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• btrfs: can i create a btrfs file system with data as jbod and metadata mirrored

  - by Yogi

  I am trying to build a home server that will be my NAS/Media server as well a the XBMC front end. I am planning on using Ubuntu with btrfs for the NAS part of it. The current setup consists of 1TB hdd for the OS etc and two 2TB hdd's for data. I plan to have the 2TB hdd's used as JBOD btrfs system in which i can add hdd's as needed later, basically growing the filesystem online. They way I had setup the file system for testing was while installing the OS just have one of the HDD's connected and have btrfs on it mounted as /data. Later on add another hdd to this file system. When the second disk was added btrfs made as RAID 0, with metadata being RAID 1. However, this presents a problem: even if one of the disk fails I loose all my data (mostly media). Also most of the time the server will be running without doing any disk access, i.e. the HDD's can be spun down, when a access request comes in this with the current RAID 0 setup both disks will spin up. in case I manage a JBOD only the disk that has the file needs to be spun up. This should hopefully reduce the MTBF for each disk. So, is there a way in which I can have btrfs setup such that metadata is mirrored but data stays in a JBOD formation? Another question I have is this, I understand that a full drive failure in JBOD will lose data on the drive, but having metadeta mirrored across all drives, will this help the filesytem correct errors that migh creep in (ex bit rot?) and is btrfs capable of doing this.

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• Mirror a RAID0 volume

  - by Ghostrider

  I have two SSD running in RAID0. The capacity and speed are just great. I use Windows Home Server to do incremental daily backups. This is fine and well and I've successfully restored from these backups. However. When one of the disks physically died. I was stuck without a working system until the replacement arrives so that I can restore the array from backup. WHS restoration takes about 5 hours which basically means that I'm losing entire day for the process. Is it possible to set up kind of a recovery volume for the RAID array? Use a single mechanical HDD that would be updated with the exact clone of the RAID array on a daily basis. This way if the array goes offline for some reason, I can just boot from the mechanical HDD, lose some perf but will still be able to work. The machine in question runs Windows 7. Creating RAID01 is not an option because of the high price of the SSD and the fact that it still doesn't protect against failure of RAID controller. Is there any way it can be set up?

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• restoring a failed SBS 2000 box...

  - by Brad Pears

  Hi there, I read a post where you had mentioned you have had a PERC card blow up on you in an SBS box... I've got a similar situation where one of my RAID drives failed and then the power supply failed before I could replace the drive... I then replaced the power supply and the failed drive and reconfigured the RAID array. I had a recent full backup of the my Win2k SBS's C: drive stored on my SYmantec backup exec server so I installed win2K server on the c: partition and then once I had that up and running, installed the backup exec agent so as to do a restore of the entire c drive including system state. THis all worked just fine, until I had to reboot. I received an "incorrect drive configuration" error and then it hangs. I figure that likely makes sense becasue I think my RAID array is configured slightly different now in that the partitions may be sizeded ever so slightly differently now than they were before I think... Is there a way I can just restore from my backup BUT maybe exclude some of the registry and hidden boot files it wants to restore so that it is booting with the current configuration now active on that machine - not the pre blow up configuration files? I also read a post that indicated you might have to install the exact same service pack etc... etc.. before attemting a restore but that does not make sense to me being as the entire c drive contents are going to be overwritten by the restore anyway? THe basic OS install is just to be able to get the backup exec agent installed . I can;t understand why one would need to install the exact same SP level. CAn you shed some light on what I might be able to do to get this thing up and running? Thanks,Brad

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• Disk IO slow on ESXi, even slower on a VM (freeNAS + iSCSI)

  - by varesa

  I have a server with ESXi 5 and iSCSI attached network storage(4x1Tb Raid-Z on freenas 8.0.4). Those two machines are connected to each other with Gigabit ethernet. The raid-z volume is divided into three parts: two zvols, shared with iscsi, and one directly on top of zfs, shared with nfs and similar. I ssh'd into the freeNAS box, and did some testing on the disks. I used ddto test the third part of the disks (straight on top of ZFS). I copied a 4GB (2x the amount of RAM) block from /dev/zero to the disk, and the speed was 80MB/s. Other of the iSCSI shared zvols is a datastore for the ESXi. I did similar test with time dd .. there. Since the dd there did not give the speed, I divided the amount of data transfered by the time show by time. The result was around 30-40 MB/s. Thats about half of the speed from the freeNAS host! Then I tested the IO on a VM running on the same ESXi host. The VM was a light CentOS 6.0 machine, which was not really doing anything else at that time. There were no other VMs running on the server at the time, and the other two "parts" of the disk array were not used. A similar dd test gave me result of about 15-20 MB/s. That is again about half of the result on a lower level! Of course the is some overhead in raid-z - zfs - zvolume - iSCSI - VMFS - VM, but I don't expect it to be that big. I belive there must be something wrong in my system. I have heard about bad performance of freeNAS's iSCSI, is that it? I have not managed to get any other "big" SAN OS to run on the box (NexentaSTOR, openfiler). Can you see any obvious problems with my setup?

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• Keep Windows Installer from using largest drive for temporary files

  - by stefan.at.wpf

  By default Windows Installer uses the largest drive for temporary storage, no matter if that's needed (meaning there would also be enough space on the system drive). Taken from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa371372%28VS.85%29.aspx: During an administrative installation the installer sets ROOTDRIVE to the first connected network drive it finds that can be written to. If it is not an administrative installation, or if the installer can find no network drives, the installer sets ROOTDRIVE to the local drive that can be written to having the most free space. Now my system drive is an SSD, my largest drive is a RAID, that spins down when it's not used. Remember the SSD as system drive? Everything is silent now! Until I install something and Windows Installer wakes up my RAID again just to put a small .tmp file on it... How can I prevent Windows Installer from using the largest drive as temporary storage? Can I maybe set some access rights to disallow the Windows Installer to write on my RAID drive? Any other ideas? Thank you!

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• Dell OpenManage On Ubuntu Server 12.04 Cannot Log In

  - by Austin

  I have a Dell Poweredge 2950 with 2X130GB and 2X2TB drives. I need to set them up in a RAID 1 array so that the 130GB Drives are mirrored and host the OS, while the 2TB drives are mirrored and are the content drives. So I go from 4 disks, down to two, one 130GB and one 2TB. I can do that in the BIOS RAID utility no problem. But I need to be able to manage the RAID arrays and be able to expand them WITHOUT shutting down the server. Now, to my understanding, openmanage will allow me to do that AND it runs on ubuntu. So I go and set it up and try to log into the web interface at and it will not let me log in. I have followed dell's guide to set up openmanage, even added the usernames to the files and permissions and such, however, cannot get it to let me log in or anything. I have reinstalled Openmanage several times, even reinstalled the OS three times, and nothing works. Google does not help either. It simply says login failed after hitting submit. Please Help

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• Which upgrade path for disk IO bound postgres server?

  - by user41679

  Hi all, We currently have a Sun x4270 with 2xquad core Xeon Nehalmen 2.93ghz cores (16 threads), 72 gig of ram and 16 x 10k SAS disks split between the os raid 1, a partition for the Write Ahead Logs which is raid 10 and a partition for the database tables and indexes which is also raid 10, all xfs. I'm currently evaluating which path to go down in terms of upgrades. We'll be sharding the DB at some point soon, but for now I need to focus on hardware upgrades specifically. The machine is not CPU or memory bound at all at the moment, just IOWait is become an issue. The machine is mostly write access as we have a heavy caching layer. We're seeing about 300 write IOPS average on both the database partitions. We don't have any additional storage infrastructure like a Fiber Channel or ISCSI network. Budget isn't too much of a concern, something inline with the size of this server (i.e no $1m IBM machines) Space is ok on the DB side of things, we're running out obviously but there's also some reduction we can do. Additional space would be good though. My current thoughts are either: * ISCSI SAN, possible with 10Gbit network that has solid state acceleration. * FusionIO card / Sun F20 card (will the FusionIO card work in the Sun box? * DAS shelf (something like this http://www.broadberry.co.uk/das-direct-attached-storage-servers/cyberstore-224s-das) which a combination of 15k sas disks and some Intel X25-E drives for DB indexes etc) what would I need to put in the x4270 to add a DAS shelf? I think it's a SAS HBA card, do I have to use Sun's own card or will any PCI Express card work? Anything else??? what would you guys do from your experience? I appreciate it's a lot of questions, but I haven't expanded a DB machine for a number of years and the landscape has changed dramatically since then! Any advice or feedback would be very much appreciated. Let me know if there's anything else I can clarify. Thanks in advance!

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• Getting access to physical drives in ESXi v5.5 installation on Dell PowerEdge R710 with PERC 6/i

  - by Big-Blue

  I've acquired a Dell PowerEdge R710 server a few days ago, which includes a PERC 6/i RAID controller. The server is now fitted with a SATA SSD, one SAS drive and four SATA HDD's, all of which I would like to be passed through to ESXi in an "as-is" state, without creating any logical drives in the RAID controller. Now, the ESXi v5.5 installation image I grabbed from the Dell homepage starts just fine but only lists the logical drives and connected flash drives as possible installation targets, not any of the physical drives. If I create a small logical drive on my SSD (which the PERC 6/i detects as SATA-SSD type), the ESXi install wizard lists the SSD value on that drive as false; which is far from optimal. I have also tried disabling the RAID controller entirely in the setup, but that also did not help. Everything that should enable passthrough is enabled in BIOS, but that shouldn't be a concern at this early stage of the ESXi installation. How would I be able to install ESXi v5.5 to a part of my SSD that is connected to the storage controller, while giving it entire physical access to the disk (to allow for SMART values to be read etc.)?

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• G4 server running slow

  - by Abby Kach

  I have HP proliant ML 350 servers. We have 8 remote locations where users connect and log on to our server through DYNDNS to access our company ERP's to conduct day to day work. The base of our company ERP's is oracle for which we have a separate server.Now the problem is day by day the load on the server is increasing and the speed is getting slower and slower and users are facing a lot of issues . so I are planning to implement Sonic wall VPN. I conducted a demo of sonic wall but it was slower than the current speed of dyndns. the configuration of my server is as follows :- Linux HP ProLiant 370 Intel Xenon 3.20 GHZ 150 GB (72 * 2) 3 GB Suse Omega HP ProLiant 370 Intel Xenon 3.20 GHZ 300GB (72.8 * 4) Raid 5 4 GB Windows Server 2K3 Enterprise Edition Storage Box HP Storage Works 1400 Intel Xenon 2.00 GHZ 4 TB(1 TB * 4) Raid 5 2 GB Windows Server 2K8 Enterprise Edition Domain & Terminal HP ProLiant 350 Intel Xenon 3.20 GHZ 250 GB(72.8 * 3) Raid 5 4 GB Windows Server 2K3 Enterprise Edition Can some one help me as to how can i speed up my network at remote locations and reduce the problems of speed etc..

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• Hard Disk based storage library

  - by Ryan M.

  We have a Tandberg T24 tape device to handle all of our long term backups right now. We decided that we're not backing up nearly everything that we would like to and that we still have a lot of vulnerabilities. To get to where we want to be, we're going to have to back up a lot more servers than we're currently doing. All of our internal servers have some sort of directly attached drive (I.e. LaCie Raid box or a simple portable hard drive) doing backups, but what we want to do is get those backups off-site. The current tape drive is directly attached via SCSI to a Windows Server 2008 File Server. So to back up anything to tape, it has to be funneled through the File Server. With the current increase that we have planned, I don't think that funneling everything through the File Server is the right course of action and I'm thinking that maybe a second backup device would be more appropriate. I would like your input on a couple of ideas. 1) Doing HDD instead of tape. Tape is hard to deal with. We have a regular rotation cycle, so they don't need years and years of shelf life, so I'm wondering if something HDD-based would be better. 2) Something accessible over the network. Instead of having the device directly attached to one specific machine, have it available to all the servers over the network. Our File Server is a 12-disk raid 6 set up.. I was thinking something like that, but with no raid involved, all disks are stand alone so they can be used/installed/removed on an individual basis. Does any such thing exist? Thanks for your ideas. I'm really interested to hear about some of the solutions you guys are using..

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• Hyper-V and attaching physical disks

  - by Mike Christiansen

  So, I'm looking at rebuilding my home server. My current setup is the following Windows 7 Ultimate 1TB Boot Drive (my smallest drive) Windows Dynamic Spanned volume, continaing 1x 1TB drive, 2x 2TB drives, totalling 5TB. I am upgrading to a hardware RAID controller, and I would like to run Hyper-V server core. However, I want to retain the ability to join my "file server" to a homegroup, so I must use Windows 7. I know VHDs can only be like 127GB or something, so I obviously need to directly connect disks to my Windows 7 machine. Here is my plan: Server Core 2008 R2 (Hyper-V) 1TB Boot Drive (storing VHDs for boot drives of VMs) - possibly in a RAID 1 with my other 1TB drive 5x 2TB drives (1x 2TB drive hot spare), totalling 10TB, directly attached to a Windows 7 VM, for use of homegroup for this array. In the past, I directly attached the windows dynamic volume to a Windows 7 VM, and performance was abysmal. The question is, with hardware RAID, will it really make that much of a difference? Server specs: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz Asus Maximus II Formula (PCI-E x16) 8GB DDR2 RAM PC2-6400 (Yes, I know its a bit out of date)

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• Hyper-V and attaching physical disks [migrated]

  - by Mike Christiansen

  So, I'm looking at rebuilding my home server. My current setup is the following Windows 7 Ultimate 1TB Boot Drive (my smallest drive) Windows Dynamic Spanned volume, continaing 1x 1TB drive, 2x 2TB drives, totalling 5TB. I am upgrading to a hardware RAID controller, and I would like to run Hyper-V server core. However, I want to retain the ability to join my "file server" to a homegroup, so I must use Windows 7. I know VHDs can only be like 127GB or something, so I obviously need to directly connect disks to my Windows 7 machine. Here is my plan: Server Core 2008 R2 (Hyper-V) 1TB Boot Drive (storing VHDs for boot drives of VMs) - possibly in a RAID 1 with my other 1TB drive 5x 2TB drives (1x 2TB drive hot spare), totalling 10TB, directly attached to a Windows 7 VM, for use of homegroup for this array. In the past, I directly attached the windows dynamic volume to a Windows 7 VM, and performance was abysmal. The question is, with hardware RAID, will it really make that much of a difference? Server specs: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz Asus Maximus II Formula (PCI-E x16) 8GB DDR2 RAM PC2-6400 (Yes, I know its a bit out of date)

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• php-cgi.exe Taking out server, multiple running

  - by Alex

  I have been using ZendServer CE for over a year and have never had a problem. Recently, about a week or two ago I have found my server to be acting up and even causing RDP to be un-connectable. After some looking around I have 20, 25, 30+ php-cgi.exe running. With my IIS7 service starting with Windows once my server started all these php-cgi.exe would start running (even though the limit is 10) and I could not even connect to it. After disabling the Web Server as startup which stops php-cgi.exe from running the server runs flawless, like it always has. As soon as I run the web server all these odd issues start. I have a post over at Zend http://forums.zend.com/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=41043&p=95133 where I was told to update my Zend install. After doing so this issue has not gone away. Even running 1 php-cgi.exe (somehow 2 start anyway) the server begins to go silly. The first issue I find myself with running php-cgi.exe is that Windows Services, weather be stock or using FireDaemon begin to lag, slow start, crash, etc. If anyone can help me with this I would GREATLY appreciate it. At this time I am forced to look for a alternative to running PHP other than cgi as it simply takes out the whole box. On another note, I run this same version of Zend on a similar server with no issues. Starting to think its a IIS issue. (UPDATE) Installed newest version of PHP, separate from Zend, same issue. Server Specs: Intel Xeon Quad w HT Nehlam Based 24GB DDR3 1333 2x1TB Raid Mirror OS 2x1TB Raid Mirror (Other) 4x2TB Raid 5 (Storage) Server 2008 R2

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• Question marks showing in ls of directory. IO errors too.

  - by jaymoo

  Has anyone seen this before? I've got a raid 5 mounted on my server and for whatever reason it started showing this: jason@box2:/mnt/raid1/cra$ ls -alh ls: cannot access e6eacc985fea729b2d5bc74078632738: Input/output error ls: cannot access 257ad35ee0b12a714530c30dccf9210f: Input/output error total 0 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 123 2009-08-19 16:33 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 16 2009-08-14 17:15 .. ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? 257ad35ee0b12a714530c30dccf9210f drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 57 2009-08-19 16:58 9c89a78e93ae6738e01136db9153361b ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? e6eacc985fea729b2d5bc74078632738 The md5 strings are actual directory names and not part of the error. The question marks are odd, and any directory with a question mark throws an io error when you attempt to use/delete/etc it. I was unable to umount the drive due to "busy". Rebooting the server "fixed" it but it was throwing some raid errors on shutdown. I have configured two raid 5 arrays and both started doing this on random files. Both are using the following config: mkfs.xfs -l size=128m -d agcount=32 mount -t xfs -o noatime,logbufs=8 Nothing too fancy, but part of an optimized config for this box. We're not partitioning the drives and that was suggested as a possible issue. Could this be the culprit?

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• p410i Mirror failed couldnt find same disk

  - by Heishiro Mitsurugi

  I have an HP server with an P410i RAID Card installed. I had two SATA Drives connected (250GB each). The RAID was configured as a Mirror. A few days ago the drive one (1) failed, and i had to remove it. Tried to find the same part number here in Venezuela, but i couldn't. So, i bought a 500GB SATA Drive, and connected it to the same bay where the 250GB failed drive was. When the server booted, it asked me if i wanted to rebuild the data. I selected the option for that, and Windows Server restarted properly. When i got into the ACU (Array Configuration Utility) it told me that it was rebuilding the data. Today the warning went away, and according to the ACU everything is just fine. My question is... What i did was right? Can i create a mirror from a 250GB disk in a 500GB disk using the p410i? I have done that before, but only using software RAID in Windows, and it just uses the space it needs. As a matter of fact, when did that using Windows i was able to use the remaining space in the bigger drive, but in the p410i i can't use it. Should i be worried? Thanks a lot in advance for any pointers or info that you could give on this. Heishiro

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• Ubuntu 9.10 won't reboot after replacing a failed drive

  - by user149041

  Hello Serverfault community. I hope someone can shed light on a peculiar problem I am having with an Ubuntu 9.10 server install. I am not a Linux expert but have the responsibility of fixing the box if something goes wrong. DOH! I have Ubuntu 9.10 server installed on on a desktop platform: Compaq Presario SR5027CL. There are two 1TB SATA drives configured in a RAID 1 array; I use the box as an email backup server for a small group of users. Last week one of the drives failed and was replaced with a new drive of the same type. The problem I have been having is getting the box to reboot after a restart or a shutdown halt. The OS and the RAID 1 array are on the same drives that make up the RAID 1 array. The replacement drive (sda) was added to the box and the partitions were created to match the existing good drive (sdb). The array is made up of sda1 and sdb1. I found an interesting point while checking the BIOS settings: there is a "HDD Boot Group Priority" section, and the new drive was selected as the "1. 3rd master"; the server wouldn't boot configured like that, but when I set the old drive to be "1. 4th master", the box will reboot. I'm checking some more things, but I would certainly appreciate any useful information. Thanks in advance.

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• Toorcon 15 (2013)

  - by danx

  The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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• Unable to upgrade from Lucid Lynx to Maverick Meerkat

  - by Rafal

  I have got a problem with Update Manager. I'm running Lucid Lynx ver. 10.04.2 and I'm unable to upgrade it to 10.10 version. I have got this message when trying to upgr. : This can be caused by: Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu I couldn't accidentally download pre-released updates or unsupported updates cause both of those options stays 'unticked' in software sources/updates, so that can't be that. EDIT: Those options stayed disable. I have never enabled them. Unofficial software packages then? If yes, how to find which of them I have to get rid off? My current Ubuntu version is: 10.04.2 LTS Thanks

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• How would you advocate not using a shared spreadsheet to track bugs / issues ?

  - by Sylvain Defresne

  In our company, the developers want to use a proper bug tracking tool to manager issues in our application. The management however insists on using a shared spreadsheet (formeerly a shared excel file, now a spreadsheet on a web base solution allowing concurrent access). Their argument is that the spreadsheet allow them to have a more highlevel view of the state of the project as they can see how many bugs are open with a quick glance. This also allow them to see who is working on each bug, and get estimation of the time required to close them all (as developer are required to fill time estimation of the bug they are working on). As you can understand, this is not really practical to use for the developers (bug tracking software were invented for a reason). So how can I advocate bug tracking software to ease the work of the developer ? As a bonus, which software would you recommend that would allow the management to be able to get their feedbacks (number of bugs opens, who is working on them, time estimation) with a high level view ?

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• What to do when:"The following packages have unmet dependencies"

  - by André Izquierdo

  When I try to install Wine, PlayonLinux, and some other programs, I get the following message: At the terminal: The following packages have unmet dependencies: wine : Depends: wine1.5 but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. At the software center: Package dependencies cannot be resolved This error could be caused by required additional software packages which are missing or not installable. Furthermore there could be a conflict between software packages which are not allowed to be installed at the same time. I already tried installing them with "aptitude" and failed. I am running Ubuntu 12.10 Please help! I've had this problem for a while now and don't know what to do!

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• What skills should a developer/tester learn in order to move into a permanent Systems Analysis role?

  - by shenaz

  I have been with a software services firm for 5 years and have fallen into a "jack of all trades" role, which I am looking to move out of. I've spent about 1 year each in programming (VB/VB.NET), application support, systems analysis, and most recently, software testing, which in my current position is all manual. I've really lost interest in the programming and testing roles; I would prefer a position where I get to work more with people, such as systems analysis. I even got a chance to be a trainer at the same company for a few months, a temporary position which I enjoyed very much. Given that most of my real experience is with software, support, and testing, what knowledge areas and skills should I focus on learning and mastering in order to make myself an attractive candidate for a permanent position as a business/systems analyst?

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• Oracle Database 12c Spatial: Vector Performance Acceleration

  - by Okcan Yasin Saygili-Oracle

  Most business information has a location component, such as customer addresses, sales territories and physical assets. Businesses can take advantage of their geographic information by incorporating location analysis and intelligence into their information systems. This allows organizations to make better decisions, respond to customers more effectively, and reduce operational costs – increasing ROI and creating competitive advantage. Oracle Database, the industry’s most advanced database,  includes native location capabilities, fully integrated in the kernel, for fast, scalable, reliable and secure spatial and massive graph applications. It is a foundation for deploying enterprise-wide spatial information systems and locationenabled business applications. Developers can extend existing Oracle-based tools and applications, since they can easily incorporate location information directly in their applications, workflows, and services. Spatial Features The geospatial data features of Oracle Spatial and Graph option support complex geographic information systems (GIS) applications, enterprise applications and location services applications. Oracle Spatial and Graph option extends the spatial query and analysis features included in every edition of Oracle Database with the Oracle Locator feature, and provides a robust foundation for applications that require advanced spatial analysis and processing in the Oracle Database. It supports all major spatial data types and models, addressing challenging business-critical requirements from various industries, including transportation, utilities, energy, public sector, defense and commercial location intelligence. Network Data Model Graph Features The Network Data Model graph explicitly stores and maintains a persistent data model withnetwork connectivity and provides network analysis capability such as shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost and reachability. It loads partitioned networks into memory on demand, overcomingthe limitations of in-memory analysis. Partitioning massive networks into manageable sub-networkssimplifies the network analysis. RDF Semantic Graph Features RDF Semantic Graph has native support for World Wide Web Consortium standards. It has open, scalable, and secure features for storing RDF/OWL ontologies anddata; native inference with OWL 2, SKOS and user-defined rules; and querying RDF/OWL data withSPARQL 1.1, Java APIs, and SPARQLgraph patterns in SQL. Video: Oracle Spatial and Graph Overview Oracle spatial is embeded on oracle database product. So ,we can use oracle installer (OUI).The Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) is used to install Oracle Database software. OUI is a graphical user interface utility that enables you to view the Oracle software that is installed on your machine, install new Oracle Database software, and delete Oracle software that you no longer need to use. Online Help is available to guide you through the installation process. One of the installation options is to create a database. If you select database creation, OUI automatically starts Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to guide you through the process of creating and configuring a database. If you do not create a database during installation, you must invoke DBCA after you have installed the software to create a database. You can also use DBCA to create additional databases. For installing Oracle Database 12c you may check the Installing Oracle Database Software and Creating a Database tutorial under the Oracle Database 12c 2-Day DBA Series.You can always check if spatial is available in your database using  "select comp_id, version, status, comp_name from dba_registry where comp_id='SDO';"   One of the most notable improvements with Oracle Spatial and Graph 12c can be seen in performance increases in vector data operations. Enabling the Spatial Vector Acceleration feature (available with the Spatial option) dramatically improves the performance of commonly used vector data operations, such as sdo_distance, sdo_aggr_union, and sdo_inside. With 12c, these operations also run more efficiently in parallel than in prior versions through the use of metadata caching. For organizations that have been facing processing limitations, these enhancements enable developers to make a small set of configuration changes and quickly realize significant performance improvements. Results include improved index performance, enhanced geometry engine performance, optimized secondary filter optimizations for Spatial operators, and improved CPU and memory utilization for many advanced vector functions. Vector performance acceleration is especially beneficial when using Oracle Exadata Database Machine and other large-scale systems. Oracle Spatial and Graph vector performance acceleration builds on general improvements available to all SDO_GEOMETRY operations in these areas: Caching of index metadata, Concurrent update mechanisms, and Optimized spatial predicate selectivity and cost functions. These optimizations enable more efficient use of: CPU, Memory, and Partitioning Resulting in substantial query performance improvements.UsageTo accelerate the performance of spatial operators, it is recommended that you set the SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION database system parameter to the value TRUE. (This parameter is authorized for use only by licensed Oracle Spatial users, and its default value is FALSE.) You can set this parameter for the whole system or for a single session. To set the value for the whole system, do either of the following:Enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SYSTEM SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;Add the following to the database initialization file (xxxinit.ora):   SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;To set the value for the current session, enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SESSION SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE; Checkout the complete list of new features on Oracle.com @ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/spatialandgraph/overview/index.html Spatial and Graph Data Sheet (PDF) Spatial and Graph White Paper (PDF)

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• Silly Developers, VirtualBox Is For Sysadmins!

  - by rickramsey

  That's one of my favorite bumper stickers. (Well, along with the sticker placed upside down on Jeep windows that says "If you can read this, roll me over.") I don't object to the "silly boys" sticker because, in my humble opinion, girls look much cuter in Jeeps than guys do. But as Ginny Henningsen points out, a similar sentiment can be applied to Oracle VM VirtualBox. While writing her other sysadmin-related articles for OTN, Ginny horsed around with VirtualBox so much that she fell in love with it. Not as a developer, but as a sysadmin. Read why she thinks it's such a great sysadmin tool: My New Favorite Sysadmin Tool: Oracle VM VirtualBox Here are some of Ginny's other articles: How I Simplified Oracle Database Installation on Oracle Linux Best Way to Update Software With IPS Best Way to Automate ZFS Snapshots and Track Software Updates Best Way to Update Software in Zones - Rick Ramsey Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

  - by The Geek

  Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your camera, computer, USB drive, or anywhere else? What you might not know is that you can usually restore those pictures—even from your camera’s memory stick. Windows tries to prevent you from making a big mistake by providing the Recycle Bin, where deleted files hang around for a while—but unfortunately it doesn’t work for external USB drives, USB flash drives, memory sticks, or mapped drives. The great news is that this technique also works if you accidentally deleted the photo… from the camera itself. That’s what happened to me, and prompted writing this article. Restore that File or Photo using Recuva The first piece of software that you’ll want to try is called Recuva, and it’s extremely easy to use—just make sure when you are installing it, that you don’t accidentally install that stupid Yahoo! toolbar that nobody wants. Now that you’ve installed the software, and avoided an awful toolbar installation, launch the Recuva wizard and let’s start through the process of recovering those pictures you shouldn’t have deleted. The first step on the wizard page will let you tell Recuva to only search for a specific type of file, which can save a lot of time while searching, and make it easier to find what you are looking for. Next you’ll need to specify where the file was, which will obviously be up to wherever you deleted it from. Since I deleted mine from my camera’s SD card, that’s where I’m looking for it. The next page will ask you whether you want to do a Deep Scan. My recommendation is to not select this for the first scan, because usually the quick scan can find it. You can always go back and run a deep scan a second time. And now, you’ll see all of the pictures deleted from your drive, memory stick, SD card, or wherever you searched. Looks like what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas after all… If there are a really large number of results, and you know exactly when the file was created or modified, you can switch to the advanced view, where you can sort by the last modified time. This can help speed up the process quite a bit, so you don’t have to look through quite as many files. At this point, you can right-click on any filename, and choose to Recover it, and then save the files elsewhere on your drive. Awesome! Restore that File or Photo using DiskDigger If you don’t have any luck with Recuva, you can always try out DiskDigger, another excellent piece of software. I’ve tested both of these applications very thoroughly, and found that neither of them will always find the same files, so it’s best to have both of them in your toolkit. Note that DiskDigger doesn’t require installation, making it a really great tool to throw on your PC repair Flash drive. Start off by choosing the drive you want to recover from…   Now you can choose whether to do a deep scan, or a really deep scan. Just like with Recuva, you’ll probably want to select the first one first. I’ve also had much better luck with the regular scan, rather than the “dig deeper” one. If you do choose the “dig deeper” one, you’ll be able to select exactly which types of files you are looking for, though again, you should use the regular scan first. Once you’ve come up with the results, you can click on the items on the left-hand side, and see a preview on the right.  You can select one or more files, and choose to restore them. It’s pretty simple! Download DiskDigger from dmitrybrant.com Download Recuva from piriform.com Good luck recovering your deleted files! And keep in mind, DiskDigger is a totally free donationware software from a single, helpful guy… so if his software helps you recover a photo you never thought you’d see again, you might want to think about throwing him a dollar or two. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stupid Geek Tricks: Undo an Accidental Move or Delete With a Keyboard ShortcutRestore Accidentally Deleted Files with RecuvaCustomize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaAutomatically Resize Picture Attachments in Outlook 2007Resize Your Photos with Easy Thumbnails TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi

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