Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Daily Archives: February 27, 2008
VMWare Vulnerability during VMotion.. is it really?
Posted by on February 27, 2008
As the Hoff posts here and on VMTN here. the proposed vulnerability that you can manipulate and possibly compromise a VM during a VMotion process isn’t exactly major, it’s clever.. but – like anything if you don’t follow the best-practice recommendations then you expose yourself to these risks… same reason they recommend you lock your server room or don’t have blank passwords – this attack is akin to gaining physical access to the hardware or being able to sniff a physical switch port – in this instance, it’s “virtual” hardware.
VMWare have always recommended keeping the VMotion traffic on a separate VLAN or network.
the other vulnerability where VMTools can be compromised on is different, but again preventable.. and not enabled on server instances of VMWare.
Impressive Facial Mapping Demo
Posted by on February 27, 2008
Cool site here of a company called image metrics, they produce systems to map facial expressions to computer models and graphics for films and games.
Cool stuff.
Firefox Download Window Stops Working
Posted by on February 27, 2008
I’ve had this problem for the last week where if you try to download a file in firefox the download status window doesn’t display although the file actually downloads.
you can fix this by going to %appdata%MozillaFirefoxProfiles and deleting the downloads.rdf file.
HP iLo Very Slow for Installing an OS
Posted by on February 27, 2008
A bit of a disappointment; we’re trying to do a WinPE 2.0 CD/DVD based installation for our Windows 2003/2008 standard blade servers in an HP c7000 enclosure.
Installing from a .ISO image presented to the iLo via the virtual media applet is dog-slow (5-10 times slower than from a physical CD/DVD- why is this? – surely its technically possible to make this access run faster and GigE chipsets are cheap-as these days. I’ve been through every combination of switching/duplex/port config and even via a cable directly into the Blade OA.
The same issue seems to manifest itself on traditional rack mount HP servers – the iLo just isn’t fast enough to make this a workable solution, unless you are really patient.
I know we could use the RDP and do it as a PXE type installation over the network to each blade, but this doesn’t really achieve what I want…
Most customers maintain an OoB (Out of Band) network to which all of the management interfaces (iLo, DRAC, etc.) are connected to. the reasoning for this is obvious; if you loose your main core switching network you can get access via a totally different physical network and path to assist in troubleshooting.
For this same reasoning I would like to use this method to build servers from a master boot CD/DVD image, you can present a .ISO image to a server via the virtual media applet on the iLo. We have a fully end-end build process that sets up the HP array controllers, flashes BIOS and installs the OS and drivers etc. from a CD/DVD.
We just update the boot CD .ISO file as required and its flexible and it doesn’t rely on any deployment infrastructure (PXE server, RDP server etc.) so we can port it between customers and data centres, VM’s and physical machines and do a bare-metal builds without requiring any build/network infrastructure in place.
This isn’t just limited to a Windows OS – I tried the same with an ESX installation; took over an hour (compared to 5-10 mins from a local CD)
New Blog Furniture
Posted by on February 27, 2008
Have been playing with a few new widgets, and I figured out how to add HTML code into the pages that wordpress.com hosts.
If you need to do it – just add a “Text” widget and then you can put any HTML code you like in that and it gets processed as part of the page load.
So, for now I’ve added clustrmaps – only takes a couple of mins – instructions here
I’ve also added Feedburner for my RSS feeds, I’ve seen a big spike in traffic to my blog over the last week
I’m trying to figure out where it is coming from… the default wordpress.com stats (where this site is hosted) don’t really go into much more detail than number of hits; and it doesn’t seem to tally up with the search-engine results or click referrals – so maybe that will shed some light on it.
Otherwise pop a comment on this post and let me know what you find interesting and I’ll try to tailor some content around your needs, the How to deploy a virtual machine from a template seems to be the most popular post so far.
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 