JDPFu.com 2025

Saw an article today that someone has decided to sell WPA passphrase cracking service for about $40. It takes about 40 minutes, but on average just 20 minutes. Seems he has a Beowulf compute cluster with idle time.

If this is what some guy can do, imagine what different governments can do.

Once again, no consumer-grade WiFi is deemed non-secure. Go wired if you care at all. There is no secure wifi/radio networking, none.

Many companies don’t really consider the bloating of server operating systems as a real problem to be addressed. This is wrong because as soon as you write any data to disk, you’ve just signed up your company to safeguard that data multiple times (3-90) for the next 3-5 years, if not longer.

How did I come up with this?

Assumptions – hopefully realistic for your situation

• Windows 2008 Server – 20GB installation for the OS only (MS says 32GB of disk is the min)
• Data is stored on a SAN, so we will ignore it. The size of data isn’t the issue in this article.
• Compressed and incremental backups are performed with 30 days retained.
• At least 1 copy is maintained off site for DR

Break down of backup disk use

• Install image – 20GB of storage
• OS Backup – 20GB of storage
• Off site Backup – 20GB of storage
• 2 extra copies of backup – 40GB of storage

Total is 100GB of storage media for a single Windows 2008 Server install. Not all that bad, really. Then consider that even small businesses probably have 5 computer servers, that becomes 500GB of storage. Still not so bad. Heck, your DR plan is just to copy the last backup to an external drive and take it home every Friday. Good enough.

Now imagine you have 50 or 100 or 1000 or 20,000 installations. Now it gets tougher to deal with. Those simple backups become 25TB, 50TB, 500TB and 10PB of storage and you haven’t got anything but the OS backed up – no data.

Alternatives?

1. Data deduplication on archive storage frames
2. Fixed OS images – if they are all the same, you only need 1 backup
3. Use a smaller OS image

Data Deduplication

Data Deduplication has been an expensive option that small companies with normal data requirements wouldn’t deploy due to cost, complexity and lacking skills. This is about to change with the newest Sun ZFS that should be out early 2010. It is already available in OpenSolaris, if you want to get started with trials. I’ve seen demonstrations with 90% OS deduplication. That means for every added server OS install, you only add 10% more to be backed up. Obviously, this will increase whenever a new OS or patch deployment over weeks and months occur, but this solution is compelling and will easily pay for itself with any non-trivial server infrastructure.

Fixed OS Images

This is always a good idea, but with the way that MS-Windows performs installations, files are written all over the place and registry entries are best applied only by installation tools. Configuration methods on Windows tends to be point and click, which can’t be scripted effectively.

On UNIX-like operating systems, base images can be installed, application installation scripted and overall configuration settings scripted too. There are a number of tools that make this easy, like Puppet. This is FOSS.

Use a Smaller OS

Xen Ubuntu Linux 8.04.x running a complete enterprise messaging system with over a years worth of data is under 8GB including 30 days of incremental backups. Other single purpose server disk requirements are smaller, much smaller. This blog server is 2.6GB with 30days of incremental backups. That’s almost a 10x factor smaller than MS-Windows server. Virtualization helps too. JeOS is a smaller Ubuntu OS install meant for virtual servers.

No Single Answer

There is no single answer to this problem. I doubt any company can run completely on Linux systems only. Data deduplication is becoming more and more possible for backups, but it isn’t ready for transactional, live systems. Using fixed OS images is a best practice, but many software systems demand specialized installation and settings which make this solution exponentially complex.

A hybrid solution will likely be the best for the next few years, but as customers, we need to voice our concerns over this issue with every operating system provider.

The script below was created as part of an Alfresco upgrade process and meant to be run manually. This is fairly trivial cold backup script for Alfresco 2.9b, which is a dead release tree from our friends at Alfresco. It hasn’t been tested with any other version and only backs up locally, but could easily backup remote with sshfs or nfs mounts or even rdiff-backup commands swapped in.

For nightly backup of our production servers, we actually perform rdiff-backups of shutdown virtual machines, which take about 3 minutes each. That little amount of downtime to have a differential backup of the entire VM is worth it to us.

#!/bin/sh
# ###############################################################
# This script should not be run from cron. It will wait for the mysql
# DB password to be entered.
# 
#  Created by JDPFU 10/2009
# 
# ###############################################################
# Alfresco Backup Script - tested with Alfresco v2.9b
#   Gets the following files
#    - alf_data/
#    - Alfresco MySQL DB
#    - Alf - Extensions
#    - Alf - Global Settings
# ###############################################################
export TOP_DIR=/opt/Alfresco2.9b
DB_NAME=alfresco_2010_8392
export EXT_DIR=$TOP_DIR/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension
export BACK_DIR=/backup/ALFRESCO
export BACKX_DIR=$BACK_DIR/extension

# Shutdown Alfresco
/etc/init.d/alfresco.sh stop

# Backup the DB and important files.
# dir.root setting will change in the next version
/usr/bin/mkdir  -p $BACK_DIR
cd  $BACK_DIR/; 
/usr/bin/rsync  -vv -u -a --delete --recursive --stats --progress $TOP_DIR/alf_data $BACK_DIR/

echo "
  Reading root MySQL password from file
"
/usr/bin/mysqldump -u root \
    -p`cat ~root/bin/$DB_NAME.passwd.root` $DB_NAME | \
    /bin/gzip > $BACK_DIR/${DB_NAME}_`date +%Y%m%d`.gz
/usr/bin/find  $BACK_DIR -type f -name "$DB_NAME"/* -atime 60 -delete

/usr/bin/cp  $TOP_DIR/*sh $BACK_DIR
/usr/bin/mkdir  -p $BACKX_DIR
/usr/bin/rsync  -vv -u -a --delete --recursive --stats --progress  $EXT_DIR/* $BACKX_DIR/

# Start Alfresco
/etc/init.d/alfresco.sh start

Why a cold backup? Unless you have a really large DB, being down a few minutes isn’t really a big deal. If you can’t afford to be down, you would already be mirroring databases and automatically fail over anyway. Right?

We use a few extensions for Alfresco, that’s why we bother with the extensions/ directory.
There are many ways to make this script better. It was meant as a trivial example or starting point to show simple scripting methods while still being useful.

The last few years, companies have added customer loyalty programs to their marketing. Most of these fail for a number of reasons.

Which companies have the highest customer loyalty and why? Which have failed, at least for me?

Successes

Coke – People like to drink Coke everywhere in the world. When Coke changed their flavoring based on taste testing, the world cried out to put back the old flavor almost like an addict would. Flavored sugar water doesn’t mean much to me.

Apple – Apple fans go crazy about their products and will tell EVERYONE how great each is. Apple product cost between 20% and 100% more than similar products that aren’t as easy to use. People are willing to pay more for that. I’m not a fan of Apple – mostly because they charge more and their fans are obnoxious.
I did get a phone call from Apple last year because someone was trying to use a credit card with my name on it to buy an iPhone and iTunes stuff. This call was from Apple, not my credit card company. I became hostile towards to nice man on the phone immediately, before I gave him a chance to explain the issue. He never wavered and was always polite and professional – without any accent in his speech. While this hasn’t changed my negative opinion of Apple product pricing, it hasn’t added any more negative thoughts either.
Apple, when will your customers be able to multi-task on an iphone? When will they be allowed to change the battery? When will they be allowed to select from any application that can run on the device?

Google – Google does most things they do VERY WELL and don’t ask me directly for anything in return. They make their money by correlating all my web data together, building a profile about me and selling ads around that data. Most of us don’t really know what this means and we don’t care. I avoid google without filtering personal connection, use, computer data. Further, I avoid sending email to gmail addresses.

Airlines – Delta and United FF programs. They aren’t really that useful to me anymore. I’ve used Continental and AA FF programs in the past but never used an award ticket from them. Which FF program works best for you depends on where you live and where you travel. I have turned in some Delta points for a $1400 international ticket, which made it completely worth while. My United miles expired before I could use them, so I transferred them to a charity.

McDonald’s – Kids, advertising, convenience. I don’t get it at all. I haven’t eaten at McD’s in perhaps 2.5 years. It was an emergency the last time I did because I needed something to eat, quick, on the way to a once in a lifetime event. The closest restaurant to my home is a McDonald’s. I could walk there. I have never been to that store.

Twitter – You love it or your don’t care. I don’t care. Why didn’t AIM or gTalk or MSN setup interfaces with SMS texts? Maybe they did, but I just didn’t know about it?

What’s missing?

Customer loyalty needs to feel like a friend telling another friend about something great that they know is likely to be relevant to them them, not just something good. My friends know the types of things I’m interested in based on prior communications. They contact me when they see something really interesting to me. When was the last time you got any great insight from a customer loyalty communication. Seriously? Most of these communications are a list of 50 things on sale and none are of interest. None. The same old marketing like newspaper inserts. It needs to be targeted and on point for my needs.

Acura – I’ve owned two Acura vehicles and I’m mostly pleased. My interactions with most Acura dealers has been pleasant enough too. When I purchased my last Acura, my last name was misspelled on all the documents and on the title. Boo. A single attempt to correct that through Acura failed, so I gave up. When my annual registration comes due, I initially tried to correct it, but that failed too. My name gets misspelled a lot, so this isn’t a big deal. At least the Acura misspelling result isn’t offensive. Every quarter, an Acura magazine arrives with stories, lifestyle articles, travel hints and offers – Free Augusta National Golf tickets and the like. I don’t golf, but the offer is appreciated. Some of the other deals are interesting and generally leave a favorable impression of Acura.

My next vehicle will probably be another Acura in a few years. The last purchase occurred without visiting the dealership. The papers were signed on my kitchen table on the day the vehicle was delivered to my home. That impression is hard to beat even with the misspelled name.

TiVo – These guys are similar to Apple, except I like them. Their product works better than any alternative, but it costs more than any alternative. I dislike that a monthly plan is even offered and I wish the lifetime plans weren’t so expensive. I’ve been a tivo owner since 2003. That same device is working. I swapped the disk drive a few years ago to get more storage. It is about time to swap the drive again to further increase the lifetime. I don’t use any of the paid add-on options, but I do have it download free internet content like Tekzilla and hak5 weekly shows. Convenience rules.

Failures

Hilton Hotels – I signed up for a Hilton awards program a few years ago due to conference attendance. I tied my room reservation to it, then attended. After my visit, I checked that it was recorded to my HH program, it wasn’t so I sent the information about my stay to the feedback link on the program site. A few days later, I started receiving emails from the hotel manager asking how my stay was. I provided good feedback and explained that the program hadn’t connected my stay with the frequent stay program ID. I attempted to connect it once more. No joy. It has been a year and still isn’t connected. I get monthly emails from Hilton which reminds me they don’t follow through. Attempts to leave their email marketing list have failed too, which frustrate me even more, every month. I’m at the point where I avoid staying at Hilton Hotels or any of their 10 other names. FAIL.

Microsoft – The two most common communications I get from Microsoft is patch your PC and your antivirus is out of date. Is that really the message they want to send weekly? Microsoft has lost my trust. Every time they create something new, I immediately wonder how it will prevent me from using anyone elses’ stuff or how much it will cost me. exFAT file system is their latest push for memory cards to support large media files. I don’t understand why all the memory manufacturers don’t just use the FOSS ext2 file systems instead? Oh – because Microsoft doesn’t (and won’t) support ext2. OTOH, WinXP and earlier OSes don’t support exFAT either.

Linux / Ubuntu – This isn’t really fair. Linux isn’t a company and has no advertising budget. Ubuntu doesn’t seem to have much advertising budget either, at least for the masses. What can Linux do better? Well, they can show 30 second clips of people using the software to solve a real problem with FOSS. It would be best of the problem highlighted something that Windows or Macs don’t do well at all. #1 – every time should show price followed by system maintenance and upgrade processes (click the red triangle in the corner). Currently, failing. Yes, I know that Linux is just the kernel and that no users actually use it directly. We all use some higher level tool created by GNU or Ubuntu or Red Hat or SuSE or Mandrake or some developer in his basement.

Amazon – I shop on Amazon for price and convenience. I maintain a wish list of things to make gifts easier and as reminders for things to purchase later. I don’t think I’ve ever purchased anything recommended for me from Amazon. They know the types of things I buy with over 200 purchases. If I bought a router, I probably don’t need another. 3 months later, I don’t need to see CAT5e cables or a switch either. I’ve had a few issues with Amazon product shipments over the years, but Amazon has always made me whole again, always. Their customer service does a good job. Their product suggestions, not so much.

Travelocity – They know where I’ve traveled, how long I’ve stayed and when I tend to go. They also know my searches for destinations. Yet, they don’t send deals for those destinations or worse, keep sending them when I’m already back home. I want international travel deals. I doubt I’ll ever take a vacation to Los Vegas or fly to Ashville, NC. STOP OFFERING THOSE DEALS, Travelocity. Offering a flight from Atlanta to Savannah is a waste of your time too. I’d end up spending more time dealing with airport garbage than a simple drive there. I’m not going to fly commercially to Savannah, ever. I’ve routinely searched for flights to Bali, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, London, Europe, Chili, and Peru. Get the hint and target those deals, please?

My Senators – About once a year, I get an email from my senators claiming to have stopped some bill that is bad for the country. I wrote to them a few years ago about some of my concerns which they responded to by a carefully copy/pasted paragraph about each of my concerns. Most recently, it was about the health care bill, which I’ve never written to them about. Nice. Fail.

Grocery Stores – They give small discounts for the cost of you letting them see what you purchase. I’ve never had a grocery store loyalty card. My privacy is worth more than $100/yr. When my local Kroger started pushing them, I spoke with the store manager about my displeasure. He wasn’t helpful, I stopped shopping at Kroger. Publix is a local competitor where I started stopping. They also had a discount card, but if I didn’t have one, the cashier always scanned hers so I got the discount. Kroger – FAIL, Publix – Success. I suppose manufacturers would be snail-mailing coupons to me if I had a card? That local Kroger went out of business. I doubt I had anything to do with that, but the store manager definitely did. Good Bye.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Which programs work for you and which have failed? Why?