CISSP in 21 Days by M. L. Srinivasan. Yes, thats the name of the new book recently launched. It is a concise revision guide that is supposed to be read just 1 month before the exam to brush up.

Why am I reading this book? First, I have been thinking of taking the exam, but things got delayed not due to project work and lack of time, but due to my own procrastination. But I am now becoming a bit more serious about this CISSP. When I downloaded the official Guide to CISSP, it was around 1000 pages and I never made it. Secondly, I did not have a full picture of the scope of knowledge or study that might be required to be ready for this exam.

This was until, I was offered to go over this newly launched book and give some feedback. This book is just 300 pages and I think I will read this over this month. I just read through Chapter 15 Telecommunications And Network Security in a couple of hours and it was kind of a concise revision of things I have learned at work over the last few years. I think I am going to read this entire book and get some honest feedback to the publishing house, who have been kind to offer me the e-book and also gave me permission to host Chapter 15 in this blog for my readers.

You can read Chapter 15 by downloading it from here and you can get more details about the book and purchase it from packtpub.

Happy Reading.//

We have often heard of people using the words SAN and NAS to indicate a very high storage area in the lab. I have often use these two words too casually without understanding the difference. Thinking about it I got confused and wanted to know the general difference between the two and here are some important points I found.

SAN = Storage Area Network
NAS = Network Address Storage.

(One reason for confusion is that one abbreviated form is reverse of the other). Anyways here are some important points:

1. NAS is a storage-solution where huge RAID disks exists and the data is exposed to the world over NFS or CIFS protocol. It means that you can connect a normal laptop or desktop to a NAS share just like you connect to any of your colleague's shared drive. All you need is a path in UNC format Exmaple: \\nasserver1\fsSongs\ in your Windows explorer. In Unix, you would add another NFS mount point.

SAN on the other hand cannot be accessed by normal desktop or servers. It requires servers with SCSI fiber channel. It means that SAN is only for server class machines.

2. Another notable difference that you might hear from very technical people is: NAS uses file level access and SAN uses block level access. What does this mean? For one, this is the reason why NAS(file level access) can be accessed via normal desktops and SAN only via server class machines. It also means that file management in NAS is handled by itself (actually a component called NAS-head in the NAS hardware itself), and for SAN(block level access) file management must be done by the client (the server which is connected to SAN via fiber).

Happying storaging.//

I have been using Cygwin with Windowmaker for connecting to Unix machines from my Windows desktop. Many people in my team still use PuTTY. Most of my colleagues have given up PuTTY when I introduced them to the beauty of Cygwin+WindowMaker. Here is an article of how to set this up.

But I still come across many developers and sys admins who still use PuTTY. PuTTY provides a window with a single connection to one Unix machines. If you need another connection you need to open another Putty window. How about having a PuTTY window with Tabs? If you care you should get the PuTTY Connection Manager from
PuTTY Connection Manager

Happy PuTTYing.//

You can now create a rouge MD5-based CA certificate. Here is the research paper released last week that explains this in detail technical terms:
MD5 considered harmful today

If you want a layman explanation to this issue, you should rather start with this blog:
A Layman's Explanation of the CA Certificate Vulnerability

RSA Data Security is one among others who issue CA certs. If you want to read about the immediate response from RSA on this , read the blog
A Real New Year's Hash

Happy Reading.//

I love the default Windows XP wallpaper, but also wanted to have some other wallpaper, but still wanted the Windows XP wallpaper, because I find it easy to locate icons on that blue background, which are generally located on the left side of the screen. So as a fun project I am making some morphed Window XP wallpaper with my own images. Here is the first one. Feel free to download and use it -- I will be more than happy if you leave a comment here if you like it.




Its is 800x600 pixels size, but will fit well into your desktop with the "Stretch" position setting. Click here to download.

Happy Bging.//