I’m working on a project that calls for a Linux LiveCD, so it can be booted off of a CD-ROM or USB drive, and not require any sort of permanent install to run. You’ve probably seen this in things like Ubuntu’s LiveCD where you can try the latest version without having to install it, or you can even install it from within the Live environment, but I’m not trying to do that. I just want a Linux environment running and providing DHCP and other network services for the network it finds itself on. While I found some great HOWTOs online, most were outdated, or just didn’t do all that I wanted, so it was time for a new one. Now, since this is going to target a server role I’m going to be kicking it with Debian, and they have a set of tools called Live Tools to assist in the building of a Debian LiveCD. This method requires working from an existing Debian instance, so get there, and then update your /etc/apt/sources.listto include the Live Tools
If you have a long running process (rsync, cp, find updatedb, etc) that causes a high load on your Linux system, it’s likely going to cause a problem (and unneeded Nagios alerts!) when it’s run via cron. This was happening on a server of mine that backed up the Apache Solr indexes every night, so after searching around I found a utility to handle this situation, ionice. This works much like the venerable nice command, but focuses on I/O priority instead of processor priority. Of course since I wasn’t going to be around to turn this on I needed a way for it to work in a script, and it ended up being pretty simple. In the head of your BASH script, turn it on a set it for -p$$ which is the working shell, so it will be in effect for anything within that script. Here’s a simple example, again, just turn it on before any long running commands, or anything that you want to turn down the I/O priority for
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Apache Solr
After having an Apache Solr search server running across multicores (that’s multiple “search” cores, it has nothing to do with multicore processors) we need to expand it by using replication for backups, as well as eventual load balancing for performance reasons. The 8 cores’ indexes are currently about 18Gig, so it’s no small undertaking to backup and move these suckers around, so we’re using KVM vitual machines as new slave nodes. I setup these up on a stock Debian Squeeze (6.0) install and read up on how to make a master/slave Solr replication work. Since version 1.4 Solr boasts built in replication, so any external rsync enabled scripts are no longer needed. For this you’ll need at least two Solr servers running, though my directions are in Debian, they’ll be indentical if you’re running Ubuntu, and the same, after the Tomcat home directory, on other Linux distros. Read more »
DEF CON 20
The DEF CON© CFP (Call for Papers) is open now until May 28, 2012, so this year instead of writing up my CFP proposal on a wiki like I did last year, I’m just going to do it here and update it as I go until I submit it. This idea was presented to me by @thepres98, who I enjoy reading, but as you can see he is a bit further along than me and already has his talk, Flex Your Rights: The Constitution & Political Activism in the Hacker Community, up and ready for review. Last year I was honored to speak at DC19, my talk Taking your ball and going home was well recieved and an amazing experience for me. After attending DEF CON for 5 years, this was only my 2nd proposal I submitted for a talk, and it was approved. After using Dropbox for a time and learning about their privacy issues, I started doing more research on the topic and started up Lipsync as an open source alternative. After encouragement on Twitter from @_videoman_ to just ‘have fun with it’, I wrote up an extended outline and submitted it. It’s with this idea that I move forward with my propsal for this year, so I dreamt up a title page and got cracking; the working title is 0nline Privacy In The Year of The Dragon.
Yet another work issue that I should have replied to with the terse, but accurate, “These are not the droids you’re looking for”
— aka ★ Phil (@fak3r) March 21, 2012
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