HowtoForge is a great site containing tutorials on how to perform setups of various tasks on Linux systems. From stuff as basic as a simple C++ tutorial to How to setup Load Balanced Cluster on MySQL, they have a very good collection of community contributed articles. Next time if you are looking for a how to its worth seraching here than simply replying on Google results and hunting down the correct one. Go to http://www.howtoforge.com/.

Happy following.//

What does 99.99% availability of a service mean? I always though that it meant that there is 0.01 percent chance that the service would be unavailable. I thought that it was just a humble way of saying that there would hardly be any downtime. But thats not true as what I know today.

In the Amazon S3 FAQ , they say "The service was designed for 99.99% availability, and carries a service level agreement providing service credits if a customer's availability falls below 99.9%." I take Amazon S3 as an example because Aminus3 uses Amazon S3 to store its image files and we had an outage last week, the longest that we have seen so far.

And here is the meaning of all those 9s:

A 99% reliability means an acceptable downtime of 3.65 days a year.
A 99.9% means an acceptable downtime of 8.76 hours a year.
A 99.99% means an acceptable downtime of 52.56 minutes a year.
A 99.999% means an acceptable downtime of 5.26 minutes a year.

These numbers are straight forward calculation:

Example: 1% downtime means .01 * 365 = 3.65 days.

Of all this 99.999% is considered to be the ultimate which is often referred to as the five nines of uptime.

Happy uptiming.//

CISSP stands for Certified Information Systems Security Professional. Its is an exam conducted by International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (commonly known as (ISC)²). Its a certification for professionals growing their career in the information security domain. Its not a test of technical competence and you dont have to be a hacker to pass this exam. They say its 10 miles wide and 5 inches deep in technical knowledge.

Read this wikipedia entry for a quick overview of CISSP and the official website's information about CISSP exam. The wkipipedia's information appears to be more easy to read and understand.

Brief key points:
1. Need lot of study as preparation to cover the 10 domains of CBK(Common Book of Knowledge).

2. Qualification: 5 years work experience in security domain. See website for more details. Re certification required every 3 years, but earning points. Points (called CPEs) can be earned by actively involving in security practices and contributions.

3. Cost: Approx $600 (see official pricing list here) and $85 per year maintenance.

4. Exams held in almost all metros in India.

Happy Studying.//

Mr Kang, a Chinese gentleman happens to visit the beautiful city of Hyderabad. Guess what the local folks calls him with respect. Guess Guess!

Ans: Mr Kang-garu.

PS: I understand that people not familiar with local lingo will not be able to make sense of this.

Happy PJing.//

This week at work Vinod introduced to me that there exists a Information Security certification called the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). He is all GO on this one. On first hand, CISSP appeared to me as THE certification for a security professional after reading through many blog entries and specially after reading CISSP : Any Value, I am beginning to have second thoughts. Is this really for me, a security application developer? I havent yet concluded in for or against. In the midst of all this I am writing this short blog post.

Happy ??.//