Points without Tangents

First off, this is not my work.  It is the work of Andy Davis.  I was just not able to find a place to link to with this info, so thought I would repost, if this is your work, and you would like me to remove it please just let me know.

Step-by-step instructions for debugging IOS using gdb - Andy Davis,
2008 (iosftpexploit “at” googlemail <dot> com):

I have been asked by many people for a simple step-by-step guide for
setting up an IOS exploit development environment, which includes
connecting to a Cisco router using gdb, so here goes:

(By the way the router I connect to is a Cisco 2621XM)

Continue reading ‘Step-by-step instructions for debugging IOS using gdb’ »

545 People
By Charlie Reese –
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

Continue reading ‘545 People’ »

Well not really. I just think people should be more informed, and more active. I want more visibility into what is going on in my Government. That’s why I really am excited about websites such as the Sunlight Foundation, and Open Congress:

Sunlight
OpenCongresss

Which is why I support this “pledge site”, Change Congress. I really enjoy the colored map depicting the “sludge”:

Okay getting off my soap box.

EDIT: Nevermind all this FUSE based solutions … they are pitiful when compared to Amazon EBS… just stick with that, and make sure you build your volumes in the same datacentre as the running instance.

–

I know it is bad form to post a part 2 before posting a part 1, but I wanted to get this posted ASAP, so that I would not forget it. I have been working with AWS recently, and here is a quick howto which cobbles together some stuff that was not clear to me before.

Caveats: mounting, formatting, unmounting, and syncing data on the raided devices is slow, like 2 hours to format a 160G partition slow, unmounting taking upwards of 20mins, and still not sure how long it takes to sync data. It could be that I am doing something really stupid, so please review and let me know if I can speed this up. Thanks

Note: I just tried echo $((30*1024)) > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min will see how that turns out.

Continue reading ‘AWS part2: EC2 + S3 via ElasticDrive’ »

Thanks to work I have been using Xen for the past year heavily, and have used VMware/Qemu and other virtualization software for years. Yep, It all started with the need to have a quiet living room… enter Mac Mini (silent, stable for the most part) running vmware fusion. I went with commercial software simply because it had the best performance at the time, and probably still does when running on the hardware. Then I started hearing whispers about beta projects running at Amazon. Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2 for computing & S3 for storage are what I am currenly focusing on, however I did not think much of them originally, since I had doubts about the stability of the visualized servers. Then I started to hear of people raving about AWS, and couple that with my work pushing me towards them as well, resulting in a perfect storm of kismet. So the next logical step would be …. skoutsec running on (AWS), in which everything is virtual. No need for any hardware to speak of any more, and considering the cost is less than what I paid for the mac mini, it could be worth it to host everything there, if for no other reason than to have better than 85% uptime. Have not quite sold the farm on the idea, but considering it seriously. I have already setup a couple boxes with RightScale for ease of administration and Elastic Drive so that I can have constant backups. I need to come up with some projects in which the AWS will be a good fit, and right now I just don’t think a simple shell server would be the right idea, and the real ideas I want to explore are probably left better unsaid in case I want to make any money off them.