Monthly Archives: February 2009

Gmail outage explained

Posted by on February 25, 2009 No comments

Gmail was out for a little while shortly after 9:30GMT on the 24th of February. The Gmail group has posted an official note stating the problem.

“Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

The bugs have been found and fixed, and we’re in the process of pushing out changes. We know how painful an outage like this is — we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect us the same way they affect you. We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future.” extracted

Read post in full – http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/update-on-todays-gmail-outage.html

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Lilac Platform error print_window_header()

Posted by on February 20, 2009 No comments

The Lilac Platform is a collection of tools to enhance existing open
source monitoring applications. Currently the focus is on the Lilac
Configurator, a configuration tool written to configure Nagios, a
popular Network monitoring application.

After installing it on an OpenSuse 11.0 I got the following error.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function print_window_header() in /srv/www/htdocs/html/lilac/index.php on line 32

The answer can be found on this forum http://www.lilacplatform.com/discussion/2/5/37#37

Apparently the subversion has been fixed, but if you download it directly from the site it still has the same problem as above. To get it to work you can change the  the following line in your php.ini

“short_open_tag = On“   (the default is off)

“short_open_tags… Tells whether the short form (<? ?>
)
of PHP’s open tag should be allowed. If you want to use PHP in
combination with XML, you can disable this option in order to
use <?xml ?>
inline. Otherwise, you
can print it with PHP, for example: <?php echo '<?xml
version="1.0"'; ?>
. Also if disabled, you must use the
long form of the PHP open tag (<?php ?>
).

This directive also affects the shorthand <?=
,
which is identical to <? echo
. Use of this
shortcut requires short_open_tag

to be on.
” – extracted from php.net

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SugarCRM Installation error: session.save_path not set

Posted by on February 18, 2009 2 comments

SugarCRM Community Edition 5.2.0a has shown me the following error during installation.

“The session.save_path setting in your php configuration file (php.ini)
is not set or is set to a folder which did not exist. You might need to
set the save_path setting in php.ini or verify that the folder sets in
save_path exist.”

Before you attempt to follow my instructions here, please check that the session.save_path in your php.ini is properly set and that your webserver is behaving normally.

This error is apparently a bug in the installation process of SugarCRM so to get past it you need to edit a PHP file.

  1. Open the file SystemCheck.php (it is located in the install folder)
  2. uncomment lines 184 to 210  (just place /* on line 183   and  */ on line 211)
  3. save file and restart installation

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Important SQL and Exchange Server patches

Posted by on February 12, 2009 Comments Off

A security issue has been identified in the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (WMSDE) that could allow an attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it (Bulletin MS09-004), and Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Could Allow Remote Code Execution (Bulletin MS09-003).

The vulnerability in the MS Exchange Server is the most severe, Microsoft explains:

”This vulnerability means that any cybercriminal sending a well
crafted email attachment to an enterprise could gain complete control
over the server and gaining one of the keys to the kingdom…

All kinds of highly confidential and proprietary information pass
through an Exchange server every day.  Gaining control over it and its
content would be a gold mine to any cyber criminal,”  – Extracted from ZDNet

Other applications are also being patched up, Microsoft Visio and IE being included. Microsoft released its monthly security bulletin on the 10th of February.

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Google Latitude

Posted by on February 5, 2009 1 comment

Google Latitude is a new function added to Google Earth for mobile phones. Latitude service uses data from mobile phone masts, GPS, or wi-fi hardware to update a user’s location automatically. Users can choose to share their location with friends.

Latitude is based on Google’s My Location feature that has been in place since 2008. It can be downloaded by pointing your mobiles browser to http://google.com/latitude. It currently works with:

  • Android Powered devices
  • IPhone & IPod Touch
  • Most Blackberries
  • Most Windows Mobile 5.0 and Symbian S60
  • (J2ME) Java enabled devices like the Samsung Tocco to be available soon

Security and privacy concerns

The BBC Technology website has released an article on the concerns over the security and privacy issues this new Google feature may bring to its users.

“..privacy watchdog Privacy International argues that there are

opportunities for abuse of the system for those who may not know that

their phone is broadcasting its location.” – Extracted from BBC Technology

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