Amazon cloud outage takes down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, & more

An outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia has taken down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, and other services. According to numerous Twitter updates and our own checks, all three services are unavailable as of Friday evening at 9:10 p.m. PT.

via Amazon cloud outage takes down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, & more | VentureBeat.

With the critical Amazon outage, which is the second this month, we wouldn’t be surprised if these popular services started looking at other options, including Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s just-introduced Compute Engine. Some of Amazon’s biggest EC2 outages occurred in April and August of last year.

Quake 3 Source Code Review

Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my “cycle of id”. After Doom, Doom Iphone, Quake1, Quake2, Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet:

idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live.

via Quake 3 Source Code Review: Architecture.

I was particularly impressed by :

  • The virtual machines system and the associated toolchain that altogether account for 30% of the code released. Under this perspective idTech3 is a mini operating system providing system calls to three processes.
  • The elegant network system based on snapshots and memory introspection.

Anyone else experiencing high rates of Linux server crashes during a leap second day?

THE WORKAROUND

Ok people, here’s how I worked around it.

  1. disabled ntp: /etc/init.d/ntp stop
  2. created http://linux.brong.fastmail.fm/2012-06-30/fixtime.pl (code stolen from Marco, see blog posts in comments)
  3. ran fixtime.pl without an argument to see that there was a leap second set
  4. ran fixtime.pl with an argument to remove the leap second

via debian – Anyone else experiencing high rates of Linux server crashes during a leap second day? – Server Fault.

TCPDUMP question

It seems to work as expected for me, but I did notice one thing. When I first tried to run the program as root, it failed to create the first file with a permission error. It turns out that tcpdump changes uid/gid internally to the user/group tcpdump. Since that user/group did not have write access to the directory, it failed. Once I created a subdir and gave tcpdump ownership of the subdir (chown/chgrp), tcpdump performed as expected.

via TCPDUMP question – FedoraForum.org.

GRUB 2.00 Boot-Loader Officially Released

The GRUB2 boot-loader features an EHCI driver, an official theme, ports to Itanium and SGI MIPS architectures, better default video mode selection using monitor EDID information, new drivers (EHCI / AHCI / ESCC serial / EFI / Network stack / VBE on Coreboot), new file-system support, improved file-system capabilities, new boot protocols, performance improvements, better internationalization, and improved installation support.

via [Phoronix] GRUB 2.00 Boot-Loader Officially Released.

Malware author taunts security researchers with built-in chat

Security researchers from AVG were decompiling a trojan — it had been originally posted to a Diablo III forum, masquerading as a how-to video — when the malware’s author popped up in a window on their screen. It turned out that the trojan had a built-in chat, as well as a screen-capture facility. The hacker who wrote the malware saw them working on defeating her or his virus and decided to tell them off for their audacity. Franklin Zhao and Jason Zhou, the AVG researchers, wrote up their experience:

via Malware author taunts security researchers with built-in chat – Boing Boing.

New manufacturing technology enables vertical 3D NAND transistors, higher capacity SSDs

According to the folks at Applied Materials, trying to build 3D NAND structures in real life would be like trying to dig a one-kilometer-deep, three-kilometer-long trench with walls exactly three meters apart, through interleaved rock strata — and that’s before we discuss gate trenches or the staircases. Conventional etching systems deal with aspect ratios of 3:1 – 4:1, 3D etching requires an aspect ratio of 20:1 or more — and that’s not easy to pull off.

via New manufacturing technology enables vertical 3D NAND transistors, higher capacity SSDs | ExtremeTech.