Both virtualization and iSCSI are fundamentally 'sharing' technologies,where multiple things use a shared infrastructure. This means that theyhave a shared set of general security risks, pretty much common to anysharing technologies: cross-contamination and base system compromise.

Cross contamination is the ability to interfere with other things usingthe shared environment and to compromise them in turn; having a sharedinfrastructure necessarily gives you a channel to attack other thingsthat are using that infrastructure. This isn't novel, but virtualizationand iSCSI make it

It's really simple: we installed the latest Ubuntu 6.06 kernel updatelast night, since it's a security fix. Today, our machines startedpanicing with 'kernel BUG at fs/nfs/inode.c:174' messages (threemachines so far, one of them three times), so we wanted to revertback to the old kernel.

Guess what: it wasn't there any more. Apparently Ubuntu feels freeto have (some) kernel updates overwrite your

There is a certain habit in applications these days of onlyallowing you to run one copy of themselves; for example, Firefox . I find myself more and moreirritated by this, because it is usually implemented sloppily.

A good implementation must hide the fact that it is not actuallyrunning a second copy of the application. Sloppy implementations failto completely hide this fact, generally by missing various differencesbetween the environment that the original version of the application isrunning in and the environment that the second copy is running in.

I want to note for the record that the combination of an Asus EEE PCand a wireless network in your machine room is a great idea. For bestresults, make sure that your wireless network does not depend on much ofyour overall infrastructure.

(Yes, we actually put a wireless access point in our machine room.Since the core wireless gateway is also in the machine room, this isfar less crazy than it might seem.)

Also, the Eee is smaller than my current lab notebook , which is