Endianness is the bit/byte ordering (thus aka byte ordering) used to store values, typically in regard to memory and streams of data over a network. This comes up occasionally with heterogenous integration and the bugs that can result. Basically, little-endian is used with the x86 chipset and big-endian is used for the PowerPC line, although in some cases PowerPC can be bi-endian, meaning that it can switch endianness. Well, it doesn’t actually do so from a hardware standpoint but instead when they’re in little-endian mode the software is little-endian, but multi-byte values end up getting swapped to big-endian during memory load. Big-endian moves up in order – addresses increase upward.…
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SMB: Name Mangling
Windows 3.x and earlier used what was known as an 8.3 naming scheme, meaning that files had eight places for a name, three for an extension and a dot in the middle. Name decorating is programatically how Windows 3.x and DOS clients interact with files that have more than 8 characters followed by a dot and then three characters for a file extension. Those of us who can remember doing mass migrations of data from Windows 3.x to Windows 9x and/or NT will remember well the naming changes that had to happen to maintain backwards compatibility during this trying time. Especially if we had been using *nix boxen to store…
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Revenue and the Big Boys
I have been known to be a little harsh towards Sun. This is because I expect so much from them, not because I don’t love ’em. Quality products that are truly enterprise scalable are not a commodity and few understand this as well as Sun. Given how I’ve given them crap, I should also give them kudos. Between Q2 of 2007 and Q2 of 2008 they experienced 29.2% in revenue growth. During that same time span, that’s almost more the aggregate of the other four big boys (from a percentage standpoint), Dell (14.2%), EMC (19.7%), IBM (2.6%) and HP (who actually lost revenue at -1.2%). So while I still…
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Heterogenous Block Level File Replication
File Replication Pro is a software package that will replicate data from one host to another, across a few different operating systems. You essentially define a source, a destination, what kind of replication and a schedule. One of the scheduling options is to simply always keep data in synchronization, which appears to be one of the main uses of the software. File Replication Pro isn’t cheap. Reason being that once an initial replication is complete it does not simply copy files – it copies delta changes to files. So if 4k worth of a file changes, then it’s only going to sync that amount of data, once the initial file…
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Kerio Mail Server in 10 Minutes
The good people at Kerio have been kind enough to distribute their mail server software bundled into a CentOS installation on a Virtual Machine. You can just snap it into Fusion very easily, if you want to take the Kerio Mail Server (KMS) for a ride. I can’t say I would recommend running it full time in Fusion on Mac hardware though, you might be better served installing the package installer that Kerio distributes in that case.. There is a second nice thing about the VM in that it does most of the work in setting up Kerio for you. When you download and run the VM, it immediately fires…
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UNIX Epoch Time Stamp Now 1234567890
It is Friday, Feb. 13 at 6:31:30 PM (EST on the server). According to the Unix Epoch Time Stamp it is now 1234567890.
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Mac OS X Server and WINS
I get a lot of questions about why a Windows computer cannot see a Mac OS X Server on the network when Macs can – or put differently why a Windows computer cannot browse the network for a Mac OS X Server. The first thing I always ask is can you ping it by IP address AND by name. If you can ping the host by IP address then you know the host can communicate with the client. If you cannot then you could be having DNS issues or NetBIOS issues. If you use DNS then that’s easy enough to fix, create or edit the record for the server and…
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Course on FreeBSD internals
The first hour of Marshall Kirk McKusick’s course on FreeBSD kernel internals.
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USB Sniffing
Some projects are stranger than others. Today I embarked on reverse engineering a certain wireless device. In order to do so it became apparent that I would need to intercept my USB traffic and then be able to analyze it and likely send my own traffic over the USB. I ended up using a Beagle USB Protocol Analyzer and was very happy with it (it’s pretty inexpensive for what it does), given my specific requirements. I also ended up using the Wireshark’s USB analysis tool available here, although with more limited success. But while looking for a tool appropriate to my task I did find a few other tools out…
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Samba 4: A Poor Mans Active Directory
Today I pulled down the Samba 4 binaries and installed it using the instructions the developers are slowly building on the Samba 4 wiki. Overall it was a fairly painless experience, although I do believe I have a couple of bug reports to file (not surprising considering it is not out yet). Overall I found the process to be far easier than it has been in the past. The Samba team seems to realize that in order for Samba 4 to compete with Active Directory that it needs to integrate really well in the *nix server ecosystem. For example, like Active Directory you can choose to have Samba integrate into…