One Step Ahead…

Knowing the path is something, but walking the path, is a totally different thing…

A few weeks back, I’ve applied for the Intel® Embedded Pre-Release Seed Board Program, I’ve provided my proposal, along with a small description of what I have in mind to design in the field of Embedded System, and vuala, I’m accepted…

So, yesterday the FedEx guy showed up with a big box for me, and there it was, right in front of me; the bleeding edge of technology…

Let’s start reading, let’s keep learning…

A few days back, I was thinking, how much books should the one read in average ?!

So, I decided to ask the man’s best friend, Google, sorry dogs it’s just google is more useful nowadays, at least for me, nothing personal   ….

Anyway, I came across someone’s blog who asked this in his blog, and for my surprise, the guy mentioned that he reads 40~50 books per year !!!!!

40 books?? come on, for god’s sake !!!! that would mean around 3 books per month ?!

And yet more, there was some reply from some other guy who mentioned that he reads 80~90 books per year !!!!!! That means 6~7 books per month…

Those guys really made feel that I’m just like an animal, eats, drinks, hunt for food (work), sleep, and that’s it !!!

I’ve spent the past 1.5 months reading a book (about 900 pages), and yet I didn’t finish it …

So, here’s what I decided to do, the moment that I stop learning will be the moment I die…

Why not? I’m still young, healthy, I have the internet right under my finger tips, instead of spending time watching some silly TV series, why not open a book ?!

This doesn’t mean that I’ll bury myself, no, it just means that I need to do better and I can do better to educate myself, enhance my way of thinking, advance my career …

So, let’s start reading, let’s keep learning…

Been a while…

Hello there everyone, been a while since my last post…

I’ve been terribly busy with lots of stuff at work, family, and even I had my PC crashed a few times…

During this period I was away, I was hit by several situations ranging from small financial stuff, to a scandal where I discovered that my employer is spying on all of its employees (will talk about this in a separate post), to a client who just ran away with all my effort without paying for it, to a client who is going down financially (he didn’t pay his bills for over 4 months), to the fact that a former employer of mine is also going down financially …

The overall experience from the past few days/weeks made me take some radical decisions that will shape the upcoming few years of my life, however, I can’t reveal any of them yet…

However, this just a small post stating one thing, I’m back …

Will MySQL die? Oracle to buy SUN !!!

Oracle to buy SUN for 7.4B $, I guess no one didn’t hear this news…

But what will happen to MySQL the most popular and best performer DBMS in the OpenSource world ??

In a brief letter about the deal, Oracle President talks about the benefit of Oracle owning Java and Solaris, without a word about MySQL. Not the reassurance corporate MySQL users might be seeking.

Will Oracle kill MySQL in favor of its over priced DBMS?

MySQL used to be a 100% free replacement for the pricy Oracle 10g, and with great performance benchmarks…

MySQL even attracted more corporate customers since they launched their enterprise plans and solutions, and they also managed to get a larger base of paying customers by providing clustering solutions, load balancing, and the new features that were introduced in the 5.x series…

Will this simply tempt Oracle to simply kill MySQL without a sweat…

Earlier in 2006 Oracle tried to buy MySQL, but MySQL turned the offer down saying “We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL” !!!!

After that during April 2006 Oracle bought InnoDB the famous and fast storage engine used in MySQL, and then Oracle’s dark intentions started to become more obvious…

Oracle’s Acquisition of InnoDB: What does it mean?

Now MySQL is served to Oracle on a platter of gold…Thanks to Sun…

Now what will happen to MySQL?

The best scenario (just an imagination), Oracle will continue working on MySQL and stop looking to it as a threat, and MySQL can really benefit from some of the technologies used in Oracle, this will give a great boost to both Community users and corporate customers, and Oracle would offer two DBMS solutions, one for small-medium enterprises based on MySQL, and the other for the large enterprises using 10g & 11g technologies…

In that scenario, MySQL would co-exist along side Oracle’s DBMS, and can provide great compatibility and interoperability between the two DBMSs, and Oracle would really contribute greatly to the open source communities…

Another scenario, Oracle could sell off MySQL to some other 3rd party (much weaker, and less competitive), and I don’t think they’re that dumb to do this…

Yet another scenario, Oracle can just deplete MySQL of its resources and funding and leave it to die quietly…

In the later scenario, we could see some good people try to resurrect MySQL and forge another DBMS based on the latest MySQL sources, but there’s always a chance that this won’t happen…

Only the coming days will tell what will happen to MySQL and other Open Source projects and solutions that SUN currently provide and support such as Solaris, SUN ONE Directory, Identity Management, Communication Suite, Lustre (distributed cluster filesystem), and more and more solutions and software suites that SUN currently offer for free…

But I must say, I’m really really sad about this acquisition, and I don’t feel good about it…

Let’s just hope for the best…

Adding a new driver to CentOS/RHEL 5.x initrd.img …

Ok, so I finally got my new Asus Eee Box B202 with Linux preinstalled, however, I didn’t like the distribution that came installed even for a bit, and I had other plans in mind for this machine…

So I wanted to install CentOS on it (my favorite), using PXE of course since I don’t an external CD/DVD drive…

However, during boot up the kernel wouldn’t recognize the 1Gbit Ethernet interface, so it was unable to retrieve the rest of the setup files…

I found that Realtek has put some drivers as source code on thier site, compiling it to the target kernel (2.6.18-53.el5) was not a problem at all…

I wanted to embed this driver into initrd so the setup would recognize and initialize the interface automatically…

Lighttpd in chroot…How to get it done…

I was always fascinated by the level of security introduced in Java application servers such as Tomcat, Weblogic and GlassFish, and how the JVM can’t access the outside OS, as well as some other features such as JDBC connection pools etc etc…

Running the web server, and all its components will be similar to Java JVM running and isolated from the existing OS…

Also, running a web server in a chroot() jail can be the ultimate solution for many security issues, including -but no limited to- PHP shells, root kits, back doors, and also have some guarantee that buggy applications (security-wise) won’t impact the entire OS…

Inspired by this post, I’ve made a few modifications to the scripts described and created one more to help in the process…

Decryption of Weblogic 8 3DES passwords in config.xml…

So, yesterday I couldn’t find the password that is used to connect to one of the Oracle DBs for an application…

The password is saved in config.xml for this weblogic domain, but it’s encrypted…

I can see the hash “{3DES}vx1VMjDei4ur7Ews12m4zQ==” in the config.xml file…

I’ve read a few threads that mentioned that the decryption key is in SerializedSystemIni.dat located in the domain folder…

I tried to use OpenSSL to do the work, but couldn’t get it working, and BEA’s dev2dev portal is no longer working so that I can check anything out…

I should have done it while I could…

Tonight, I’ve just finished watching this movie, it’s called He’s just not that into you, it was a really nice movie, I like it….

For a moment, actually lots of moments, I felt that I can see my life being displayed on that silver screen !!!!

I mean, that is just me, that what did happen to me, I was in shock, part of that movie was telling some part of my life, and I walked out of it speechless, not the movie was “WOW” it’s just a nice movie, but it made me think over about things…

Lots of things, choices I’ve made, things I just passed either because someone didn’t like, or things I accepted because someone would be happy with…

Why on earth did I do this??

Also I had that chance, golden chance; to set things right for me once again, and yet I just didn’t take it, why? because it would have made someone sad, and now it too late…

I mean, what about me? what did I get in return? Am I really that demanding?

I’m just lost…I really should have done it while I could…

Install Linux on a machine running Windows – Remotly, no CD-ROM, no PXE…

One day, I got stuck with that server running windows, and I wanted to install Linux on it…

It was connected to an IP-KVM, so I thought I’m in control, and I can just boot it up with PXE, but there was my surprise, no PXE support in the BIOS !!!!

And the machine has no CD-ROM, the IP-KVM doesn’t provide virtual media capabilities…

A little googeling around, I was mainly looking for a way to install grub on this machine, and there is was; Grub4Dos, as well as this wiki page…

I used method 5, placed grldr and grld.mbr from grub4dos package, created folders C:\boot and C:\boot\grub…

I grabbed the kernel and Ram disk from CentOS mirrors in the PXE folder…

Embedded the kick start file into initrd.img using the the method described in this post.

Transferred the kernel and the modified ram disk to the windows machine and placed them under C:\boot…

And created C:\boot\grub\menu.lst with the following content:

title My Linux installer of choice
kernel   (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz  vnc vncpassword=password ip=dhcp ks=file:/ks.cfg
initrd   (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

Now one last thing to do before rebooting, added the following line into boot.ini (as described in method 5…

Now it looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /noexecute=optout /fastdetect
C:\grldr="Start GRUB"

Rebooting the machine, and choosing “Start GRUB” in the boot up menu instantly brought the beloved grub menu…

Now the setup started up, and I get to watch it by connecting using VNC to <ip>:1…

Installation done, reboot done; bye bye Windows, welcome Linux…

Modifying initrd.img

Sometimes you might want to alter the content inside initrd.img for many reasons…

Using mkinitrd might sound like the obvious solution, but it doesn’t do much except for boot time drivers…

But assume you want to embed a kick start file inside the installer’s initrd.img, let’s take this for example…