weblog
Ophcrack
cornet — Thu, 2007-02-01 23:59
I've yet _really_ understand Rainbow Tables but this article gives a good overview on the subject.
Using this concept Ophcrack allows you to recover passwords from Windows based machines very quickly (we are talking single figure minutes at the most here) by exploiting the fact that, by default, Windows uses saltless hashes for passwords.
The iso is downloading at the moment and will be put to good use ;)
MySQL Monitoring
cornet — Thu, 2007-02-01 22:58
Database monitoring is a must if unless you like living on the edge.
Here are some tools to help monitor MySQL so you don't get any nasty surprises:
The MySQL Graph Collection for cacti
Cacti is a great tool for monitoring, giving you pretty
graphs allowing you to easily spot sudden and long term trends.
It takes some setting up but well worth it.
I do not currently know how much extra load this will put on a database but I don't expect
it to be much. Expect and updated post once I've done some testing.
mytop
mytop is a console based monitoring tool by Jeremy Zawodny
who helps look after Yahoo's MySQL databases.
It is basically a clone of top for MySQL and is useful for seeing, in real time, what is
happening on you MySQL server.
innotop
innotop is much like mytop with but specifically for InnoDB tablespace. It can show loads of things
such as
transactions,
deadlocks and
statistics
MySQL Report
This tool does nothing other than take the output of SHOW STATUS and puts it into a more readable form.
The main thing is not necessarly the tool itself but the documentation
that goes through a sample report and explains it line by line.
This tool is extreamely use for for quickly diagnosing problems related to high load on a database.
Other Notes
You really should monitor the size of your InnoDB table space and also individual table sizes.
Its often the case that tables which grow rapidly contain redundant or old data eating up space
and reducing the performance of the server.
I have yet to find a nice script that will do this for you, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of tables,
although it shouldn't be that tricky to hack one together.
Vista: The most secure operating system avaliable
cornet — Wed, 2007-01-31 23:24
So apparently Windows Vista is "dramatically more secure than any other operating system released"
While I suspect my definition of "secure" is wildly different that of Mr Gates, there are many other worrying things to consider.
I don't think i'll be leaving my little Linux/BSD/OS X world just yet.
Bash Scripting Guide
cornet — Wed, 2007-01-24 17:17
I'm not convinced on some of the coding style but definitly looks useful.