Basile's Musings

Why hardening is important.

basile — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:35:37 +0000

As far as human endeavors go, computer systems are the most complex thing we’ve ever created. If the ancient Egyptians gave us great buildings, and the Greeks gave us great philosophical systems, then today our digital technology will be the legacy we leave our children. But with anything so complex, there are modes of operations which exceed the intelligence of any one individual. All it takes is one unseen path in the maze that leads to mischief and one determined individual to find it, that it will be found. Hardening operating systems is the evergoing task of finding these paths and closing them off before your adversary does.

Why Web 2.0 is taking off.

basile — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:37:38 +0000

Remember the day when you had to know HTML to put a web page up? It was only for Geeks. Now I have my student just use a Web 2.0 app, type into their browser and they have professional looking pages. That’s because the Wordpress team did all the work of making the page look good, and they just have to add the content.

OMG RAM does not lose its memory on powerdown

basile — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:19:20 +0000

The MIT team found a technique for perserving ram memory after powerdown! They do it by cooling the ram so the state does die on power off and then boot it with a tiny kernel, dump the ram contents, do hard core ECC and get the whole shbang.

Information Leaking is not just an Internet Phenomenon.

basile — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:39:02 +0000

Every time I go to Party City, they ask me for my Zip code, and every time, I give them a random answer. I make sure its an existing Zip code, so they can’t identify it as an error, but nonetheless, it is andom. Why do they need to know where I live? Information leaking and information gathering is everywhere, not just on the Internet, and frankly, its pissing me off. I don’t like being watched.

Yesterday, I was shopping at Target. They went one step further in what I feel is clearly crossing the lines. After I said no to the dozens of credit card offers that their employees are forced to push, I was given a receipt with a username and password so that I could go on line and “anonymously” rate their performance Anonymously? How? They generated the username/password pair after I had given them my credit card which reveals my identity. So, their computers have a record of who I am and what username/password corresponds to me. If I were to “anonymously” answer their survey, they would know who I am, what I bought, what I said about them, and even the cashier to whom I spoke — if I didn’t like her performance, would she be fired? I don’t like that. Now maybe they don’t record the identity-survey response connection in their database, or the cashier-survey response, but maybe they do. If you trust them, then be my guest …

This is a case where it is not only morally okay to lie, but one might argue that you have a moral obligation to do so. If everyone were to give random answers to surveys, these devices would become useless in identifying us — its called poisoning their database. Even anonymously gathered information is disturbing. These companies want to know what our buying habits are so they can “better serve” us. Better serve or better entice? Playing on the irrational impulse to buy is a desired skill in the marketing world. Look at the debts incurred by the average American who has not only not learned self-discipline in frugality, but does not even appreciate the value of such restraint. In the Target case, even if I had paid cash, the username/password would be linked to the cash register and the cashier behind it. Did she know that when she so vigorously pushed the survey?!

Do not underestimate the power of poisoning databases. Every time I get email scam saying things like, your Paypal account is suspended, please click here to reactivate it, I write an evil little program. It goes over and over to their site and enters randomly generated username/passwords. I make sure to disguise my IP address and then leave them with the task of figuring out which username/password is potentially victim, and which is a waste of their time.

I’m sorry Kant, but sometimes, it is morally right to lie.

Setting up proper mail relaying for moodle and bb6

basile — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 13:24:20 +0000

So from 7:00 this morning until 9:15 I’ve been working on making our content management systems properly relay through our mail server, mail.ddl.dyc.edu, so that everything will conform with our DNS’s MX record. Actually I did moodle two days ago, it was trivial to reconfigure since we’re using postfix. One line in the configuration file did it. But, bb6 runs the Blackboard 6 suite. I tried switching from sendmail to postfix, but Blackboard crapware wouldn’t play nice. Rather then figure out how to make it work, I just switched back to sendmail, set up mail.ddl.dyc.edu as its smarthost, and rebuilt the sendmail.cf file. All is good. I’m wondering if I have to do the same for project.dyc.edu, since the blogs might also email … it can’t hurt so as soon as I’m finished with this entry, I’m back to work.

New Subnet for the Distance Learning Servers

basile — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:42:47 +0000

Today, we switched to a new subnet for all the distance learning servers: 67.151.215.224/27. Whois gives:

PaeTec Communications, Inc. PAETECCOMM (NET-67-151-0-0-1)
67.151.0.0 – 67.151.255.255
D’YOUVILLE COLLEGE PAET-RO-DYOUV-1 (NET-67-151-215-224-1)
67.151.215.224 – 67.151.215.255

The switchover was easy enough, six servers, a switch and a router. The breakdown:

moodle.dyc.edu 67.151.215.226
backup.dyc.edu 67.151.215.227
survey.dyc.edu 67.151.215.229
ddl.dyc.edu 67.151.215.230
bb6.dyc.edu 67.151.215.231

Intellinet 523554 24-port Managed Gigabit Switch
Cisco 2800 Router

So far, I’m not impressed with the line. It has punctuated latency which I can’t explain. It supposed to be 6 Mbits per second dedicated. We’ll see.

Update to 1.2.3

basile — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:22:02 +0000

I updated Wordpress MU from 1.1.1 to 1.2.3. I also added a bunch of themes.

Welcoming Dan to the family of Blogs@DYC

basile — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:22:13 +0000

Dan, an IT student – Education Major has just joined the family of bloggers at DYC. Round of applause please ….

I hate reality TV

basile — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:32:15 +0000

Reality TV has taught me nothing more than there is a level of human dignity, or lack thereof, which I have not hitherto imagined possible — perhaps the modern equivalent of the ancient gladiatorial games where the combats tear emotional gashes at one another to the cheers of an audience that is made to feel better about itself becaue they have nothing better to compare themselves to than the drama of human trash. At least the Roman games had the redeeming factor that there is some value in the courage to face an adversary which is your equal in battle. But what values of excellence are there in Reality TV? I am a lesser person for having watched it

project.dyc.edu is born

basile — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:32:32 +0000

Welcome to my blog and to project.dyc.edu which is the latest in a long line of servers that I’ve set up for D’Youville College’s Distance Learning program. Its running GRSEC hardened Gentoo on a 4×3GHz Intel Xeon, 4GB RAM, 6×320GB RAID-5 on aMegaRaid card.