Platonic

It’s not a Y2K bug but the enhancement and new innovations causing this. I found this story reported on ZdNet blog few days back. You might find it interesting.

While disks are incredibly reliable devices, they do fail. Our best data - from CMU and Google - finds that over 3% of drives fail each year in the first three years of drive life, and then failure rates start rising fast.

With 7 brand new disks, you have ~20% chance of seeing a disk failure each year. Factor in the rising failure rate with age and over 4 years you are almost certain to see a disk failure during the life of those disks.

But you’re protected by RAID 5, right? Not in 2009.

Continue reading…

A neat firefox plug-in for reading favorite Kannada weekly magazine Sudha online by Sunil…Here is what he says about the plugin.

You might be knowing that there is a sudha weekly (www.sudhaezine.com) that gets published. In fact, I personally enjoy reading Sudha at home. She has been my companion for many years now. I could hardly wait to get a copy on every Thursdays.

A small firefox plugin that lets you read Sudha at your ease.

Few advantages of this plugin are:

* Ease of use - All the technical details are abstracted. Just click the page you want to read and woila!!! you have it on your desktop. (Check the attachment sudha-ezine-plugin.jpg)
* It provides off-line capabilities. - You can read Sudha even without using Internet.
* Saves your Internet bill (useful for dial ups and traffic based billing) - Once you read a page using this plugin, it archives in your system, so next time when you would want to read the article, the saved copy is served from your own desktop. No internet is required for subsequent visits.

In fact we could implement many more social ideas around this.

Download the FireFox plug-in: Sudha-kannada-weekly

Need a cool PDA/Notebook look for your Ubuntu installation? Then try this Notebook launcher package. It fills in on top of your existing Ubuntu installlation and gives a cool look for the UI.

In a terminal type:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

This will bring up your source list. then add these two lines to the end of your source list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-team/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-team/ubuntu intrepid main

In a terminal type:

sudo apt-get update

To update your source lists.

Then Install the Netbook Remix packages

In a terminal type:

sudo apt-get install go-home-applet human-netbook-theme maximus netbook-launcher window-picker-applet

Now you need to restart the Gnome display manager.
In a terminal type:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

After the reset you will see the UME-Launcher running.

To maximize your workspace area, you might want to remove the bottom pane, by right clicking the bottom panel and selecting the “Delete this Panel” option.

To get the most from your top panel you will want to add functions to your top panel. Right click the top panel and select the “Add to the Panel” option. Some suggestions include: GoHomeApplet, WindowPickerApplet, NotificationArea, and VolumeControl.

You also need to set netbook-launcher to your startup programs. Go to System>Preferences>Sessions and add enteries for both of these commands.

Source: UbuntuMini.com

Webhosting appliance cPanel announces its new initiative called “cPanel Accelerated” with substantial performance improvements. It’s currently available for all with cPanel’s Current release. Later this month it will be made available with STABLE releases.

New Features

• XML-API
• Improved Backup Performance
• Transfers
• NSD nameserver
• Dovecot mail server
• VPS Optimized 2.0
• Getting Started Wizard

View Release Notes

Read about this announcement on cPanel blog:

cPanel, announced this week the release of version 11.24 of their industry leading server management software.  Version 11.24 introduces a new initiative to cPanel’s software, cPanel Accelerated.  cPanel Accelerated brings new features designed to decrease system resource usage and increase speed and performance significantly from previous versions.

Running security scan on your website? Then you might be looking for a tool for the same.

There are pretty good open source tools available to do this. One of them is Nikto2 . This is a great tool which packed with a lot of features which can scan for over 3500 kinds of potentially intrusive files and CGIs.  It makes a comprehensive check on various files and tells whether the file is secure or has a security vulnerability. Nikto scan process is designed to run the scan in the shortest possible time frame.

The latest version, Nikto 2, has a lot of enhancements. Some of the newest features are :

* Fingerprinting web servers via favicon files
* Reduction of false positives to a great extent
* Reports outdated software from
* Apache expect headers to check for XSS vulnerabilities.
* Tuning the scanner so that we do not need to run the same scan every time and focus upon areas of crisis.
* Single scan mode that allows you to simulate requests for testing.
* Provision for HTML requests and various templates for generating HTML reports.
* Provision for users to make additions to the scan database.
* Support for upgrading code automatically.

There are a lot more features and a very expansive documentation available for this software, which can be understood easily by a novoice. With all these features you can pin-point the flaws in your Web server and make it more secure, in turn also keeping your database safe to a greater extent.

Simple command that I run is as follows:

# nikto  -host <domainname.com>

Happy Hacking!

It’s really cute to see the new face of gparted on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. No issues with NTFS resize. In turn it’s quite fast when compared to earlier resizes which I had done on dozens of laptops.

Above is the picture of Ubuntu Installation wizard paritioning stage. That also has been made colorful.