mitm and ssl

The Secure Goose: TLS renegotiation vulnerability and Frequency X Blog: IBM Internet Security Systems show this vulnerability. or one kind of CSRF.

core dump analysis

In Getting a backtrace from a coredump, it shows the tools for getting backtraces from coredumps.

Recently, my stuff asks me what is the procedure to get the reason that a program generates coredump in an AIX 5.3 machine.

# dbx <program generates="" the="" coredump=""> <coredump file="">

then the reason will be shown and which function/line generates the coredump.


Here is another post that show similar information.
It is interesting for me.
So I get involved to study whether to get such information in various platform.

btw, is there any tool to show such information in various platform ?

network access control

Network Access Control

FreeNAC
netpass
PacketFence
HUPnet
NetReg
RINGS

VPN - by IPSEC

Build an IPSEC VPN without Losing Your Mind show a sample to build VPN by IPSEC.

A tutorial is shown in Openswan's wiki

btw, OpenSwan is a fork of FreeS/WAN which is no longer in active development.

Ext2 disk driver on Windows

Ext2Fsd Project
Tools and utilities for Windows

AMF - Action Message Format

More and more web pages embedded flash to do complicated task.
e.g. the hottest facebook farm game.

I just wonder how messages are exchanged in HTTP protocol level.
After track down the traffics, there is a lot of AMF payload in HTTP body.
I would like to do something to remove weed/pest automatically.
And it is necessary to understand the AMF first.

Action Message Format in Wikipedia

AMF - Gnash Project Wiki show information and library for this.

OSFlash - Open Source Flash also shows the information/code for this.

Google App Engine -- PyAMF - AMF for Python

amfast - Flash remoting framework for Python - it is easy to use its AMF Encoder/Decoder.
The same author also have a few document on this topic.

logical volume, snapshot and db backup

Recently, I get the chance to review the usage of the snapshot of a file-system.

In Linux, only logical volume supports this feature. Btrfs is also documented to support this feature.
In AIX, JFS supports snapshot. (But there is no document mention this in Linux's implementation)
In Solaris, ZFS directly support this. (ZFS provide logical volume management, raid management etc). UFS also supports this.

Logical Volume Snapshots - shows information on this topic.

So, is it possible use the snapshot feature to back up a database ?
Yes, it is possible in limited condition.

Here is the reference
PostgreSQL 8.3.8 Documentation Chapter 24. Backup and Restore 24.2. File System Level Backup - list the pros and cons of this.

MySQL Volume Snapshot for Backup also shows the similar information on this topic.

In short, if you want to use this feature, all files must be in the same filesystem/logical volume.
And this may take a long time to complete the job.