Planet Sysadmin               

Recently I managed to get my gmail account disabled by Google. At first, I didn’t think that it would be a big deal since free email account can be registered every now and then, if it managed to get disabled/suspended.

But…. It turns out I WAS WRONG.

See, when Google disabled a Gmail account, it also disabled all other accounts that associates with that account, including (but not limited to) :

• Youtube (your videos will be inaccessible)
• Blogger (all your blogs will be made inaccessible)
• Google+
• Google Play / Android Market (partially affects your Android phone and contacts, your paid apps will not be available)
• Google Drive / Google Docs (you won’t be able to access your files /documents)
• Google Code (loose access to your code repo)
• And anything that is related to Google service

How does a Gmail account gets disabled ?

Officially Google states that each accounts holder must comply with Google Terms of Service.

Unofficially, there could be tons of reasons why Google disable a particular Google account, which includes:

• Suspected partaking in spamming activity
• Age factor (based on D.O.B data entered, those under 13yrs old aren’t allowed to use Google
• Suspected using illegal credit card (in case of purchasing through Google Wallet or Google Pay)
• When Google suspect that your account has been compromised
• etc…

Anyway, they didn’t tell me exactly what I did and why they disabled my account (they tell me that they won’t disclose details to avoid their automated system from being compromised by hackers).

What they do is ask me when the last time I access my account, using which browser and what are the things that I do with my Google account recently before my account being disabled.

After that, within 24 hours, my account has been restored! So if you find yourselves in similar situation, then you should try get some help from Google Products (Gmail) forums. The people there are helpful, as long as you don’t get too emotional and push them too much.

Note that you should understands the Google Product Terms & Policy when you are using any Google Products. Because from what I’ve seen from the forum, there are also those who aren’t as lucky as I am, getting their accounts permanently disabled. Once it is permanently disabled, there are absolutely *ZERO* chances of recovering your precious data.

Be warned.

Plesk has some baked in magic concerning MySQL and the admin account. If you try to use mysql or mysqldump using your root user name or password, it will not be allowed. You’ll see something like this:

[root@server] mysql -u admin -p
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'admin'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

If you want to access MySQL as root, you simply use the command my. What exactly does my do?

[root@server] type my
my is aliased to `mysql -A -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`'

So, in order to use mysqldump, one has to use the following command syntax:

mysqldump -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` [database] > [outfile-name]

Strange but true. Of course, this is for a vanilla installation of Plesk. I’m sure you can customize your MySQL permissions and groups to behave differently, however I would not advise that. Plesk likes to have things its own way, and it will either break if you change things or set things back to how it likes them on the next update.

Useful commands to extract packages:

yeah sure, citi’g gonna give me a memo for this

© ruchi for Ubuntu Geek, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: desktop, install mynotex ubuntu 12.04, install mynotex ubuntu precise, mynotex deb package

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I was asked to troubleshoot an interesting problem today where the Windows Security event log was being "flooded" by one particular sort of event.  By flooded, I mean about 20 duplicate entries logged per second.  The biggest problem with this is that it was making the Security log on that server useless, as the log would fill up within 45 minutes at that rate.  Click to enlarge the screenshot below:

*Names were changed to protect the guilty*

 The operating system is Windows 2008 R2. The server is a domain member. The server also runs SQL Server 2008 R2.  The server is a cluster node in a failover cluster.  I started Googling and Binging the event ID and description, and I didn't get much at first.

As an aside, I can't believe I just used the word "Binging," and I much prefer Google for almost everything, but if you want to search Technet, MSDN, and other Microsoft sites, the built-in Bing search on those sites actually does tend to produce better results on those sites than a general Google search. For me anyway. Maybe a "site:technet.com xyz" search on Google would do just as well. Anyway... onward:

So the only solid clue I found in my searching was this Technet article. The Windows Password Policy Checking API was being called at a staggering rate, but why?  By whom?  How do I make it stop?  The same SQL service account was being named in the events, so it obviously must have something to do with SQL.  Well, I could turn off the auditing of "Other Account Management Events," either by way of domain GPO or local security policy on that server... but that would only suppress the logging of that behavior.  It does nothing to stop the actual behavior.  Plus I would also lose any other events of that same category on the system.

I also knew that there was an "Enforce Password Policy" option that can be configured on each SQL account.  So I fired up SQL Management Studio on that server and did some testing, and as it turns out, that option was enabled on several accounts, including service accounts that are designed to hit the database rapidly.  It appears that every time an authentication attempt is made by one of those SQL accounts that has that Enforce Policy option checked, the SQL service makes a call to that Windows API to do some password policy checking, and that event is logged.

I tactically identified a few key service accounts that I knew to be very active on that database, and I disabled the "Enforce Password Policy" option on those accounts one by one.  I confirmed that with each account I changed, the rate at which those Security event 4793's were coming in decreased. Until finally, they stopped completely.

That's all for today.  On one final note, I wish we did cool things like this in the United States, especially as a resident of a state that cuts science funding.

• Grades 4-5: Talia Mastalski, Grade 5, East Pike Elementary School, Indiana, Penn., for her doodle “Traveling to me.” Talia says, “When I think of Google, I think of a wormhole leading me to knowledge. If I could travel in time, I would visit a similar wormhole into the future to find out about ME.”
• Grades 6-7: Herman Wang, Grade 6, Suzanne Middle School, West Covina, Calif., for his doodle “Retro City.” Herman says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit Retro City. A future city made of robots and humans.”
• Grades 8-9: Susan Olvera, Grade 8, SOAR Alternative School, Lafayette, In., for her doodle “Traveling Back to the Future.” Susan says, “If I could travel in time, I'd travel back to the future. If there is life on other planets, I believe we'd visit the natives as well as invent different ships and rockets for quicker transportation. With what we have accomplished currently, I believe the ‘future’ isn’t so far away.”
• Grades 10-12: Cynthia Cheng, Grade 11, Edison High School, Edison, NJ, for her doodle “A World of Adventure.” Cynthia says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit the age of the Vikings. Though their tales of monsters may not have been entirely true, they were some of the greatest explorers in history. It would be a remarkable experience to share adventures and discover new lands with them.”

I have been using Git for years now and I am still a novice user. Actually, if you are an individual developer or work in a really small team, you don’t really need to go beyond using the basic stuff like cloning a repo, committing code, branching and pushing back to the origin repo. And that’s exactly what happened with me. Working alone most of the times and working in my own repos. I never felt the need to explore advanced usage.

Last week, we didn’t have internet at home for like four days. So, I thought I’ll read a book. I downloaded ProGit : The Free Git Book and started reading. It’s an awesomely written book. I learned a lot of new things about Git. A few more concept about using branches efficiently. If you are a Git beginner or looking forward to getting started with Git and you don’t like reading too much, I’ll suggest that you read at least first three chapters thoroughly. That along with a free GitHub account should be enough to get you going if you are not going to be a heavy Git user soon.

Fedora Tutorials and Videocache by Kulbir Saini.

There's been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I don't have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff Atwood's piece because, well, I agree that it's pretty silly to think that the world is going to be a better place if the Mayor of New York City learns how to code. I agree with Atwood that his valuable time would be better spent elsewhere.

I believe there are essential skills you learn as an engineer who codes. It teaches you how to structure your thinking, and the process looks something like this:

• I have this thing I want to build.
• I have a finite set of tools that enforce a certain set of rules I must follow.
• And... go.

Coding is unforgiving. Its structure is well-defined and enforced by whatever interpreter or compiler you might be using. You are punished swiftly for obvious errors. You are punished more subtly for the less obvious ones.

Once you've mastered a particular language, you've also mastered a means of thinking. You understand how to decompose a problem into knowable units, and you learn how to intertwine those units into pleasant and functional flow. Perhaps you've figured out how to get that flow to perform at Herculean scale. There is no doubt in my mind that this is an essential and valuable skill for anyone to learn and master.

However, there is a language you could master that teaches many of the same lessons, appears far more forgiving in terms of syntax, and has immediate broader appeal.

The language you can learn is your own.

I argue that there is an essential set of skills that intersect both with writing words and writing code. Let's revisit the process:

• There's this thought I want to write.
• I have finite set of words, a target audience, and, likely, a certain article length that all serve as constraints.
• And... go.

Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its/it's issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here's the rub: there is a compiler and it's fucking brutal. It's your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?

The articles on Rands keep getting longer and longer, and as I'm finishing a piece, I worry, "Is it too long?" I worry about this because we live in a lovely world of 140-character quips and status updates, and I fret about whether I'll be able to hold your attention, which is precisely the wrong thing to worry about. What I should be worried about is, "Have I written something worthy of your attention?"

Writing is the connective tissue that creates understanding. We, as social creatures, often better perform rituals to form understanding one on one, but good writing enables us to understand each other at scale.

Now... go.

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:

1. Find the right thing
Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent—your results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do.

2. Get the best summary
With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.

The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities that’s the key.

3. Go deeper and broader
Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!

We’ve begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets—read more about how we’ve tailored this to mobile devices. And watch our video (also available on our site about the Knowledge Graph) that gives a deeper dive into the details and technology, in the words of people who've worked on this project:

We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.

Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering

This won’t be my usual “Problem, Solution, Long Story” style troubleshooting post. There are a few complexities involved that don’t allow it to fit into that template so easily.

I have a client-facing server running CentOS 5.7 and Plesk 10.3. When clients need web space, I put them on my Plesk server so they have shiny buttons to click when managing their own web space. Recently I had a series of unfortunate events cause an outage on one client.

It starts with my craving to have things standardized. All client account domain directories are in lower case. All, that is, except for one: AmazingClient. Their main domain’s vhost directory is /var/www/vhosts/AmazingClient which, in Plesk-land means that any reference to that client’s domain is always in that case. It bugs me. More than it should. When I created the client account several months ago, for some inexplicable reason, I used CamelCase in their name. One recent evening I decided to change the capitalization for their account’s main domain. Simple, right?

I did say that I’m using Plesk, did I not?

Before I go any further, I know what you might be thinking. “Domains aren’t case sensitive! What nonsense are you on about?!” They’re not case sensitive when approaching domains from a DNS perspective. However, I’m looking at this from a filesystem and Plesk user account perspective.

To change something as simple as the case of a domain’s vhost directory, one cannot merely rename it. There are many configuration files to consider as well as Plesk-specific tasks that rely on the domain’s directory not being glibly swapped out from underneath it. To change a domain’s name in Plesk, one has to go into the client’s control panel, and click on the Websites & Domains tab.

From there you will find the domain that you want to change the case of (remember, this isn’t about “domain” in the DNS sense, but rather the representation of that domain within Plesk and on the filesystem) and click on its link. From there you will come to the Host Settings page for that domain. Once on the Host Settings page, you’ll have the option to change the domain name. Here comes the trouble: you can’t change the name merely based on case. Even though Plesk sees the client domain differently in the backend based on case, in this Host Settings interface case is not taken into account. Plesk will complain that the domain already exists. You need to change the domain name to something different, then change it back to the original domain name, minus the capitalization. (Plesk FAIL #1)

In my case, I wanted to swing it from AwesomeClient.com, to awesomeclienttemp.com, and then back to awesomeclient.com (sans the capital “A” and “C”).

Tipping Over the Edge of Doom

When trying to move from AwesomeClient.com to awesomeclienttemp.com I received this error:

Internal error: [domain path] is out of webspace
Message is out of webspace
File Webspace.php
Line 334
Type PleskFatalException

After that error, the Websites & Domains tab is no longer accessible to that client account. Trying to use it receives the same “Internal Error: [domain path] is out of webspace” error.

You see, it appears that Plesk, upon requesting a domain rename, copies the domain’s existing files and then deletes the old ones. It does not perform a mere rename action (Plesk FAIL #2). This client uses quite a bit of space and it apparently maxed out their quota. I say “apparently” because, by a strict accounting for free space and quotas on the server, it should have been allowed – but just barely. Perhaps there’s more space that Plesk needs than a simple doubling of existing files. (Plesk FAIL #3?) Plesk certainly didn’t perform any kind of filesystem or account limitation checking prior to attempting the move. (Plesk FAIL #4)

The client site was still responsive; there didn’t appear to be any negative effects. I needed to investigate further, but as the night wore on I decided to postpone a thorough examination until another day.

Ask Not For Whom Your Cell Phone Tolls

Bright and early the next morning, I got a call. It was from the client.

“Our website seems to be down, so… uhh… if you could look into that…”

Super.

Nothing was being served up in response to any page requests for this domain. Apache’s error logs were showing requests for this client’s files as hitting in the default vhost root, not their own. Then, it hit me.

Plesk does not use the standard Apache configuration files. I mean, it does, but not really. It auto-generates Apache configuration files based on the information that is stored in its own customer database within MySQL. That’s why the domain was just fine the evening before, but didn’t fail until the wee hours of the morning. The configuration files had been latently generated based on the failed attempt at changing the domain account name.

Silly me… I expected there to be rollback statements in any of the SQL DML statements made to the database. I expected that a fatal error would be caught and changes rolled back. They weren’t. (Plesk FAIL #5) Silly, silly me.

Of course, I wasn’t going to be able to change the domain information because the Websites & Domains tab bombed out permanently with an internal error. I couldn’t access the officially sanctioned means of modifying the domain account. This called for some database mangling.

Let Pry Through the Portage of the Database

I logged into mysql and dumped the psa database. From there, I used grep to scour the .sql file for any mention of awesomeclienttemp. Sure enough, the bad change was recorded in the database. There were dozens of records in several tables that pointed to the bad domain. That was causing Apache configuration files to be written with bad data, among other applications. There was also mention of the original, unsullied domain. I guess not all of the SQL statements that are part and parcel of a domain change were able to be executed before the error condition was achieved. (Side note: ROLLBACK!! ROLLBACK!! ROLLBACK!!)

Solving the problem was a simple as searching for and replacing the string awesomeclienttemp with AwesomeClient. I used mysql to perform that, but it could have been done on the dump file and then imported. For those interested, I used the replace() function and performed a select statement first just to make sure that I was changing the data that I expected to. Once satisfied with the results I performed an update statement also using the replace() function. Here’s an example of changing some values in the dns_recs table of Plesk’s psa database:

mysql&gt> SELECT REPLACE(displayVal,'clienttemp', 'Client') FROM dns_recs WHERE displayVal LIKE '%clienttemp%';
+--------------------------------------------+
| REPLACE(displayVal,'clienttemp', 'Client') |
+--------------------------------------------+
| mail.AwesomeClient.com.                    |
| AwesomeClient.com.                         |
| AwesomeClient.com.                         |
| AwesomeClient.com.                         |
+--------------------------------------------+
mysql> UPDATE dns_recs SET displayVal=REPLACE(displayVal,'clienttemp', 'Client') WHERE displayVal LIKE '%clienttemp%';

With the database in a better state, there is still one more thing left to do. Plesk doesn’t dynamically look to the database for configuration information. It looks to regular files that have been dynamically generated from the database’s information. That generation happens on a schedule, but can be expedited using the httpdmng command. Specifically, I used:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpdmng --reconfigure-domain AwesomeClient.com

You could also use the –reconfigure-all option to perform a regeneration of all domain configuration files. After running httpdmng the domain was up and running.

Apache Test Page or Blank Page Problems

I glossed over some of the troubleshooting techniques I used while tracing the problem to its root. If you’re having trouble with seeing the Apache test page, then search through your httpd.conf file and make sure that your DirectoryIndex directive is set to look for all of the variants of an index.html page that you use. For example, index.html, index.htm. index.php, etc.

Furthermore, just to reiterate, check all of your vhost conf files, such as yourdomain/conf/vhost.conf (or any conf files that reside in that directory) for the DocumentRoot directive and make sure that it’s pointed to what you want it to be pointed at. Do not edit the files that are named similar to 13279881860.14852200_httpd.include. Those are auto-generated by Plesk and at worst you could cause destruction of files in your domain; at best you will have to re-edit those files every time a new one is generated.

Of course, do a dummy check to make sure that the domain you are trying to access is really resolving to the IP address of your web server. Just… do it. It takes 5 seconds and you have the outside chance of being pleasantly surprised.

The Takeaway

Plesk is rickety. If anyone has used a better control panel for client-facing servers, let me know. I’ve worked with cPanel and Plesk, but never with any of the others that I’ve listed in this giant list of web based server control panels. Most people will shout “Just don’t use a control panel!” but that’s not a terribly client friendly option. I’m not categorically against control panels when used in the correct situations. I am, however, against misbehaving control panels.

Let me know your experiences in the comments below.

In this post you will find set of password managers for Linux which provides secure storage for your passwords for sensitive data. If you still keep the passwords in plain text then you must consider one of available password managers so this article is for you.

KeePassX

KeePassX has been a very popular and famous password manager for Linux for a very long time and still trusted by pretty big number of users. When user launches the KeePassX password manager first it requires to set up of a master password to add an extra layer of security to password storage. As an option you can use a file with encryption key instead of the password. This key file can be used along with the master password to provide stronger security. KeePassX application is rather simple so you can easily create one or more databases which will have a master password and will contain all the login credentials stored encrypted. This manager is considered to be one of the most secure managers. If you’re Ubuntu user just type in terminal the following command:

sudo apt-get install keepassx

GPassword Manager

Gpassword Manager (GPM) is also one of the most secure and highly rated password managers which have more friendly and easy to use interface that KeePassX. This utility has many features that make it to be a good choice for most of the high level computer users. This password manager allows to set and add favorites into system-tray that is one of the unique features of this application. GPM utility uses the crypto++ method for encryption which can be used in Windows and Linux hence it enables the same database to be used on different platforms without the need to convert anything.

My Passwords

My Passwords is a simple and easy to use utility that allows you to store all your login credentials in an encrypted manner within a file. The most exciting feature of this utility are its speed and no requirement of an installation. Encryption algorithm that is used there is AES. Storage in Derby Database format along with AES encryption gives the user the power to create secure and fast password repository. The interface for this utility is fairly simple.

Fiagaro’s Password Manager 2

Fiagaro’s Password Manager 2 is another powerful tool with strong encryption methods that makes it one of the most secure utility for managing passwords in Linux. Fiagaro’s Password Manager 2 uses the AES-256 encryption of the database files which hold all your login credentials (it uses master password that should be set up once you started the program first).

Gringotts

Gringotts is rather old project: its application for Linux/Unix provides the user the possibility to store his or her notes in secure storage encrypted by symmetrical ciphers. Gringotts has a set of eight different algorithms that can be used to encrypt the desired data. This utility also provides different methods for hashing as well as compression. The interface of Gringotts is not as simple as of other password Managers but still easy to use and most effective for old school bearded Unix users.

ClassicMenu Indicator is a notification area applet (application indicator) for the top panel of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment.
(...)
Read the rest of How to install ClassicMenu Indicator in ubuntu 12.04(Precise) (63 words)

© ruchi for Ubuntu Geek, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ClassicMenu Indicator in ubuntu 12.04 ppa, desktop, install ClassicMenu Indicator in ubuntu 12.04, install ClassicMenu Indicator in ubuntu precise

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To celebrate the release of my new video course Getting Started with Arduino and iOS, O'Reilly Media are offering 60% off when you buy it along with my book iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino.

60% off when you buy both the video and book together

It's the MAKE: Hardware Innovation Workshop this week, as well as Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, and I'll be hanging around both talking about this and other things and well as doing some live demos. So come and talk to me if you see me, and you want to know more about connecting your iPhone to the open hardware world.

Back in November last year I spoke at Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, about location enabled sensors, and the video of the talk has just been put up onto the web by the organisers.

If you're interested in the topics discussed at Øredev, all the talks will eventually make it onto the website including another talk I did at the conference on visualisation which hasn't made it online quite yet.

Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always separated by function and time zone.

So, my nice example of a collocated team in Thoughts on Infrastructure, Technical Debt, and Automated Test Framework, rarely occurs in a program, unless you have cross-functional teams collocated in a program. If they do, great. You know what to do.

But let’s assume you don’t have them. Let’s assume you have what I see in my consulting practice: an architecture group in one location, or an architect in one location and architects around the world; developers and “their” testers in multiple time zones; product owners separated from their developers and testers. The program is called agile because the program is working in iterations. And, because it’s a program, the software pre-existed the existence of the agile transition in the organization, so you have legacy technical debt up the wazoo (the technical term). What do you do?

Let’s walk through an example, and see how it might work. Here’s a story which is a composite from several clients; no clients were harmed in the telling of this story.

Let’s also assume you are working on release 5.0 of a custom email client. Release 4 was the previous release. Release 4 had trouble. It was late by 6 months and quite buggy. Someone sold agile as the way to make software bug-free and on-time.

You do not have automated tests for much of the code, unit tests or system tests. You have a list of defects that make Jack the Ripper’s list of killings look like child’s play. But agile is your silver bullet.

The program manager is based in London. The testers for the entire program are in Bangalore because management had previously fired all the testers and outsourced the testers. That was back in release 2. They have since hired all the Bangalore testers as employees of the Bangalore subsidiary. The program architect is based in San Francisco, and there is an architect team that is dispersed into 4 other teams: Denver, LA, Munich, and Paris. The developers are clustered in “Development Centers of Excellence:” Denver, LA, Cambridge, Paris, London, Munich, and Milan. That’s 8 development teams.

Oh, and if you think I’m kidding with this scenario, I’m not. This is what most of my clients with geographically distributed teams and programs face on a daily basis. They deserve your sympathy and empathy. Do not tell them, “Don’t go agile.” That’s nuts. They have a right to go agile. You can tell them, “Don’t go Scrum.” That’s reasonable. Scrum is for a cross-functional co-located team. Agile is for everyone. Scrum is for a specific subset.

What do you do?

1. Assign specific testers to specific development teams. No calling people resources; that allows managers to treat people like resources and plug-and-play them. You need to get rock-solid teams together. Once you have teams together, you can name them.
2. Name teams so the teams reflect the feature groups they work on. What does an email product do? It gets email, it sorts email, it deletes, it forwards, it creates new mailboxes, and so on. The eight feature teams had to be named for the feature areas: Platform for the general features, Sort, Delete, Forward. There were two teams who worked on Platform. They were called Platform 1 and Platform 2. At one point, someone suggested they call themselves Thing1 and Thing2 from the The Cat in the Hat" target="_blank">Dr. Seuss book.
3. Make sure you have enough product owners so they can develop roadmaps for each feature area. With a roadmap, the teams know where they are going. Even more importantly, the architects know where the program is going.
4. Architects think and provide just enough guidance ahead. In a small project, the architecture can probably evolve with the project. In a larger program, that risk is too large. You have too many people developing in parallel for the architecture to evolve on its own with no guidance. But I do not mean there should a Master Architect Who Knows All Handing Down the Architecture From On High. NO NO NO.
   I want the architect who is a working member of the development team, who also is part of an architecture community of practice team, who curates the architecture, who guides the business value of the architecture. I do not want Big Architecture Up Front. But Thinking Up Front? Sure, that’s a great idea. Stuck on only one idea? Bad. Willing to spike an idea? Great. Willing to play in a sandbox and debate several ideas? Great. I wrote about this before, in How Agile Architects Lead.
5. Decide what done means for every feature. You must have acceptance criteria for each feature. What does that mean? You need a product owner present for each team. You still need the conversations with each team to discuss what done means. Especially with a geographically distributed team, you need the conversation when you create the backlog at the beginning of the iteration.
6. The US  development teams had trouble planning their iterations with their testers, because of the time zone differences with the testers. So, they asked their product owners if the product owner would write more than just a few phrases on the cards, because that would help them get through the iteration planning meeting faster. Someone was going to get up early or stay up late, and either way, someone was going to suffer. It made more sense to have a little bit more preparation than less sleep.
7. Decide to do continuous integration and stick with it. Especially if you know you have technical debt and you don’t want to create more, you have to do continuous integration now. That prevents more technical debt.
8. I have recommended to some teams that they have one-week iterations so that they stop the estimation nonsense and make their stories small. The point of estimation is so that you have an idea of what you can do as a team and not commit to more than that. The idea is that if you know what it takes to make your stories small, you will.
   Instead, we have all these crazy rituals around estimation and management tracking velocity of all things. (Yes, I’ve been drafting this post for a long time, and I wrote Why Does Management Care About Velocity? last week.) You know, velocity is a little like weight. Only you and your doctor need to know your weight. If you are healthy, you are fine. If you are not, you need to change something.If your team velocity is not healthy, you, as a team, need to change it. But, your management has no business butting its head in. Only you can change it.
9. When you limit the iteration length, you tend to have the team swarm around a story. This is a tendency, not a given. If I really was the Empress of the Universe, I would decree this, but I’m not, so I won’t. If you want to decrease technical debt, or even eliminate it on your program, explain that your team will only work on one story at a time until that story is done. That story will be polished and gleaming. Fast. You will not have to worry about what kinds of testing will be done. All if it will be done.
10. Explicitly discuss what you will automate for testing and when. In a program, I assume we will have automated system tests first. I assume we will do exploratory tests later. That’s because if you don’t start building something for test automation when you start the program and refactor as you proceed, you can never catch up. I assume every time we fix a defect, we will have an automated test for it. I also assume we build these assumptions into how we develop :-)

So far, this is all about preventing more technical debt, not what happens when you trip over technical debt as you enter code or tests you never looked at before.

If you expected to walk into a closet, take out a shirt, and close the closet door, that’s one thing. But now, you stepped into something out of one of those death-by-hoarding shows on TV, you have an obligation to do something. You can document the problem as you encounter it; you can let the product owner know; file a defect report; write a test so you can contain the debt; and maybe you have more options. Whatever you do, make sure you have done something. Do not open the door, see the mess inside and close the door on the mess. It’s tempting. Oh my, it is tempting.

See, on programs because of the size, everything is magnified. With more people and more teams, everything is harder. Things happen faster. If you have co-located cross-functional teams, no problem. But if you don’t have co-located cross-functional teams, you have to work with what you have. And, if you already have a big legacy product, you want to address technical debt in small chunks, refactoring in small bits, integrating as you proceed.

My philosophy is this: the bigger the program, the more you need to become accustomed to working in small chunks, integrating as you go. Fully implement a small story, integrate it on the mainline. Everyone on the program does that. If you need help from an integration team, so be it.

But, if everyone only implements small stories, and everyone takes care of their own technical debt as they discover it, you don’t need an army of integration people. You only need an army of integration people when you have technical debt around integration and release. Fix that, and everyone can become responsible for their own integration.

And, if you can’t release, that’s where the architects should start. If you can’t do continuous integration, that’s where the architects should start. Because that’s what’s preventing you from making progress on the product. Work backwards from release, and then the architects can work on the rest of the product. Until you can release and build reliably, the rest of the product doesn’t matter.

Who s/he claims that knows everything, must be constantly being asked by everyone else.

If you want to ask me something, do it public.

I have some knowledge of linux stuff, but i dont know everything.
This is a well known fact.

If you ask something in public then there will be something magical.

1.
More people could experience the same problem.
They will immediately comment that they have the exact same problem with you.
You will feel that you are not alone in this world!

2.
Some nerds will try to answer you before you even complete your question. Dont pay any attention to them. But your post will be the top of every search in a few seconds. Dont be bias at them. They have good at their heart.

3.
Some geeks will try to answer you with LMGTFY and wikipedia comments. Dont feel sorry about that. You should have read the manual in the first time, so this is your fault. Read them know.

4.
Some guru will answer to you. Be very carefully. Statistics are against you. From time to time you will cry like a baby by these answers. Guru’s have the ability to amplify all problems and resolve them in a way that even you can understand them.

5.
From the moment you asked something public, there is a trace that you exist! People now know you!!! You are the newbi3_1995 (or something).

6.
If you asked something that someone else have already asked, then you feel this magical connection to him. Internet love is true, embrace it. But seriously you have solved your problem with just a few links to the first question (back in 2005)!.

7.
And the most importance of all, is of course that you will not bother me :P

ps: dont afraid to ask me something.

• Access our research library of studies and whitepapers from across 21 different countries. You can search for research by country, sector, marketing objective or media type.
• Use the Insights MENA tool to explore the media habits of consumers in the Middle East and North Africa, or do the same for consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa with our Insights Africa tool.
• Watch new videos on the consumer journey, with information on behaviors such as “research online, purchase offline” (ROPO).

Dnsmasq is a lightweight server designed to provide DNS (and optionally DHCP and TFTP) services to a small-scale network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP for network booting of diskless machines.
(...)
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Since then I attended a conference on Director's and Officer's insurance in Connecticut, and spoke on a panel about that SEC guidance. During the conference I learned that the SEC guidance isn't a big deal -- it's a really big deal. We're talking a game changer, potentially on three fronts. Here's what I heard at the conference.

1. First, lawyers who read the language in the SEC guidance treated it as a "stop whatever you're doing and read this" moment. The lawyers I spoke to said the SEC guidance absolutely defined new reporting duties for companies, despite talk of it being merely a "clarification" or restatement of existing guidance.

   Clients bombarded insurance firms asking what language they should use in their SEC disclosure documents. They asked "what are other companies saying? What should we say?" The firms noted similar boiler plate shared among clients, most of which insufficiently met the SEC's requirements.

   One lawyer I spoke with said she expects the SEC to give publicly traded firms a "one year pass" before bringing enforcement actions against them for insufficiently outlining digital risk, pre- and post-breach.

2. Second, the SEC language will encourage shareholder lawsuits against companies by disgruntled parties who believe boards are not disclosing risks and actual breach details to investors. This will probably not be the primary cause for a suit but it will likely be one of other factors a shareholder action uses to show that a board is not fulfilling their duties to investors.
3. Third, the SEC language may prompt whistleblower reports from dissatisfied IT and security staff to organizations like the SEC Office of the Whistleblower. (That is a real organization!) In the seven weeks beginning with this new office's launch in August 2011, parties reported 334 tips from 37 states and 11 countries, with successful enforcement actions in up to 30% of cases.

   Although it doesn't appear that this new office has paid any whisteblowers yet, it is apparently gearing up to do so. Imagine a case where security staff believes that management is not treating a breach as the staff thinks it should be treated, and decides to report the incident to the SEC -- with the possibility of a payout waiting!

At least a half-dozen major U.S. companies whose computers have been infiltrated by cyber criminals or international spies have not admitted to the incidents despite new guidance from securities regulators urging such disclosures.

Top U.S. cybersecurity officials believe corporate hacking is widespread, and the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a lengthy "guidance" document on October 13 outlining how and when publicly traded companies should report hacking incidents and cybersecurity risk.

But with one full quarter having elapsed since the SEC request, some major companies that are known to have had significant digital security breaches have said nothing about the incidents in their regulatory filings.

Now Senator Rockefeller is taking a closer look as reported by Jennifer Martinez of Politico this week:

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller thinks the SEC needs to ensure hacked companies are adequately informing their investors about when they suffer a security breach or cybersecurity risk that could jeopardize their financial standing.

The West Virginia Democrat wants the full commission to issue guidance for companies — right now they only have staff-level instructions — on when they have to report cyber breaches or threats and what steps they’re taking to minimize the risks.

“It’s crucial that companies are disclosing to investors how cybersecurity risks affect their bottom lines, and what they are doing to address those risks,” Rockefeller said in a statement to POLITICO.

Rockefeller will soon introduce an amendment that calls on the SEC to issue interpretive guidance on when companies must disclose cybersecurity risks and intrusions. Staffers for the Commerce Committee are finalizing the amendment and aim to introduce it before Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) cybersecurity bill goes to the floor.

This is the sort of activity that I think is going to mark a sea change in digital security over the coming years. I don't expect engineering or technical developments to have anywhere near the same level of impact as issues that involve legislators, lawyers, insurers, and financiers. Stay tuned!

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Copyright 2003-2012 Richard Bejtlich and TaoSecurity (taosecurity.blogspot.com and www.taosecurity.com)

The update on S's lunch-bag serial story:

Today is May 14th! Four years ago today, I wrote my very first entry on the Standalone SysAdmin blog!

In Free advice is worth what you pay for it, I wrote about the genesis of my blogging – it all started with my LiveJournal, and my friends complaining that they didn’t “get” what I was writing…so I moved to blogspot, then to my own VPS.

The blog has really come a long way from this look!

Every once in a while, someone will ask me how to blog. My answer is almost always the same, and it sounds disingenuous, but it isn’t. The answer is to write. Write. Write. Write.

My theory behind blogging is that if you start a blog, you want to eventually be successful and have lots of people read it. If you want lots of people to read it, you want to have stuff for them to read, so you need to write a lot, especially in the beginning. Even if your writing is bad (especially if it’s bad, because then you’re getting practice, too!). Even if you don’t have anything amazing to say.

Just keep writing. Build a body of work, because some day, you’re GOING to write something amazing, and people are going to wonder, “gee, I wonder what else that person has written”, but if you don’t have a body of work, they’re not going to have anything to read, and they’ll leave. So you need to write.

If you look at the early posts on Standalone SysAdmin, there are a few gems among a lot of cruft. But I kept writing anyway. Eventually I wrote better stuff, and more people read it. But it took time to build that body of work, and it took time to build a group of readers.

When I celebrated my first blogiversary, I had a bit over 500 subscribers, and I was highly impressed. Given how my writing was at that time, I’m still impressed ;-)

As it stands right now, I have over 2,700 subscribers (thank you everyone who subscribes!), and in the past six months, I’ve had around 2 million page views (!) according to CloudFlare. That is simply amazing.

I want to thank all of my readers, whether they subscribe or just visit regularly (or even just find me on a Google search). Thanks to everyone who has emailed me over the years offering support, advice, and asking for help. I’m thankful for all of the opportunities you all have given me, and I look forward to blogging for years to come.

This past year at LISA’11, I won a drawing for a free pass to the Technical Sessions at LISA’12 this year in San Diego. Now, that’s kind of silly, because as a member of the LISA Blog Team, I get free admission anyway. So what should I do with it? I guess I could put it on Ebay…

Or I could give it away! To one of you!

So here’s how it’s going to go. You have to work for your entry, but only just. Fill out the following survey for a chance to win the pass to the LISA’12 Tech Sessions pass. This doesn’t get you into training, but it does include 3 days of tech sessions, plus the hallway track and BoFs. I don’t know the value because the prices aren’t up yet, but it’s worth a lot of money.

LISA’12 is in San Diego, California from Sunday, December 9th through Friday, December 14th. The Technical Sessions (what this pass gets you into) is from Wednesady, December 12th through Friday, December 14th. It covers the conference pass only. No airfare, no hotel, no food (except that which may be provided by the conference itself). It’s literally a pass to register for the tech sessions.

So there you go. Fill it out to throw your hat in the ring. Also, I included a thing for “don’t include me in the contest”, since some of you may not want (or need) to win a free pass.

If you have any questions, please throw them in the comments or email me directly at standalone.sysadmin@gmail.com. Thanks for 4 great years!

(Today is another guest post from security expert Scott Pack!)

I spend a lot of time doing text based data processing. A *lot* of time. During an analysis, I often want to do things like look at ‘Top Talkers’, ‘Most Frequent Visitors’, or really anything that comprises a list of unique identifiers sorted by count. As a result, I’ve translated two actions into a series of pipes:

1. What’s the count of events per thingy: “ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n“
2. Who has been doing whatever: “ | sort -u“

This tends to work pretty well in most cases. Today, however, was not one of those cases. While attempting get a list of unique MACs I started out with a source (i.e. non-uniqued) 16GB text file with one MAC per line. This is where things got annoying. Muscle memory kicked in and since this matched Action #2, I ran the following command: cat macs_all.txt | sort -u >; macs_unique.txt

I expected it to take a few minutes, so I went back to the other things I was doing and let it go. I checked back 15 minutes later, and it was still running. Waited 5 minutes…still running. When the command had been running for 45 minutes, I got fed up and decided that I could do better. Perl, being my go to tool, came to the rescue in the form of hashes. I won’t go into gritty detail, but a Perl hash is a data structure that consists of a list of key/value pairs. Whenever you assign a value to a key it will add an entry for the key if it doesn’t exist, or update the value if it does. Since a key cannot be in the same hash multiple times, it makes for a pretty good hack to generate a unique list. This is what I ended up doing:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
my %unique;
 
while( my $line =  )
{
  next unless $line;
  chomp $line;
  $unique{$line} = '';
}
 
for my $key ( keys %unique )
{
  print "$key\n";
}

This worked significantly better for me. The output was not sorted, but that’s fine, I didn’t need it sorted, only unique. The timing information looked a lot better too.

packs@ node1:~> time cat macs_all.txt | sort -u > macs_unique.txt
 
real    181m12.417s
user    176m13.926s
sys     1m42.335s
packs@ node1:~> time cat macs_all.txt | ./fast_uniq.pl > macs_fast_uniqed.txt
 
real    8m9.074s
user    7m28.176s
sys     0m46.271s

The times can’t really be directly compared, since output from fast_uniq.pl isn’t actually sorted. Given the pretty substantial difference I think we can reasonably accept the fact that fast_uniq.pl is better in this use case. After seeing this, I’m tempted to add some functionality so I stop using both sort and uniq entirely.

I’m interested to hear if anyone else has done something similar or explain to me how much my code sucks.

In 2011 Yorba broke ground on a new email application for the GNOME desktop. Codenamed Geary, Yorba plans to bring to the open source community a new lightweight, easy-to-use, feature-rich email client. Our long-term vision for Geary is an email client built for daily use that can be used in place of or alongside Web-based email services. Features we’re planning include:
(...)
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• Hooray! The sun has returned! #
• Lunch! (@ Rogue Kitchen & Wetbar) http://t.co/yO6lbpsI #
• Why can't Eddie Bauer employ more than one person who can run a cash register? Every time I wait ten minutes to pay. Horrible. #
• Escaped Cow Visits McDonald's Drive-Thru, Ponders Circle Of Life http://t.co/nnVPWCT3 #
• According to Elizabeth, skunk cabbage smells like corn, ice cream, strawberries, and bananas. #
• Elizabeth just named the boat in Queen's Park "What Is Your Big Idea". I think she's been reading too many Iain M. Banks novels. #
• Heartland Institute’s horrible anti-global warming billboards are costing them donors http://t.co/X1Yg38SF #
• On this day in 1982: Gilles Villeneuve killed at Zolder http://t.co/ki5FUuo4 #
• Hello. This is a retweet of a tweet. RT @crazybutable Hello. This is a tweet. #
• Hive and Seek: Domestic Honeybees Keep Disappearing, but Are Their Wild Cousins in Trouble, Too? http://t.co/uheQjgqn #
• Ferrari and Jacques Villeneuve come together in tribute to Gilles http://t.co/ng60z2Kf #
• Thanks, bus, for driving right past my stop. I really wanted to get home even later than I already am. #
• On the day Google updates its iPhone G+ app to make it pretty, I haven't been able to check Facebook because its app is horrible. #
• NDP sets up roadblocks to budget bill http://t.co/rn5KnWbt #
• Fish shawarma from @freshlocalwild is delicious! http://t.co/NzQLWJ7y #
• Me: "He's a killer whale! Do you know what his name is?" Elizabeth: "No." Me: "It's Fin!" E: "Fin! I love Fin!" cc/@VanCanucks #
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• The Lego Lord of the Rings Videogame Is Really Happening http://t.co/LPpnECre FUCK and YES. #
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• Hatched and unhatched mason bee cocoons: http://t.co/Kw95tx1y #
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On my day to day work sometimes I have to discover what request are really pushed to my web servers without digging into access logs. So I found some handy tools.

console ready:

• http://justniffer.sourceforge.net/  –  pretty nice multi purpose sniffer with http support
• http://dumpsterventures.com/jason/httpry/  –  packet sniffer for http traffic
• http://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/tshark.html - comes from wireshark tool
• http://www.circlemud.org/jelson/software/tcpflow/ - multi purpose sniffer with convenient file store format
• http://www.rhythm.cx/~steve/devel/tcptrack/ - it is not a sniffer, but it shows us source,amount, tcp state of traffic
• http://www.tcpdump.org/ - of course

gui ready:

• http://www.wireshark.org/ - with remote capture http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup#Step_5:_Capture_traffic_using_a_remote_machine

gui but with capturing http traffic from end user perspective:

• http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/
• http://getfirebug.com/network
• and much more…

Easy to find out just try to download one of the free evaluation copy of RHEL.  I’m definitely not ready:

We noticed that your Red Hat Login uses a personal email address. We’re sorry, but users must have an enterprise or business email address to obtain product evaluations.

Proof of the absurd.

• Too Many Words Again! | www.hathitrust.org
  Great post on Lucene / Solr + memory usage.
  (categories: lucene memory histogram oom solr )

• Changing Bits: Lucene’s RAM usage for searching
  Bunch of tips on memory usage and Lucene / Solr.
  (categories: lucene solr search memory java )

Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone.It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn’t provide.With its help, you will enjoy with the experience of Ubuntu!
(...)
Read the rest of Ubuntu Tweak 0.7.1 released and installation instructions included (207 words)

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Summer has already started and we (a small group of current and ex-IIITians in Hyderabad) are planning to have some fun digging into Ruby on Rails and related technologies. If you are also interested in utilizing your summer in a productive and fun way, you can join us and share your knowledge while learning from the rest of the members at the same time.

Assuming that all of us know at least one programming language (C/C++/Python), below is the list of things we are planning to learn.

1. Ruby
• If you already know a programming language, it’ll not be difficult for you to pick up Ruby.
• In case you happen to know Python, you’ll feel at home.
• Spend a good half an hour on Ruby In Twenty Minutes and you’ll know how simple and beautiful Ruby is.
• Once you are done with Ruby quick-starter, you can try ruby in your browser and have some fun.
• Please go through Ruby Style Guide to see how to write beautiful and easy to understand Ruby code.
2. Rails
• If you have worked with any MVC framework in past, you’ll pickup rails quite easily.
• If you have worked with Web2py, then go through this Rails vc Web2py presentation which tries to show similarities among both frameworks.
• RailsGuides is one of best and complete documentation for getting started with Ruby on Rails. It may look like a lot of content to beginners. If that’s the case with you, you can skip the guides in Digging Deeper section.
• RailsCasts is  like a sea of quality Ruby on Rails screencasts. Watch a few on topics where you may have doubts.
3. jQuery
• We’ll be learning jQuery assuming that all of us are already familiar with JavaScript.
• We’ll learn only basics initially and explore more as we start using it in a Rails project.
4. CoffeeScript
• CoffeeScript is a language that compiles to JavaScript but it’s way more beautiful to look at and easier to read and understand.
• We’ll not write JavaScript code for our Rails app. Instead, we’ll be writing CoffeeScript!
5. SCSS
• SCSS is an extension of CSS3. It’s fun to write stylesheets using SCSS as it brings in additional features like variables, nested rules etc.
• SCSS will ultimately be compiled to CSS.
• Again, there is not much to do here. Half an hour to familiarize yourself with the syntax and you are ready to roll.
6. Twitter Bootstrap
• Bootstrap is a super simple and crazy awesome CSS and JavaScript toolkit developed by twitter.
• We’ll be using bootstrap to power our Rails apps which we’ll build at a later stage.
• Nothing much to learn here. It’s more about getting familiar with commonly used classes.
7. Git and GitHub
• We’ll be using Git for tracking code while building our apps.
• We’ll learn about basic Git functions like cloning a repository, committing code, pushing code to a remote repository, working in different branches etc.
• Go through Git Basics and we can learn more as we start using it full time.
• We’ll be using GitHub to host all our code. If you don’t have an account already, get one.

We’ll learn these technologies while working regularly at our work places. Once in a while, we’ll meet and share our experiences and knowledge. The plan is to spend one or two weeks to go through basic stuff in all the topics. After that we can start a dummy rails project and learn more as we go.

If you are not in Hyderabad and still want to join, just start exploring and we can connect online! Happy Hacking!!!

Fedora Tutorials and Videocache by Kulbir Saini.