SPIN -- Awesome
I am usually not one to post videos on my blog, however this one is rathe excellent!
I am usually not one to post videos on my blog, however this one is rathe excellent!
I just read the rather excellent articale The sorry state of Open Source software on The Jem Report. I will let the article speak for itself, I enjoyed the read!
I am really pissed off, Samba is throwing errors at me, and I have no clue how to fix them. Samba developers say read the documentation, but this is a standalone server. These are the error messages:
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_administrators(785) create_builtin_administrators: Failed to create Administrators [2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_users(751) create_builtin_users: Failed to create Users [2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_administrators(785) create_builtin_administrators: Failed to create Administrators [2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_users(751) create_builtin_users: Failed to create Users</pre>
So I did what the documentation told me to do, and tried to net groupmap them.
Guests (S-1-5-21-3909197182-276841819-79004845-546) -> nobody Administrators (S-1-5-21-3909197182-276841819-79004845-544) -> wheel
There is no good documentation on what the error means or how to fix it. The weird thing is that the share used to be working fine until I decided I did not want to give others the ability to add items to the share, unless they were logged in as me, so I wanted to make it accessible by guests yet have it writeable by me. That is when the nightmare started. Now no-one could access the share, with valid username/password or without. (Yes, permissions were set up properly, I am not dumb).
Fuck samba. I can set up an FTP server, allow anonymous logins and make people use an FTP client to access the files. Samba is becoming too big, too convulated and too overwhelming for the standard user. I by no means think of myself as a standard user, however if I am unable to figure out how to get Samba working by reading the docs and having a clear grasp on the concepts then something is wrong. Setting up Samba used to be simple, compile it, install it, smbpasswd a new account edit smb.conf and off you go. Nowadays there are many more steps.
Is there a FUSE port for Windows yet? I bet there is a really good Fuse FTP plugin! Samba needs a timeout, some cleanup and some better documentation as to why it can't create it's own builtin users.
I was watching some of the 2007 ShmooCon video's and came across one about Backbone Fuzzing.
This one caught my eye, I have been hearing quite a bit about fuzzing lately and I got interested in it, since it applies to the field of Network Security and Software Engineer. Since any data I would be receiving over the wire could be fuzzed I would need proper input validation, studying what one is will be subjected to could help avoid mistakes.
I also believe that if she does find real flaws in Cisco's IOS and other implementations it could mean big problems for the internet. She is going after the core protocols that run the internet, and would cause it to die a pretty harsh death if they suddenly stopped working.
Looking forward, the MPLS stuff ought to bring up very interesting results!
I am starting to question wether these days we need to even have physical hardware lying around to do testing on. I ask this question because I have been playing with VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X, and I love it. I have several images of different OS's that I can boot in a virtual machine to do certain tasks, mostly testing of software.
Normally I would have grabbed an install CD for my OS, walked up to one of the many machines I own, and installed the clean OS with the software and tested it. If I screwed something up badly I would start from scratch, no harm done. These days I do my testing after I create a quick snapshot of the OS as it currently stands, so if I screw up, I hit another button and it all gets undone. No more long waiting time to install an OS, quick snapshot and we are back to where we were.
I for myself have been trying to justify keeping the machines I have, especially since every single last one of them has been used because I needed machines to test something on, with Virtual Machines that has become a thing of the past and they are mostly neglected. One of them is still used for the lan parties at UAT, but that is just one HD, which I could pop into any machine with two interfaces and have it up and running. Thinking about it now, I could technically run that in a VMWare session as well without losing functionality by getting a second interface for my Mac OS X, and exposing that to the underlying Guest OS as well.
In a business environment I think VMWare machines would come in very handy for testing of new software that is about to be deployed. Is virtualization the way of the future in terms of testing? Or even for machines that have to do real work? Let me know what you think by commenting on this post.