Ok I’ve just painstakingly restored all the posts I could find since September 10th until now from Google Cache.

I’ve worked out the maximum posts missing would be 1 as I could get the cache back to September 12th and the latest post before that is September 10th, or I might not have posted on September 11th anyway.

Anyhow things should all be restored now – and it was incredibly boring…so it shows the power of taking regular backups. I’m incredibly thankful I took my own backup on September 10th…I can’t imagine what it would be like if I hadn’t backed up or it was 2-3 months out of date.

I made a few upgrades as well seen as though I was re-installing the whole site..I’ve upgraded to the latest branch of Wordress – 2.3 and I’ve internalized the tags so they no longer point to Technorati. I’ve also upgraded all plugins and mods so we should be stable and secure now.

You can now click the tags on the index or inside posts and they will take you to the tag archive page for that tag.

The sites feels a bit faster and more responsive to me after I’ve upgraded to 2.3, but that might just be me.

Do let me know what the performance is like from your side.

I’m most likely going to get a VPS to run Darknet on, so there might be a very minor down-time shortly when I shift over to that, but after that it should be rock steady and fast.

If you spot anything funky or something going wrong/error/weird behaviour/files missing just drop me a comment or use the contact form and let me know.

Regular posting will resume in the next 1-2 days after I get some sleep.

Thanks for the kind words, e-mails and comments – I appreciate it!

This is a bit of hacking in the original sense of the word, taking a $60 router and giving it the capabilities of something costing in the hundreds or thousands (enterprise level).

Of all the great DIY projects at this year’s Maker Faire, the one project that really caught my eye involved converting a regular old $60 router into a powerful, highly configurable $600 router. The router has an interesting history, but all you really need to know is that the special sauce lies in embedding Linux in your router. I found this project especially attractive because: 1) It’s easy, and 2) it’s totally free.

I’ve done something similar before with the same series of Linksys router, it’s pretty cool!

What you’ll need:

1. One of the supported routers. I used a Linksys WRT54GL Wireless router that I picked up from Newegg, and the instructions that follow detail the upgrade process specifically for that router and its close siblings. If you’re upgrading one of the other supported routers, you might want to look into instructions specific to your router. These instructions may generally work for other supported routers, but I’m not making any promises.
2. The generic DD-WRT v23 SP1 mini firmware version.
3. The generic DD-WRT v23 SP1 standard firmware version.

You’ll be upgrading twice.

Pretty neat stuff, check it out and more at the DD-WRT Wiki.

Source: LifeHacker

Microsoft has taken a bit of a leap with the integration of .net into SQL Server, and a lot of developers(Myself included) are worrying about what security implications this could have. DevX.com have taken an in-depth look into the guts of it, and spilled them onto a page for us all to look at.

CAS provides a code-based rather than user-based authorization scheme to prevent various kinds of luring and other code attacks. But how does that security scheme coexist with SQL Server 2005′s own, newly enhanced security features? By default your .NET code is reasonably secure, but it’s all too easy for the two security schemes to butt heads and cause you grief. In this article I’ll look briefly at the concept behind CAS and a few new security features in SQL Server 2005, then explore how to make the two systems work for you instead of against you as you take advantage of these advanced programming features in SQL Server.

They seem suitably impressed, but sensibly wary at the same time.

The good news is that Microsoft did a great job bringing together the security systems of SQL Server and the Common Language Runtime, with tools to control code. But there are some interesting features’ both to watch for and to take advantage of!

So over a month down the line, our SQL2005 upgrade project should now be in the workable prototype stage. But as with all things that “should” be(More security in IE, Great Britain ruling the world and my kitchen being fitted), it’s not, it’s not even close. On top of this our company is currently undergoing some “painful but neccessary steps to streamline our profitiablility in the european market”. In other words, lots of people are about to get the chop. Anyhow, on with the analysis.

SQL Server 2000 -> 2005 upgrade tool.

Overall I’m impressed with the upgrade tool, it made a fine job of upgrading our code and data, with almost everything going straight into 2005. All our DTS’s were wiped as expected, and our custom written security mod was discarded as a “fault” in the 2000 install(Not a big deal), but everything else looked fine. Little were we to know a shitstorm was about to start when we released the 2005 run site to a small group of testers. As a constant piece of self-evaluation we allow some users to run there own SQL code, it’s nothing major, just simple “Get this from here” stuff, but it allows us to monitor what users can access and when we have to change security or file flow we can be sure that normal users cannot access sensitive data. Unfortunately 2005 didn’t have the same notion of security that we do, and decided that encrypted fields that were created using our custom mod weren’t really that important, so it unencrypted them all using our mod(Hang on, I thought our mod was a “Fault”?) and then removed the permissions, allowing users to get direct access to the data. That’s a bad thing. So we pulled the plug immediately and scrapped the whole server, experiment over.

We learnt a couple of important lessons there, the main one being, dont trust the update tool. It un-encrypted the data without informing us, and removed permissions without raising an error(Allthough the permissions removal was later found buried in the upgrade log).

Initial impressions

There was some fairly impressive(From an MS point of view) changes to how SQL installs that caught our eye, namely the large number of components and features that were disabled by default. Not least XP_cmdshell, that is generally used to execute external programs or hack into sql databases. About fucking time too.

If your an MSSQL2000 regular you’ll be hoping to just boot up 2005 and have your permissions all working, but unfortunately its not that simple. The security model has changed radically, and your going to have to work a lot harder to keep things secure, but the means to do so have actually been provided this time. With principals and securables being included this time around, you will have to be a lot more careful, but once your in the know your a lot more secure. As always the best place to read up on this stuff is the MSDN, particularly this section on the changes between 2000 and 2005.

Enterprise Server Pricing

While I’m harping on about how great MSSQL2005 is, a lot of you are sat there wondering why were not using Oracle. Well the price is the the main reason, and I was going to have a detailed breakdown of the difference in costs between MSSQL2005 and Oracle with our current setup. But as a friend of mine quite rightly pointed out our setup could be radically changed by deploying Oracle, with us maybe needing less servers and therefore less licenses. So I’ll work on the principle that were upgrading to an identical network, but its not a 100% accurate comparison.

MSSQL2005 has a fairly simple licensing scheme, with no issues involving DC or HT chips, and a clear definition of what a “user” is and where that user can access the data from. On average a 1 processor license of SQL Server standard will set you back £4500GBP($8300USD), which is a tiny cost for any medium to large company. If your a fairly small company you can get a 5 CLT(Not to sure what the acronym is, but its a Client Access License) for around £600GBP($1100USD). Now for us we would be looking at per processor, and we have 23 processors running SQL2000, with the rest of the boxes using MSDN versions for development. So in total for our entire setup to go 2005 it would cost us £103500GBP($192000USD), which is again a fairly small amount of money for us to spend on replacing our entire database setup.

Now, Oracle. Its a little bit harder to find out what Oracles charges, and I’m not going to go into the details, you can find all the relevant info on there website if you wish to check what I’ve come up with. I’ve used the price offered by oracle themselves for a perpetual processor license(£23236GBP($42996USD)), but oracles pricing is per core for there enterprise product, and considering nearly all our servers run on xeons, were looking at a hefty bill. In total we have 43 “Oracle” processors, giving us a total bill of £999148GBP($1900000USD). Yes, thats almost one million pounds. Again thats not an enormous amount of money for a company our size, but when your compairing the two side by side, you have to wonder where all that extra cost comes from.

For next time

Round 3 will involve us upgrading one of our smaller and less mission critical databases(IT Support) and trying to switch over. Then we can have a bash at breaking it.