The software RAID on Linux works very well.  Our backup machine (still using Red Hat 9) uses a RAID‑5 with 6 drives: 4 hot and 2 reserve.  When a main drive fails, a reserve is auto-magically brought in (thanks to the “md” daemon). But last Sunday…

PDF encryption is sort of silly.  If you really wanted to grab the text, you can screen capture each page and then OCR it.  So clearly the true intention of the encryption is to deter the 99% of the users…

As a Web developer, I have a confession to make: I prefer writting desktop applications.  In an enterprise-level Web application, just to get a usable display tier you need to perform gymnastics in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JSP, Java, and Struts (a similar set of gymnastics…

One great feature of Linux and other Unix variants is that you can quickly make a “bare metal” restoration or duplicate of a system provided you have a full backup of the original.  (With Windows, the registry requires special tools in order…

At TCG, many of our servers are running Fedora Core 2.  As an emergency restore technique, I wanted to be able to quickly recreate a server on a VMWare virtual machine running FC2.  In addition, virtual machines are a great way of quickly creating…

At DefCon 13, Alex Stamos of iSec Partners gave a very interesting talk entitled “Attacking Web Services”.  In summary, there are currently three known web service attack techniques: Injecting XML into an input box, overwriting tags set earlier in the SOAP…

DefCon (http://www.defcon.org) is a large annual hacking conference that attracts corporate security personnel, federal agents, and of course, hackers.  DefCon is significant since hackers use DefCon as a forum to unveil security vulnerabilities in tools and utilities we use daily.  The first…