NAT Woes

I had a fairly simple job to do today - set up some NATing on a new ZyWall firewall. I've done similar in the past, but it beat me this time. Everything looked OK, but the firewall failed to play ball. All I wanted was to NAT one (for now) public IP from the WAN to the DMZ. I called the ISP and they confirmed that everything was OK on their end. So I upgraded the firmware - still no joy. I called local ZyWall support. They talked me through what to do, which was what I had done (with one exception - I had done something extra which wasn't required but wouldn't cause a problem) and gave me a couple of workarounds. The workarounds failed drastically - seemed like the ZyWall got its knickers in a twist. So, factory reset and build from scratch (yes, I had a backup of the config, but I was advised to build it from scratch in case there was a problem with the config). Still no joy .

So, I put back in the old solution (always have a backup plan), tested it and took the ZyWall away with me for further analysis. Next step is verification that I wasn't having finger trouble. Thereafter, escalation with ZyWall and perhaps hooking up a sniffer to see what's going on. Unfortunately it's just one of those two hour jobs which is going to take something more like two days!

I'll post an update when I get to the bottom of it. Grrrr.

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VI to vSphere

VMware launched vSphere 4 today with great fanfare and lots of smiley people in blue shirts. There were no major surprises for anyone who's been following VMware closely for the past while. Big emphasis on (improved) cost reduction through (vSphere's) virtualisation technology - which is no surprise given the current economic environment.

The big push that I got from the launch event was "100% Virtualisation" i.e. now VMware claim you can virtualise every workload including your (demanding) DBMSs and OLTP applications. VMs can now have 8 vCPUs with 256GB RAM and can yield 30Gb/s and 300,000+ IOPS. That's pretty good, and may even suit analysis applications that need to run just such machines for hours (or even days) to process TBs of data - think large telcos mining their data. (As I'm on the subject, if you want to learn more on data mining, here's a good introduction to data mining that was given at a seminar I attended in Dublin some time ago.)

Other features in vSphere include zero down time with fault tolerance i.e. a VM runs on one ESX host with a shadow copy "lock stepped" (VMware's words - not mine) on another host. If the primary host dies, the VM fails over instantaneously to the other host. They demo'd this with a BES Server. It's been around for ages though - I viewed a more technical demo months ago. Check it out if you want more detail on VMware's (then pre-release) fault tolerance. It's great to see this feature finally making it to an end product.

Another feature is "thin provisioning" - and they did a Storage vMotion demo where a VM was migrated (live) from one datastore without thin provisioning to another datastore with thin provisioning. This reduced the size of the VM from 4GB to 3GB - pretty good, but it'll be interesting to see what real world yields will be. It's the like of these features that (still) gives VMware the edge over the competition.

If you want to see the complete hour and a half webcast, it should be available here soon.

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Oracle Buys Sun

I was as surprised as anyone to hear that Oracle bought Sun after the IBM talks collapsed. This gives Oracle the ability to sell systems from the application layer right down through the OS to the hardware. CRM / ERP / DBMS in a box anyone?

But who knows, maybe this model won't appear, or if it does appear, maybe it won't work. Look at Salesforce.com and the number of servers they sell.
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Right != Legal...or is it?

Unless you've been living under a rock over the weekend, you'll no doubt have read that Carl Lundström, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (the guys behind The Pirate Bay) were found guilty "of being accessories to breaching copyright laws". It looks like they're being made an example of. They're appealing the verdict. No surprise there. What might be surprising is that hundreds of supporters protested in Stockholm over the weekend. I'm no lawyer, so I can't speak authoritatively on the case. Nevertheless, I could see the appeal upholding the original verdict as equally as I can see it being overturned.

A Pirate Bay blog entry states that "what we do is right" - an interesting choice of words. Legal? That's a matter for the courts to decide.

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The Early Worm Caught The Bird

As you may have heard, Twitter was hit over the Easter weekend by a worm. This wasn't some generic worm that just happened to hit Twitter - it was a targeted attack. Some technical detail is here. While the fallout appears to have been relatively benign, it certainly caused the guys at Twitter some headaches. It appears to have been a clickjacking attack, one of the vulnerabilities that Robert Hansen specifically mentioned at NITES this year.

Needless to say, the Wintel mantra of running up to date antivirus software, patching systems and running properly configured firewalls is completely useless in this scenario. Twitter's developers will probably be sent on a security refresher course pretty soon.

The "victims" of this attack are lucky that it wasn't particularly malicious. That might not be the case next time.

No Sun in the Big Blue

Well, it looks like IBM aren't buying Sun after all, and Sun's lead chip designer has resigned. Whether this is the death knell for the SPARC platform remains to be seen.

One thing's for sure, there'll be no Deep Purple after all.

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Conficker Stops Big Ben

Conficker stops Big Ben, if you believe The Washington Post story. Seriously though, there hasn't been any noticeable payload - yet. But don't forget, Conficker will still be around once this day is over. Londoners - keep an eye on Big Ben, just in case.

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