DB2, tips and techniques improving it are always welcome.

The future of filesystems is not Microsoft’s WinFS (no longer an actual filesystem but instead an API built on top of NTFS) or even IBM’s mainframe lineage XFS. Instead a Linux filesystem known as Reiser4 is poised to change the way we think about computer technology. Check out kerneltrap.org’s interview with Hans Reiser, the creator of Reiser4. Reiser4’s speed looks to be nothing short of revolutionary. Add to it a plugin-able architecture that allows unheard of functionality to take place in filesystem space and you get what could be the most disruptive filesystem technology to be seen sense the advent of the modern computer.

Marcus Ranum has listed , in his opinion, the six dumbest ideas as releated to computer security. Not everything on the list is as intuitive as one might guess. Overall its a great rant about how we shold frame the computer security debate.

Jon Smirl has posted this article on the current state of Linux Graphics. It basically tracks the technologies and limitations of the current form of X, based on the coming X.org 7 codebase. While X provides an amazing number of features, ones that are not available on any other platform, is has huge limitation when it comes to 3D support. While these limitation are notacible, they also provide a significant opportunity X and Linux.

I am always google searching for this list. The top 75 security tools, based on a survey of the nmap mailing list, consistently points out some of the most powerful security tools available on any platform. While there are obvious “newby” entries (i.e. SuperScan and Zone Alarm) overall insecure’s catalog is probably the most solid you will find on the public Internet.

I am working on building Linux From Scratch to use as a learning experience for another side project of mine. While reviewing it I ran across this tutorial on setting up LFS. The same site also has Part II and Part III (titled “Beyond Linux from Scratch”) that extends of the original tutorial. Even after all the years I have been developing on Linux; the idea of building an entire OS from source seems pretty amazing.

The OpenSUSE project is really starting to look exciting to me. With the recent release of Beta4 we are just 9 days away from the first release candidates of OpenSUSE 10.

One of the first difficulties of any Linux distribution is package management. Fedora uses Yum (not bad), Kubuntu uses apt (great!), Suse uses Yast (not good.) Yast was fully capable of doing everything the other package managers were but it suffered from two problems. 1) The newest version of Suse never had online packages available; 2) Older versions were really slow and pretty buggy. Steady progress on problem #2 has been going on since the 9.x releases, to the point were Yast is pretty nice to work with. Problem #1 was solved… with the creation of OpenSUSE.

So here are a couple of useful links for getting Yast working with online package repositories. A tutorial on setting up Yast; and the locations of OpenSUSE repositories.

Ever wonder what you happen if you popped a water balloon in space? See for yourself.