This explains the outage today.

Malaysia Today has been hacked by the GasakdotNet group. They better have their backups ready…..

UPDATE: 19:10, Malaysia Today is back online.

SIRIM’s site has been exploited with malware. The compromised URL is “www.sirim.my/pop_event2.asp?id=685″. The URL when accessed downloads malicious software and infects the client PC. If I were you I would not access that link.

From what I know many Malaysian sites are still susceptible to cross side scripting and SQL injection attacks. Chances are this is what happened this time.

Google has already picked this up and is currently warning users about the threat. Google Advisory

Source: LowYat.net

Recently I wrote about implementing session timeouts on Linux. For admin’s who know what they are doing(most times) this can sometimes be an annoying experience.

There’s a simple noop script over at bashcurescancer to help work around session timeouts. This will work for ssh and also the default virtual consoles.

Watch noop in action.

Source: BashCuresCancer

I am facing the same annoying beep issue which I experienced on my Linux notebook before on my XP machine now.

Most users don’ t fancy having sounds turned on their OS. In XP turning off your sound schemes will turn off all notification sounds but then all beeps get channeled to your pc speaker instead thus begins the annoyance. I read somewhere that MS claims that this is a bug with the motherboards, ya right!!

Fortunately the fix was simple. I downloaded TweakUI from MS and unchecked the “Beep On Errors” from the general options area.

Today my DBA reported that the server she was working on was spitting out “too many open files” errors and no new processes could be started.

This is a common problem with DB servers with heavy transactions. In my environment there are 6 DB instances running on the server. No quite the optimized setup I would say.

The fix was to increase the total file descriptors kernel parameter count in the /etc/sysctl.conf file. I doubled my limit from 8192 to 16384.

The walk through,

1. Find out what the current open file descriptor limit is.

~# more /proc/sys/fs/file-max

~# 8192

or

~# sysctl -a | grep fs.file-max

~# fs.file-max = 8192

2. View how many open file descriptors are currently being used.

~# more /proc/sys/fs/file-nr

~# 8191

3. View how many files are open. The number returned might defer as 1 file descriptor can have multiple open files attached to it.

~# lsof | wc -l

~# 10325

4. Edit the kernel paramneter file /etc/sysctl.conf and add line “fs.file-max=[new value]” to it.

~# vi /etc/sysctl.conf

fs.file-max = 331287

5. Apply the changes.

~# sysctl -p
~# fs.file-max = 331287

Problem fixed.