Rick’s Playground

Surprise, surprise, surprise! I can’t launch my newly baked VMware server 2.0 Beta on my Ubuntu 7.10 console. vm-anywhere patch? dependency issue? in-compatible customized kernel? But there is no error message and it just asks me to read the man page. Everything works fine when I use the web-ui … mmmm… . May the force be with you and my star-war heroes/villain’s chat cleared all my questions.

Quoted from Linux Mag http://www.linux-mag.com/id/4403
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We take you now to the Planet Virtual, where two combatants are already engaged in mortal combat. Laser swords drawn and at the ready, and facing each other on opposing levitating anti-gravity platforms hovering over a fiery river of molten metal, the opponents utter their final words.

Open Source Kernobi: Darth, slow, memory hogging and less functional Web interfaces compared to native Linux software are evil. Why did you remove the native Linux console client from VMware Server in the 2.0 release? We’ve been using it for years and its worked great.

Darth VMware: Evil from your point of view! From my point of view, the Open Source freeloaders and non-paying end-users are evil. You should be lucky that we give you a free Server product, period. And besides, if you don’t like the Web interface, you can always use the Windows-based Virtual Infrastructure client. You want native? Use our free VMware Player or buy VMware Workstation.

Open Source Kernobi: Well, then you are lost! That’s not what we Linux users want! Don’t you remember who and what you started with, back in 1999? Developers and power users need a free server with a native client!

Darth VMware: This is the end for you, My Linux community. I wish it were otherwise.

The fighting continues for what seems like an eternity, with the opponents trading blows against each other, until what seems like a stalemate. Finally, Kernobi opens up his Targus laptop bag, and produces a huge stack of DVDs, containing Linux distro builds with integrated Xen, KVM, and Virtualbox — all native and Open Source Virtualization packages for Linux.

Kernobi: It’s over, Darth. Open Source has the the high ground. Our hypervisors and management tools are catching up to you in polish and functionality, while you lag behind in driver support in your enterprise product offerings, produce bloatware, and alienate the fan base which got your company started in the first place.

Darth VMware: We’ve outgrown your community, Kernobi. You underestimate our power! We have more than 80 percent market share and we’re backed by one of the biggest names in enterprise storage. We can sit on our laurels, force end-users to eat what ever we give them, and we’ll get away with it too.

Kernobi: Don’t try it, Darth. Once the end users get a taste of free and open source virtualization, they’ll want to go to Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, SWsoft or any other vendor that will give them support at their enterprise. Your 80 percent market share will shrink like a slice of Bantha bacon hitting a cast iron pan.

And so it went. Well, we all know how that sucky movie ended. Darth got burnt to a cinder and ended up having to wear a permanent sleep apnea mask welded to his face, and Kernobi and the rest of his kind retreated into the safety of their Open Source development model, one day to return and conquer the proprietary villains.

Of course, it didn’t have to end that way if Darth didn’t want to maintain the native Linux client anymore, they could have open sourced it for the community to maintain it themselves. Or better yet, release their entire hosted virtualization product as open source, since their enterprise hypervisor-based version ESX Server and its derivative products are what make them the big bucks anyway.

And as to Darth’s concerns of an open source version detracting from sales of their hosted VMware Workstation product, from which VMware Server shares much of its technology? Well, think of it as free development resources. Red Hat and Novell have been able to make that work for them. People still want to pay for support for a fully regression tested and stable version.

Of course, if I were one of Darth’s competitors and one of Kernobi’s friends — such as the aforementioned Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat or Novell all of which are using Open Source hypervisors as basis for their commercial virtualization products — I’d come out with an easy to install free product that seamlessly and easily converted VMware images over to whatever their native VM file format is, as well as a physical-to-virtual converter utility, with a nice, fast and native Linux GUI front-end. I might write it in a multi-platform toolset like QT, or maybe even Java so the client will run on Macs and Windows too.

Oh yeah, and if they want support and enterprise capabilities, they should charge them for that too. Cause, like, people pay for that. Even the Linux freeloaders, when they go to their day jobs in corporate America.

Jason Perlow is Senior Technology Editor of Linux Magazine. You can send Jason email at jperlow@linux-mag.com.
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It took me a few nights to figure out what’s wrong with the failed kernel re-configuration. My customized Ubuntu 7.10 kernel always stuck at the ubuntu logo stage. The re-compile process usually takes 55mins on my INSPIRON 8600 and it is really time-consuming. I am not sure whether there is any short-cut available.

3 weird bugs I encountered:

- Symmetric multi-processing support

When this option is enabled, there will be a setting of “Maximum number of CPUs (2-255)”. The initial generic kernel configuration enable SMP and set the max number at 8. It seems the moment I change this number to 4 or 2 etc. The new kernel will stuck at the Ubuntu logo page. I still can’t figure it out why this option matters. For the moment, i disable SMP at all (anyway my lappy is not SMP) and it works fine.

- firmware files are not copied

Somehow the firmwares located in the /lib/firmware/2.6.22-14-generic directores are not copied to the new kernel directory if you follow the kernel recompiling proceedure in my previous post. One of the affected components is my wireless ipw-2100 driver. Anyway just copy them to the new kernel directory and it solves all the problems since we are only re-configuring the kernel using the same source.

- abnormally big initrd.img

Initially it is very weird that the newly configured kernel initrd.img is significantly larger (>40M, the generic one is only 7M). But the new vmlinux is 0.3M (15%) smaller and system.map is 40k (5%) smaller. After googling a bit, I managed to find the reason from this thread. ‘Kernel hacking / Kernel debuggung’ option need to be disabled manually. Again this is funny because I copied the generic config file and used it as the base for my customization, but somehow the kernel debugging option is enabled in the config although it is not so in the generic kernel. After disable the ‘Kernel debugging’, the initrd.img size is back to normal (6.7M) and 0.5M (7%) smaller than the generic one.

In conclusion, there are still bugs here and there in the kernel compilation process, but the mass user base of Ubuntu provides excellent support for all the trouble-shootings. It is much easier and more convenient to do kernel re-configuration nowadays.

Recently I have been doing some work on risk management mainly information security risk and impact to a medium to large companies in financial sectors. Commonly used risk categories include but not limit to following types:

1. Monetary loss (such as reduced Revenue, inflated expense etc)

• High Risk: Potential for a significant impact on revenue or expense plan (greater than $xxxx per day)
• Medium Risk: Potential for a moderate revenue or expense plan (between $xxxx - $xxxx per day)
• Low Risk: Potential for little/no impact on revenue or expense plan

2. Legal and Regulatory Risk

• High Risk: Risk of potential regulatory intervention and supervisory action or fines (greater than $xxxk per day)
• Medium Risk: Significant compliance gaps with potential serious impact or fines (between $xxxx - $xxxx per day)
• Low Risk: Common compliance findings without serious impact (less than $xxxx per day)

3. Reputation

• High Risk: National or international news segment (Print, TV, Blog or Radio). Repeated news mentions.
• Medium Risk: Makes local news with potential for national coverage
• Low Risk: No external exposure. If leaked externally, unlikely or negligible impact

4. Competitive Ability (For example leakage of new products information etc)

• High Risk: Potential for a significant impact on potential new enterprise-wide customers or incremental fees
• Medium Risk: Potential for a moderate impact on potential new customers in isolated markets or incremental fees
• Low Risk: Potential for little/no impact on potential new customers or incremental fees

5. Customer/internal Staff

• High Risk: Potential for significant loss of existing customers enterprise-wide or significant impact on employees enterprise-wide
• Medium Risk: Potential for a moderate loss of existing customers in isolated markets or moderate impact on employees in certain geographies
• Low Risk: No loss/negligible loss of existing customers or impact on employees

The last time I studied about BCM was during year 2005 when I was preparing for my CISSP exam. The post-SARS period was also the moment companies in Asia became aware of the importance of BC practices. In my current working group, we have a couple of BC experts who are developing and managing regional BC practices. Although I am in the InfoSec side, there is also opportunity for me to get in touch with all the BC stuff and it is pretty interesting.

I have just read a PDF document on “How to Deploy BS 25999″ by Susan Yardis and John DiMaria and pleasantly surprised by a couple of new items in the current BCMS in comparison with those back in year 2004.

For example, the main activities and stages in the current BCMS defined by BS25999 are:

1. Business Impact Analysis - determining the impact of a disruption of critical organizational activities
2. Risk Assessment - understanding the threats and vulnerabilities to the organization’s critical activites
3. Risk Threatment Options - determining the strategy options to mitigate risk by reducing the likelihood of an interruption or limiting its timeframe
4. Business Continuity Options - defining how the organization will recover critical activities, and accounting for those activities not deemed critical
5. Response Activities - determining the process to respond to an interruption and manage the business recovery activities
6. Planning - documenting the process determined in the previous three sections
7. Exercising - validating the plans and arrangements are effective and up-to-date with current information
8. Strategy and Plan Review - updating the plans and arrangements following exercising or review
9. BCMS Review and Maintenance - reviewing and revising the BCMS to ensure the program is meeting objectives in an efficient manner

One significant additional item between this new practice and the old one is item 3 - Risk Treatment Options. It clearly indicates the additional responsibility of BC professionals to be involved with risk mitigation and shift the emphasis from a traditional “find problem and deal with it when it occurs” approach to “find problem and fix it before it occurs”. This is definitely a nice feature improvement, and we shall see the actual industrial acceptance to this.

Just manged to get a 2nd hand Dell Inspiron 8600 lappy for less than s$220. It came from a liquidation sale and in almost new condition. However the charger was spoiled and 512MB ram was merely sufficient for me to run at most 1 VM instance. Sourcing for a replacement charger and 1G DDR1 ram did take some time and finally I got everything ready for a total sum of s$130. So s$350 for a almost new Dell is definitely a bargain. To my surprise the battery life is excellent and can last more than 3.5hours with continuous wifi connections. I guess dimming the back-light does help a lot to save battery.

This lappu will be the new playground for my infosec + linux + exploits + MMORPG hacking + anything geeky under the sun research activities. 1st thing 1st …Ubuntu 7.10… the installation was a breeze until I want to run the linux EVE-online client and it just hang after the initial login screen. Then I realized it is using wine and since I haven’t done much study of Wine configuation, I decided to figure it out later. After the initial installation, a customized kernel is what I ususally do in my Redhat days and same here for Ubuntu.

1) Check current kernel verion and download the kernel source. Mine ubuntu 7.10 Desktop version is currently using 2.6.22-14

$uname -a

2) (optiona) Patch the source and create /usr/src/linux softlink

3) Copy kernel config from existing kernel to /usr/src/linux

$cp /boot/config-`uname -r` ./.config

4) Configure kernel

$make menuconfig

Here i will strongly suggest you to start with your current kernel and add/remove modules in batches so that when problem occurs and you will know exactly which change causes it. Yes, I know you need to recompile the kernel and it takes a lot of time, but unless you are very sure what each module is doing, otherwise it will cost you longer time to figure out what goes wrong if you make all the changes in one go.

5) Compile kernel

$make-kpkg clean
$fakeroot make-kpkg –initrd –append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers

(It took more than 50 mins on my Dell)

6) Create boot image

$dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.18.1-custom_2.6.18.1-custom-10.00.Custom_i386.deb
$dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.18.1-custom_2.6.18.1-custom-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

(This is very handy)

7) Verify your entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst

Restart your machine and pray it works !

One of the main reference I used is here.