Dadnology

Cloud Storage: Where does your information live?

2012-01-24T11:49:00.001-05:00

Increasingly more and more people are using cloud storage services to share files between each other. E-mail was fine back when hardly anyone had a file that was more that 20 MB in size. But we live in an age when a single high-resolution picture for a camera phone could be 5 MB itself or more. And lets not even get started with those videos of your kids playing in the sprinkler during summer or that report for work/school you have to share with people who aren't on Google/Facebook/Hotmail/etc. And corporate networks are the worse. You can't send them anything. So what do you do? Why cloud storage of course.

What Is Cloud Storage
Direct from the Wikipedia Page,

Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored on virtualized pools of storage which are generally hosted by third parties. Hosting companies operate large data centers; and people who require their data to be hosted buy or lease storage capacity from them and use it for their storage needs. The data center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to the requirements of the customer and expose them as storage pools, which the customers can themselves use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resource may span across multiple servers.

Fancy huh? Long and short is companies on the Internet have huge amounts of storage that they setup and make available for people to use to share files. Most services give you anywhere from 1 GB to 5 GB free with some limitations. After that you can pay for additional storage and features (i.e. group sharing, ssl, encryption). Great concept right?

Do You Own Your Cloud Data?
Have you heard of MegaUpload? Brief history is MegaUpload "was" a cloud storage service in the strictest definition of the term. People would upload files to it and MegaUpload would give you a URL where the files could be download from on their servers. This URL could be given to anyone you knew online so they could get access to those files. So issues like e-mail caps were no longer an issue. Awesome. Problem is some people thought it would be great to upload copyrighted material like blockbuster movies, bestseller books, new music releases and such. This is a bad thing.

But the law has a provision that if a service is notified of copyrighted material being hosted on their servers they have time to take the offending material down before they get in trouble. So as long as they don't know about said files everything is fine. Well kind of fine. The problem MegaUpload and a number of similar services presented was they knew not only that people were uploading copyrighted material but they encouraged it. Even to the point where they tried to index it so they could make ad revenue off of the users who used the service to search it out and download it. Doing this gives agencies like the FBI reason to break down your doors and take you to jail. No Bueno.

It should always be kept in the back of your mind that all cloud servers should be used as a secondary backup solution. Never put something up in the cloud that if the service went away tomorrow you couldn't get from somewhere else. Be it another cloud storage service, local backup, etc. Most services have provision to protect your data but everyone is one fire, earthquake, intrusion, or asteroid away from loosing your data forever. So duplicate, triplicate, etc. whenever possible.

So Why Should I Trust Cloud Storage?
Simply put, not all cloud storage services are like MegaUpload. Not even most. There are legitimate reasons to use them. If you broke down the usage of even MegaUpload you would probably find that there were a large number if not even a majority of people storing non copyrighted material on the service for legal purposes. It's sad that one company can give an entire industry a black eye but that is what happens some times.

Who Should You Trust?
As I stated earlier you should trust no one. But as long as you protect yourself and don't falsely believe that any of these services are going to be around for 100 years they are to say the least useful. I created a poll on Go Poll Go with names of some of the service I've heard good things about or trust (Online poll from GoPollGo) .

Google Storage
Google Storage isn't a services as much as an add-on. Starting at $5 a year you can get an additional 20 GB of storage to use across all of your Google services. That means Gmail, Picasaweb, Docs, Sites, etc. The bonus is with Google Docs you can now upload any file and store in your Google Docs folder. Be it a video, an application, a document or a picture. Just don't convert it to Google Docs format and it will be unchanged. After upload you can share it to anyone you want on or off Google.

Dropbox
The current leader at least in mind-share for cloud storage. You get 2 GB of storage free and can sync files with your Mac, Windows box, Linux workstation, iPad, iPhone, and Android phone or tablet. Hell I think you can sync it with your alarm clock. Additional storage does get a little pricey. $99 for 50 GB a year. That hits pockets hard. But to say this is the most useful of all the cloud storage services would be to say breathing is important to living. A gross understatement.

Box.net
This is going to sound cruel but Box.net can be considered a Dropbox clone. They do pretty much the same thing. The positive is Box.net gives your 5 GB free instead of 2 GB like Dropbox. After that it becomes more expensive in the log run for additional storage. And the free account doesn't have the secure sharing features like Dropbox. Also, while it is widely adopted it doesn't have the traction like again Dropbox. Box.net's enterprise solutions are way more fleshed out that Dropbox so if that appeals to you that might give it the edge.

Minus.com
Minus is a little of the sketchy side because of how similar it is to MegaUpload and its competitors. Compared to Dropbox and Box.net it could be looked as the "Wild Wild West". But it is fast and easy to use and one of my go to utilities. Best of all it is free and give you 10 GB of storage with an additional 1 GB every time you refer someone to sign up. Plus they're mobile apps to upload and download your files.

PogoPlug
One of these things is not like the other? That would be PogoPlug. PogoPlug is a device you plug into your home network with USB attached storage. This makes the storage available to you anywhere on the Internet. Great concept since you could put anything from a 5 GB thumb drive to a 2 TB external USB hard drive on it and same anything anywhere. The thing to keep in mind however is your speed is that of your home network. So if you want to download a bunch of data from home to work that will count against your home ISP data cap (150 GB to 250 GB in most cases). Also, if you have slow Internet speeds at home that is how fast you will be able to retrieve your data. Bummer.

Hope this info helped.

The Ark of Humanity

2012-01-19T10:41:00.000-05:00

The Orcam Orbital Camera System

I'm a pretty big SciFi fan. Not huge, but if I have a choice between an action or science fiction movie I'm pretty sure I'm picking aliens and time travel. So needless to say when I went though my Google Reader feed this morning and I see the a post from The Verge about a 3D scanner that can take perfect digital representations of objects it got me to thinking about every way out SciFi movie I had ever seen.

What if we were at the point in our existence where we could create digital Arks and send them out to the furthest reaches of space. Would we put the "I have a Dream" speech in next to the 1948 World Series? What would be our "Great Spinx" that we would want civilizations millions of years from now billions of miles from here to see and learn about us? I bet if we got NASA working on it they could figure out some great 3D technology that didn't require glasses.

Taking it a step further. What if we could put a to scale representation of Earth and its history in a virtual environment? Maybe hologram. Maybe something like the virtual world in in Caprica? But it would be Earth at any point in its history. With actual "sentient" constructs that would interact with the being that came into contact with the Ark. The library in The Time Machine remake from a few years back. (They make a Wiki for everything now). That could be our modern day version of The Great Pyramids. A collection of our wisdom, culture, and history without the preserved human remains and curses anyway.

The one flaw in my fantasy is with as expansive as space is and the billions of years we know the universe has existed, why hasn't any other lifeform done something like this that we could have stumbled upon. Would hate to think God had a giant billboard at the edge of our solar system telling everyone else to keep it moving. Nothing to see here. And yes I did actually like 2010: The Year We Made Contact.

Blank Slate or How I Got My Inbox Back

2012-01-12T12:45:00.001-05:00

Taking Control of Email

I received my Gmail invite just after my birthday in 2004. I just check and I still have my welcome e-mail as my first message. On like page 624 of my inbox. Yikes!!!

If your like me you probably has used your Gmail account like a message repository since day one. The bad thing is 2700 days later (give or take a few dozen) you end up with a seemingly endless number of messages. Of which you can't tell the "Family Vacation to Texas" pictures from the "Pick up some milk on the way home" ones. This problem is mitigated a lot by the awesome search features built into Gmail as well as the Gmail-ers best friend "Priority Mail Box". But still you need a little order in your life. It would be nice open up your mail Gmail Inbox and only see a few things that matter you you and not the "1 of Many" notifiers you get when you have pages upon pages of messages just stuck in your Inbox. Now if your an email Samurai like Gina Trapani you could go though your entire Inbox and read (or at least eyeball) everything. But I'm not a business (yet) and while I may care about people I don't like most of them to stay interested that long in what they are saying. So the only thing that is left is of course the Nuclear Option.

The Nuclear Option
A lot of people don't know that the Inbox is actually just a label. Whenever email is delivered to your Gmail account it is labeled "Inbox" and unread. Reading an email marks it read but it stays in your Inbox. On way to remedy this is to use your Archive function.

Archive is just another label. Just less prominent. Everything is still in your mailbox but if your archive a message it is just put to the background. It is still searchable and not deleted. This is where the leap of faith comes in. On your left hand Gmail navigation bar you need to hover over Inbox and scroll down until you get to the more drop down. Click on More and you will see "All Mail". Click on "All Mail" and all your mail messages sorted by date should appear. Now just under the search box above your mailbox you should see a grey box with a square in it. This is your select box. Click on it and choose "All". This will select all the emails in the browser window. Now here come the hard part. Just above your first email you will see the words "All 100 conversations on this page are selected. Select all (some number) conversations in All Mail". Click the highlighted part. This will select every email in your mailbox. Now hit the "e" key to Archive all your messages.

Oh My God!!! Did I just say archive everything? But ... where will my messages go? Simmer down now. You can see everything again just by going to All Mail as described before or going to your Archive label. And like I said everything is searchable. Which are small prices to pay for the ability to click on your Inbox and see... Nothing. Total order and silence. Yes this would be like moving all humans to Mars so you can have some breathing room. But it works. Now when you open up your mailbox you know what is in there is new or important. Plus it is a lot easier to clean an almost empty mailbox weekly than going though tens or hundreds of thousands of mail messages.

Yes there are tons of messages in my mailbox that you probably didn't read. And some would consider that rude. But really were you ever going to read them? How important is a unread "How are you today" email form a person you don't even date anymore from 2008? Not very. So start new. I know I'm doing this every Jan 1 from now on. Last year was a year ago. Time to move on. And job one every Jan 1 from now on is Gmail cleaning. And just to help you along here are some quick gmail shortcuts you can use to plow though your messages and stop emails from piling up again.

Archive a message - "e"

Delete a message - "#"

Next Message - "j"

Previous Message - "k"

Star a message - "s"

Mark as Important - "= or +"

Admin Corner: Add a Service in RHEL

2012-01-09T16:02:00.002-05:00

So you have a Linux box your using as a LAMP server (Linux Apache mySQL PHP). But you are not an experienced admin and the thought of downloading and compiling AMP part is keeping you up at night. So you decided to use a pre-packaged developer suite call XAMPP. You just uncompress the file and run a command and BANG you have your own web application platform. Simply awesome.

But the reality starts to set in. Every time you reboot the box you have to start the service up manually. And sometimes you get nasty mySQL errors because the server stopped right in the middle of a transaction. What to do what to do? Well my friend I’ve been right where you are. And I figured out though much Google search and smart fellow users of XAMPP on Linux how to add the package as a service on RedHat Enterprise Linux based distributions. Namely CentOS for my example. After this is setup you will be able to:

1. Specify which run levels XAMPP will run at.
2. Auto create the start and stop scripts for those run levels.
3. Check on the status of the service using the service command.
4. Modify which runlevels the service runs on using the chkconfig command.

Special Note:
Please be advised that out of the box XAMPP is a developer tool. It is not meant for production deployment of services. mySQL has no root password, Apache SSL is not totally configured, and services like ftp are spawned by default. Please only setup XAMPP in a secure development environment knowing the risks involved.

The Service Command
Most distros of Linux that I have run have the service command. Basically, it is the interface for all the services that the OS starts up and shuts down automatically. Its basic uses are

service --status-all
service “service name” status
service “service name” start|stop

The --status-all option returns a full list of the operational states of all services. Now this list can be a little long so you may want to pipe it though the less or grep command if you looking for something specific. If you know the name of your service you can user the “service name” status option to see its current state. And of course the start|stop options starts or stops the service. Most applications have a script that conform to these commands. Now to setup the the service so we can use this command.

Edit the Start-up File
Most application packages like XAMPP have a start-up files that allows you to start or stop the app. If we assume you installed the package in the default location (/opt) that file should be /opt/lampp/lampp . Now yes the package is called XAMPP but on Linux its called lampp. Annoying but that’s Linux baby. Anyhow first thing you want to do is make a trivial but important edit to the start-up file. Using your favorite editor add the following comment to the file:

# chkconfig: 1-5 95 05

This comment will not effect your scripts operation so don’t worry about that. After the chkconfig: you have the numbers 1-5. These represent the run-levels the service will operate on. All the runlevels should be typed next to each other with no spaces. So run levels 2, 3, 4, 5 would be 2345. The second number is the priority of start scripts. The last number is the priority for kill scripts. For most uses the last two numbers don’t matter but if you are using this tip on a production or secure system you may want to do further research.

Adding and Activating the Service
Now comes the fun part. After you have edited the start-up script you want to create a symbolic link for the script to the /etc/xinit.d directory. The command should look like:

ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp /etc/init.d/lampp

Once that is done you want you activate the service by running the following command:

chkconfig --add lampp

And there you go. Your new service should be be installed. You can run these commands to make sure:

service lampp status
chkconfig --list | grep lampp

And of course to start your service if you haven’t already done so you would run:

service lampp start

Things to Think About
Like I said earlier software applications may start up a number of services you may not want running on your server. So take care to look though the start-up script to see what is there. Most times you can do so simply by invoking the script.

The Admin Corner: Leave Environment Alone

2012-01-05T13:03:00.000-05:00

Tux the Linux Mascot

The Admin Corner: Leave Environment Alone

Part of an admin's job is securing his systems. Not fun I know. But if you want to make sure that you system isn't frequented by citizens of the Peoples Democratic Region of wherever you need to take some things into account. One of those as I am learning is access to the terminal. Specifically the mesg command.

The mesg command controls the ability of other users to write to the terminal your currently logged into. The old “write” and “talk” commands allow you to send messages to other users logged into the system when “mesg y” is invoked. While this is not a huge security backdoor, it does allow for someone to circumvent security and view sensitive data on said system. So it is advised when locking down systems to use the “mesg n” command in all initialization scripts to turn off the ability for other users to write to your terminal. One problem though. /etc/environment.

The file /etc/environment is a global initialization file. You can add system wide variables in it for use for all users and daemons. So it would seem like a perfect place to put “mesg n” right? WRONG!!! I haven’t tired this on Debian distros yet but commands that deal with the terminal when put into the /etc/environment file cause … issues. I saw PAM permissions issues, authentication issues, and biggest of all all my cron jobs just stopped working. Big issue when I have reports that have to be produced daily and weekly. Luckily after some research I found the issue and took the “mesg n” command out.

Again I don’t know if this is the same for all Linux distros. But at least with RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux) based once be aware. You can catch most this issues in the /var/log/cron and /var/log/security files. Especially when cron jobs are supposed to launch so do a “crontab -l” or “crontab -l -u username” for a point of reference when things are supposed to happen. If you see issues specific to crond or PAM authentication try commenting out commands like “echo” or “mesg” and anything else that writes to the terminal.

Cool App - Shush! Ringer Restorer

2012-01-03T11:20:00.000-05:00

Shush! Ringer Restorer

It's not a game. Its not a spreadsheet. And it won't order you lunch. But this app will save me more than once. Pretty much I am famous for putting my phone on vibrate and forgetting to put the ringer back on. Well thanks to my favorite podcast All About Android (Follow them on their Google Plus Brand Page) I heard about Shush! Ringer Restorer.

Ringer Restorer Dialog Box

Plain and simple you turn your ringer all the way down using your volume controls to vibrate. Shush! kicks in put showing you a pop up asking you when in quarter hour increments do you want your ringer restored. And that's that. No more "Why don't you answer your phone" voice mails for me. I hope anyway.