vgdisplay
lvdisplay
Commands to list volume groups and logical volumes in a more civilized manner.
This link was posted in the past but not with regard to these commands which are very very useful when needed.
Category Archives: Technical
How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!) – DNS
How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!) – DNS.
My colleagues & I run a popular website and are constantly concerned with scaling and performance. Until last week, we had been running our own DNS servers (BIND) on Amazon EC2 instances.
We use Pingdom to monitor many functions of our servers, including DNS. What we saw was a resonable average resolution time of about 130ms, but frequent outliers higher than 500ms! The thought of a half-second penalty to the load time for first time visitors is not appealing. So we started to dig into the problem.
Load balancing – LVSKB
In computing, load balancing is a technique used to spread work load among many processes, computers, networks, disks or other resources, so that no single resource is overloaded.
Load balancing can also be considered as distributing items into buckets:
- data to memory locations
- files to disks
- tasks to processors
- packets to network interfaces
- requests to servers
Its goal is even distribution.
Ostiary
If you leave such programs running all the time, you take the risk that someone is going to use an exploit on you before you have a chance to apply a patch. For some purposes, this is an acceptable – even necessary – tradeoff, but it would be nice to enable them only when actually needed, to minimize the risk. And for other purposes, ssh et. al. are overkill. Perhaps you only really need to remotely initiate a limited set of operations. In this case, you don’t need a shell prompt, just a way to securely kick off scripts from elsewhere.Enter ‘Ostiary’. It is designed to allow you to run a fixed set of commands remotely, without giving everyone else access to the same commands. It is designed to do exactly and only what is necessary for this, and no more. The only argument given to the command is the IP address of the client, and only if the authentication is successful.
via Ostiary.
No-permission Android App Gives Remote Shell
To demonstrate this we’ve built an app which requires no permissions and yet is able to give an attacker a remote shell and allow them to execute commands on the device remotely from anywhere in the world.
via No-permission Android App Gives Remote Shell – viaForensics « viaForensics.
Here is a paper.
An MIT Magic Trick: Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them
An MIT Magic Trick: Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them – Forbes.
Now the Google- and Citigroup-funded work of three MIT scientists holds the promise of solving that long-nagging issue in some of the computing world’s most common applications. CryptDB, a piece of database software the researchers presented in a paper (PDF here) at the Symposium on Operating System Principles in October, allows users to send queries to an encrypted set of data and get almost any answer they need from it without ever decrypting the stored information, a trick that keeps the info safe from hackers, accidental loss and even snooping administrators. And while it’s not the first system to offer that kind of magically flexible cryptography, it may be the first practical one, taking a fraction of a second to produce an answer where other systems that perform the same encrypted functions would require thousands of years.
Welcome to BitPim
BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on many CDMA phones from LG, Samsung, Sanyo and other manufacturers. This includes the PhoneBook, Calendar, WallPapers, RingTones (functionality varies by phone) and the Filesystem for most Qualcomm CDMA chipset based phones. To see when phones will be supported, which ones are already supported and which features are supported, see online help.
via Welcome to BitPim.
Biquad Antenna Construction
This page details the construction of a biquad antenna. The biquad antenna is easy to build, and provides a reliable 11dBi gain, with a fairly wide beamwidth.
Loopholes in Verified by Visa & SecureCode
At issue is a security protocol called “3 Domain Secure,” (3DS), a program designed to reduce card fraud and shift liability for fraud from online merchants to the card issuing banks. Visa introduced the program in 2001, branding it “Verified by Visa,” and MasterCard has a similar program in place called “SecureCode.”
Cardholders who chose to participate in the programs can register their card by entering the card number, filling in their ZIP code and birth date, and picking a passcode. When cardholders go to use that card at a merchant site that uses 3DS, the shopper then enters the code, which verified by the issuing bank and is never shared with the merchant site.
via Loopholes in Verified by Visa & SecureCode — Krebs on Security.
HyperCard
HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface.[1] HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written by Dan Winkler, a programming language for manipulating data and the user interface. Some HyperCard users employed it as a programming system for Rapid Application Development of applications and databases.
HyperCard was originally released in 1987 for $49.95, and was included with all new Macs sold at the time.[2] It was withdrawn from sale in March 2004, although by then it had not been updated for many years.