Tech

I have a pair of 200 gigabyte Maxtor Shared Storage drives -- which are relatively inexpensive network storage drives that integrate with windows client machines. They come with an ethernet port you use to connect to a switch or hub on your home LAN, and will plug and play by negotiating an IP via DHCP. Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) provided a windows client that helps with finding and setting up the drives, since they advertise themselves as Workgroup peers that can be shared. I use the drives to store things like digital camera pictures and DVD's I've ripped in order to play them through my Tivo Series 2. They also come with some software that makes it easy to backup the My Documents area of our windows machines.

With Windows XP, the Shared Storage drives worked fairly reliably, but after I upgraded my Gateway desktop to Vista Business edition, I found myself unable to connect to the drives I'd mapped to it. Trying to mount them manually, I'd receive a login dialog. The name and password I use from my XP Pro based computer works fine, but on Vista the drive would reject the same credentials.

It took me a while to sit down and dig into the issue, and my first guess was that firmware might fix the problem. The Shared Storage drive predates Vista, so it wasn't a total surprise to me that authentication didn't work. The bundled web interface allows you to login with a browser, and administer the drive, setting up user accounts and mounting and unmounting USB devices you can connect to either of 2 provided USB ports. We have a printer attached.

After logging into the webserver, it displays a menu that includes the Firmware version -- mine was 1.2. A quick search of the Seagate site, and I found Maxtor offering version 2.6.2 firmware! The Advanced Settings | System Maintenance menu | System update menu provided a simple upload and update process that was completed in about 2 minutes. Despite the major point upgrade to the drive bios, I still was unable to login to the drive from Vista. What made this even more confusing is that I somehow had been able to successfully find the unit on the Windows network, authenticate to it and map a drive when I had first done the Vista upgrade. A bit of googling on the problem, and I discovered something surprising about the Maxtor unit I'd never suspected -- it is actually a linux box....

Continue reading "Fun with Windows Vista and the Maxtor Shared Storage Drive" »

I gave a talk on the use of Xen for web developers at Lampsig. It took me a while to get my notes transcribed, but here at last they are. This prescription has been used by me to install Xen successfully on a Fedora core 4 box, Centos 4.3 and 4.4 boxes, and should probably work on RHEL, assuming you can figure out how to get the packages you need.

I cover use of file backed file systems, and how to mount and edit them, as well as expanding a file based filesystem.

I have run gentoo and Centos guests I got from jailtime.org and have found them to be very stable. I even was able to use this on a 64 bit server, although I did have to build my own guest. Many people who have had trouble getting Xen to work reliably when using the packaged (rpm) versions of Xen may find this prescription fixes their problems.

Xen 3.0 Centos How-to

I recently had need to add XWindows to a Centos 4.x install that didn't have X or Gnome. I was doing this under VMware which added slightly to the degree of difficulty. As it turns out, using Yum makes this a very easy process, although you probably end up with some bloated packageware.



Pay close attention to the capitalization -- Yum is picky. "Gnome desktop environment" won't work, for example.

I have a small phpBB2 forum attached to this site, that I used briefly to support some of my side projects. phpBB has had a checkered past in terms of security, having been the victim of many exploits. To be fair that's one of the costs of having been one of the first and most widely successful php based community projects. The number of phpBB deployments is staggering even to this day. With so many forums out there, spammers quickly figured out that if they could write a bot to create an account and auto post messages, they'd be able to spread their spam messages far and wide. I was getting so much spam, I ultimately disabled the ability of people to authenticate their own accounts, and despite this change, still see as many as ten new signups for the forum every day. Who would bother to sign up for an account they can't use? There had to be a way of determining the bots from the humans who wanted to post to my forum.

CAPTCHA, as the conventional wisdom of the day was concerned, would provide a useful deterrent to this annoyance -- bots arent' smart enough to decipher the captcha images and extract the right combination of numbers and letters depicted in the image, and type them back to into the form in order to unlock the account. Without the account, the spammers couldn't have their bots post their spam messages. While phpBB introduced a CAPTCHA capability relatively late in the game, it is now something you get out of the box, and there is at least one mod that improves on the quality of the CAPTCHA image, which is to say, makes it harder to read.

The problem is that CAPTCHA's are there to defeat dumb machines, but not dumb humans. And as the old saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute who is more than happy to help your local spammer defeat the CAPTCHA image on your site. How might you ask? Well, the scam works something like this: John Q. Sucker visits some site that informs him he's getting something for free -- it could be a free ipod, porn, or an xbox 360. All that is important is that this person believes they will be getting access to this free stuff once they register.

They visit the spammer's site, and are presented a CAPTCHA image in order to register, only, this image didn't come directly from the spammer's site -- it came from YOURS. The spammer writes a simple bot that goes to your site and hits the registration page. It takes the CAPTCHA image your site provided, and presents it to John Q. Sucker on the spammer's site.

Continue reading "CAPTCHA busting -- A sucker born every minute" »

I'll be talking about the Dynamic Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) with Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax) demo I created for the LAMPsig booth at the Southern California Linux expo 2006 (SCALE) conference that was held last weekend.

There were some excellent LAMP oriented discussions including Zend's Andi Gutmans himself, who talked about the PHP community project and PHP 6, then hung around for a while whilst myself and Chris Thompson peppered him with questions about MySQL's oop, its applicablility to the various framework projects underway. In short, Andi indicated that the PHP core team currently has no plans to add anything to the Oop capabilities of PHP 5, although I suppose that could change once the PHP Framework project matures. He indicated that the PHP Framework should be available in alpha or beta within the next few weeks.

Other LAMP hi-lights included Jim Winstead from MySQL AB who discussed new features in MySQL 5.x and provided some nice example code, and David Schecter from Sleepycat gave an entertaining talk that illustrated how integral berkely database is to Linux in general, and how its used by many major players to provide a high performance caching layer in front of oracle and mysql for websites like Yahoo.

Give this a day and it should be in Spartacus and the Sourceforge Additional Plugins cvs branch.

-.05 release
- Updated GeSHi to latest release (1.0.7.4)
- This release includes some fixes, and new language files for:
applescript, D, diff output, DIV game language, DOS batch language, eiffel, freebasic, gml, Delphi Inno script, Matlab M language files, MySQL specific SQL, Objective CAML, Ruby, Scheme, SDLBasic, and VHDL: Very high speed integrated circuit HDL