You can tell OSX Snow Leopard to consider shell scripts safe to execute without a user prompt. This is useful for automation of certain tasks.
benninger.ca
Personal site of Christopher BenningerIf you are automating anything with virtual machines, you likely will be automatically assigning MAC addresses to Nic cards. If you are using any OSX guests, you may have issues around new Nic cards being assigned and having them come up without human interaction. To force OSX to register and bring up new Nics, run the following:
networksetup -detectnewhardware
Applying that to the virtualization case, you can use Automator to create and Application that runs an AppleScript with the above command, and set it to run on login.
In my use case, I have a variable number of independent ActorSystems. As a new system starts up, it initiates a simple Syn/Ack procedure with the command and control system, allowing the C&C to deploy remote actors. Just for fun, here is some example code.
Creating actors in Akka is generally pretty straight forward. If using the general use-case, there are two slightly different methods to use depending on whether or not your Actor has any parameters in it’s constructor.
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It’s been a long while since I last posted anything, I thought I would summarize a few of the things that have occurred lately. The first of which is that the research paper based on my graduate research was presented at the IEEE Cloud 2012 conference in Hawaii in June. Dr. Onat Yazir presented the work for me as I wasn’t able to attend. For anyone interested, the paper can be found here.
In addition to this news, I have accepted an R&D/Development position at Sophos (SophosLabs) in Vancouver BC. I have been there for about a month now and am having a lot of fun. In particular, I’ve been playing a lot with the Scala programming language. In combination with the 3rd-party Akka library, Scala provides an extremely powerful set of tools for building distributed systems using the Actor model. I must admit, I originally resisted many of the changes in thinking required for effective use of the Actor model and Scala, especially coming from my favouritism towards C and Python. Scala actors however, have begun to restore my faith in the JVM (what’s that you say?). I suggest you give it a shot, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Well it’s done, I am finished all the requirements for my MSc. and have now been approved for graduation.
My thesis, entitled Maitland: Analysis of Packed and Encrypted Malware via Paravirtualization Extensions can be found here if anyone is interested. In addition, a few months ago we began working on a conference paper version of my thesis work. It was recently accepted to the IEEE Cloud 2012 conference and I am very excited about it. I will post some paper details and a citation once the conference is over (late June).
Now that my MSc. is finished, I’ll be investigating some career opportunities both here in Vancouver and abroad.
I’ve spent the better part of two years working on a very technical project. I don’t personally know many people who are able to really help me with the technical side of things. As my environment has little solid documentation, I had nowhere to turn but the developer community’s IRC channel and mailing list.
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Here is a nice one-liner to convert a .m4a audio file to a .mp3 file:
$ faad -o - input_file.m4a | lame - output_file.mp3
Note: Make sure you have lame and faad installed. In debian they are just ‘faad’ and ‘lame’ packages.
This is most likely common knowledge but I keep forgetting how to do it. If you want to run shell command on a small section of text in file you have open in vim, here is how.
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Workviz is a prototype tool I built for viewing live server metadata in a compact way. The original intention was not to create an admin tool but rather a way for human’s to use their natural pattern recognition to identify properties in a server cluster. Written in python, using NumPy and VPython, Workviz displays a 3d representation of user-selected metrics about any number of physical machines. It also supports simulations by creating alternate “Workload Generators” and inserting them on the fly.
Here is the Project Page.
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