Conficker Worm Defense for Enterprises

A blog-post over at ZDNet describes how enterprise data-ops can use network scanners to detect and disarm the Conficker Worm vulnerability on Microsoft Windows platforms, before it potentially wakes up on April 1st and begins to disable your anti-virus software.

One wonders whether the ZDNet writer was suffering from subliminal puritanism. The name of the worm is Conficker, not ConfLicker (sic). Presumably, the name is derived from the conjunction of Con, as in confidence trick (to enable it) and ficken, the German F-bomb (when it disables you).

Confession: Aye, 'twas I who corrected the ZDNet scribe. :-)

See the US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA09-088A, for more information.

Treemap Visualization of Disk Volumes

GrandPerspective is a FOSS tool for Mac OS X that provides a treemap visualization of file layout on a disk. I created the treemap below from an 80 GB disk on my G4 towermac, which has both Mac OS X files (left) and WinXP files (right); the latter being a copy from the disk of my recently deceased Sony laptop). It certainly gives new meaning to the term disk blocks.


It's quite striking to see the greater number of larger aggregations of files on the Mac side vs. the many smaller files on the XP side. I guess that's why we don't need to do "defragging" on macs. :-)

Apres MacWorld, an Al MacBook

I'm writing this on my newly purchased Aluminum 13" Macbook---and what a beautiful machine it is. The decision to buy it was made for me by the spontaneous death of my 12" Sony VAIO V505EXP, which has been my trusty mobile workhorse since 2004. I prefer a smaller screen, especially on flights and for working in front of the TV---like this. And now that Macs run Windoze as well, it's a no brainer. I'll move all my Sony VAIO files onto this Macbook (eventually).

Guerrilla Data Analysis Class - Seats Still Available

Most operating systems are capable of collecting hundreds of system and performance metrics every second. Even if you only record them once an hour, after a week you will have more than 50,000 samples; after a month you will be staring at almost a quarter of a million samples! But data are just data. How do you extract performance information out of all those data? Easy! You attend our new and expanded 5-day Guerrilla Data Analysis class, here in California.

In this class, computer engineering and statistics expert Prof. David Lilja presents an easy introduction to statistical methods and finally leads us into the topic of Design of Experiment (DOE) methods applied to performance and capacity planning data.

Having established the foundation theory, R expert, Jim Holtman will show you how to apply DOE and other statistical techniques using example case studies.

You can register for the class, and book your hotel room, online. Book early, book often! We look forward to seeing you in August.

Building Perl PDQ with VisualStudio

PDQ user Alex Podelko reports a gotcha when building Perl PDQ with VisualStudio. His solution has been posted to the PDQ download page. Thanks, Alex!

Solaris to Shine on the Mainframe (Say what!?)

Quite apart from the surprise over what passes for physics these days, PhysOrg.com recently reported on a surprise deal that will enable Sun's Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers.

Initially, the agreement will involve only IBM's (AIX) mid-range servers, which can also run the Windows and Linux operating systems, but eventually, so the report says, IBM hopes to bring Solaris to the mainframe. I assume this means it will run in a z/OS LPAR, like they do with Linux. If I take the view (and I do) that the mainframe is not a "dinosaur" but just another (excellent data processing) server on the network, one wonders where this leaves future Sun hardware platforms.

Add to this the growing emphasis by Sun to deploy Intel and AMD microprocessors for cost reasons and, as Jonathan Schwartz says, it "represents a tectonic shift in the market landscape." No kidding! I just wonder whether Schwartz will be riding the plate that stays on top or the plate that goes under.

Overview of Virtualization Performance

As the Guest Editor for this month's MeasureIT e-zine on the topic of virtualization, a compliation of articles is presented from both earlier MeasureIT authors as well as some papers from the CMG conference proceedings. Titles include:

• Visualizing Virtualization


• It May Be Virtual - But the Overhead is Not


• A Realistic Assessment of the Performance of Windows Guest Virtual Machines


• Measuring CPU Time from Hyper-Threading Enabled Intel Processors


• Hyperthreading - Two for the Price of One?


• To V or Not to V: A Practical Guide To Virtualization


• The Virtualization Spectrum from Hyperthreads to GRIDs

This issue of MeasureIT is unique in my mind because it is rare to find, in one place, such a broad collection of performance perspectives centered on the intensely hot topic of virtualization.