IT Sec News ISC Handler's DiaryUPDATE: Looks like it’s been re-enabled. Hopefully for good. Maybe they were upgrading the service.
Looks like Google may be having some issues w/their IMAP services. I noticed earlier that my palm pilot couldn’t access my gmail account via IMAP, producing a connection error. When I log into my gmail settings, the IMAP section from the ‘Forwarding and Pop’ tab is now missing:
I’ve been using VMWare’s Fusion product on my 1st gen Apple Macbook (2.0Ghz, 2GB ram, 160GB hard drive upgrade) sporadically now for about six months. I originally purchased the 1.0 version and was pleased when just a few weeks ago I found out that there was a free upgrade to 1.1 which included a few bug fixes. The original install and subsequent upgrade were as smooth and uneventful as one tends to expect from Mac software versions. Insert the installation cd, drag the icon to your Applications folder and you’re done. After that, you’re ready to run Fusion for the first time. Of course, you will need to configure or install your first virtual machine the first time you run it. And wouldn’t you know it, there are hundreds of ready-made virtual machines for you to download at VMWare’s appliance marketplace.
Perhaps a brief explanation of virtualization (of the software variety) might be in order here. Normally your operating system (be it OSX, a Linux-variant, or WindowsXP) runs on top of the hardware platform that you’ve chosen. The operating system needs to have various drivers that allow it to connect to and control the myriad little pieces of the system. From network connections to video cards, they all need corresponding software for the operating system to be able to utilize them. So imagine that you have a program that runs on top of your operating system that intercepts and mimics all of the system calls and abstracts and isolates them from the real hardware you are running on. This software creates a separate ‘virtual’ computer on top of your existing system. You can then install a new operating system along with various programs into this ‘virtual’ computer and you then have a computer system running inside of (or on top of, depending on your viewpoint) your original system.
But that’s silly you say. Why in the world would I want to run two operating systems, one inside the other? Surely that can’t be very efficient! Actually there are several benefits to running a virtual system. First and foremost is the ability to create distinctly separate environments in which to work. For example: My primary laptop is as I’ve mentioned previously a wonderful little Apple Macbook running the latest OSX Leopard operating system. There are times when it would be beneficial to have access to various WindowsXP programs, such as Internet Explorer when I am trying to work out some cross-browser html/css hack. Or I need access to certain security tools that are only available for Windows (read: Cain & Abel ~ caution: this site is not safe for work environments) or perhaps I’m working on a particular Solaris 10 issue. Wouldn’t it be handy if I could just fire up the operating system of my choice from within my macbook?
And that’s exactly what I do with VMWare Fusion! Not only do I have two full WindowsXP installs, I also have the latest Ubuntu Stable version (7.10 as of this writing) and a full version of OpenSolaris 10 (Indiana) all available to me with just a click!
Another advantage comes from the ability to consolidate server hardware. Suppose that you have a web server that is used primarily during business hours and a secure ftp server that has its peak activity during the middle of the night. Instead of maintaining two separate servers, you could consolidate them onto a single server by migrating them into a VMWare instance running on a single server. With some of VMWare’s other tools you could even load balance both the web server and the ftp server across multiple machines.
So you get the ability to access multiple operating systems from a single desktop, giving you the ability to create an on-the-fly virtual lab. From a server perspective you can consolidate hardware resources (reducing power, heat and physical space consumption) or leverage your existing hardware better by taking advantage of VMWare’s Virtual Infrastructure.
One particularly useful benefit of VMWare’s Fusion product is its ‘Unity’ feature that allows you to run applications from a virtual machine along side your mac software. Instead of a single window dedicated to your virtual machine and all of the programs that run inside of it, you get a drop down menu that allows you to run the individual applications in their own window! Pretty slick and a fun trick to show your co-workers that you can run the latest Internet Explorer on your Mac (useful for testing those browser html/css hacks mentioned earlier!)
See some initial Fusion screenshots after the cut.
Gentoo Prefix Bootstrap Process for Mac OS X has a lengthy walkthrough on getting Gentoo’s emerge package management system installed onto a Mac OSX system. Naturally I had to give it a shot! I’ve never worked with Gentoo before so I really had no idea what to expect from emerge.
From a few conversations with a collegue I learned that I could very easily tailor the build process to my specific environment by customizing the make.conf file for emerge. Unlike some package management systems that either grab a generic binary for your platform, emerge will pull down the latest source code and compile it directly for your specific machine. If I recall correctly, the FreeBSD ports collection also works this way, as does Debian’s apt (although I’m not sure of the ability to modify machine-specific compile time flags with either system)
The install detailed in the walkthrough (see link above) is a bit sparse on background information such as why call emerge with the oneshot option. (still not sure about that myself, from the emerge man page: “Emerge as normal, but do not add the packages to the world profile for later updating”) Each of the build steps took a rather long time on the aging Mac G4 box and I unfortunately kept running into compile errors about 3/4ths of the way through the process. The process failed trying to compile Autom4te (an M4 replacement for autoconf) due to various reasons (one of which might be a missing perl library)
After stepping through the various stages of the install a couple of times and only getting marginal success, I decided the easiest route would be to script the install process so that I could re-run it at my leisure. I just grabbed the commands listed in the walkthrough and stuck them in a shell script (no error-checking or anything fancy) which would allow me to set a couple of variables and then re-run the script as often as needed. The script (and the author’s walkthrough) relies on another script called ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ (also available from the walkthrough site) so I created a directory called ‘emerge’ and therein placed both the ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ script and my own ’setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh’ script.
I set my ‘EPREFIX’ variable to /usr/local/gentoo, so everytime the process would fail, I could just ‘rm -rf /usr/local/gentoo’ and start over. Since part of the process includes pulling down all the latest sources I figured that if I just waited a week, maybe someone would have found the issue and fixed it. But alas, as of this morning the process still fails in the same spot. So I’ll send a note to the maintainer and see what happens. Until that time I have to conclude that emerge on OSX constitutes the ‘epic-fail’ tag.
After all of this, I finally just grabbed the latest macports and within minutes I installed several standard software packages. Both macports and fink provide very easy access for OSX to most readily available linux software. However it does appear at the moment that macports has been getting more attention and is more supported (at least by comparing the verbage on each of their websites) and even though I’ve been a big fan of fink in the past, I went with macports if for no better reason other than its the one that I haven’t utilized before.
Code for setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh located after the cut.
Well I didn’t exactly update the site per se. I moved Intuition & Elbow Grease to a new server and in the process upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. I created a new database and installed the code fresh (i.e. I performed a ‘new’ install) and then restored my posts from an exported xml file from the old site. The theme and plugins I simply tarred up from the contents of a full backup I made from the old site and then uploaded to the new server. So far the only code I’ve needed to regenerate was the adsense code that I use. If you notice any weirdness with the site, please let me know!