Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Had a good time in Miami for a few days this week, got a lot of good content from the conference. I'm going to go over my notes some more next week, but there are some of the highlights from the show: New offering Fraud detection and scoring - Akamai does tokenization removing PCI scope, and they can build a profile on the end users and given them scores. Cybersource - they are one of the processors of the akamai pci solution. Edge encryption - Encrypts the data at the edge all the way to the database Only privledged systems can decrypt the data from the database. (might be useful, not sure) Siteshield - ACL only allowing requests from specific akamai servers (protects against ddos) ADS - Predictive analytics Shows the proper ads based on what they are looking at across all sites Look across 500+ shopping sites, on 160M users Don't use pixels to allocate ads (slows down the site) Akamai - Velocitude mobile reformatting on the fly - http://www.akamai.co...

Before I go into these 3 suites of tools, when is HP finally going to update BAC, RUM, or Diagnostics? It seemed like these tools have been really stagnate the last 3 years. I’m not going to HP Software Universe anymore, and I keep getting new account reps, so I have no idea what the roadmap is these days. That’s enough HP bashing, onto the good stuff. We did the yearly HP upgrade over the last couple weeks, here is the rundown on the technologies and what was involved in each: 1. QTP – Very easy upgrade, did this on our terminal server and a desktop. The license server is now supported on 64-bit machines, so we moved the license server off an older 2003 box onto a 2008R2 system. No issues with the upgrade, and there seems to be a lot of improvements. Still waiting for feedback from our QA team on the improvements. 2. PC – Ended up building a couple new VMs for this, as we moved it onto Windows 2008R2 (64-bit) as well. There were no issues with the reinstall or moving our...

Personally I am a big fan of proper password management procedures. For my personal data I always used the open source tool Keepass ( http://keepass.info/ ) for my passwords, but it was always missing two items: Better browser integration (I know you can use the form filling plugins, but they aren't very well done or supported) Distribution (I know you can use dropbox or something else and it works fine) For my encrypted data I always built hidden share volumes using another open source tool Truecrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ ). The product works great, but I find that I need to encrypt less and less of my data these days. I just replaced them all with Lastpass ( http://lastpass.com/ ), which is a very impressive product. It integrates with pretty much every major browser out there and it's all centralized and allows for web access for all of your data. It allows for import from pretty much any browser database, or product (such as keepass). Its $12 per year for premiu...

At my previous company we were a heavy user of Solaris, and we also had a lot of legacy specific SCO systems as well. 3-4 years ago, some person (who shall remain nameless) was pushing Opensolaris as "the future", personally I thought the guy was way off base. He did deploy some of it, and it worked well, the problem would be the support and future for another player in the x86/64 market. There was no future, I saw it, but apparently other people in management didn't. I then read this article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/requiem-os-opensolaris-board-closes-shop-961?source=rss_infoworld_news I love being right J Sorry to see you go, but it's for the better. Oracle hopefully will invest more resources into Linux which it hasn't been doing as much since the Sun purchase.

I've been waiting for quite a while for a major security firm to be purchased by one of the big boys. I am glad that Intel was the first one to start this trend, because they are generally only a hardware player. If security were embedded at that level it would create a differentiator from other competitors, weather they are x64 based or other chips (Oracle, IBM). Security has become very commoditized and consolidated over the last several years. You haven't seen much innovation in several years either. Is that because we've solved the problem? I think not… Is that because there isn't capital in this market? Nope… I think the main reason is due to the massive consolidation and the work needed to integrate all of these smaller companies together. You are also seeing players like Microsoft developing a larger security portfolio, as well as network vendors integrating more security features and products into their appliances. If you look back 5 years ago, there ...

Writing this thanks to gogo wireless… Love this service. I'm going to start upgrading our hosts to 4.1 next weekend probably. Going to try update manager even though it crashed and burned on my 3.5-4.0 upgrade and I ended up using the host utility. I know the command line upgrader works. I read this on the spiceworks message board: Resolution: This is worth knowing as it's a bug and definate gotcha. VMWare said: "I had one of the escalation engineers for Update Manager look at the log and here is what he said The customer imported the pre-upgrade offline bundle which is NOT needed and in fact causes problems. [2010-07-28 13:36:55:781 'DownloadOfflinePatchTask.DownloadOfflinePatchTask{9}' 3700 INFO] [vciTaskBase, 530] Task started... [2010-07-28 13:36:55:781 'DownloadOfflinePatchTask.DownloadOfflinePatchTask{9}' 3700 INFO] [downloadOfflinePatchTask, 123] Upload offline bundle: C:\Windows\TEMP\vum8205261630712700578.pre-upgrade-from-ESX4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260...

Let me start off, by just saying that this site is great, its always entertaining and filled with great data : http://get-admin.com/blog/ I'm very happy that Vmware released 4.1 recently. After the horror stories I read about 4.0U1 we decided to skip them and wait for 4.1. There wasn't a lot in the updates we cared for anyways. There are quite a few interesting features in 4.1, and one of the good things that Vmware has done is finally killed off ESX (after this release). ESXi has been great for us over the last couple years, and I haven't had any complaints with switching over to it from ESX in previous years. I found using update manager was not the most reliable when moving from 3.x to 4.x on the physical systems themselves, so we opted to use the host upgrade tool. This is not a supported method to move from 4.x to 4.1. We will probably have to give the update manager another run, which concerns me. At least its not as complex as upgrading Hyper-v J I wi...