Virtualization Benefits for Small Business
Coalescing a few links I’ve been keeping up with for further reading:
Photo credit pedrosimoes7
I’m bookmarking a couple more videos to watch.
First, Defcon released their teaser set of videos from this year’s con, including Adam Savage’s “Failure”.
Second, I saw a link to Marcus Ranum talking at TEDx MidAtlantic.
http://tedxmidatlantic.com/live/#MarcusRanum
I had the opportunity to watch the first few minutes of the stream of Marcus Ranum’s talk at DojoCon 2009 but then had to go to a client site. I was happy to see they posted the videos to UStream so I can go back and watch the rest.
Among those who spoke:
In case you want to catch up too:
This post is mostly a note to myself. I haven’t tried this yet, but the Disk2vhd tool from Sysinternals is for P2V for Microsoft virtualization such as Hyper-V.
When I get to try this out, I’ll post some notes about using it and how it stacks up against something like VMWare Converter.
Just a quick note. I will be moving my focus to putting posts up on my company web site at www.sterlingideas.com. Any really technical items will still end up here, but I am going to make a new effort to post regular content over on the company site, particularly items of interest to my clients.
Be sure to add http://www.sterlingideas.com/feed/rss/ to your feed reader.
Quick note:
When you do domain masquerading with sendmail, root is exempted from that by default. No big deal unless the host name of your system is not actually registered in DNS. I have a couple VMs that don’t need outside access or DNS registrations, but I’d like to receive their cron output cleanly.
This is a rather easy fix. In most sendmail .mc files you will find the DOMAIN(generic) statement. This refers to loading the generic.m4 file which includes a default statement to expose root without masquerading — EXPOSED_USER(`root’). Copy the generic.m4 to mycustom.m4 and remove the EXPOSED_USER line. Go to your .mc file and change the DOMAIN(generic) to DOMAIN(mycustom) and rebuild your sendmail.cf file.
This is a simple note to capture process.
I just upgraded the main perl port on a FreeBSD box from 5.8.8 to 5.8.9 and a perl based service promptly died, complaining of problems locating dependencies. D’Oh!! That’s not good.
After a bit of crunching away I found that each perl module port (each p5-* port) needed a ‘make deinstall && make reinstall’ to align with the new perl version. The only bugger is that this machine has 54 p5-* ports installed. Now I’m basically lazy so I wanted a better way than manually reinstalling each port or even writiing a script to handle these specific ports.
Thankfully a little deeper google exercise turned up pearl-after-upgrade. From the man page:
The standard procedure after a perl port (either lang/perl5 or lang/perl5.8) upgrade is to basically reinstall all other packages that depend on perl. This is always a painful exercise. The perl-after-upgrade utility makes this process mostly unnecessary.
The tool goes through the list of installed packages, looks for those that depend on perl, moves files around, modifies shebang lines in those scripts in which it is necessary to do so, tries its best to adjust dynamically linked binaries that link with libperl.so in the old path, and updates the package database.
Brilliant!! Just what I was looking for.
I ran perl-after-upgrade followed by perl-after-upgrade -f, and it did all the heavy lifting of getting things straight. Just for good measure I ran a rebuild on mimedefang (portmaster mimedefang), and it was back off to the races for that system.
So I must say…. perl-after-upgrade is your friend!
I am starting a new category of posts, called Is Your Friend. Frequently when talking with Todd Long (of the Jireh Consulting blog), one of us will find a cool tool or technology and inevitably it is said that <blank> is your friend.
Recently, Todd said that “OpenDNS is your friend.” I have to agree.
It seems that every few weeks or months another tool saves my bacon or another technology finds a home in my world. I will be filing these away under the Is Your Friend series.
Do you have a particular tool, program, gadget, widget, or whatnot that qualifies for Is Your Friend status? If so, let me know, and I’d be glad to include it here.
As I’ve been planning for my trip to Shmoocon, I’ve been thinking through what I will and won’t be taking along. I will also follow the advise I’ve heard time & again on podcasts about taking care at security conferences. As such, I’m planning to travel much lighter than usual. I will not be carrying my laptop. I will be taking:
That’s it. Toss in a book and some clothes, and I’m ready to roll. Yee-haw.