Replace with:

It should work fine now

It should be helpful for forensics or to retrieve data from a failing drive.

Slides for a forensics class lecture on ext2/3

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Tommorow at 8:00AM, I will be giving a lecture to the CSE 4273/6273 Computer Crime and Forensics class here at Mississippi State University.  I was asked to speak on the topic of “Linux Filesystems”, and I have chosen to focus on the ext2 and ext3 filesystem data structures.  The class is using the excellent “File System Forensic Analysis” by Brian Carrier as its textbook, so it’s a great opportunity to cover the chapters on ext2/3 (chapters 14 & 15).

It’s a 50-minute class, and pretty strictly so, since the Information and Computer Security class is held immediately afterwards .  Due to the limited time I have, I’ve scaled back my coverage of these two chapters to what you see in the following slides.  I’m focusing on the basic data structures used by “extx” to point at files and metadata, such as the superblock, group descriptor tables, and inodes.  I’ve included an example of finding a file on a filesystem using only dd piped through xxd and less, and some discussion of what a forensic examiner or someone tasked with data recovery should be on the look-out for.

Unfortunately with this PDF version of the slides, you won’t see the slick Keynote animations I’ve worked into my lecture.  I’m considering expanding the detail and coverage of this, and recording the slideshow as a video with narration for this site:

Slides – PDF Format

Computer Weekly IT Blog Award -> Programming and technical blogs -> Adrian Bridgwater: Software application development

ZDNet’s biography of Adrian:

Adrian Bridgwater a freelance journalist specialising in cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects of software engineering and project management.

Adrian is a regular blogger with ZDNet.co.uk covering the application development

landscape and the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is.

His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge – and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.

Adrian has worked as a freelance technology journalist and public relations consultant for over fifteen years. His work has been published in various international publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Register, BBC World Service magazines, the UAE’s Khaleej Times and SYS-CON’s Web Developer’s Journal. He has worked as technology editor for international travel & retail magazines and also produced annual technology industry review features for UK-based publishers ISC.

In previous commercially focused roles, Adrian directed publicity work for clients including IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, Motorola, Computer Associates, Ascom, Infonet and RIM. Adrian has also conducted media training and consultancy programmes for companies including Sony-Ericsson, IBM, RIM and Kingston Technology.

He is also a published travel writer and has lived and worked abroad for 10 years in Tanzania, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and the United States.

Please go cast a vote for our Adrian!

I am working on a future version of ASE and am interested in hearing about your experiences with the logical process manager (LPM).  LPM consists of engine groups and execution classes, as well as the ability to set spid priority in an ad-hoc manner via sp_setpsexe.  This functionality is sometimes referred to as application queues.

If you have used this feature I’d like to know:

• What was the use case (in other words, why did you use it)?
• What elements did you use?  How did you use it?
• Did it meet your needs?  Did you run into problems?
• Any shortcomings or requirements that weren’t met?
• What was your overall impression?

If you evaluated the functionality but chose not to use it, please let me know what you were trying to accomplish and why you decided against using LPM.

Finally, if you have use cases or requirements around managing multiple applications in a single ASE server, or managing the priority / resources of specific spids, please pass those along.  Unaddressed use cases are extremely useful to hear about.

Please provide your feedback directly to me at david.wein@sybase.com, and include “logical process manager feedback” in the mail subject (I get a lot of mail and this will help make sure I don’t miss your mail!).  Please be as detailed and specific as you can about your use cases and results.

Thanks a bunch,
Dave

Let’s help Dave, and ourselves, out by giving him our experiences with the logical process manager.  Please be descriptive as “it sucks” or “it’s great” doesn’t really help.

If anyone wants to post their experiences to this blog post, that’s okay too.  I’ll forward any comments to Dave.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered the blog The Big Road and a Nut run by “thenose“.  He is a big time Linux user and a truck driver.  Who can’t love that?

Even though my dad is a 15 to 20 years older and doesn’t ‘get’ the whole computer thing, thenose’s posts make me feel like I’m taking a peek into my dad’s world of Trucking