Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Bitcoins mining - there you go!

Not so long ago, I wrote a short post about my suspicions toward the BitCoin system, and that I thought someone would just harness others' machines' power to generate the random numbers associated with the "bitcoin mining". In short, every ten minutes, the system creates 50 units of currency that are given to the account whose machine created a number matching certain criterion.

My gut feeling at that time was that it wouldn't be long before someone runs a trojan to generate these numbers on hundreds or thousands of machines, to get the loot as many times as possible.

That's now a thing of the past ... someone did it. In his case, it didn't work well, but I'm pretty sure the bad guys will find something else. After all, there is money to be taken.

EXT4, OEL 5.5, Kernel 2.6.18 => kernel panic

Ok, not bleeding edge, but it made my day a bit less sunnier: I was wondering why my shiny Linux server running OEL 5.5 was not coming back to live ...

Well, kernel panic due to mounting the ext4. Tried it manually, same result. Mounting the same device formatted with ext3 doesn't trigger the same issue.

As it's an old kernel, I'll just let it die peacefully.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

multipathd woes!

Today, playing with multipathd - it's not often I have a server, FC switches AND the storage at the same time to lay my beer-tainted hands on - I ran into an issue: no matter what, multipathd wouldn't hear a thing about my LUNs.

Tried a lot, installing some scsi debugging packages - which showed me that the storage was indeed presenting the LUNs, modprobing some modules and things.

Until I ran "udevinfo -e", which exports all the devices the kernel sees. Which also told me that the WWID have to be lower case!

I had done a couple of copy-paste between the SAN configuration screen and my /etc/multipathd.conf: the SAN configuration page gives me the WWID with capital letters (ex 35001ADE...), where udev reports lower case letters (35001ade...).

A quick trip to /etc/multipath.conf, change all the letters to lower case and ... voila! Both multipathd and I are happy.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Bad guys go after Bitcoins

Highly predictable: the bad guys now go after bitcoins.

For these who don't know what Bitcoins are, it's a new form a virtual, distributed currency. Instead of being managed by a state, a public entity or a government, the users manage it. Some people already accept them as a mean of payment for purchase on the Internet.

With the ability to convert hard cash into bitcoins and back, of course there is the ability to steal virtual money, which can translate into real money.

It's now done. When I first read the article in New Scientist, my first reaction was that it wouldn't be long before someone gets an "interest" at it. But my guess was mostly bad guys hacking into computers to steal processing resources to earn the random generation process.

It seems they found another way: stealing the purse.