Diskless Remote Boot in Linux

DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) is a free software, open source solution to managing the deployment of the GNU/Linux operating system across many clients. Imagine the time required to install GNU/Linux on 40, 30, or even 10 client machines individually! DRBL allows for the configuration all of your client computers by installing just one server machine.

DRBL provides a diskless or systemless environment for client machines. It works on Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS and SuSE. DRBL uses distributed hardware resources and makes it possible for clients to fully access local hardware. It also includes Clonezilla, a partitioning and disk cloning utility similar to Symantec Ghost®.
The features of DRBL:

• Peacefully coexists with other OS
• Simply install DRBL on a single server and all your clients are taken care of
• Save on hardware, budget, and maintenance fees

Peacefully coexists with other OS
DRBL uses PXE/etherboot, NFS, and NIS to provide services to client machines so that it is not necessary to install GNU/Linux on the client hard drives individually. Once the server is ready to be a DRBL server, the client machines can boot via PXE/etherboot (diskless). "DRBL" does NOT touch the client hard drives, therefore, other operating systems (e.g. MS Windows) installed on the client machines will be unaffected. This could be useful in, for example, during a phased deployment of GNU/Linux where users still want to have the option of booting to Windows and running some applications only available on MS windows. DRBL allows great flexibility in the deployment of GNU/Linux.

Simply install DRBL on a single server and all your clients are taken care of

Using a standard PC, you can transform a group of client PCs into a working GNU/Linux network in some steps:

1.     Download the DRBL package
2.     Run the scripts

In about 30 minutes, all the client machines will be ready to run GNU/Linux and all associated packages. No more deploying client machines one by one. Just use DRBL!

Save on hardware, budget, and maintenance fees
Hard drives are optional for a DRBL client. Actually, the hard drive is just another moving part that creates more noise and is susceptible to failure. If a hard drive is present, the client can be configured to use it as swap space while GNU/Linux is installed and configured on the centralized boot server.
A lot of time can be saved by configuring the client settings at the boot server when using the DRBL centralized boot environment. This gives the system administrator more control over what software configurations are running on each client.

Cycas

Cycas is the type genus and the only genus currently recognised in the cycad family Cycadaceae. About 95 species are currently accepted. The best-known species is Cycas revoluta, widely cultivated under the name "Sago Palm" or "King Sago Palm" due to its palm-like appearance although it is not a true palm. The generic name comes from Greek Koikas, and means "a kind of palm".

The genus is native to the Old World, with the species concentrated around the equatorial regions. It is native to eastern and southeastern Asia including the Philippines with 10 species (9 of which are endemic), eastern Africa (including Madagascar), northern Australia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. Australia has 26 species, while the Indo-Chinese area has about 30. The northernmost species (C. revoluta) is found at 31°N in southern Japan. The southernmost (C. megacarpa) is found at 26°S in southeast Queensland, Australia.

The plants are dioecious, and the family Cycadaceae is unique among the cycads in not forming seed cones on female plants, but rather a group of leaf-like structures each with seeds on the lower margins, and pollen cones on male individuals.

The caudex is cylindrical, surrounded by the persistent petiole base. Most species form distinct branched or unbranched trunks but in some species the main trunk can be subterranean with the leaf crown appearing to arise directly from the ground. The leaves are pinnate (or more rarely bipinnate) and arranged spirally, with thick and hard keratinose. The leaflets are articulated, have midrib but lack secondary veins. Megasporophylls are not gathered in cones.

Often considered a living fossil, the earliest fossils of the genus Cycas appear in the Cenozoic although Cycas-like fossils that may belong to Cycadaceae extend well into the Mesozoic. Cycas is not closely related to other genera of cycads, and phylogenetic studies have shown that Cycadaceae is the sister-group to all other extant cycads.

The plant takes several years to grow, sexual reproduction takes place after 10 years of exclusive vegetative growth.

Personal Firewall

A personal firewall is an application which controls network traffic to and from a computer, permitting or denying communications based on a security policy. Typically it works as an application layer firewall.

A personal firewall differs from a conventional firewall in terms of scale. A personal firewall will usually protect only the computer on which it is installed. Many personal firewalls are able to control network traffic by prompting the user each time a connection is attempted and adapting security policy accordingly. Personal firewalls may also provide some level of intrusion detection, allowing the software to terminate or block connectivity where it suspects an intrusion is being attempted.

Features
Common personal firewall features:

• Protects the user from unwanted incoming connection attempts
• Alert the user about outgoing connection attempts
• Allows the user to control which programs can and cannot access the local network and/or Internet
• Hide the computer from port scans by not responding to unsolicited network traffic
• Monitor applications that are listening for incoming connections
• Monitor and regulate all incoming and outgoing Internet users
• Prevent unwanted network traffic from locally installed applications
• Provide the user with information about an application that makes a connection attempt
• Provide information about the destination server with which an application is attempting to communicate

Criticisms

• If the system has been compromised by malware, spyware or similar software, these programs can also manipulate the firewall, because both are running on the same system. It may be possible to bypass or even completely shut down software firewalls in such a manner.
• The alerts generated can possibly desensitize users to alerts by warning the user of actions that may not be malicious.
• Software firewalls that interface with the operating system or with other firewalls or security software at the kernel mode level may potentially cause instability and/or introduce security flaws.

OSpy

oSpy is a tool which aids in reverse-engineering software running on the Windows platform. With the amount of proprietary systems that exist today (synchronization protocols, instant messaging, etc.), the amount of work required to keep up when developing interoperable solutions will quickly become a big burden when limited to traditional techniques. However, when the sniffing is done on the API level it allows a much more fine-grained view of what's going on. Seeing return-addresses for each recv/send call (for example), can prove useful when you want to look at the processing code at that spot in a debugger or static analysis tool. And if an application uses encrypted communication it's easy to intercept these calls as well. oSpy already intercepts one such API, and is the API used by MSN Messenger, Google Talk, etc. for encrypting/decrypting HTTPS data. Another neat feature is when wanting to see how an application behaves when in a firewalled environment. Normally you would have to simulate such an environment by configuring firewalls etc., which not only is time-consuming, but might also cripple the rest of the applications you've got running. oSpy solves this problem by a feature called softwalling which allows you to set rules based on the type of function-call, the return-address, local/remote address/port, etc., and lets you choose which error to signal back to the application when the rule matches. This way you can make the application think that for example a connect() timed out, connection was refused, there was no route to host, etc.