Linux

It seems everyone is posting their review after a few days of working with the laptop. I decided to take a different perspective with the initial review. When I first started playing with ChromeOS betas a few months ago I came to the realization that this was not for me. Two things were apparent: This machine is to provide a cloud-based Thin Client. I live off servers around the world, not necessarily in the cloud. As a geek, the Walled Garden drives me crazy. “What do you mean I can’t install a SSH server?!?!?” My girlfriend on the other hand could care less about a SSH server. She finds the Mac Mini a little overwhelming at times and really just wants the internet. “Show me where the Safari icon is.” For that reason alone I found ChromeOS to be built for her. Instant On and just a web browser. ...

For there record if you say "CAC Card" in my presence you will be "SOL Luck" talking again soon. If you are running Linux or Mac there is a good chance you haven’t been touching my CAC, otherwise known as Common Access Card. George Bush signed HSPD-12 way back in 2004 to mandate the usage of CAC and multifactor authentication on federal networks. The DoD giggled as it was already deploying limited installs at choice commands and was way ahead of the curve. The rest of the government and corporate entities are starting to roll-out the installs and a common theme I see is lack of heterogenous OS support. In this day and age your CIO/CTO/CISO must think beyond what the Microsoft sales lead tells them and think of the user base. Here is a big hint to save you from looking silly – You can’t say iOS/Android development is important to your divisions and then mandate they use Windows computers to comply with your SmartCard policy. I only mention that having sat in the room when the mobile development PM had to make his leadership aware they were basically shutting his group down. ...

A question from a distinguished colleague of mine: Q: Some security group is claiming that locking apps down to a single cpu is more secure that multi-threaded apps. Is there any basis in fact that I don’t know of or is this as ridiculous as I think it is? – Distinguished Dude A: It is called Side Channel Attacks…thus far its only a theory that has no known in the wild exploit ...

I struggle with ROM for log file storage. It is one of those things that no one EVER looks at, but everyone covers their asses. As an example DHS requires 90 days online, 7 years offline. Anton Chuvakin from Security Warrior posted this today and I thought it was pretty good: 100,000 log messages / second x 300 bytes / log message ~ 28.6 MB x 3600 seconds ~ 100.6 GB / hour ...

I love Debian (looks over lovingly @ the fileserver) and look forward to many more years of stable releases. Debian was my first distro when I ran 1.3 at the ripe old age of 12. I built a VM a few years ago just to see how far we’ve come: http://geekyschmidt.com/2008/03/29/login-looking-back-on-debian-13 A link to some interesting history: http://digitizor.com/2010/08/16/happy-17th-birthday-debian-and-some-interesting-history/