Read Rework

Listening to the Exotic Liability the other week, a book was mentioned. Book called Rework. One of the casters (I know who, but not going to name drop here) said he requires his staff to read the book. Since I look up to the guy, hey we all have our info-sec heroes and he's one of mine, I got the book.

It's a business book written by the guys at 37Signals. It was actually a very fast read, and I was familiar with the concepts already. I didn't agree with everything in the book, but I agreed with the majority of it.

It contains concepts of why hiring Rockstars just to hire them is a bad idea. Why meetings suck the life out of your team. Don't chase the large customer, do what you think is right. Run it like you want to be the best you can be. The biggest thing I like in it was the Decisions and Quick Wins.

I have project coming up. I've been thinking that it's going to be a pain, and felt overwhelmed a few times. I'm going to set up the new web site for the Martial Arts School I teach at. Updating it to run on Drupal and the like. The book showed me I can do sections of it at a time, and go from there. Thinking up a finished product and pushing to that keeps you from being agile enough to change. Things won't be as good.

But if I start small, and go from there. Get the basic site up first, and then add things as needed, it'll be better. It'll give me time to move on feedback better. Which will make the site better.

So instead of installing drupal, getting blogs and forums set up, and user accounts, locked video section and all the different pages. I'm going to start with the basic drupal website. Add a few pages to it. And then add things as needed going forward.

Seriously the book is worth the read. It shows how you can be a lean mean company, hobby, or employee and ADD value instead of just being a Cog.

Wrote a book review

So I said I was reading Hacking for Dummies, 3rd edition. I finished it a while ago. Part of the reason I was reading it was to write a book review for an online magazine.

The book review is up: Ethical Hacker Network Book Review

it's been a while

I'd love to say I have been spending the last month playing with my great new CCNA lab, but I haven't been. It's sitting on a chair in my front room right now. I have almost everything I need. All I have to get is a rack, a shelf, a pdu (perfer a switched pdu), and a PC to rule it all (which is sitting half a part on my kitchen table and floor, changing cases).

However, due to projects at work, I'm back to studying Xen. The last book I had sucked. In fact it sucked so bad that all the errata I submitted has yet to show up. I will not be wasting my time with that book anymore, and probably will just toss it into the recycle bin the next time I find it.

I recently purchased Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization. It's really good. I mean really really good. I did have some problem with the Xen 3.0.3-0 LiveCD, but that's not the book's fault. I am also seriously telling everyone I know in computers to buy this book.

Other things I have worked on...

Well once again, I remind everyone in the department why you want physical security on the servers, not just software. I've had 5 boxes, from a company the people I work for bought out, that had to have data or other things accessed. 4 of the 5 went down easy with TRK. We just reset the administrator password, that's right I get paid to crack boxes. The last one we had to do a little different. We really needed the data off of it, and it turns out that KDE based linux distros (at least the 2 we tried) don't handle ntfs mounts very well maybe it's just something in the debian tree, I'll have to check more later. However Fedora 8 (gnome desktop)got the data no problem did. Even if it is taking all day to copy the data over to our usb drive (probably could have done a network drop faster but I was teaching the windows admin how to use the stuff, and he went with the usb drive).

I recently got to build out a system to move the large amounts of data we get from customers to our network in what we hope will be a faster way. Get the drive, take it out of it's usb case, put it into a removable SATA tray and copy it up to the share at gb speeds (after they get the line ran next week, so for now it will be 100mb speed). It's been a pain in my but to get the system up, problems with the Nix distros I wanted to install, bios updates, things breaking when I install the drivers. It went from being a Linux box, to a Win2k3 to an XP-64bit box. I'm hoping XP will work since intel's excuse is it's meant to be a desktop box. It has to be up and running by morning though, which is why I'm still at work at almost 22:30 edt.

Today I also got to design an 8TB storage system. I'm hoping it will work, I'll find out in a week or so when the hardware comes in. 8 sata drives, 1 ide drive (os), lots of memory and FreeNAS

Xen Virtualization: The book - update

I decided to not build the last two xen boxes in chapter 3. So far the book has been a major disappointment. The author wasn't even trying in chapter 3. And I really wonder if the reviewers read the book.

Whole steps were left out while installing the NetBSD box, and instead of giving pointers to make things work during install, it was a case of oh just go read this web page on the NetBSD site.

Overall I'm very disappointed with the book.

The reading so far

So far, I'm 16 pages in, and have installed Xen on Fedora core 8. It's up and running dom0, but that's the extent of it. Next I'll learn how to install xen from source.

So far, I found one part that took me a second to realize what happened. They referred to system emulation on one page, and then referred to it again as hardware emulation after turning the page. Maybe a nitpick but I did file an errata on it.

Another thing, they're using FC6 in the book, I'm using FC8. When I did my yum install, yum install kernel-xen xen I got about 3 more packages than they said I would. I'm not complaining though. I figure it's a difference in the systems. The ifconfig screen capture left me scratching my head, I'm missing one of the interfaces they said I would see, and 2 of them are called something else. One command didn't work as advertised either. But again, that is probably a difference in the software vs when the book was written.

It's not fair to tear apart a book before you read it, is it?

Ok, I'll be fair. I've only made it 5 pages in to the book so far. Basically the TOC and the Preface. The last page of the TOC fell out already... It's a brand new book, just arrived today. I know sometimes the binding doesn't take well.

The other thing I saw that bothers me, after just thumbing through it at random, is the Typesetting. There are large sections of pages where they didn't put anything. You think you're at the end of the chapter, only to turn the page and get a paragraph that was too large for the previous page. Instead of carrying over, they mid paragraph, they move the whole paragraph to the next page. Which of course used up more space. Otherwise the book would probably only be 100 pages. (Well maybe not).

Lots of screen shots, and they drag text from the paragraph with them too.

Minor annoyance, they mention customer support in the preface, but then leave out all ways of contacting said group. Unless of course they mean the Errata and question sections on the next page, after the large gap at the bottom of the Customer Support page. Probably about 1/5 of the page. (The section between the boarders). They are also trying to get more writers in the preface too.

An O'Reilly book, it's not. I'll do a more proper update later, after reading more of it.