Linuxense Blog

We are skiing over to another new year! At Linuxense we are prepared to embrace 2008 with more exciting stuff for those who put their trust in us.

The year passing was more of a product development year at Linuxense; our idea-driven R&D work which we all at Linuxense enjoyed very much. And now excited to start a new year to reap the fruits.

Mettle SE has seen the largest set of feature addition this year reassuring the decision of those who bought Mettle SEs to manage their Networks and resources; it includes the integration of BGP (yes! Mettle SE is now ready to be deployed as your edge router) and extensive Web usage reports for fine-grained monitoring of who-is-doing-what.

Mettle CM completes two years of reliable service. It’s now capable of building your mission-critical customer contact centre. Integration of IM and email are fast nearing completion. 2008 is going to be an exciting year for Mettle CM as more deployments are in pipe line. Watch out this blog for more updates.

Mettle Stor SAN/NAS system enjoyed the largest number of installations this year. Customers are convinced with the benefit of having NAS and SAN in a single framework and using them simultaneously. Mettle Stor made that possible for them.

Our anti-spam system now filters millions of messages per day and fans out spam emails with an accuracy that exceeds 99%. India’s largest class-B ISP and largest class-A cable ISP are among those who enjoy our anti-spam service and having peace of mind. Our dedicated anti-spam team is working on it to make it further effective (more information to follow).

Linuxense has been repeatedly proving its ability to innovate products one after another to cater market demand in the IP Networking and infrastructure sector. And we are enjoying the process here at Linuxense.

We all here hope that in 2008 we will see Linuxense rising further to reach up the stars!

While you enjoy welcoming the New Year, we will continue watching over your Networks, emails, and your valuable data.

Wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year!

Mumbai-based Hathway Datacom Pvt. Ltd. selects the anti-spam solution from Linuxense. Hathway is the largest broadband provider and it provides service in eleven cities across India.

Their evaluation was a rigorous, month-long procedure to check out whether the solution is capable of achieving near-zero spam rate in their customer Email boxes. That too without adding any latency to the delivery time.

Linuxense designed a Linux-based anti-spam filtering solution which is a multi-server scalable cluster. It is designed to stand heavy spam-runs and protects the mail servers from being overwhelmed by such traffic.

Hathway is the second ISP to avail of this solution from Linuxense.

Linuxense started offering Qmail Migration service from April 1 2006. We have been providing this to our existing customers on a case-by-case basis. But now we are offering standardised fixed-price consultancy packages. This makes decision making easier and more clear for those who would like to avail of this service.

Over the past years Linuxense have developed several methodologies and techniques which makes Qmail migration process quick and least error prone. In most of the situations such a migration can be done even without the users knowing it.

See this page for more details.

Much awaited GuardianConnect is out. All at Linuxense have been working on this project for quite a while now. Now it has been installed and running at Christ Nagar English Medium School, Trivandrum and Sainik School Kazhakootam.

GuardianConnect™ is a device that filters the Internet for content which is inappropriate for children. This device is meant for schools, hostels, libraries and other places where children use the Internet.

GuardianConnect is a rugged table-top box designed to handle up to 2 mbps of Internet traffic. And it does not put any cap on number of users or Desktops neither there is no licences to renew. GuardianConnect (also referred as Guardian Connect) is a one-time investment.

Linuxense has been decided to provide GuardianConnect with one year comprehensive warranty and support.

The Hindu daily referred it as the “Guardian of the young Net surfer”.

Several schools have shown interested in GuardianConnect.

For more information you please visit the GuardianConnect web site.

Initially it sounded amusing when we got a call from C-DIT seeking expertise to set up live streaming of Chief Minister’s office. But we took it seriously because of two reasons. First: we were planning to try out VLC in a real-world scenario for quite a while. Secondly, we were told that a couple of MNC consultancy firms declared that this is an impossible task. And we accepted the work order from C-DIT.

The Components
It was difficult to get a camera with remote-controlled tilt and pan facility in sub-30K range. We finally procured a D-Link DCS 5300W. Being an experimental setup it is we asked for just two desktop machines; one for connecting the camera which is inside the secretariat LAN. And the other to act as a “slave” server which handled the Internet traffic.

Secretariat was linked with a 2-mbps leased line from BSNL. Though that was very much inadequte a bandwidth, we decided to hook up the streaming server to this link as there was no other option.

Public Response
Whether is it a stupid idea or not; public welcomed it. The news was all over the media. Within a few minutes after the inauguration the traffic overwhelmed the 2 mbps link. People were calling (even from outside India) and complained that they could not connect to it.

Is It Really Relevant?
The answer is: it depends. Because, you and I may not be watching this stream on a regular day unless we are terribly bored and have nothing else to do. But, all of us will tune in if some crucial thing happens in CM’s office; an important meeting, a conference, or a meeting with a foreign delegate. Or anything at CM’ office which particularly interests us. So, it makes sense.

Now, let’s look at it from CM’s side. For him it is like having his own television channel! He can say whatever he wants to the public face-to-face without depending the media (which are known to report preferentially); here there is no one in between –just CM on one side of the Internet and the public on the other.

Technology makes things do-able in very cost-effective way these days which is really cool. And the good point is that our CM is wise to take advantage of it.

–
Anil Kumar K. (VP Operations & Engineering)

None broke into the server which was on the Net for 96 hours. Kudos to Adamantix!

See details at http://www.linuxense.com/challenge

At the end of 48th hour we have released a shell account with the login name ROT13ed. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for the first person to login! But there were several contestants who complained about a login account which “just doesn’t work'’.

Most of the attempts had stack-smash as the basic technique which Pax is good at. But there was a Pax privilege elevation bug to which Adamantix 1.0.4 was susceptible. See http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2005/Mar/0211.html for more details. But the first exploit wasn’t out till the end of 96 hours (though the Kernel used was not fully susceptible)

Packet capture dump is being circulated via Bittorrent and had several downloads so far.

We thank Asianet Satellite communications for providing us bandwidth.

This break-in challenge was unique in a sense that this was the first time an Open source product was put under such a test. Normally companies do this to show off their own product’s capability.

Raja put on his hat and jumped on his new Yamaha with his installation CD stack for yet another enterprise-grade, Linuxense-special Sarge installation. This time it was for an 100% EOU, Technopark company. And he steped into their space-age office and flashed the purchase order and he was accompanied to the server room right away. And he was on and took out the installation disks.

“Hold on!'’ the admin rushed to the server room and screamed. “Huh. You know, today is a Tuesday and so it is not good to install Linux today.'’

Wait; are you laughing or? In India sometimes it is like that.

Starting from last Sunday 7 of December one of our servers located at ServerBeach experienced severe and repeated hardware problems including HDD failures and motherboard problems.

They replaced the HDD twice, motherboard once, and chassis once. But we decided to move over to another server of higher configuration. Despite of repeated hardware failures we could restore the data (including log files) completely. We managed to migrate all the services and data to the new server in 12 hours’ time starting from 18 Dec 1800 hrs to 19 Dec 0600 hrs.

This havoc disrupted several services like SMTP, FTP, and Web running on this server.We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our clients and associates and we acknowledge their understanding.

A few words about ServerBeach: They are basically good guys. What we like about them is that they support Debian. And most of their offerings are good deals if you have in-house Linux expertise. But if you are looking for sub-minute support response this is a wrong place; have a look at Rackspace.

Linuxense is shifting to a new office in Poojapura. We will be functioning on the third floor of “Koipurathu Buildings” located on Karamana road (there is an SBT ATM functioning in this building). Shifting process will be completed by Saturday 18.

All of us are happy and sad at the same time in this occassion. We are excited because the new place has more amenities and features. We are sad because we are leaving an one-of-a-kind, 75 year old, huge building surrounded by fruits and trees and flowers which kept us busy while we were not coding.

We are thankful to the landlord, Krishna G.S. and CVR for arranging the present place for us. Linuxense has been functioning out of this place for the past two years. We also thank CVR’s parents and brother Rajaram for taking care of us during their stay here in this building.

agni.linuxense.com was was not reachable from outside Linuxense since last Saturday night. The reason found out to be a routing issue at Asianet; routing wasn’t taking place properly for our subnet.

It looks OK now. Should be working fine here on wards.